Ted Bleiler
Ted Bleiler was originally from Mannville, Alberta.1) He was teaching in Edmonton 1929 where the stock market crash had shrunk wages. United Keno Hill Mines was offering three or four times as much as he was making.2) He came to the Keno Hill school in 1929. When the mine closed in 1931, he moved his five pupils to Werneke Camp, where the school opened with thirteen children in grades one, three, five, nine, and ten. The company and the parents provided and maintained the classroom. Bleiler received no salary until the Council met the following spring and voted the necessary funds. He taught school from 1929 to 1932. Bleiler left teacher to placer mine and his place was taken by a young girl from Dawson, Emma Skistad.3)
Bleiler hung around with the mining recorder, Billie Slime, and had heard all the mining talk. In 1931 he and a friend hiked into the Bonnet Plume country after hearing a lost mine story from one of the Dawson characters. In the summer of 1932, Bleiler and Norval Lochore worked for Bobbie Fisher and Archie Martin on their tungsten claim overlooking Dublin Gulch. They went down to Jack Suttles old claim and sluiced the ground for three weeks.4) Jack Suttles claim, where he was getting some coarse gold, had lapsed without him noticing and the Cantin Brothers jumped the claim. Suttles put a curse on the claim, saying the Cantins would get nothing from it. The Cantins had mined it for scheelite, valuable during the war.5) Ted and Norval sluiced out fourteen hundred dollars in gold after their few weeks of effort, and this started a small staking stampede. Ted and Norval staked a two-mile prospecting lease and Ted bought the Cantin Brothers old mining equipment for $150.6) The better pay was below the blue clay pan to which the Cantins had mined. The scheelite didn't increase with depth and the Cantins had only mined seven to ten inches deep.7)
Bleiler gave up teaching to mine, but the rich ground gave out and Lochore left the territory in 1936. Bleiler mined by himself and then took Fred Taylor as a partner in 1937. Bleiler married that year and sold the mine to Taylor.8)