John James “JJ” Van Bibber (1920 - 2012)
	
J.J. Van Bibber was born near Russel Creek on the banks of the Macmillan River to parents Ira and Eliza Van Bibber. His family travelled immense distances. When J.J. was a young man, the family would put on snowshoes and walk to Fort McPherson and that was all in a day's work. It was called travelling light.((Josee Bonhomme, as told by J.J. Van Bibber, "The Good old days according to JJ Van Bibber." //The Klondike Sun// (Dawson), 6 May 2009.))
	
The family trapped when JJ was a child. They had a winter home in the McArthur Range and a summer home on the banks of the Pelly River. They hunted in the fall and dried the meat for the winter. His family sold vegetables to the mail delivery man, T. C. Richards, as he passed by in the winter. They had a great basement root cellar with spuds, carrots and turnips.((Chris Beacom, "JJ Van Bibber's life in pictures." //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 7 October 2005.))
	
The younger kids went to school at Dawson and stayed in the St. Paul’s Hostel. The hostel was not a good place to live as the food was bad and students were always hungry. JJ left school when he was twelve and went to get home-schooled by his sister Leta. She and her husband, Afe Brown, lived at Williams Creek, above Five Finger Rapids. He looked after her two little kids and did chores. Sometimes that year he went with Afe to work at the mine on Mount Freegold. Most of the time he was out hunting.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 28.))
	
In the fall of 1923, JJ stayed at Mica Creek. His brother Dan showed him how to use his camera. He had a darkroom in the back of the homestead cabin. They made a few dollars hauling wood and JJ soon had enough to buy his own camera. JJ and his younger brother Pat hunted together for the first time, and it became a lifelong partnership. Around November, they would go up Crooked Creek into the McArthur Mountains where Ira had a trap line. Ira might go off to cut wood, leaving the kids to run the line. In the summer they worked at the Mica Creek farm or cut wood with the Fort Selkirk people. The wood camp was about twelve miles below Mica Creek. The Van Bibber had horses and they skidded the logs down to the riverbank.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 35, 37.))
	
JJ left home when he was sixteen and headed out to find work in Mayo. He worked right in Mayo for the summer, loading the sternwheeler //Keno// with ore bags. In the fall he worked for Ed Kimble as a catskiner, hauling wood for the sawmill, and then worked for the Keno mine.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 39, 41.))
	
Van Bibber never gave up hunting. He and his brothers Dan, Pat and George kept a hunting cabin in the Ogilvie Mountains for about five years. They would go up in November and came back in April. All of the brothers had cameras. J.J. spent some years on the Yukon River. He worked on the //S.S. Klondike// in 1942. The boat was barging heavy equipment down to Circle, Alaska for construction of the Alaska Highway. He worked for Captain Marion from Fraser, British Columbia. The //Klondike// ran day and night, using a buoy system to mark the turns in the river between Dawson and Whitehorse. Floodlights on the boat would illuminate the buoys. After Dawson, there were no more buoys and it was 500 miles to Circle with no markers. Marion trusted J.J. at the wheel so he would hand it over to the 21-year-old and sleep in his chair. The barges on the end were pretty long. When they came into a jack-knife or turn, J.J. would shake him to try and wake him up. Marion would survey the situation and blow the horn to tell the first mate which way to steer the vessel. He would yawn and say J.J. was doing fine while J.J. would be shaking and nervous. J.J. was on a raft when he stopped at Twelvemile River for tea and there he met Clara Taylor, the daughter of Joe Taylor, an immigrant from New Zealand, and his wife Ellen, of First Nation descent. Clara was cleaning salmon on the riverbank when she caught J.J.'s eye. She was only fifteen. There were only two girls in that family. Her mother ran the dog team and the trapline and JJ thought Clara would make a good partner.((Chris Beacom, "JJ Van Bibber's life in pictures." //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 7 October 2005.))
	
Pat and JJ were the only two Van Bibber brothers who did not enlist during the Second World War. Pat was deaf in one ear and JJ had Clara and the babies. JJ was part of the Northern Pacific Rangers, 38th Company, a precursor for the modern Northern Rangers. There were about fifty in the Dawson company and they received basic training and learned Morse Code. They were told to watch for Japanese fire balloons and report what they saw. JJ found a balloon way up the Macmillan River years after the war was over. If the Japanese ever invaded they would be on the front line.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 104-105.))
	
JJ, Clara, and Pat Van Bibber owned a trading post on the MacMillan until the fur prices fell in 1950. JJ worked driving cat on the Mayo Road construction. He learned how to mine efficiently when he worked a few years for Lorne Ross at Territorial Placers.((JJ Van Bibber and Naill Fink, ed., //I was born under a spruce tree.// Vancouver: Talus Publishing Group, 2012: 111, 119, 123, 129.))
	
JJ started placer mining on Bear Creek in the 1960s. Bear is a tributary of the McQuesten River and the old-timers had worked there before. They left a flume and a great big dike to mine the low-flow creek. JJ was able to use a return box is recycle his water. The sluicing water and slurry came barrelling down and the water was directed through openings at the bottom of the box back into a settling pond and reservoir. The slurry went over the box, the water went underneath. The inspectors couldn't believe it, they had never seen anything like it. When the reservoir was empty, the automatic gate would shut with a bang and the system would refill itself. The gate could be re-opened for sluicing once the reservoir was full again. The gate flipped open or closed based on a 1/3 - 2/3 proportion and gravity.((Josee Bonhomme as told by J.J. Van Bibber, "The Good old days according to JJ Van Bibber." //The Klondike Sun// (Dawson), 6 May 2009.))
	
In the spring of 1978, the Van Bibber brothers won a contract with Prism Resources to haul some camp trailers and fuel 150 miles northeast of Keno on the Wind River Road. The company was in a panic to beat the spring thaw. The exploration project was in the Rusty Mountains, past Kathleen Lakes. JJ's son Steve did the paperwork on the job and JJ's brother Archie was the only cat operator who could back up a fuel sled under a 40-foot ATCO trailer, load and secure everything and then walk it down a trail. They bid $86,000 and did well with no breakdowns or mishaps. They had 2 D-8s and one brand new D-6. They had special sleds made to haul fuel barrels 24 feet long with spacers four inches wide so the loads would not shift. The sleds were designed by Archie and Bill Scott for Mobil when they went up to Eagle Plains to look for oil in the 1960s. They brothers bought two of eight sleds left in Dawson with some tie-down chains for $1,000 apiece. They hauled one caboose trailer as a combination cook shack and bunkhouse with two bunk beds. They never stopped going for twenty-four hours a day trying to beat the spring melt. The forty-foot trailers were mounted on the fuel sleds using the heavy equipment. They used "steady-bars" to support the sixteen-foot overhanging sections of the trailers. They hauled five trailers in and only broke one window.((Josee Bonhomme as told by J.J. Van Bibber, "The Good old days according to JJ Van Bibber." //The Klondike Sun// (Dawson), 6 May 2009.))
	
Clara Van Bibber died in 2004 in August after sixty-one years of marriage to JJ The couple had four children, thirteen grandchildren and fifteen great grandchildren.((Chris Beacom, "JJ Van Bibber's life in pictures." //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 7 October 2005.)) Clara added to their collection of images, both with her own photos dating back to the late 1930s, and with the 8mm video camera she purchased in the early 1960s. in 2003, Van Bibber approached the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in Heritage Department with a shoebox of black-and-white photos. Sue Parsons, collections manager at Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, immediately recognized the historical significance of these pictures of boat building, dog sledding, and life on the land. She initiated research that resulted in the Van Bibber and Clara Van Bibber Collection. It features more than 1,235 digitized images (with hundreds more to be processed), 46 8mm films, five beaded artifacts, and an associated archive containing dozens of oral history transcripts. A selection of these photos went on display at the Danoja Zho cultural centre in 2005. The exhibit, //Trapped Memories: Illuminations,// marked the first public presentation of Van Bibber’s photographs and stories. ((Naill Fink, "A century of stories: Dawson elder J.J. Van Bibber turns 90." //Yukon News// (Whitehorse), 15 September 2011.)) 

In 2012, J.J. Van Bibber’s memoir, //I was born under a spruce tree,// became part of the Yukon’s school curriculum.