William James “Billy” Cletheroe (1881 – 1953)
Billy Cletheroe was born in the Falkland Islands and came to the Yukon during the gold rush. His grandfather had settled in the Falklands after he was shipwrecked at the Horn in 1848. He was on his way from England to the California gold rush. Billy finished grade 12 in 1898 and his father gave him money to travel. He went to the Canary Islands, London, England and then New York. He travelled across the continent by train to Seattle where he heard about the Klondike. He reached Dawson in 1900 and took various jobs including bull-cook and dishwasher. From 1903 to 1905 he cut and sold wood around Dawson. He went out to British Columbia to pick apples and then returned to the Yukon and settled in the mining community of Livingstone, north of Whitehorse.1)
One time Billy was hauling freight on the river from Carmacks to Winter Crossing. Winter Crossing is located where the rough road from Whitehorse to Livingstone crosses the Teslin River. He arrived to find that a girl had fallen into the fire and was very badly burned. Her family had given her up for dead, but Billy took her to the Whitehorse hospital, and she survived. The girl, Amy, was thirty years younger than Billy when they married.2)
In 1925 or 1926, Billy Cletheroe was the manager of the Taylor and Drury store in Champagne. He hauled freight from Whitehorse by horse and sleigh until he bought the first vehicle to be seen in that area. Cletheroe left Champagne after five years. His second vehicle is on display at MacBride Museum and is known as the John Sewell truck.3)
William and Amy mined in the Livingstone Creek area, along with “Dutch” Henry Broeren.4) Billy was hydraulicking with a single giant on Little Violet Creek in 1914.5) His cabin on the claim was burned in a forest fire in 1920 but he rebuilt his home in 1931. Billy and Amy had seven surviving children: Stanley, Frances (Woosley), Ralph, Alice (McGuire), Violet (Storer), Dora, and John.6) Little Violet Creek is about ten kilometres down from Livingstone Creek.
At the start of the Second World War, the family was living in Whitehorse in a house built by Billy on rented White Pass land. Amy worked next door for Mrs. Breen in a private laundry that washed and ironed uniforms for senior United States Army officers. It was bad time for alcohol and the number of parties in Whitehorse. To escape the chaos, Billy moved the family back to Little Violet Creek in 1943.7)
The Cletheroes moved back into Whitehorse in 1947 and William and his oldest son Stan went out to Livingstone seasonally to mine. William Cletheroe had cancer in 1953 but wanted to stay at Livingstone as long as he could. Another miner at Livingstone, Louis Ingoll, got sick and Stan was only back a week from walking out to get a plane for him when he had to walk out again to get a helicopter for his father. When Louis got sick, Stan walked to Whitehorse in twenty-five hours non-stop. He left at 9:00 and got to Whitehorse at 10:00 the next day. He went to Laberge and borrowed a boat to cross the lake to the farm market. He used the phone there to call a taxi for the $15 ride to the RCMP station. Gordon Cameron arranged a chartered plane. The next time, Stan was unable to get a plane and instead got a rescue helicopter from the air force. They left Whitehorse at 4:00 am and then came back at 10:30 am. Stan packed his father three miles to the airport on a stretcher and William died two weeks later.8)