Pete Anderson

Pete Anderson and partner Percy deWolfe were salmon fishing in the Stikine River when they heard about the Klondike gold rush. They arrived in Dawson to find the likely ground staked and so they spread gill nets in the Yukon River and supplied the Dawson restaurants with fresh salmon for $1.25 a pound. After the gold rush, Pete bought the Northern Commercial Company store in Forty Mile and became a merchant, living with his wife and three children in a comfortable cabin at the townsite.((Yukon Archives, //Rock Fluff// (Clinton Creek), 80/1 22 Pt.1, A, f.7, COR 002.)) Pete’s wife, Mary (Charles) Phillips, died in 1912 giving birth to their last son Arthur Eldon, the youngest of six children. By 1912 the population of Forty Mile had dwindled from 300 to about a dozen. Pete raised Art and they stayed in a small log cabin after their first home burned.((Information for the eulogy of Art Anderson that Jane Gaffin wrote for the //Yukon News// and //The Whitehorse Star// in October, 1996, was excerpted from Jane Gaffin, //Cashing In,// DW Friesen & Sons Ltd., 1985.))

Anderson’s store supplied the miners in the Sixtymile area until the road was put through to there from Dawson. Pete then turned his store into a warehouse where each fall 200 tons of supplies were delivered by steamer to supply the upper Fortymile River mining operations during the winter. There was usually enough to carry the miners through until the next fall when the new shipment arrived. When the store closed, the Andersons looked for another source of income. The barn that still stands at Forty Mile once housed about forty of their horses used largely to transport supplies from their warehouse to the mines. They found a sandy slope on one of their trips and Pete planted some potatoes in a small plot. In a few years they had a farm that yielded four to five tons of potatoes a year. Oats, broom grass and wheat grew waist high, and alfalfa, turnips, carrots and lettuce flourished. Pete and son Art seeded while the ice was still on the Yukon River and they harvested in the first weeks of September. They sold their produce to the surrounding miners as well as in Dawson. The large water tank that later supplied Clinton Creek stood in the centre of what was Pete Anderson’s farm. The Anderson’s ran a trap line in the winter. It extended from near Forty Mile to the Alaska Dome. Pete and his family operated a fish wheel a few miles up the Yukon River from Forty Mile. They usually caught enough to make four to five tons of dried fish. A fifty-pound fish yields about ten pounds of dried meat. The fish start running in the first week of July and tapered off in mid-August. During the peak two-week period the wheel brought in seven or eight hundred pounds in twenty-four hours. They sometimes worked from four am to nearly midnight, so the overflowing boxes did not lose fish. The salmon bellies were salted and alternated with moose and caribou as the main meal of the winter. The dried roe, and the rest of the fish was used for dog food. There were a half-dozen wheels between Dawson and Forty Mile to supply the many dog teams in the area. The Mounties alone needed about six tons annually. Most of the fish wheels were withdrawn from the river with the decline of fur prices and the advent of the skidoo.((Yukon Archives, //Rock Fluff// (Clinton Creek), 80/1 22 Pt.1, A, f.7, COR 002.))