Yukon who is who

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Michael Laberge (1836 - 1909)
	
Michael Laberge was born in Chateauguay, Quebec. He and Major Robert Kennicott were on the same vessel during a passage to California. There were some incidents on the crossing by Nicaragua, including the loss of a steamer. Laberge was involved and his actions impressed Kenncott who hired him on the Western Union Telegraph Expedition. The expedition was part of the Russian-American Telegraph project to lay an electric telegraph line from San Francisco to Moscow, Russia. Frank Ketchum and Michael Laberge were the first men from the Russian-American Telegraph project to explore the Yukon River basin between the Russian posts and Fort Yukon.((W.H. Dall, "A Yukon Pioneer, Mike Lebarge." //National Geographic Magazine,// No. 9, April 1898: 137-39. YA Pam #1898-14.))

Despite Kennicott’s death in 1866, Laberge and Ketchum carried on with the project. Starting in May, they went up the Yukon River from Nulato to Fort Yukon and then returned to St. Michael to report to the chief of the Telegraph Expedition, Col. Chas. S. Bulkeley. In the following year the expedition party (Ketchum, Laberge, W.H. Dall, and F. Whymper) wintered at Nulato. Ketchum and Laberge travelled over the frozen river to Fort Yukon with two Indigenous men in March and arrived just as the ice was breaking up. They took birch canoes from there to the site of Fort Selkirk. They returned by canoe to join Dall and Whymper at Fort Yukon. They descended to St. Michael having make the first continuous trip from what Dall considered the headwaters of the Lewes River to the sea.((W.H. Dall, "A Yukon Pioneer, Mike Lebarge." //National Geographic Magazine,// No. 9, April 1898: 137-39. YA Pam #1898-14.)) Dall named Lake Laberge after Michael Laberge in 1869.((Sessional Papers of the Dominion of Canada, Vol. 53, Issue 11, Supplement, //Fifteenth Report of the Geographic Board of Canada containing all decisions to March 31, 1917.// Sessional paper No. 25c., Canadian Department of the Interior, 1918: 141.))
	
In 1868, Laberge joined the Pioneer American Fur Company and then worked for the Alaska Commercial Company from 1871 to 1875. Laberge was the agent in charge at Fort Nulato in 1874 for the Alaska Commercial Company with Frederick Harte as his assistant. Laberge left Alaska in 1875 and by 1898 he was again living in Chateauguay, Quebec.((Francois Xavier Mercier, //Recollections of the Youkon: Memoires from the Years 1868-1885.// Edited by Linda Finn Yarborough. Anchorage: The Alaska Historical Society, 1986: xiv, 12, 17.))