Mike "Black Mike Winage" Winovich (1869 -1977)
	
Mike Wenovich was known throughout the Klondike as "Black Mike Winage." He was born and grew up in a rural part of Yugoslavia. He was seen poaching when in his teens and left the country before he was arrested. He went to Turkey and then travelled the world, working on boats.((W. J. Swanson, "Black Mike as I knew him." //The Yukon Magazine,// June 1998: 38-48.))

Mike came to the United States in the late 1890s and settled around Butte, Montana. He became involved in the labour movement and was with a group that killed a local sheriff. He fled the states in 1906-07.((Ron Wendt, "Black Mike in his later years." //The Yukon Magazine,// June 1998: 49-50.)) 

On his way to the Klondike, Mike worked as a drover with a herd of cattle making their way north from central British Columbia. He arrived in Dawson a few years after the stampede and worked on the Yukon Ditch. He later joined Frank Rae as a partner on a trapline along the Blackstone River. He took a year off to travel by dog team to Nome and took only one year outside, in 1924. About that time Winage organized his own trap line on the Hart River, over 200 miles long.((W. J. Swanson, "Black Mike as I knew him." //The Yukon Magazine,// June 1998: 38-48.))
Mike married the ex-Mrs. Helen Gordon in 1937. Helen had been a dance-hall girl in Dawson during the gold rush days. During her dance-hall career she had met and married a brother of General Gordon of Khartoum. He had his wife declared insane after a number of years of marriage. She was committed to the mental institution at Essondale, near New Westminster, British Columbia. She was getting old when she made a request to be allowed to return to the Yukon. The hospital was willing to allow this if there was someone to look after her. Mike heard about the situation and offered to marry her. This was Mike's first marriage.((W. J. Swanson, "Black Mike as I knew him." //The Yukon Magazine,// June 1998: 38-48.))

He quit his trapline along the Hart River and started a woodcutting business to supply firewood to Dawson. His winter wood camp was at Rock Creek and there was a cookhouse and bunkhouses. Mike was 68 and Mrs. Mike was 71. She died in 1940 and Mike went back to trapping until the mid-1940s.  He died at the age of 108.((W. J. Swanson, "Black Mike as I knew him." //The Yukon Magazine,// June 1998: 38-48.)) During Mike’s burial, the casket was dropped and Mike rolled out for all to see. All agreed that Mike would have enjoyed the event.((Jim Lotz, //The Gold of the Yukon.// Pottersfield Press, 2012: 137.))