Clement S. Lewis
Clement Lewis was the well-educated second son of John Travers Lewis, the first Anglican Archbishop of Ontario. When Clement heard of the Klondike strike in 1897, he left Trinity College and took a steamer to St. Michael. He toured the area and returned home. In 1898, he returned to Skagway and travelled on to the Klondike. He joined the stampede to Nome and Tanana but settled on the upper Pelly River. His father died in 1901 and left him a small inheritance. Lewis arrived at Smith's Landing, near present-day Ross River, on the third trip of the steamer La France, in August 1902. He came to prospect, attracted by rumours of the gold strike on Ketza Creek up-stream from Tom Smith's trading post. Lewis bought the trading post from Smith in 1903. He may have had Poole Field as a partner.1)
In July 1905, Lewis was in Victoria to sell furs he had collected from a successful season of trade. Old-timer James Grew looked after the post while he was gone.2) Lewis sold the trading post, named Nahanni House, to Taylor and Drury (T&D) around 1905 and he stayed on to work for the company. In 1912, Lewis moved from Ross River to take charge of the T&D post at Teslin Lake and left his fine library behind him. On a visit to Teslin, Lewis became reacquainted with 16-year old Angela Ward whom he first met in 1898 in Skagway. The story went that during the “Soapy” Smith and Frank Reid shoot-out, Lewis grabbed a two-year-old girl and they hid behind some barrels. Lewis gave her a gold nugget and Angela still had that nugget fourteen years later. They were married in 1912 and their first child, Iris, was born a year later. They nicknamed her Nugget. Lewis gathered Indigenous artifacts at Teslin Lake for the Museum of Canada. In 1914, Clement Lewis and his family moved to a new post on the Liard River near present day Watson Lake and continued to prosper. Lewis closed the Liard Post in 1919 and took his family to northern British Columbia and later southern Alberta where they lived a long life.3)