Richard A. Fox (1861 - 1950)
Richard A. Fox may have been William Henry Mannes, born in Ipwich, United Kingdom, who immigrated to the United States and went through divorce proceedings in Colorado in 1897.1)
The re-invented Richard Fox worked as a boilermaker in Colorado for a few years and took building contracts. He saved a reported $1000,000, lost it in a bank failure during the 1890s depression, and then stampeded to the Yukon in 1898.2) Fox was working in construction in Dawson in 1903.3) He soon turned to creating well-crafted in-laid boxes and objects made of bone and mammoth ivory. In July 1915, he recovered a mammoth tusk and brought some mammoth meat to Dawson in a gunnysack.4) In 1921, Fox advertised his ivory shop at 317 First Avenue in a local newspaper saying his specialty was in mammoth ivory beads, lodge gavels, paper knives, paper weights, cribbage boards, tongs and canes.5) In 1922 he added Mayo silver souvenirs to his advertisement.6)
Fox delighted in exhibiting the things he made or found interesting. In September 1906, when Fox was living at Eighth and Craig streets in Dawson and operating an ivory working shop on First Avenue, he exhibited a 6’6” potato plant at the Klondike Market. Grown in his garden without fertilizer or artificial watering it produced eleven potatoes. The largest weighted two pounds and even the smallest was almost as large as a man’s fist.7) In 1910, he collected a meteorite that struck earth a few feet from where he was mining on Minto Gulch. He brought the six-pound rock to Dawson and exhibited it at Nick’s barber shop.8) Fox was also a poet with a poem published in a local newspaper. The poem retells the story of the Klondike gold strike, putting Skookum Jim as the discoverer and leaving George Carmack completely out of the story. This at a time when Yukoners were championing Canadian Robert Henderson over American George Carmack as the discoverer.9) Fox was outspoken in his views and wrote to the newspapers several times on topics related to good and bad behaviour.10)
Fox was a believer in the “mother lode” as the source of all the Klondike gold and he was an early staker in quartz claims when other scoffed.11) In 1911, “longtime Hunker and Minto Gulch miner” R.A. Fox returned to Dawson from a prospecting trip to the new placer creeks on the Yukon River, Britannia and Canadian.12)
In June 1924, Fox left the Yukon for a year to travel and find a publisher for his book The People on Other Planets.13) It was difficult to find one willing to print it for his few thousand dollars but it helped that he had advance orders.14) Fox returned to Canada in 1925 and started a lecture tour with “The Fulfilment of the Prophecy of the World’s Tribulations.”15) He was back in Dawson in July with a promised movie contract for $30,000 to be completed in 1926.16)
Richard Fox was accepted as a member of the Yukon Order of Pioneers in 1919.17) In 1926, he presented the Yukon Order of Pioneers with one of his fine mammoth ivory gavels.18) Fox was still living in Dawson 1930 and was a member of the International Highway Association.19) In 1931, a Vancouver newspaper printed Fox’s directions for safe northern travel in the skies and on the ground.20) In 1934, Fox was again writing to the Dawson newspaper about a trip he took to Europe and Russia.21) This time he may have really travelled in body as well as mind as he was seen coming back north through Whitehorse.22)
In 1937, Fox was still behaving in a quirky manner, such as panning for gold on the main street in Dawson, and making useful objects out of mammoth ivory.(“Dawson Proves to be no ghost city.” The Lethbridge Herald (Lethbridge), 18 September 1937.)) He remained outspoken on several topics including agriculture and graft in the government, and in the 1930s added opinions on the benefits of a highway connecting the Yukon to southern transportation routes. In November 1938 and January 1944, he connected several of his favourite topics stating drought-stricken farmers would do well to relocate along a northern highway.23) Just when you think the man is making sense, he veers away from science. Fox’s 1925 book, The People on Other Planets, is dedicated to people of advanced thought and to scientists and inventors not hampered by prejudice or so-called impossibilities.24)