William Michael “Billy” Cashin (1927 - 2004)
Bill Cashin was born in Eastern Passage, Nova Scotia.1) He signed on to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) in 1944. He was a seventeen-year-old crew member of the RCMP boat St. Roch that year when the 31-metre wooden schooner started on the historic west-east passage through the Northwest Passage and back. It took eighty-six days to do the westward voyage on a deep-sea route never used before. Cashin stayed with the boat for five years, as it patrolled the western Arctic and supplied northern RCMP detachments. [They used Herschel Island as their northern base.] The Captain was the Norwegian-born Sergeant Henry Larsen, who had served on the St. Roch since it was launched in 1928. Before Cashin joined the crew, the St. Roch had already made history with its first northern voyage through the passage. It took twenty-eight months from Vancouver to Halifax, including two winters in the ice. The boat was caught in the ice for ten months during the first winter. The trip was prompted by wartime orders to support a planned allied invasion of Greenland to keep a vital cryolite mine out of enemy hands. The invasion never took place, but the St. Roch continued on.2)
Cashin moved to the Yukon in 1949. In 1955, he moved to Carmacks from Keno Hill and started logging timber. He met his wife to be, Dolly, in 1955. In 1962, he started work at the Tantalus Butte Coal Mine until its closure in 1976 and then went on to work at the Carmacks Highway Maintenance Garage in 1988. He retired in 2001 with failing health due to cancer. Cashin was survived by his sons Michael and Malcolm and daughters Patsy, Gloria, and Michelle. Wife Dolly and daughters Anna and Frances were predeceased.3)