George Holt (1836 - 1884)
George Holt is credited with conducting the first systematic prospecting for gold in the Yukon, but the dates of his first travels into the interior have been contradictorily recorded as being in 1872, 1874, 1875, and 1878. Holt did make several trips. On the first one he crossed the Chilkoot Pass and descended the Lewes (Yukon River) to Marsh Lake, returning by way of the Teslin, Dease Lake and the Stikine River.1)
George Holt wrote an account of his travels into the Yukon in the fall of 1875 and sent it to M. P. Berry, Collector of Customs at Sitka but it was lost. The best story of his travels is told by a Tlingit man named Kayich and known as “Chilkoot Jack” Benson. Kayich was Holt’s guide through the mountains and forty years later, lying near death at St. Ann’s Hospital in Juneau in 1914, he told a reporter about the groups of white men he led over the Chilkoot Pass in the 1870s and 1880s.2)
Kayich began his story of travels with George Holt in 1973, where the party went as far at Teslin Lake and the Hootalinqua River. The primary hazard on the Chilkoot Pass was the Chilkat clan who guarded the trail and the trade between the coast and the interior. Kayich tried to take a large group of Sitka prospectors over the pass in 1878 and the Chilkats were so belligerent that the party turned back. Kayich was taken to task and his life threatened if he persisted in guiding the men who the Chilkat feared were traders. Kayich claimed to have an ancestral right to use the trail and argued that it was good policy to encourage the miners. An unsigned letter to the editor in The Alaskan, October 2, 1897, gives slightly different dates and particulars about Holt and Chilkoot Jack.3)
Holt had moved on to the Cook Inlet region by 1876 and claimed he had found nothing that would pay over two dollars a day. He found frost at the depth of three feet everywhere the party sunk a hole. He planned to go to the Susitna River in the spring of 1877 and if he found nothing he planned to quit Alaska.4)
“Slim Jim” Wynn and John McKenzie came over the Chilkoot Pass in 1880 and they verified Holt's story of finding gold on the gravel bars of the Hootalinqua (Teslin) River.5) Holt did not appear to be credible and many of his stories have been disproven, but he was the first prospector to report gold in the Yukon.6)
In 1885, Holt was the Alaska Commercial Company trader at Nuchek in Prince William Sound. When Lieutenant Henry T. Allen started his exploration of the Copper River in 1885, he learned that Holt had ascended the Copper River in 1882, looking for the fabled copper deposits of the Chitna River. Holt was crippled through some accident and did not achieve his goal. Holt had very bad relations with the Copper River people. Months after meeting Allen, Holt was the manager of the Alaska Commercial Co. store at Old Knik, near the head of Cook Inlet. On 26 December 1885, a note in the logbook of the Tronek Station detailed the murder of Holt by a Copper River man. According to his gravestone at Kodiak, Holt was 48 years old when he died in 1884.7)