William D. “Billie” Moore (1854 - 1945)
Bill Moore and his father, William, and two brothers landed at Wrangell in 1873 and necked their sleds over the Stikine ice to Dease Lake on the way to the Cassiar Mines. They took claims on the first creek worked and discovered pay on the second creek worked. They took out nearly a hundred thousand dollars and put the money into steamboats on the Stikine River. Moore had run flat boats on the Skeena River years before this and helped line boats up from Barkerville when that camp was discovered. Moore went over the Dyea Pass with Bishop Sehgers, Fathers Tosi and Ribaut, Jack Wade, John Burke, and Joe Ladue in 1886. They whipsawed lumber for a boat and went down to the Fortymile River where they located claims on Bonanza Bar just as the first miners were cleaning off the bedrock.1)
In the fall of 1887, Dick Walsh and he built a log cabin three miles down the Yukon from Forty Mile. There was an island in the Yukon with several cabins with two to four man in each. Among the men was Jack Tremblay. He came across the thin ice even through his pole went through several times. When he was twenty feet from shore, he went through the ice but his feet hit the bottom. He was up to his waist in ice and water. Moore broke the ice near the shore and Jack broke the ice as he came towards the shore. He stayed with Moore and Dick for two days.2)
Billie Moore was one of the men who hanged the First Nation man who killed John Bremner on the Koyukuk in 1888. The same year he stampeded to Beaver Creek but found nothing. In the spring of 1890, he went to the Seventymile district and worked with Barney Hill on Barney Creek. The next year found him on the Koyukuk with Gordon Bettles, working on Tramway Bar and trading with the First Nations. In 1893, Moore started work for the Alaska Commercial Co. at St. Michaels and became a master on the riverboats. Over the years he captained the Arctic, Yukon, J.P. Light, Sarah, Lavelle Young, Oil City and others.3) Captain William Moore made five trips on the steamer Arctic in 1896 before going prospecting in Nome. The J. P. Light wintered at the mouth of the Yukon and got a late start in the spring of 1902. It arrived at Dawson nine months later, taking ten days to come up from Forty Mile. Captain William Moore was in command.4)
Moore was in the employ of navigating companies at St. Michael and on the river in various capacities for ten years until he retired to Kotlik. His daughter Wilhelmina Gertrude was born in Alaska in 1896 and died in 1919. She was educated at Holy Cross Mission. His wife of forty-one years died in 1931 of the flu.5)