C. A. Kippy Boerner (b. 1875)
Kipp Boerner was born in Stockton, California. He started his career as a boatman running between Stockton and San Francisco and learning to be a pilot. His captain, Captain McNoble, heard about the Klondike strike and signed up for two years with the Alaska Exploration Co. He took his whole crew with him, including Boerner, and they left San Francisco on the Leelanaw in mid-June 1898. They were supposed to find four steamers and six barges ready to go at Unalaska but only the steamer Linda and one barge was ready to take the big load of passengers and freight from the Leelanaw. The steamer Herman and barge Seal were ready by mid-July. The steamer schooner Brunswick towed them to St. Michael, near the mouth of the Yukon River, where they loaded for Dawson. They arrived on August 14th and left again on the 16th. On the way down, Boerner transferred to the steamer Arnold to travel to Dawson and then back down the Yukon River to winter twenty-four miles above Eagle. The strike was made at Nome that winter, so the Arnold returned to Dawson to take a full load of passengers to St. Michael. That autumn, 1899, Boerner was pilot on the Arnold and in 1900 he was the pilot on the Linda. In 1901, the Alaska Commercial Company, the Alaska Exploration Company, the Empire Transportation Company, and the Seattle Yukon Transportation Company merged with the Northern Navigation Company to become the Northern Commercial Company (NCCo). The company had too many pilots and not enough pursers, so Boerner became the purser on the Rock Island.1)
Boerner was pilot on the Rock Island in 1902. He spent 1903 on the Tanana River: first on the Seattle No.3, the first boat to go to Fairbanks for the NCCo; then on the Rock Island to Fairbanks; then as captain of the Isabelle, a boat taken over from Captain E.T. Barnette. He was on the Isabelle most of the summer, bringing lumber to build the NCCo grocery and dry goods store and a few warehouses. He was in Fairbanks, as master of the Koyukuk, when Frank Manley needed gold coins to pay for two claims on Cleary Creek from Barnette. Manley asked Turner, NCCo manager at Fairbanks, to get him to Nome and back with the gold coins inside of a month. The Koyukuk was still loaded with freight and needed the boilers washed, so Boerner and his crew took the Isabelle which was sitting without a crew. They took a load of wood so they would not have to stop before the mouth of the Tanana River, where Manley could catch the sternwheeler Sarah to St. Michael. They wired the Sarah to wait, and also wired St. Michael to have the tug Meteor waiting to take Manley to Nome and back. When Manley returned, Boerner was at Chena with the Koyukuk to take him up to Fairbanks. Manley made it with two days to spare.2)
Boerner was captain of the Lavelle Young from 1906 to 1908, and captained the Delta in 1909. In 1910, he took the Lavelle Young from St. Michael to the Kuskokwim River, and in 1911 he built a store and warehouse at Boerner on the Tacotna River. He went to San Francisco in 1912 but was back on the Yukon in 1913. All the boats were sold to White Pass & Yukon Route in 1914 and Boerner worked for that company until he left the river for good in 1917.3)
Boerner was the NCCo agent at Hot Springs in the fall of 1917 and then went to Iditarod until 1920 when he returned to San Francisco. He was the agent in Circle in 1921 and then was assistant manager to Jim Cody at Mayo where they built a store and warehouses. When Cody was transferred to Dawson, Frank Boerner stayed as assistant to R.M. O’Loane. Enid McIntyre was a nurse at the Mayo hospital and they met and married. In 1932 Frank and Enid travelled around to do inventory and that summer O’Loane was transferred to Hot Springs and Boerner became the Mayo agent. In January 1943, he was transferred to Whitehorse where there was no accommodation for him or employees. The company allowed him to buy a lot on Steele Street beside the store and they built a two-story building to accommodate the agent, the Caterpillar manager, plus four rooms for female and two rooms for male employees. He went to Mayo to order lumber, as there was none in Whitehorse during the war, and learned while he was in Mayo that the Whitehorse store had burned down, so he got enough wood to rebuild the store as well. The burned store was still smoking when he and Enid arrived on 14 June. By 12 December, the living quarters were finished, and the store was open for business. The crowd to get in was two abreast for the whole block. People stood in line for two and a half hours in minus forty weather. Boerner was manager at the Whitehorse store until 1 February 1949. He worked for the NCCo for fifty years and seven months.4)
Kipp Boerner was a founding member of the Whitehorse Board of Trade in 1947.5) In November of that year, the members discussed changing the weekly half-day holiday from Wednesday to Thursday afternoons as, during the tourist season, the store were closed when a large number of tourists were in town.6) In February 1948, a petition seeking incorporation of Whitehorse was prepared by the Board of Trade Corporation Committee.7)
John Scott interviewed Boerman around 1965 about his activities on the Yukon River and the sound recordings are held at the Yukon Archives.8)