Yukon who is who

This page is read only. You can view the source, but not change it. Ask your administrator if you think this is wrong.
Norman D. Macaulay (1869 – 1919)
	
Norman Macaulay was born in Ontario, the son of William James and Harriet (nee Keenan) Macaulay.((“Heritage Register Rockland: Highlands Cottage/Edgehill.” Victoria Heritage Foundation, 2019 website: https://victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/HReg/Rockland/Rockland1630.html)) William Macaulay was involved in the establishment of many lumber businesses and mills in Ontario, Manitoba, and the north-eastern United States. He started the People’s Bank in St. Paul and was the president for four years. The family moved to Victoria in 1888. Soon after, he and Charles Peabody negotiated a deal for the Cheminus Mills and a hundred thousand acres of timberlands. William formed a syndicate for the operation of the mills and was the vice-president.((John Blaine Kerr, //Biographical Dictionary of Well-known British Columbians: With a Historical Sketch.// Kerr & Begg, 1890: 223.)) William’s business was called the Victoria Lumber and Manufacturing Co., and by 1896 the mill was generating 100 million feet of lumber per year. This company was one of the largest on the west coast.((“Victoria Lumber and Manufacturing Company fonds.” University of British Columbia Library Rare Books and Special Collections, 2019 website: https://www.memorybc.ca/victoria-lumber-and-manufacturing-company-fonds)) 
Norman Macaulay and Florence [Garesche] were married around 1895.((“Heritage Register Rockland: Highlands Cottage/Edgehill.” Victoria Heritage Foundation, 2019 website: https://victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/HReg/Rockland/Rockland1630.html)) 	

Norman Macaulay and partner J.J. Shallcross formed a partnership as commission merchants. The firm moved north to Dyea in 1897 and Norman Macaulay arrived in the Yukon that year.((Helen Dobrowolsky and Linda Johnson, //Whitehorse, An Illustrated History.// Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2013: 67.)) He built a saloon and roadhouse at the beginning of the portage around Miles Canyon and Whitehorse Rapids near present-day Whitehorse. During the winter of 1897-98 he constructed a horse tramway on the east bank of the Yukon River. The tramway was rough logs laid as a track over five miles of a constructed earth and gravel base.  It was completed in three weeks by a crew of eighteen men.((Thomas J. Hammer, “On the Periphery of the Klondike Gold Rush: Canyon City, an Archaeological Perspective.” Master of Arts thesis submitted to Simon Fraser University, June 1999: 17-16, 28-29; “From Trail to Tramway – The Archaeology of Canyon City.” Yukon Government, Department of Tourism and Culture, 2019 website: http://www.tc.gov.yk.ca/canyon_city.html)) The construction crew included two brothers from New Brunswick, Tony and Mike Cyr.((Helen Dobrowolsky and Linda Johnson, //Whitehorse, An Illustrated History.// Vancouver: Figure 1 Publishing, 2013: 52.)) 

The upper end of the tramway and Macaulay’s buildings became the core of the transient community of Canyon City. The Canyon and White Horse Rapids Tramway Company carried freight and small boats for a cost of three cents a pound and $25 a boat. At the peak of the Klondike stampede, Macaulay’s freighters and twenty-three horses moved between seventy and ninety tons of freight a day. Macaulay intended to convert the tramway to a narrow-gauge railway in 1899. To control the market, in June 1899 he bought a competing tramway on the west bank of the Yukon River built and operated by fellow Victorian businessman John Hepburn. The cost was a reported $60,000 and Macaulay operated both tramways for a time. The White Pass & Yukon Route railway was under construction from Skagway to Whitehorse, and in August 1899 it purchased both tramways for $185,000. Canyon City was abandoned when the rail line reached Whitehorse in June 1900.((Thomas J. Hammer, “On the Periphery of the Klondike Gold Rush: Canyon City, an Archaeological Perspective.” Master of Arts thesis submitted to Simon Fraser University, June 1999: 17-16, 28-29; “From Trail to Tramway – The Archaeology of Canyon City.” Yukon Government, Department of Tourism and Culture, 2019 website: http://www.tc.gov.yk.ca/canyon_city.html)) 
	
During the winter of 1900/01 Macaulay operated three roadhouses on the road to Dawson. He sold these to the Canadian Development Corporation in February 1900.((//Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), First Annual Edition, 1 May 1901.)) He is listed as the owner or proprietor of the Victoria Lodging House and Saloon in Skagway in 1898; the Canyon City Hotel in Canyon City in 1899; the Whitehorse Hotel in Whitehorse from 1899-1901; the Hotel Upper Laberge at Upper Laberge in 1900, and the Wynton Hotel in Wynton, British Columbia in 1906.((Roadhouses Index. website: www.yukonalaska.com Historic Yukon & Alaska Hotels, Roadhouses, Saloons & Cafes Index - Proprietors and managers.)) 
Macaulay's Whitehorse Hotel opened on 6 June 1900. It was the first hotel in Whitehorse to have electric lights.((//Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), First Annual Edition, 1 May 1901.)) Macaulay sold his Whitehorse hotel in 1902 and re-joined his family in Victoria in December.((Helene Dobrowolski, Canyon City research binder, Yukon Historic Sites.)) The Macaulay family built Highlands Cottage, now a heritage house, in Victoria in 1900. It was constructed just to the west of Norman’s parents’ home Highlands. Highlands Cottage was Norman and Florence’s home in Victoria.((“Heritage Register Rockland: Highlands Cottage/Edgehill.” Victoria Heritage Foundation, 2019 website: https://victoriaheritagefoundation.ca/HReg/Rockland/Rockland1630.html)) 
	
Macaulay was in Fairbanks in 1906, having inherited a fortune from his mother. He was active in the Dawson region from 1914 to 1916 as the manager of the Royal Alexander Hotel.((Helene Dobrowolski, Canyon City research binder, Yukon Historic Sites.)) In 1914, Macaulay gathered up the material to build a fox farm at Snag and transported it up the Yukon and White rivers on the launch //Chisana.// He brought in a couple of pedigreed fox hounds from Ontario and was expecting to use them to track foxes to their dens. They were the first of their kind in the territory.((“Another Fox Farm.” //Dawson News// (Dawson), 24 July 1914. //ExploreNorth,// 2020 website: http://www.explorenorth.com/library/history/fox_farms-yukon.html.))
	
Norman Macaulay left the Yukon around 1916 and died in Port Townsend, Washington.((Helene Dobrowolski, Canyon City research binder, Yukon Historic Sites.)) The Norman D. Macaulay Lodge, a care facility in Whitehorse, was still in use in 2019.