Willis Thorp
Willis Thorp grew up being familiar with cattle raising and driving. He moved to Juneau in 1886 and opened a butcher shop. He had a slaughterhouse on the edge of town and brought in cattle by ship. In 1896, Thorp was the first to send a herd into the Yukon.1)
Thorp assembled a party of ten men and a herd of forty to sixty head of cattle and they left Juneau for the interior in early July. The party walked and swum ten miles up the Chilkat River, a trip Thorp called the mill race of hell. Twenty of the steers were carrying two hundred pounds of supplies, and many animals were already footsore twenty miles up the valley. Jack Dalton refused Thorp’s party passage over “his” trail, and so they cut their own route over the mountains, along Kusawa Lake, and over a route that was latter followed by the Overland Trail between Whitehorse and Dawson. It was called it the G. Bounds Trail named for George Bound, a member of the party and a relative of Thorp’s.2)
The men reached the Yukon River below Five Finger Rapid and built a raft designed to transport the herd to Circle, Alaska. They stopped at the mouth of the Klondike River and sold most of the beef to the hundreds of hungry miners and prospectors for sixteen thousand dollars. They staked some claims for themselves and then hauled the rest of the beef to Forty Mile. When the party left in the spring of 1897, they took out eighteen thousand dollars in gold dust.3)
In early September 1897, Thorp left Haines, Alaska with forty of his own cattle, and another forty plus belonging to others. Winter came early on the Chilkoot Pass and Thorp had to turn the herd around, following a trail back to the coast marked by his forty-eight dead horses and discarded equipment. He followed a trail back up to Bennett where most of the surviving animals were slaughtered and frozen for sale, or to be served in Thorp’s newly constructed hotel. North-West Mounted Police Superintendent Z. T. Wood told Thorp that he had to pay a duty of sixteen dollars a head on the cattle he brought to Bennett. Thorp refused on the grounds that the border was not yet established, and he considered Bennett in American territory.4)
Thorp’s son, Ed, and a dozen other men took twenty-eight of the surviving horses and some cattle hoping to get supplies to Ed’s uncle who was mining near Dawson. They met Joe Boyle and his party at the Yukon River and Boyle bought the animals.5)