William “Billy” Anstett (1876 – 1935)

Billy Anstett was born in Philadelphia. He tried to enlist in the navy during the Spanish American War but was rejected for having a heart condition.¹⁾ Anstett had seventeen dollars when he heard news of the Klondike strike. He got to St. Paul, worked his way to Skagway, and walked over the Dyea trail.²⁾ He travelled over the Chilkoot Pass with Grant Crosan and entered Canada in January 1898.³⁾

Anstett mined but did not strike it rich, so he went into chicken farming. He bought an island not far from the mouth of the Klondike River and built a log hen house. His eggs sold for fifty cents each and his chickens for $40 - $50 a dozen. He built the flock up to 900 chickens and became known locally as “Chicken Billy.” With competition the price dropped to a dollar a chicken and his hens were not faring well in large flocks. By 1916 he was raising only fancy chickens and devoting his energy to hogs and potatoes with occasional crops of turnips and oats. The Toledo Weekly Blade reporter Frank Carpenter went to visit Billy in July 1916. Billy had cucumbers and tomatoes in the hot house. There were more than twenty-five big hot houses in Dawson, and they were all doing well. Up to July, Billy had sold over 900 cucumbers and thought he would sell twice that many by the end of the season. The first cucumbers sold for more than four dollars a dozen, the next dropped to $3.50 and on the average his cucumbers sold for about twenty cents each to bring in a total of $500 for the year. He picked 111 in one week and the vines were still loaded. The price of tomatoes was equally high, and he had a good crop under glass.⁴⁾

Blly's hothouse was about thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. A great pit was lined with logs to the surface of the ground and above that there was a framework with a glass roof. A hundred-gallon gas tank had been made into a wood stove. The plants were in beds on low tables and grew along wires on the walls and roof. The hogs were kept in enclosures in the open with sleeping pens of covered platforms that they could crawl into at night. In the winter they lived in the log henneries which had been converted into large pens. There were thirteen log buildings on the farm and most were for the pigs. Billy’s first fourteen prize pigs came from Vancouver and cost sixty dollars each. They were Duroc-Jerseys, Berkshires and Yorkshires and were for breeding only. He sold his little pigs for fifteen to twenty-five dollars when they were six weeks old and he sold a hundred in 1925. The pigs were fed potatoes and grain in the winter, cooked and served hot morning and night. Billy saved the manure and sold it. Each hog could produce about thirty-seven dollars’ worth every year.⁵⁾

Billy’s seventeen-acre potato farm was on the mainland, close to the river. The half mile long field yielded a $10,000 crop in 1915. The farmhouse in the centre of the field has a great cellar where the potatoes were stored. The walls were double, and the floorboards ventilated. It was constructed with a dead air space to keep the area from freezing. The potatoes were in large bins each holding hundreds of bushels. The 1915 crop was still solid and sweet, and hard to tell from new ones. Anstett hoped to have six or seven tons to the acre in 1916 and thought the patch should yield about 100 tons or over 3,000 bushels. He expected to get $100 per ton. It cost $100 to clear an acre of bushes and trees. Billy was paying $75 a month and board in July 1916 and had hands making as little as $2.75 a day and found, even though wages in Dawson were as high as five to seven dollars. Jobs were scarce. Anstett thought one field of potatoes would bring in $10,000 fall in the fall of 1916.⁶⁾

When he was not farming, Anstett hired out his boat for river trips and transported people to Mayo by wagon. In 1924, Anstett put his horses, pigs, and seventeen hectares of land up for sale in one lot, and his poultry farm and ten acres seeded in brome grass in another. He and his mother, who usually visited in the summer, left Dawson in Anstett’s boat the Flamingo. Mr. and Mrs. Naylor travelled with them as they made a leisurely cruise to Nenana, Alaska where the boat was delivered to Bishop Rowe, an episcopal minister. Anstett died near Tacoma, Washington where he had been raising chickens.⁷⁾