Bernard “Barney” Hill (d. 1898)

Barney Hill came into the Yukon in 1886.1) He and Mark Russell and Hank Summers were headed up the Yukon River later that year and met French Joe and Henry Davis near the Big Salmon River. They all went up the river together, headed for Juneau. They met Carmack and his wife at Lake Bennett.2)

In 1894, Robert English, from Forty Mile, and Barney Hill, from the temporary trading post of McQuesten & Co., visited the Birch Creek, Alaska mines and decided to locate there. They staked the townsite of Circle City on June 20, 1894. The named it because they thought it was on the Arctic Circle, but it is forty miles south. McQuesten & Co. had established a trading post the previous summer about twelve miles above the present site of the town and moved to the townsite in the fall on 1894.3) Hill built the first cabin at Circle City.4)

Barney Hill signed the founding charter of the Yukon Order of Pioneers at Forty Mile in December 1894.5) He is buried at Forty Mile. 6)

1) , 4) , 6)
Dawson City Museum, YOOP microfilm.
2)
John Gould, “Yukon Order of Pioneers: A History.” Unpublished manuscript, nd: 52.
3)
Sam C. Dunham, The Alaska Gold Fields. Alaska Northwest Publishing Company, Anchorage, 1983: 49.
5)
Yukon Archives, D. E. Griffith, “Forty-Milers on Parade.” Coutts coll. 78/69 MSS 087 f.5.