Yukon who is who

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Achille "Archie" Fournier
	
Archie Fournier came into the country in 1902. He came over the Chilkoot and over the interior trail on a bicycle. His possessions were his clothes, a blanket, and a small supply of food. He sold his blanket at Lake Laberge and arrived in Dawson with what he stood up in.((“Report on Dawson City – Mayo – Yukon Interior Survey Trip during August 1946.” Whitehorse Experimental Substation, November 8, 1946. YA GOV 1672 file 35459))
	
Fournier purchased the Arlington Hotel/Roadhouse and operated it from 1912 to 1918. The hotel was on the Granville Road, at the bottom of Hunker.((Sessional Papers, Reports of the Chief License Inspector for 1913, 1914, and Polks Gazetteer and Business Directories.)) Archie and Martha Wilfred Leonard were married in Dawson in 1914.((Indexes to Applications for Marriage Licenses, 1898-1901. Yukon Archives, YRG 1 Series 1. Vol. 75 Microfilm)) 

Fournier established a dairy farm on the Klondike River after Miss [Belle] Munroe stopped selling milk, sometime in the teens. They brought in an inspector two or three times. Milk was not pasteurized in those days.((Joyce Hayden, //Victoria Faulkner: Lady of the Golden North. A Biography.// Whitehorse: Windwalker Press. 2002: 43.)) Fournier had the only dairy farm listed in Dawson in 1923.((//Polk's Alaska-Yukon Gazetteer,// 1923-24.)) The Fournier homestead was surveyed in 1926.((Yukon Archives, Dickson's 1925 Fieldbook 19560.)) 

Archie’s daughter, Betty, was born at the ranch in 1916. She remembers that they had 160 acres and twelve milking cows, mostly Holstein, and Archie did a milk run every two days. He sold the milk in beer bottles for twenty-five cents a bottle. Betty referred to the farm as "The Ranch", never 'The Dairy' nor 'the farm'. They grew a large vegetable garden for themselves and had a root cellar, but most of the acreage was hay for the cows. They initially used horses to plough the fields, and later a tractor.((Betty Fournier interview with Suzanne Crocker, Dawson June 2017.)) 
	
Pierre Berton remembers the twilight noons of December and January in the early 1930s in Dawson City. Archie Fournier had the only automobile to venture out as he delivered the milk in beer bottles stopped with old corks.  He hand-cranked his Model T at every house as the steam poured off the radiator. Even the RCMP kept their horses in the stable when the temperature dropped to -40.((Pierre Berton,// Drifting Home.// Toronto: McClelland and Stewart Ltd. 1973: 74.))
	
In 1945, Fournier had a mixed herd of milk cattle, some twenty-six head, predominantly Holstein but now evolving into Holstein-Shorthorn cross. Some ten head are regularly milked. There were good sales that year of all his dairy products against the previous year when he many times had to bring back bottled milk and cream and gave it to his hogs. His sales in 1945 were 90 to 110 quarts every second day at .25 cents per quart. He didn’t prepare the land in the fall of 1944 for the seed from the experimental substation and it was too wet in the spring to plow it. He had 25 head of hogs, 15 weanlings, 8 half-grown, and two mature animals, one boar and a sow. He also kept 50 chickens, a mixed flock of W. Leghorn and New Hampshire. He had six work horses and an area of 60-odd acres under cultivation, most of it in brome grass. An extensive and productive garden had a good yield of commercial quality cabbage, carrots, turnips, beets, parsnips, and potatoes.((“Report on Dawson City – Mayo – Yukon Interior Survey Trip during August 1946.” Whitehorse Experimental Substation, November 8, 1946. YA GOV 1672 file 35459))
	
The Fournier Ranch is now the site of the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in teaching farm.