Yukon who is who

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Robert Henry (Harry) Breaden (b. 1927)
	
Harry Breaden was born in Whitehorse. His grandfather [Henry] was a Yukon river boat captain in the early 1900s. Harry’s family moved to Mayo in 1929 when his father [James] went to work for Greenfield and Pickering who had the mail delivery service between Mayo, Whitehorse, and Dawson. The Mayo school offered classes up to grade 8, and Harry graduated when he was fifteen in 1942. He started work in Mayo as a longshoreman for the British Yukon Navigation Company(BYN), White Pass’ river division. Two men used a handcart to wheel the 60-kilogram sacks down the gangplank onto the sternwheeler //Keno//’s cargo deck. The carts could handle up to sixteen sacks at a time. Breaden commented that you had to get the balance right and keep it moving. Sometimes stevedores fell off into the Stewart River but he did not remember anyone getting injured. Later in his first season, Harry joined the //Keno// crew as a deckhand. The boat had a crew of twenty-six men who saw to the manual day-today work and were on call twenty-four hours a day. The boat used more than a cord of wood per hour going upstream and stopped often at woodcamps along the river. The crew could load ten cords of wood in an hour. Breaden worked his way up to mate and received his master’s ticket but resigned before he used it.((Linda E.T. MacDonald and Lynette R. Bleiler, //Gold & Galena.// Mayo Historical Society, 1990: 246 - 248.)) 
	
In 1945, Harry joined the crew of the //Neecheah,// a prop-driven boat on the Stewart River. The captain gave him some training and he wrote an exam in Vancouver to get his mate’s ticket. He became the mate of the //Neecheah// in 1948. Like many riverboat personnel he spent the winters in Vancouver where he met Alice, his wife to be. They were married in 1948 and 1950 was Breaden’s last season on the regularly running Yukon boats. He could see that the era of Yukon riverboats was ending. In 1960, Parks Canada refitted the //S.S. Keno// after she had sat in the Whitehorse shipyards for eight years. Breaden was mate of the vessel for her last run to Dawson.((Linda E.T. MacDonald and Lynette R. Bleiler, //Gold & Galena.// Mayo Historical Society, 1990: 246 - 248.))  He worked for many years for the Northern Canada Power Commission until his retirement.((Michael Gates, “Breaden family had deep roots in the Yukon.” //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 31 July 2015.))