François Buteau
François was born in Quebec on July 29th,1856. He left his native province at the age of 21.
Having worked here and in the United States, Buteau landed in the Yukon with 21 companions in January 1856. After having passed through the Chilkoot Pass, the group went down the Yukon up to Fortymile. Buteau was about thirty years old then. Michael Gates described him thus: small, nervous man, with a sunburnt-tanned complexion, and a moustache and very thick and dark eyebrows.
With two French-Canadian companions, Louis Cotey and French Joe, he built a rudimentary cabin on an island situated about one mile from the mouth of the Fortymile River. The island was named “The Island of the Sixteen Liars” because of the talent and skills of those 16 story-tellers who spent the 1886-87 winter there. This is how the mining village of Fortymile was born, isolated and without any comforts nor provisions.
The cabin of Buteau and his companions was so cold, due to having no wood stove that the block of ice which served as a window remained intact, without thawing-out all winter long. It was also a dark and somber winter because there were only six candles in the whole cabin. It was a winter when the survival of the group depended on their hunting and on finding firewood. Luckily summer brought its rewards. Buteau prospected in a certain region and found $3,000. dollars worth of gold.
The following winter, Frank Buteau and John Nelson became blacksmiths and improvised to answer to the demands made by the miners of the region. Before Joe Ladue came back with steel and the borax necessary for the fulfillment of their tasks, they had to use their imagination in order to repair the prospectors’ used buckets. In 1889, Buteau and his associates were among the first in the Yukon to use the hydraulic method to exploit the claims of the Franklin Ravine/ Gap.
Buteau got married in Fortymile in July 1890. In March 1883, after a business trip, he returned to the Yukon. During the trip on the Chilkoot Trail, Buteau and his companions (Corbeil, Laroche and François Roy) showed their ingeniousness/cleverness: they installed a sail on their sleds for the descent of the trail and skates to help cross the lake.
In December 1898, Buteau obtained three lots from Block #1 in Klondike city. In 1902, he was still in the region of Dawson City where he mined the Bonanza Creek claim.
Frank Buteau was a member of the Order of the Pioneers of the Yukon. In 1920; he saw Fairbanks (Alaska) with his sister. He died in 1930. His memoires were published in the collection, “Sourdough Sagas”.
Ref: L’Empreinte Volume 2, pages 11,12,13
No comments:
Post a Comment