Leonard S. Sugden (d. 1923)
Dr. Leonard Sugden served with the British Admiralty in the Orient before he arrived in the north.1) He arrived in Juneau on a whaler and stayed to practice medicine until 1897 when he started for the Klondike. He had to winter at Marsh Lake and he worked as a doctor for the North-West Mounted police (NWMP). It may be that Robert Service based one of his poems on a story about Sugden. He checked on a miner with scurvy and, finding him dead, brought him back to the NWMP post at Tagish. The sternwheeler Olive May was wintering there, and the crew helped him load the dead man into the boiler where he was cremated. Sugden worked as a pilot at Miles Canyon in 1898.2) He was practicing medicine in Whitehorse in 1903 when he delivered Ned and Kate Hoggan’s son, John William Hoggan.3)
Dr. Sugden was the NWMP surgeon at Silver City in Kluane from 1903 to 1907.4) He was an active prospector and a successful mining promoter. He was among the first to prospect Bullion Creek in the Kluane district and staked a discovery on Sugden Pup, a short tributary of Bullion Creek from the south. Sugden Creek is a tributary of the Kaskawulsh River from the north.5) In 1906, Alex Fisher and Dr. Sugden purchased the holdings of W. L. Breese {Breeze] at Claim 23 above the canyon on Burwash Creek.6)
Sugden bought a Prizma movie camera and in 1915 made a silent film called The Lure of Alaska.7) He took five reels of colour photography of the Yukon including gold and copper mining, a trip over the White Pass, and the running of the White Horse Rapids. In order to get the picture of the rapids he had to navigate the route several times. On the seventh trip, he took two rafts through, guiding the first one himself and having the moving picture machine lashed to the second and focused on the first as it plunged through the rapids. He visited Yukon and Alaska in 1923 with his films and lectured in Skagway and Whitehorse. He sent the films to Dawson and went himself to Mayo, intending to travel on to Dawson. As he was leaving Mayo he lost his balance, fell from the barge into the river, and drowned. The films went to auction and were obtained by the Church of England in the Diocese of the Yukon. Bishop Stringer intended to use them on lecture tours, and they were shown in Dawson on the nights when the tourist boats were docked.8)
A copy of The Lure of Alaska is held by the University of Iowa and was digitized in 2001. The film was meant to accompany a lecture tour sponsored by the J.B. Pond Lyceum Bureau who had a roster of famous celebrities, explorers and travellers. A poster advertising the film was designed and drawn by R. A. Reed.9)