Jimmy Kane, Ch’èdèghu (~1883 - ~1983)

Jimmy Kane was born at Neskataheen, a Southern Tutchone fishing village on the Tatchenshini River. The village was on a Chilkat trading route from the coast into the interior. Kane remembers the first time saw Jack Dalton. He was around fourteen, and it was first hunt. Some of those who heard about the approaching white man thought he might be sick and carrying disease to their community. Kane worked for Dalton wrangling horses and helping with the pack trains. He worked until the gold rush waned and the Dalton Trail was abandoned.¹⁾ Jimmy Kane and his family lived at Shäwshe [Dalton Post] with at least four other families until the 1950s. (“Shäwshe.) Yukon Geographical Place Names Board, 2024 website: Dalton Post - Yukon Geographical Place Names Board (yukonplacenames.ca) ))

Jimmy Kane was known as an easy-going, philosophical man who always had a smile. In the early days, Kane was a guide for big-game hunters. After Gordon and Joyce Yardley sold the Dezadeash Lodge and built a home in the Hay Meadow in 1967, Joyce Yardley and Jimmy Kane went prospecting for copper in a place known to both Jimmy and Gordon Yardley. Their arrangement was that Jimmy, Gordon, and Joyce would stake the ground and Gordon would sell the claims for them. Johnny Amato, a promoter, happened by the lodge and gave them $5,000 cash for the claims, of which Jimmy got $2,500. Amato sold the claims in Whitehorse for $35,000 and a mining company named Jackpot Copper was formed. The site was not rich enough for a mine.²⁾ In 1968, Jimmy Kane was in a movie filmed in Juneau, Alaska called the Alaska Boy starring twelve-year-old Alaskan Tlingit Tony Williams. In 1971, Chuck Keen of Alaska Pictures made a movie based on The Saga of the Mad Trapper of Rat River. The movie was eventually called Challenge to be Free and the trapper was played by Mike Mazurki. Gordon Yardley scouted out locations for shooting, Alex Van Bibber and Bob McKinnon played parts in the movie. Gordon had a part as well and his son, Ted, was assistant photographer and production manager. Jimmy Kane was the old Indian scout who planned the strategy of the epic chase.³⁾ Jimmy sold his trapline to the Yardleys in 1971. It was fifteen miles long and fifteen miles wide, bordered on the west by the Haines Highway and stretched to the British Columbia border, taking in Klukshu and the Howard Lakes at the head of the Takhini River. Jimmy Kane was in his eighties when he lived in a log cabin just past the big garage at Beloud Post.⁴⁾

Kane Creek, named to honour the family, flows into Village Creek [T’àt Chùa] and then the Tatshenshini near the site of the old village of Nesketaheen.⁵⁾

Jimmy Kane and Jack A. MacDonald were interviewed in 1979 and spoke about the human history of the Kluane area.⁶⁾

In 1988, Jimmy and brother Bobby Kane were inducted into the Yukon Prospectors’ Association Hall of Fame.