John A. “Troublesome” Campbell
John Campbell, Pete McDonald, George Matlock, and Frank Buteau formed a partnership in the fall of 1889 and bought Troublesome Point on the Forty Mile River. The claim was about a quarter of a mile below Franklin Gulch and was named because it was rich and the source of trouble between the two previous partners. The Alaska Commercial Company’s boat sunk on the way to Forty Mile in 1889, and the miners were told they would not get any winter provisions. The new partners did not want to leave for St. Michael because they wanted to whipsaw lumber for a flume. Their food supply was low, but they managed to kill forty caribou. George Maddock and his wife and Pete McDonald and his wife had two sacks of flour between them. They had no butter, a few beans, a few pounds of dry fruit, and all of the food was mouldy. John Campbell and Frank Buteau made one sack of flour and few pounds of beans stretch from 1 October to 1 July, 1890 when the first boat arrived. The partners built a flume which worked well and were the first miners in the district to use a hydraulic method of mining. They had a short season as Franklin Gulch did not produce much water in the dry summer season. None of the miners got rich. Five hundred to fifteen hundred dollars was a good year’s work and the richest man made $3,000.1)