Grace Chambers, nee Dickson (1912 - 2007)
Grace Chambers was born at Silver City, the daughter of Tom and Louise (Davis) Dickson.1) Sue Van Bibber and Belle Desrosiers were her sisters.2)
Grace went to school at Dawson and lived at St. Paul’s Hostel. She and Fanny Hume came to Champagne to work for George Chambers. They cooked for the summer when George and Sue Chambers were boarding the RCMP, and people were going back and forth to Dollis Creek mining. After the summer Grace returned to Dawson for the winter and worked in the hostel. She went back to Champagne and went to Dollis Creek and all over, working as a cook and doing odd jobs. She married Shorty Chamber's son Carl and moved to Champagne Landing in 1938 and stayed there until 1945. Carl went to school and graduated. Carl was in and out of the store and he hauled freight and did odd jobs. He was mostly gone with hunting parties. Grace's oldest daughter, Kluane, was born at Champagne in [1935] in Louise Davis’ old house. Grace would take over the storekeeping from George Chambers in the summers. She also ran it once and a while when Alex Davis was there. George's wife, Sue, usually ran the store when George was away with the mail run in the winter. He would have to go to town with the horses. Grace took in laundry when the highway went through.3)
Grace and Carl’s son Ron Chambers was born in Whitehorse in 1943.4) Grace moved to Burwash Landing from Champagne in 1945 and worked for Gene Jacquot. She fished from a little boat with an inboard motor that she took out on Kluane Lake. She sold her fish to the Lodge and to all the lodges along the north Alaska Highway. The wind was strong on the lake and sometimes she was unable to go fishing for a week at a time. She trapped and cooked for the restaurants and for hunting parties. Grace Chambers brought up her children (Kluane, Louise, and Ron) by herself with support from her relatives in Champagne and Burwash. She taught them to respect the land.5)
Grace met Darrell Duensing at Jacquot’s Lodge when she was working there, and he was in the American Army and working on the Alaska Highway construction. After the war, Darrell moved to Burwash. Grace’s grandson Ernest Martin helped Grace trap live animals for Al Oeming’s Alberta Game Farm when Darrell was mining. Al met Grace when Ernest was 10 in the 1940s after the highway was built. In the 1950s, Grace trapped wolverine, lynx, coyote, foxes and everything but wolves. Darrell designed the traps using 45-gallon drums. The animals would be all together in barres in the garage before they were shipped out. They would phone Al and he would send up a small plane to Whitehorse. They had crates supplied by Al and the animals were transferred from their barrels and driven to the Whitehorse airport in the wooden crates. Grace was the first to have a snowmobile in Burwash, and the first to have a truck.6)
When the federal government was surveying the land for the Kluane Game Preserve, Grace started cooking for the camps. She worked as a cook in the 1950s and ‘60s for about fifteen years when there exploration camps looking for platinum. The community would see a helicopter go over with a stove hanging underneath and know that Grace was off to work somewhere. At the same time, she was fishing and selling fish at the Burwash store while her husband Darrell Duensing was selling groceries and trading for furs. Grace and Derrell stayed together until she died in 2007.7)
Grace Chambers Creek flows into Kluane Lake near Burwash Landing.