Angus McIntyre (1860 - 1950)
Angus McIntyre was born in St. Elmo, Ontario.1) He came west with the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway. He arrived at Skagway on the steamer Humbolt at the beginning of the Klondike gold rush in October 1897 and worked on a pack train from Skagway to the Summit. When he was on the Canadian side, he pushed on with without his ton of goods and arrived in Dawson in July 1898. He bought a horse for $600 and empty barrels for $10 each and started hauling water from the Klondike for Dawson customers. Hay for the horse cost him $500 a ton. He had many contracts from the late fall 1899 to the fall of 1905 to haul freight from Dawson City to Moose and Glacier Creeks and advertised his “side hill mules” as having legs longer on one side to better navigate the hills.2) From 1905 to 1908 he ran a pack train with supplies for the construction of the Yukon Ditch hydraulic mining project and then he was foreman of the Yukon Ditch construction from 1908 to 1911.3)
In 1920, large scale mining was over, and jobs were scarce. McIntyre’s wife and three children moved to Whitehorse and Angus moved to Mayo with Greenfield and Pickering to haul silver-lead ore from Keno Hill to the Mayo waterfront. His contract ended in 1924. He tried to live in Vancouver, but the introduction of the Holt tractor meant horses were not in demand. He got a call from Pickering and Greenfield to buy horses for a new contract and he went back to the Yukon.4) In 1925, he was the Dawson agent for Pickering and Greenfield on the Whitehorse-Dawson mail contract. Later he worked as a teamster for the Yukon Consolidated Gold Corp.5) McIntyre’s last job was walking the Yukon Ditch to identify problems before they became major obstacles to the flow of water.6) McIntyre retired to Kelowna in 1942 at the age of 82.7)
In 2007, Angus McIntyre was inducted into the Yukon Transportation Hall of Fame as the Transportation Person of the Year. He was one of Yukon’s last great frontiersmen, a man of toil, courage and endurance. He had a leadership role in building the Yukon Ditch and in designing and developing the ‘drag-rack’ used to haul lead-silver ore from the Keno Hill mines into Mayo. His work involved manpower, pack mules, and horse teams.8)