Yukon who is who

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William "Hobo Bill" Donnenworth  (1874 - late 1950s)
	
William Donnenworth quit his job at a sawmill at False Creek, British Columbia in the fall of 1897 and sailed north on the //Amur.// In six days he arrived at Skagway and two hours later was working for Joe Brooks, owner of 350 horses. Donnenworth was in charge of a twenty-horse pack train taking freight to the summit of the White Pass. Each horse carried 150 pounds divided into two packs and freight was one dollar a pound. The snow was twenty feet deep at the summit and the trail was like a tunnel. In the spring, Bill joined the stampede to Atlin. He pooled his resources with two other men and they bought a sled, rifles, supplies, and tools but the claims were all staked when they arrived. They stampeded to Spruce Creek and staked claims there. They built sluices and found two pockets of gold in the next few months. After they sold the claims, Bill went to work freighting for the new railway to Whitehorse. When the stage started to run between Whitehorse and Dawson, Bill got a job as a driver.((Charles W. Clemons, "Drove Yukon stage during Gold Rush." //Province// (Vancouver), 17 June 1944.))
	
Donnenworth had charge of a large coach on the White Horse to Dawson winter trail from 1900 to [1921]. He was one of the first to guide the mail coach 400 miles over the river from White Horse to Dawson. Later the overland trail was opened up and the distance dropped to 320 miles. Donnenworth was on the route for over twenty years and was known to all along the way. He brought gold from Dawson to the bank in Whitehorse, transported in boxes weighing 500 pounds. A pound of gold was worth $196 and he might have several boxes on the coach. When he slept at the roadhouse overnight, he just left the gold in the stage overnight as the boxes were too heavy to lift. No robberies ever occurred on the Canadian side.((Charles W. Clemons. "Men whose whips cracked in Hayday of caribou and Yukon stage routes." //Province// (Vancouver), 20 May 1928.)) The stage drivers, or "skinners", wore coon-skin coats with a long red sash tied about the waist and soft buck-skin gloves with black silk or wool gloves as liners. It might be warmer that -40 when a stage left a post, but could drop to -50 or -60 before they reached the next post.((W. D. MacBride, "Yukon Stage Line." Dawson City Museum vertical files.))
	
In the summer, Donnenworth worked on the river boats, mainly as a purser. In the summer, the river boats would haul all the hay, oats and supplies around for the horses in the winter. The boats quit around October and the stage line started again with freeze-up. In about 1907, the trail was not too bad between Dawson and Pelly except for the Wounded Moose summit that was drifted in. The horses went down in the snow so deep they had to unharness them and take them across one at a time and then haul the stage over with lash ropes. It was drifted in from Pelly on down. The horses couldn't find the trail and there was a north gale. The company had to load light for several trips and one time it took twelve hours to make the twenty-three miles from Wounded Moose to the Indian River. Donnonworth had a whole herd of caribou cross his trail one time. Most of the news came with the stage and Bill knew just about everyone in the territory and they all said hello along the way.((Helen Horback's History Broadcast dramatization on CBC, 1984.))
	
Donnenworth found other jobs between open navigation and the winter road. In September 1910, he was the foreman of a group of men constructing lengths of new road from the Mason’s Landing on the Teslin River to Livingstone. The government budget for the project was about $5,000.((//Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 23 September 1910.))
Bill Donnenworth left the Yukon in 1921 and worked as a stable man in Vancouver for the Canadian Bakeries. He retired in 1946 and was in his 80s when he died.((Helen Horback's History Broadcast dramatization on CBC, 1984.))