George Andrew Martin Lane O'Brien (1864 - 1901)

George O’Brien was born in Jersey in the British Channel Island. By 1881, he and his family was living in Birmingham, England where George was working as a blacksmith. In 1888, O’Brien was found guilty of robbery and attempted murder and was sentenced to seven years at Dartmoor prison. He was released in 1894. O’Brien was in Dawson by May 1898 and planning to rob and murder travellers along the river trail with a partner Chris Williams. This plan did not materialise. In September 1898, O’Brien was arrested for theft and sentenced to hard labour at the North-West Mounted Police (NWMP) wood lot. He escaped I December, was captured, and then sentenced to an additional six months. In jail, he suggested the robbery and murder plot to George West, a career criminal from Washington who was known as Kid West. O’Brien was released in mid-September 1899 and ordered to leave the Yukon. He partnered with Thomas Graves, about whom little is known, and they travelled south along the river trail with two dogs they had stolen in Dawson.¹⁾

George O’Brien and Thomas Graves killed three men on the Dawson Trail a few miles below the North-West Mounted Police post at Hootchiku in December 1899. Lawrence “Ole” Olsen, the lineman at Five Fingers, was called out to fix the line just before the holidays. He travelled north and stopped at Hootchikoo where Corporal Patrick Ryan invited him for Christmas dinner on his way back. Olsen continued north and fixed the break he found before returned south. He reached Fussell’s Minto Road House, 14 miles north of Hoochikoo, on December 24. There he met Fred Clayson, a merchant from Skagway, and young Linn (or Lynn) Relfe, recently employed as a cashier in a Dawson City hotel. The three stayed at Minto and set out early in the morning. O'Brien and Graves were camped six miles from Minto, and they ambushed the three men and killed them. Corporal Ryan was not alarmed when Olson did not arrive. It was several days before Constable Bacon arrived from Five Fingers looking for Olsen.²⁾ Jennie Prathed and her husband met O’Brien on the River Trail on 27 December and they travelled with him off and on and stayed in the same roadhouses. O’Brien bought a sleigh and two black horses at Schock’s roadhouse on Lake Laberge.³⁾

The new telegraph line allowed word of the murders to spread up and down the line. The police at Tagish Post recognised and apprehended O'Brien.⁴⁾ Holes had been bored into the wooden runners of his sled and he had placed about $6,000 there.⁵⁾ O’Brien was charged with theft on another matter until the bodies surfaced in the spring and then he was charged with murder. He was hanged in Dawson on 23 August 1901.⁶⁾