Pete Nelson 
	
Pete Nelson was in the Yukon in 1886, having arrived at the mouth of the Stewart River on 2 May. He partnered with Joe Ladue to travel to Fort Reliance below the Klondike River.((Peter Nelson, Snow Family Papers, Alaska State Library.)) Pete and his brother John Nelson, Joe Ladue, and Dan Sprague set out from Fort Reliance to prospect to the northeast.((Michael Gates, //Gold at Fortymile Creek: Early Days in the Yukon.// Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994: 22.)) Ten years before gold was discovered in the Klondike River drainage, they travelled overland thrty-five miles and reached the Klondike River about forty-five miles up from the mouth. They travelled on up the Klondike. In the first day’s travel, they stopped at a bar on the left side of the creek, and then about three miles further on to a gravel bank about thirty feet high and 400 yards wide. The bank was a very heavy wash mixed in with large quartz boulders and had a fine slate bedrock. It was an old riverbed and they could trace its course for miles right into the Rocky Mountains. It was flat and level and the old bed ran straight as far as the eye could see. They made a spear out of moose bone fastened in the end of a pole and "that kept us in salmon for the rest of the trip; we just speared one every day for dinner."((Peter Nelson, Snow Family Papers, Alaska State Library.)) They found twenty-five to thirty-cent prospects on one bar but did not consider it significant.((Michael Gates, //Gold at Fortymile Creek: Early Days in the Yukon.// Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994: 143.))
	
Pete Nelson was on the finance committee of the first lodge of the Yukon Order of Pioneers (YOOP) at Forty Mile in 1894.((Yukon Archives, Victoria Faulkner MSS 135 83/50 f.5.)) He later owned a saloon in Circle City, Alaska.((Michael Gates, //Gold at Fortymile Creek: Early Days in the Yukon.// Vancouver: UBC Press, 1994: 124.))  He was one of ten members to apply for a charter for a branch of the YOOP, and they formed a lodge at Birch Creek, in 1895.((A. Baird, "Early Yukon Order of Pioneer Records" in Yukon Archives, Victoria Faulkner MSS 135 83/50 f.5.))