Norman “Kid” Marion (1880 – 1946)
Kid Marion was of white and First Nation ancestry from Fraser, British Columbia.1) He came north as a young man and for some years delivered mail by dog sled over the trail between Dawson, Eagle, Fort Yukon, and St. Michael, Alaska.2) There is another story about Marion’s heritage. Geologist Hugh Bostock was told he was Metis from the Mackenzie country and came into the Yukon at the age of 19 as a dog driver for the Mounted Police.3)
William MacBride remembers meeting him when he first arrived from the lower Yukon where he was a pilot for the Northern Commercial Company boats. In 1915, Marion signed on as an extra pilot of the White Pass & Yukon Route steamer Casca and he continued to work for the company until the late 1940s.4) In the 1930s, he captained a boat on the Stewart River.5)
In 1942, J.J. Van Bibber worked for Captain Marion on the steamer Klondike when the boat was barging heavy construction equipment for the Alaska Highway down the Yukon River to Circle, Alaska. Marion was known for his ability to “read the water” and pilot his boat through shallow stretches of the river. The Klondike ran day and night, using floodlights at night to illuminate the buoy system that marked the turns in the river between Dawson and Whitehorse. After Dawson there were no more buoys for the 500 miles to Circle. Marion would turn the wheel over to the 21-year-old JJ and fall sleep in his chair. The barges on the end were long. When they had to jack knife into a turn, J.J. would wake Marion up. Marion would survey the situation and blow the horn to tell the first mate which way to steer the vessel. He would yawn and tell the nervous J.J. that he was doing fine.6)
Kid Marion rivalled Joe R. Matthews, the popular and well-known engineer of the steamer Yukon, as the best storyteller in the service of the White Pass. The difference in style and subject matter made it hard to judge who was the best. Matthews was at a disadvantage because he confined himself to the truth, while admirers of “the Kid” wished he would relate some of his actual experiences.7) Marion’s creative sense of humour included telling passengers about a crazy woman who lived on a houseboat and who would run and hide every time the steamer passed her home. This was Pauline LePage who would leave the family’s houseboat near their woodlot because the riverboat wash rocked the boat.8) One time he had friends tie antlers on a cow and told his passengers that a bull had escaped death after a barge full of cattle had capsized. The lonely bull had mated with a moose and the evidence was there in front of them. A reporter was so impressed with the story that she wrote it up for her newspaper back home. Marion was also known to have salted the riverbank near a cemetery with boots. He told his passengers that the river was washing out the graves.9) Bostock said there were two great liars in the Yukon and both of them were Kid Marion. He loved to pull peoples’ legs and entertain with tricks and yarns.10)
Kid Marion spent his winters outside, and he died in Chilliwack, British Columbia. Marion Crescent in the MacPherson subdivision on the North Klondike Highway is named for Captain Norman Marion.11)