Clement Emminger (b. 1900)
Clem Emminger was from Salzburg, Austria and he and his brother [Andrew?] came to the Yukon in 1925.1) In 1933, Clement’s brother Andrew was killed in an accident three miles north of the Little Salmon Roadhouse when the sleigh he was driving overturned.2) Emminger and his partner Louis Engle spent many years before the Second World War placer mining in the Livingstone Creek region. They had a cabin at Cottoneva Creek and mostly mined there. They hunted their own meat and had a vegetable garden. They had a little derrick for hoisting boulders out of the creek and drilled the larger ones with hand steel in order to blast them. They shovelled up to the sluice by hand and had a homemade sawmill for cutting planks.3)
Emminger was the owner and original discoverer of scheelite on the Pueblo 54 claim and on adjoining property 1.4 miles southwest of the Alaska Highway on the Fish Lake Road.4)
In 1941, Emminger and Engle lost part of their placer working at Livingstone Creek in a heavy land slide.5) In October 1941, Eminger and Leroy Churchill, both well-known Yukoners, were working on the construction of a new Northern Airways airplane hangar at Carcross. They fell from a scaffold and suffered broken bones.6)
In 1953, Emminger trekked into the White River country and returned with a sample of copper and a description of a three-ton slab of ore. A committee at MacBride Museum worked for four years to acquire the rock, and in 1958 Northern Affairs donated it to the museum.7) In April 1958, six men went in to collect the giant nugget. Buck Dickson and Carl Chambers were from the Kluane area and they used a dog team to guide Joe Langevin, Metro Kaduk, and Peter Versluce. The Canadian Army was maintaining the Alaska Highway at the time, and they donated the use of a cat and an experienced operator, Dave Hume. The nugget site was 2.4 km above Canyon City on the White River. The slab was maneuvered on a sheet of steel, bound by cable and then hoisted 121 metres to the top of a riverbank and then around two canyons and across a river to the highway. The five-day operation cost more than $3,600. Once in Whitehorse, the nugget was dedicated to the pioneer prospectors of the White River country: Frank R. Miles, Harry Townsend, Frank Slaggard, Clem Emminger, Bill Blair, and others who staked claims on the White River between 1900 and 1958. Frank Miles was the adoptive father of Bill MacBride.8) The large nugget now sits in the southwest corner of the MacBride Museum property. It has no market value because it is too hard to mill, but it is a priceless museum artifact.9)
Clem Emminger is listed on the Yukon Prospectors Association Hall of Fame and Honour Roll for his prospecting activities in the Wheaton and Ross River areas.10)
The Yukon Archives has copies of photographs of Emminger, his friends, and activities associated with him taken between 1930 and 1940.11) John Scott interviewed Emminger in the 1960s. The sound recordings cover the topics of Yukon mining and exploration in the 1920s and 1930s, and life in the Yukon in the first fifty years of the twentieth century.12)