Francois “Frank” Buteau (1856 - 1930)
Frank Buteau was born in Quebec. He lived in Maine and Wisconsin before travelling west in 1882. He reached Juneau with a party of prospectors in January 1886 and worked at the Treadwell Mine to make a stake. He joined a prospecting party bound for the interior and crossed the Chilkoot pass in August 1886.1)
Buteau and twenty men who had travelled together from Victoria B.C. met Jack McQuesten and John Hughes just above the mouth of the Big Salmon River in August. McQuesten told them of gold on the Stewart River but knew nothing of gold on the Forty Mile River. McQuesten was on his way to San Francisco to order supplies for the miners located at the mouth of the Stewart River.2) Buteau reached the Fortymile River by 13 October 1886 after spending some time on the Stewart River. He stopped at an island about a mile above the mouth of the river. There were sixteen prospectors on the island and about five men living near the mouth of the Fortymile River. There was no trading post there yet, and their only provisions were what they could carry.3)
Buteau built a cabin at Forty Mile with two French Canadian companions, Louis Cotey and French Joe. Their home was called the Island of Liars for their storytelling talents. Buteau prospected in the area and found $3000 in gold.4) During the winter of 1886-87, the sixteen men living on the island at the mouth of the Fortymile River agreed to stake 300-foot claims so there would be room for others who might want to locate in the district. In the spring and summer of 1887, Frank Buteau was located on Bonanza Bar about halfway between Franklin’s bar and Madden’s Bar, at the foot of a riffle a half mile above Canyon Creek. Louis Coty located another bar he also called Bonanza Bar above the riffle and about one-quarter mile above Buteau. After the ice went out, Buteau built a rocker and started working the ground – making from $20 to $100 a day. Dan Spragg came down the river looking for a claim of his own. Buteau offered to make him a partner and made him a rocker. They worked together for a week, taking out $200 a day which gave them each $600 a week. During the summer of 1887, Buteau took out $3000 in gold dust. It turned out he had made more money than any of the others mining on the river, so they called him the “King of Forty Mile.”5)
In the winter of 1887-88, Buteau bought one-third interest in the discovery claim on Franklin Gulch from Franklin for $1000 cash. It took him three years to get his money back out as the ground was not rich. Buteau and partners Pete McDonald, George Matlock, and John Campbell bought Troublesome Point in 1889. In March 1890, they went up Chicken Creek and whipsawed lumber for a flume to divert water from Franklin Gulch to Troublesome Point. This was the first hydraulicking operation in the Yukon River basin.6) That spring the steamer Arctic came up to the mouth of the Fortymile to bring supplies, arriving there in July. Buteau and his partners returned to Franklin Gulch and that fall, fifteen of them made a fish trap and caught about a ton and half of fish, so everybody had grayling for the winter.7)
Frank married an Indigenous woman from Unalakleet in 1890. In 1892 he went outside for a year and left her at McQuesten's post at Forty Mile. When he re-joined his wife, they worked as mining partners until the summer of 1894 when she paid a visit to her relatives at Unalakleet. She brought back a nephew who lived with the couple until he died in 1911.8) In 1893, Frank Bateau met John Lind as he and his family were coming down the river from Miller Creek and Lind was going up. Bateau told Lind that two or three men had taken out $100,000 from Miller Creek in the Sixtymile River drainage.9) Buteau travelled outside for business in 1893 and returned with [Ambroise?] Corbeil, Laroche, and Francois Roy.10)
Buteau was the first warden of the first lodge of the Yukon Order of Pioneers (YOOP) at Forty Mile in 1894.11) He was one of ten members to apply for a charter for a branch of the YOOP lodge at Birch Creek, Alaska in 1895.12) In 1896, Frank Buteau was the original staker of Claim No. 48 Above Discovery on Bonanza Creek.13) In December 1898, Buteau obtained three lots in Klondike City [Tro’chek]. In 1902, he was mining on Bonanza Creek. In 1920, he was living in Fairbanks.14)