Yukon who is who

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Frank Foster (~1876 – 1950)
	
Frank Foster was born in Bradford, Yorkshire in England. He left Bradford in 1893 and went to the United States where he spent a few years in the east. He came to the Klondike in the spring of 1899 and staked two claims neither of which was profitable by hand mining. He came north with one sound lung and the warning that he might not live long. He sold his claims and moved to Fort Yukon where he started trading, prospecting, and trapping. For many years he and a partner trapped in a remote area north-west of Old Crow. It was a three-hundred-mile trip down the Porcupine and up a tributary. They would spend ten and a half months there every year until 1941 when they were too old for the life. Each partner had a trap line with a central cabin that they shared. It took three weeks for Foster to cover his line by dog team. The partners sold their trap lines to a forty-year-old French Canadian. Malcom MacDonald met Foster at his cabin in Old Crow in 1942. He had lost the sight in one eye and was going blind. MacDonald was impressed by Foster’s extensive library.((Malcolm MacDonald, //Down North.// Oxford University Press, 1943: 149-51.))
	
A collection of Foster’s diaries, correspondence and photographs are held at Yukon Archives. The final diary and the correspondence relate to his life in Old Crow.((Yukon Archives, Frank Foster fonds 82/415.))