Charles Camsell (1876 - 1958)
Charles Camsell was born in Fort Liard, the son of the Hudson’s Bay Co. factor. When he was nine, he made a three-month journey by canoe and Red River cart to Winnipeg where he went to school. He returned home after ten years and taught school.1) He had a BSc from the University of Manitoba.2)
Charles and his brother Fred started for the Klondike when they heard about the gold discovery. They joined four other men including D.W. Wright, A. M. Pelly, (experienced prospectors from the Okanagan) and Dan Carey and his son Willy. They left Fort Simpson in September 1897 with five or six Indigenous packers to help line their boat. In October, they were stopped by ice about twenty km below the mouth of the Toad River. They reached Frances Lake at the beginning of May and stayed there trapping and exploring the country around Frances and Dease lakes. They returned to Fort Simpson by canoe in 1899. In the summer of 1898 there were as many as 400 men coming up the Liard and some of these were in real trouble by the spring of 1899. A petition was sent to James Porter, the gold commissioner of the Cassiar mining district at Telegraph Creek. The petition was signed by forty-two men and was dated Mountain Rapids, 3 April 1899. It reached Porter on May 7th. At least five men had scurvy or frozen feet. They were unable to continue the trip and had inadequate provisions. Fred Camsell took charge of the relief expedition on May 8th. His scow returned to the upper end of Dease Lake with fifty or sixty men. Some were so sick they had to be carried on and off the boat at each camp. All of them recovered and returned home. An estimated twenty-six men died that winter in the Liard-Cassiar region, seventeen from scurvy, and the rest drowned.3)
Camsell started working for the Canadian government in 1904 and spent the early part of his career on geological expeditions that went to many remote parts of the north.4) In 1905, he was sent to explore the rumour of a stampede to a new placer gold field east of Dawson. He went from Dawson, up the Stewart River to the headwaters and descended the Wind River to the Peel. He explored Hungry Creek, the supposed location of the gold strike, and then explored and surveyed the Peel River before returning to Dawson.5)
Camsell took postgraduate work at Queen’s University, Harvard, and MIT in Boston. He held L.L.D. degrees from three universities. He was appointed Deputy Minister of Mines in 1920 and in 1936 became the Deputy Minister of Mines and Resources. He retired from public service in 1946.6) The Charles Camsell Hospital, a tuberculosis hospital for Inuvialuit and Dene, was opened in Edmonton in 1946.7)