Daniel Van Bibber (1913 - 2002)
	
Dan Van Bibber was born in a tent at the west end of Tatlman Lake where Mica Creek flows out to Taata Lake and then on to the Pelly River. His parents were Eliza and Ira Van Bibber and they had fifteen children. Leta, May and Abe were older than Dan. Younger than Dan (by age) were Archie, Alex, Helen (d.1933), John James (JJ), Pat, Kathleen, George (d. 1977), Lucy, Linch, a baby(died at birth), and Theodore (Dode). Dan's birth place was a favourite camp for generations of Tutchone who gaffed fish and shot ducks at the camp.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.))

Dan attended school in Dawson , staying at St. Paul's Hostel. The first time Dan took is younger siblings down the Yukon River, 230 miles to Dawson, He was thirteen. They took a poling boat and sold it in town for spending money. The next year went down in an eight-cord raft of dry wood they sold in town for $12 a cord.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.)) 

Ira was unwell in 1928, and Dan quit school after completing grade seven. Dan and Ira went on the trapline and set traps and erected tents at Willow Lake and Willow Hills and then Ira went home and didn't come out again. At age fifteen, Dan ran the trapline alone but he didn't have the skills. He visited Abe's cabin at Grayling Lake and his more experienced brother gave him advice.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.)) 

Dan's parents and the younger children were settled at Mica Creek on the Pelly River. In [1931?],the winter trail from Minto to Mayo was cut past near the Van Bibber's homestead and Pelly Crossing was named. Dan trapped for the next few years from the homestead and he bought a team of horses and hauled wood for people rafting cordwood to Dawson. Around 1935, Dan went to Dawson and worked for Yukon Consolidated Gold Corp (YCGC). The first summer, he worked on the Arlington ditch from Rock Creek to Hunker Creek. The five mile ditch was hand dug by fifteen men. The second summer, he dug dredge pits to build the dredges on Dominion, Sulphur, and Hunker creeks. The third summer, he repaired phone lines and set up power lines to the dredges as they moved forward.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.))

Around 1941, Dan and brothers Archie and JJ built two boats, one moose skin and one canvas, and drifted down the Porcupine River trapping beaver. They expected to catch the steamer //Yukon// from Fort Yukon to Dawson but the boat was redirected to the Kuskokwin that summer and they had to hire a motor boat. Dan then went trapping with Archie and JJ on the Nation River and Charlie Creek.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.)) 

Dan was the first of the Van Bibber boys to enlist for service in the Second World War. Archie and Alex went east for basic training in the summer. Most of the boys joined the service when the war was almost over. Dan was the only one to see active service.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 81, 85, 103, 105.))He took basic training in Wetaskiwin, Alberta and advance training at Currie Barracks, Calgary.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.)) They made him a sniper because he had been shooting guns all his life.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 81, 85, 103, 105.)) In 1945, Dan joined the Westminster Regiment A. Company in Holland and then came back home on furlough with the first draft of volunteers for the South Pacific.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.)) 

In 1945, Dan had a six-week furlough and snowshoed about two hundred miles from Dawson to the Nation and Charlie creeks area where brothers Pat and JJ were trapping. He did about forty to fifty miles a day, pulling some food and his eiderdown in his little Ice King toboggan. JJ thought he was toughest man in the Yukon.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 81, 85, 103, 105.)) Having volunteered for services in the Pacific, Dan left Whitehorse in early September 1945 to report for duty in Vancouver.((//The Whitehorse Star// (Whitehorse), 7 September 1945.)) He was discharged after the atomic bomb ended the war.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.)) 

Dan trapped alone for a few years on Nation River, Charlie Creek, and Back River and then, in 1951, turned over the trap line and all his equipment to Joe Netro for the Old Crow people. Dan went to work as a grader operator on the  [Mayo Road] for United Keno Hill. Dan married a girl from Watson Lake and they had two children, Abe and Bobby. In 1953, he became the highway foreman at Stewart Crossing. He transferred to the Yukon Government when they took over maintenance of the highway in 1957 and then worked for YG for twenty years at Stewart, Tuchitua, and Ross River. Dan retired in 1978 at age sixty-five.((Kathleen Thorpe, "Dan Van Bibber." //In Their Honor,//Ye Sa To Communications Society, 1989: 20-25.))