Fred Hutchinson

Fred Hutchinson was a very reliable miner who came into the country in 1885. While he was using a rocker box on a river bar, he lived all summer on only flour, fish, and enough bacon to fry them with. [Amazingly] he did not get scurvy.1) In the summer of 1886, he worked on the bars of the Salmon River or on Cassiar Bar, twelve miles above the mouth on the Yukon River.2)

Hutchinson mined on Franklin Gulch in 1887 and followed a paystreak that extended under the water. In the winter he chopped a hole in the ice without breaking through and forced the ice down to the bottom. He created a dam this way and was able to mine by building a fire and thawing the pay dirt. He was the first to work through the winter and the following year two others followed his lead.3) Fred Hutchinson signed the founding charter of the Yukon Order of Pioneers at Forty Mile in December 1894.4)

1)
Yukon Archives, W. D. Johns, Robert Coutts fonds, 78/69 MSS 092 f.20.
2)
The Alaskan (Sitka), 13 November 1886.
3)
Edwin Tappan Adney, The Klondike Stampede. UBC Press, 1994: 241-42.
4)
Yukon Archives, D. E. Griffith, “Forty-Milers on Parade.” Coutts coll. 78/69 MSS 087 f.5.