Richard John Bowen (1868 – 1952)
	
Richard Bowen trained with the Church Missionary Society at Islington College, London in 1894.((The Anglican Church of Canada, General Synod Archives, R.J. Bowen fonds.)) In July 1895, Bowen, a Clapham Institution student, was at the mouth of the Yukon River. He had been sent to work for Bishop Bompas as a carpenter and was to be supported at Buxton Mission by funds at the bishop’s disposal.((//The Church Missionary Intelligencer,// Volume 46, Church Missionary Society, 1895: 859.)) Mrs. Bompas went down to the coast, a distance of 1,200 miles, to meet and escort him up to the mission.((Church Missionary Society, //Proceedings of the Church Missionary Society for Africa and the East…// Church Missionary House, 1896: 400.)) Bowen had a large chest of tools in his baggage and a little concertina which he taught himself to play on the voyage from England.((“Concertina.” Government of Yukon, Yukon museum guide, 2020 website: https://www.yukonmuseums.ca/treasures/olc/12.html.)) 

Shortly after Bowen arrived, Bompas was prevailed upon to lend him to the mission at Circle, Alaska where services were being held in the rehabilitated Beaven’s Saloon.((Melody Webb, //Yukon: The Last Frontier.// UBC Press, 1993: 189.)) Bowen had expected to work with the Indigenous population and did make serval trips to outlying camps. The Colonial and Continental Church Society offered a grant for a mission at Forty Mile and in the spring of 1896, Bowen began services in the first Yukon mission devoted to the miners. When gold was discovered in the Klondike, Bompas had, in Bowen, a seasoned missionary ready to minister to the stampeders.((H.A. Cody, //An Apostle of the North.// University of Alberta Press, 2002: 281-282.)) 
	Missionary teacher Susan Mellet left Ireland and arrived at Forty Mile in 1893. Bowen and Mellett were married by Bishop Bompas at Forty Mile in 1896.((//Five Pioneer Women in the Anglican Church in the Yukon.// Whitehorse: Women's Auxiliary of the Anglican Church, 1983: 1-5.)) In 1898, the Bowens travelled to Dawson and built the first Anglican church there. The back of the log cabin church was the living quarters, and they slept in the loft.((Hannah Tolman, //Women of the Anglican Church in the Yukon.// Whitehorse: The Old Log Church Museum, 2019: 4-6.))  
	
Bowen had been ordained as a Church of England deacon in 1897 and became a priest in 1898.((The Anglican Church of Canada, General Synod Archives, R.J. Bowen fonds.)) Reverend Bowen contracted typhoid malarial fever in May 1898, and he and Susan returned to England for his convalescence. Bishop Bompas promised not to call them unless he was desperate, and the call came within the year to build a church at Whitehorse. The Bowens came in on the second passenger train after the railroad was finished in 1900. The church was finished in the autumn of 1900 and was used for the next sixty years. In the spring of 1903, Bowen became seriously ill again, and the Bowens left the Yukon for good.((//Five Pioneer Women in the Anglican Church in the Yukon.// Whitehorse: Women's Auxiliary of the Anglican Church, 1983: 1-5.)) 

Rev. Bowen served at Nanaimo and Ladysmith, British Columbia from 1907 to 1925 and was the district secretary of the Bible Society.((Hannah Tolman, //Women of the Anglican Church in the Yukon.// Whitehorse: The Old Log Church Museum, 2019: 4-6.)) He was licensed in the Diocese of Huron from 1930 to 1952.((The Anglican Church of Canada, General Synod Archives, R.J. Bowen fonds.))
	
Bowen’s little concertina and the tools he used to build the log church are held at the Old Log Church Museum in Whitehorse.