James Murdoch Christie (1874 - 1939)
Jim Christie was born in Perthshire, Scotland and immigrated to the Canadian prairies. He was farming in Carman, Manitoba when he heard about the Klondike strike.1) He travelled to the Yukon in 1898 over the all-Canadian route from Edmonton.2) The route took him through the Selwyn Mountains and the headwaters of Ross River.3) Christie was a trapper and a prospector. In 1903, he and others owned 1,700 acres of quartz claims just behind the Five Finger Coal Mine. The men apparently expected to find copper.4)
In 1907, Christie was engaged by Dominion Land Surveyor J. Keele who wanted to explore the headwaters of the Pelly, Ross, and Gravel rivers. Keele also engaged Robert Henderson, R.B. Riddell, and George Ortell. Christie left in the autumn to trap for the winter and joined Keele and Riddell again in the spring.5) Keele surveyed the pass that connects the Keele River, in the Northwest Territories, to the Yukon’s Ross River. Keele named the pass and a nearby peak for James Christie who had travelled through the pass in 1898.6) Christie and Riddell told Keele about Charles Wilson, a prospector searching for the lost McHenry Mine, and said that a great deal of the country between the Macmillan and the headwaters of the Nahanni has been travelled in search of the lost mine.7)
Christie and George Crisfield were trapping on the Rogue River, a tributary of the Stewart River in 1909. He was tracking a grizzly bear that was bothering their caches when he startled the bear at the top of a bank. He shot the bear as it charged but it crunched his skull and right arm before it died. Christie wrapped his jacket around his broken jaw and made it eleven kilometres back to his cabin. When his partner Crisfield returned from his trapline he strapped Christie into a dog sled and took him to Lansing Post on the Stewart River, a four-day trip. The trader and his wife, the Ferrills, tended him for two months until he was fit enough to travel to the hospital in Dawson. He was on a liquid diet because his jaw had healed crookedly. The Dawson hospital could do nothing for him so he went to Victoria where a surgeon reset his jaw in several operations.8) By late fall he was back prospecting at the mouth of the Rogue River.9)
During the First World War, Christie was a scout and sniper for the Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry. On 30 October 1917, during the battle of Passchendaele, his unit had to capture a number of German pillboxes. Communication was broken and he passed through enemy lines several times to relay messages. He and two others came to a pillbox firing in all directions. Christie provided covering fire while the other two captured the pill box. They received the Victoria Cross, and Christie got the Military Cross.10)
After the war, Christie came back north to continue prospecting. He was noted for the speed he could travel through the bush. He lived to old age and retired to the Gulf Islands with his wife. Mrs. Ferrell kept the hide of the grizzly bear at Lansing and later in Mayo after they sold the post in 1915.11)