Thomas Sergeant Lippy (~1860 – 1931)
Thomas Lippy was an athletic instructor and secretary of the YMCA in Fargo, North Dakota before he broke his knee when working for the YMCA in Seattle. He had to find another job and a Methodist minister, named Hestwood, offered to hire him to work on his claim on Miller Creek in the Yukon River drainage. This was before gold was discovered in the Klondike. Lippy brought his wife Salome and adopted son in that first spring. Water was short that summer and he put in 400 hours, more than any other man on the creek. He was a partner with Putro on Miller Creek in 1897.1)
Lippy staked Claim No. 16 on Eldorado Creek in 1896.2) He staked the claim after a Nanaimo miner abandoned it in favour of some other claims on Eldorado. Lippy was attracted to the claim because it had cabin timber on it.3) Salome Lippy met Ethel Berry, the wife of another successful miner, on the sternwheeler Arctic on their trip from Forty Mile to Dawson in the fall of 1896 and they were neighbours on Eldorado Creek.4)
In 1897, Lippy had sixteen men working on Eldorado No. 16 and he recovered $300,000.5) The claim was among the richest in the Klondike and the Lippys arrived in San Francisco in July 1898 with gold valued at around $200,000.6) In 1902, V.C. Gorst took a lay on Lippy’s claim and planned to have ten men working it until the lay expired in June 1903. The foreman on the claim, Putnam, went to United States to bring in steam shovel plant and they planned to open up the claim from rim to rim and work as if it were all virgin ground.7)
Lippy sold his holdings in 1903. He and his wife went on a world-wide tour and built a large house in Seattle. He donated money to the YMCA, the First United Methodist Church, and the Anti-Saloon League, and he donated the land for a five-story edition to the Seattle General Hospital. He set up a free hospital in Dawson, and sent a library of books to Skagway, Alaska. Libby invested in the Seattle Automobile Company, the first car dealership in the city. Lippy won the 1907 Pacific Northwest Amateur golf tournament in 1907. He was the Port Commissioner in Seattle from 1918 to 1921. His business investments failed during the Depression and he died bankrupt in 1931 at the age of 71. Salome Lippy was supported from a hospital land agreement and she died seven years after Thomas.8)