Yukon who is who

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Anna Katrina “Kathleen” Viaux, nee Lauridson (1868 - 1957)
	
Anna Katrina Viaux was born in Horner, Denmark and came to North America when she was sixteen. She was the only one in her family to come to Canada.((Margaret Crook, Norma L. Felker and Helen Horback, //Lost Graves.// Whitehorse: City of Whitehorse, 1989: 118.))
	
Mrs. A. K. Viaux came to the Yukon in 1904. She looked after the White Pass Hotel beer parlour in Whitehorse for many years and purchased the hotel in 1928. It was said that she fired a shotgun up the hotel chimney to clean it out. The chimney was reputedly scavenged from a steamboat and would have been tough enough to withstand the blow. The hotel, when new, was very luxurious and featured steam heat, a fine restaurant, and a mahogany bar carved from a single piece of wood.((Need source.))

 J. Matsushito and Mrs. C. Negrean leased the White Pass Hotel’s Whitehorse Grill from Mrs. A.K. Viaux in March 1921. The Whitehorse newspaper noted that restaurant was a first-class dining room.((//The Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 25 March 1921.))

By the 1950s, the hotel was quaint and run down, and had become a popular residential hotel for those waiting out the winter in town. Mrs. Viaux lived in the hotel and was having problems with her sight. She kept the hotel’s cash in a bag in her room and an employee dreamed up a scheme to substitute rolled-up paper with a real dollar on the outside. By March 1953, Emily Paquette had deposited $5,000 of Mrs. Viaux’s money to her own account. The scam was discovered by a visiting niece and Emily was given a two-year jail term and promised to make restitution. After Mrs. Viaux died, the hotel became the property of local lawyers James and Gordon King. It was renamed the Edgewater Hotel, and a brother of the Kings became the new manager of a renovated hotel. In 1961 the block of historic buildings burned in a Christmas Day fire that destroyed the hotel and the Kings’ law office. The fire started in the Edgewater and was blamed on a faulty exhaust fan.((Need source.))
	
Mrs. Viaux’s friend Harold Nielsen helped her operate the hotel for the last ten years of her life. She was almost totally blind for eight of those years but remained alert until her final illness.((Margaret Crook, Norma L. Felker and Helen Horback, //Lost Graves.// Whitehorse: City of Whitehorse, 1989: 118.))