Hubert Darrell (1875 – 1910)
	
Hubert Darrell was born in southern England to Charles and Lily Darrell. He immigrated to Britle, Manitoba when he was sixteen to help on his elder brother Charles’ farm. He went north to the Klondike in 1897 and prospected for over a decade. He was a hunter, a fur trader, guide, mail carrier and worked on a riverboat. He usually travelled by foot, averaging 1,500 miles a year, aided by his own sketches, having no faith in maps. He gained a reputation for knowing the land between Hudson Bay and Alaska better than any other white man. In 1901, the explorer David Theophilus Hanbury included him on a sixteen-month trip west of Hudson Bay. Darrell kept a journal and sketched maps, and Hanbury named a lake and a river after Darrell. After this trip Darrell travelled to England and Manitoba to visit friends and relatives, and he and Agnes Dudley were engaged. Vilhjalmur Steffansson extolled his lone trip through the Endicott Mountains in Alaska and thought Darrell had more achievements than many famous Arctic explorers. Darrell left Alfred H. Harrison’s 1905 expedition in the western Arctic because he thought the surveying and mapping were insufficient. He had praise for Comte de Sainville’s surveying and mapping of the Mackenzie Delta. In 1906, he refused to join Perry’s polar expedition and when Perry encountered the problems Darrell had predicted, Darrell was in the area and conveyed news of Perry’s problems. The Hudson’s Bay Company hired Darrell in several capacities over the years. He was a special constable for the Royal North-West Mounted Police from November 1906 to June 1910 on the Dawson, Fort McPherson, Herschel Island patrol. He guided four patrols in that time and was expected to guide another in the winter of 1910/11.((Peter Lorenz Neufeld, “Hubert Darrell.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 2019 website: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/darrell_hubert_13E.html)) A photograph in the Yukon Archives shows RNWMP Constable James Fyfe, Fred Horn, and Hubert Darrell and two dog teams. The photo caption reads that they were carrying mail to the Arctic coast. [1909/10 patrol]((Yukon Archives, James Fyfe fonds, 86/42.))
	
In the summer of 1910, Darrell and Joseph Jacquot and his wife went on a long exploration and prospecting trip. He parted from the Jacquots on 21 September, and they were to meet again on 5 December. Some Inuvialuit travelling southwest of Liverpool Bay were the last to see Darrell alive.((Peter Lorenz Neufeld, “Hubert Darrell.” Dictionary of Canadian Biography, 2019 website: http://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/darrell_hubert_13E.html)) In 1916 the remains of Darrell’s cache were found on the Husky Lakes. Darrell went to Cape Bathhurst for supplies and planned to head for the Mackenzie River. An inscription was found on a tree down the Anderson River. The tree was signed by Darrell, described as the missing and lost Klondiker, in November 1917.((“Trace found to long lost Klondiker: missing since year 1910.” //Dawson Daily News// (Dawson), 6 November 1917.))