Murray Lintick
Murray Lintick was originally from Daulphin, Manitoba. In 1947, he was working in Vancouver at Rogers Sugar Refinery for sixty-nine cents an hour when he heard of work opportunities in the north. He thought he was going to Dawson Creek and ended up in Dawson City. He checked in at the Westminster Hotel but would have turned and left the country if he had more money. Yukon Consolidated Gold Corp (YCGC) was the main employer in town, hiring some 1500 men every summer to work on their twelve dredges. Lintick liked the friendly community. He accepted a post-dated cheque to go to work at YCGC and spent five seasons working on the dredges. He started at $1.05 an hour and worked seven days a week for seven months. An employee who worked the whole season to freeze up received a $100 bonus. In the fall, Lintick had $2,700 and headed back to Dauphin. He had nothing left in the spring when he started back to Dawson.1)
Lintick stayed in the Yukon for the next ten years and worked around Dawson, Elsa, and Mayo. He worked on a seismic crew at Eagle Plains before the Dempster Highway was built. In 1953, he got married at Bear Creek and he and his wife raised two boys and a girl. He worked briefly for Madame Liberty at her brothel as a timekeeper. The house charged ten dollars for ten minutes upstairs with the girls and when the time was up Lintick pounded on the ceiling with a broom stick. In 1958, he moved to Whitehorse, worked twelve years for White Pass on a section crew, and rose to the position of foreman. Tired of the isolation, he transferred to the fuel tank farm near Valleyview and monitored the flow and level of different types of fuels coming up the pipeline from Skagway to Whitehorse. He worked twenty-one years there and spent the last eleven working the graveyard shift alone. Lintick retired to his Marsh Lake cabin in 1989.2)