Wilfred Gordon (b. 1912)

Wilfred Gordon was born in Harris, Saskatchewan to Elizabeth and Henry Thomas Gordon. He lived in several places before moving to Grand Prairie, Alberta in 1919. In 1929, he worked in Tulameen, British Columbia and then moved to Barkerville before coming to Stewart, British Columbia in 1934. In the middle of the great Depression, he had enough money to get to Carcross and then he and friend Bill Scott walked to Whitehorse. From there, he and fifteen others sat on a load of mail to Dawson.¹⁾

Gordon worked in Dawson until 1937 when he was the first passenger on Grant McConachie’s Yukon Southern Air Transport’s mail service. He travelled to Stewart to see Jean Matheson, and they were married in September of that year. They spent that winter, until January 1939, in the south and then headed for the Yukon where they worked for Andy Taddie at his roadhouse in Granville. When Wilfred got a job with Yukon Consolidated Gold Corp, they moved to the intake of the Australia Ditch with their young daughter Betty. The company shut down the Australia Ditch in 1944 and the family moved to Mayo in 1945 where Wilf worked for White Pass & Yukon Route as a longshoreman. After several year, he started guiding for Louis Brown and then started his own lumber business selling timbers to the Elsa mine. After the equipment burned in a fire, the Gordons started mining on Highet Creek. They were not successful so Wilf went back to cutting wood, this time for the Yukon and federal governments. In the early 1970s he returned to Highet Creek and started mining there and on Rudolph Gulch. After Jean was elected to the Yukon legislature in 1967 she had to spend many weeks away from her home in Mayo.²⁾