Michael “Klondike Mike” Mahoney (1876 - 1951)
Michael “Klondike Mike” Mahoney was born in Buckingham, Quebec, near Ottawa in 1876. In the early 1890s, he worked as a log skinner bringing logs into the E.B. Eddy plant at Ottawa. When he was in his twenties he went west. He spent a year in the wood camps of Wisconsin where he became the junior boxing champion of northern Michigan. He arrived in Spokane on 17 June 1897 on the same day that the Portland arrived from the Yukon. A month later he was hired as a stoker and deckhand on the Williamette and sailed for Skagway. At White Horse he earned $50 navigating five boats through the Whitehorse rapids and reached Dawson in October 1897.1)
Mahoney took the mail from Dawson to Dyea, Alaska in 1897. He hauled 250 pounds of mail estimated at 2000 letters and charged a dollar a letter. He repeated the trip the next year and charged the same price. He advertised his services in four Dawson saloons.2) Mahoney met Hal Henry in Skagway and agreed to take a singing troupe of six women, called the Sunny Samson Sisters Singing Sextet, and all their equipment over the trail to Dawson for $2,500.00 and a share of the performance earnings. Their piano fit on a sled to Sheep Camp but Mahoney had to carry it over the summit. It was not the heaviest load that ever went over the top. The NWMP refused to allow the women into Canada as it was February with bad conditions in Dawson.3)
In 1899, Mahoney staked a rich fraction of a claim on Dominion Creek in the Klondike goldfields and sold it two weeks later for $100,000. In 1899, he joined a stampede to Jack Wade Creek, in the Fortymile district, and staked a claim between two of the richest claims. He invested more than $100,000 but the land was worthless. In 1900, Mahoney left for Nome, Alaska and worked for a time for Tex Rickard as a bouncer. He freighted until the diggings wore out and in 1904 he moved to Fairbanks following another gold rush. In November 1904, he accepted a job of freighting the corpse of Thomas Hume, the Alaska territorial judge, to Valdez for shipment down south. The Hume family was willing to pay $5,000 so Mahoney embarked on a seventeen-day trip with a 250-pound coffin. He left Fairbanks at -35 and ran into a two-day blizzard. He lost two dogs to wolves and was rescued by two men from near Valdez on the 26th day. He received newspaper coverage for that trip. In January 1906, Robert Service wrote a poem with all the elements of the Hume story.4)
Mike Mahoney and George Rich acquired some good claims near Fairbanks and Mahoney married a nurse from Fairbanks. He and his partner sold their claims to the Guggenheims, and he and his wife went outside. Mahoney and Rich became wealthy through CNR grading contracts. Mahoney became famous across Canada and the United States for his recitations of Robert Service's poems. He came to believe that Sam McGee and Dan McGrew were real, and only a letter from Robert Service at an International Sourdough Reunion at Portland, Oregon stopped his career as an entertainer. He died at Santa Monica, California.5)