DESLAURIERS, Joseph Emile (372 0 English)
DESLAURIERS, Joseph Emile Deslauriers, a French-Canadian originating from Ottawa, was among the 885 persons who attempted to reach the Klondike leaving from Edmonton and then descending the MacKenzie River up to the Arctic Circle. Pierre Berton mentions him in his book, KLONDIKE, because he overcame the treacherous passage of the McDougall in the autumn of 1898. He was forced to leave nearly all of his baggage on the shores of Rat River near Destruction City. This site is well named because it is there that the travelers dismantled their boats to build smaller ones. It was the only way they could cross the terrible rapids in front of them. Deslauriers left with a bag of flour, a piece of salt pork, a gun and his small boat which he pulled thanks to a cloth-band which he’d strung across his shoulders. Thus he walked in icy water stretching himself to hook on to rocks along the way. After a very tiring trip, he finally reached the Klondike.
In 1903 , J.E. Deslauriers was a janitor in Dawson City, then a guard at the Palace of Justice. From 1910-1914, he worked as a designer- cartographer at the office of the Government Territorial Bureau for Surveyors. During that same era, he had a business in Dawson with an associate. During these years, the Deslauriers-Lemieux enterprise obtained land in the region of Dawson City.
In 1911 and 1914 Joseph Emile Deslauriers and his wife Gabrielle were present at two weddings in Dawson City, that of Jean-Baptiste Deslauriers and of Emma Daoust, as well as that of Mathews Decourcy and Antoinette Marie Novetna.
We have no other details of this family.
Ref. Empreinte, vol. 11, page 37
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