Afe Brown (1885 – 1953)
Afe Brown was born in Tennessee and came to the Yukon in 1906. He was a freighter for White Pass & Yukon Route for several years and then for two or three years he was a packer with an International Boundary survey crew. In 1913, he packed for geologist D.D. Cairns DLS. Brown and Fred Best staked a claim at Chisana, Alaska and sold it in 1915. He and Frank Rae prospected in the Dawson area and in 1917-18 they followed the north fork of the McQuesten River, crossed to the headwaters of the Hart River, and travelled to the NWT border before returning to Dawson. In 1919, they and some others established a base camp at Francis Lake and prospected a wide area for thirty months. After briefly living in Mayo, Afe married Leta van Bibber and they settled at Fort Selkirk.1) Afe and Leta had two sons, Afe Allen and John Ervin. For many years Afe and Leta had a wood camp near Merrice Creek, a tributary of the Yukon River.2)
Afe Brown is listed in the Yukon Prospectors Hall of Fame. He was a co-discoverer of important gold-silver deposits in the Carmacks area. Afe Brown and George Fairclough (Yukon Gold Mining Syndicate) staked the quartz claims Theodore and Rock in March 1931. Over the years, the area was further explored and became an important copper, gold, and silver resource of interest known as Mount Freegold and Rambler.3) In 1943, A. Brown and G. McDade staked the Big Thing quartz claim and others in the Mount Nansen area.4)
Afe Brown disappeared while on a prospecting trip in the summer of 1944.5) The Big Thing property was sold in 1945 to Yukon Exploration Ltd (Leitch Gold Mines Ltd.). The company explored the area and then sold the property to Brown-McDade Mines Ltd. and they developed it. The property was acquired by Peso Silver Mines Ltd. in 1964 and transferred to a subsidiary, Mount Nansen Mines Ltd. in 1965. A new company was formed in 1984, BYG Natural Resources, and they developed a mine. Operations were suspended in 1999 due to environmental problems. In 2019, the Mount Nansen and Tawa properties, including the Brown-McDade occurrence, were sold to Alexco Environmental and JDS Group, collectively called the Mount Nansen Remediation Limited Partnership.6)