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Updated: May 17, 2025
The creek he was on was natural in appearance, and trended as it should toward the southwest. But Surprise Lake was as lost to him as it had been to all its seekers in the past. Half a day's journey down the creek brought him to the valley of a larger stream which he decided was the McQuestion. Here he shot a moose, and once again each wolf-dog carried a full fifty-pound pack of meat.
As he turned down the McQuestion, he came upon a sled- trail. The late snows had drifted over, but underneath, it was well-packed by travel. His conclusion was that two camps had been established on the McQuestion, and that this was the connecting trail. Evidently, Two Cabins had been found and it was the lower camp, so he headed down the stream.
Why, he built Fort Reliance six miles below the mouth of the Klondyke in '73; he discovered gold on the Stewart in '85, and established a post there. Everybody knows Jack McQuestion; an" quickly, as he saw he was about to be interrupted "you heard about that swell watch we all clubbed together and give him? No? Well, sir, there ain't an eleganter watch in the world. Is there?"
The witness admits it. We admit it. It wa'n't necessary. No tracks led to that bank. The snow wa'n't broke." "There was a man on the other bank just the same," Smoke insisted. "That's too thin for skatin', young man. There ain't many of us on the McQuestion, an' we got every man accounted for." "Who was the man you hiked out of camp two weeks ago?" Smoke asked. "Alonzo Miramar. He was a Mexican.
Not alone was he the richest man in the country, but he was Burning Daylight, the pioneer, the man who, almost in the midst of antiquity of that young land, had crossed the Chilcoot and drifted down the Yukon to meet those elder giants, Al Mayo and Jack McQuestion.
The Alaska Commercial Company has a station here which was for some years in charge of L.N. McQuestion; there are also several blacksmith shops, restaurants, billiard halls, bakeries, an opera house and so on. Rather more than half a mile below Forty Mile townsite the town of Cudahy was founded on the north side of Forty Mile River in the summer of 1892.
So here and there we cached grub, that our sleds might be lightened and there be no chance of famine on the back trip. At the McQuestion there were three men, and near them we built a cache, as also did we at the Mayo, where was a hunting camp of a dozen Pellys which had crossed the divide from the south.
McQuestion is in the employ of the Alaska Commercial Company at Circle City, which is the distributing point for the vast regions surrounding Birch Creek, Alaska. In 1882 a number of miners entered the Yukon country by the Taiya Pass; it is still the only route used to any extent by the miners, and is shorter than the other passes though not the lowest.
In 1885 rich bar-washing was done on the Stewart River, and in 1886 Cassiar Bar was struck just below the mouth of the Hootalinqua. It was at this time that the first moderate strike was made on Forty Mile Creek, so called because it was judged to be that distance below Fort Reliance of Jack McQuestion fame.
Surprise Lake was a hoodoo; its location was unremembered; and the gold still paved its undrained bottom. Two Cabins, no less mythical, was more definitely located. "Five sleeps," up the McQuestion River from the Stewart, stood two ancient cabins. So ancient were they that they must have been built before ever the first known gold-hunter had entered the Yukon Basin.
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