John Olaf “Ole” Erickson (1878 – 1974)
	
Olaf Erickson was born in Malungsfors, Sweden. He worked his way around the world on a sailing ship and was in Seattle in 1900 when he heard about the Klondike gold strike. He took the newly constructed White Pass railway to Whitehorse, and then walked 300 miles to Dawson. His moccasins fell into the fire while he was drying them, and he finished the trip with gunnysacks as shoes. He mined in the Klondike goldfields and worked as a stableman at a roadhouse. In the early 1920s, Erickson had claims on Bullion Creek and worked for the Jacquot brothers in the Kluane Lake area. In 1925, he returned to Sweden to marry a childhood sweetheart, Kristina Erickson, and brought her back to live at Silver City on Kluane Lake.((Jane Gaffin, “John Olaf Erickson: Prospector and Hotelier.” Yukon Prospectors Association, 2019 website: https://www.yukonprospectors.ca/john_erickson.pdf)) 

Ole Erickson purchased the Regina Hotel from C.H. Johnson in 1926. It was one of the original Whitehorse landmarks, erected by Johnson in 1900.((//Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse, 22 October 1926.)) In the 1940s, the hotel was full of wartime workers. They opened Yukon’s first cocktail lounge in 1951. In 1969, the old building was replaced by a new building on the same site. The Erickson family ran the Regina Hotel for seventy years until Gudrun Sparling and her brother John Erikson retired and sold the hotel to Ed Festel and Rolph Meierhans in 1997. Olaf Erickson was a long-time member of the Yukon Order of Pioneers. He was inducted into the Yukon Prospectors’ Association Hall of Fame in 1988 for his Bullion Creek ventures in the 1920s.((Jane Gaffin, “John Olaf Erickson: Prospector and Hotelier.” Yukon Prospectors Association, 2019 website: https://www.yukonprospectors.ca/john_erickson.pdf))