John A. MacDonald (1897 – 1983)
Jack MacDonald was born in Broad Cove Chapel, Inverness, Nova Scotia.1) He had some experience in the coal mines before he decided he wanted something different. He did a steam boiler apprenticeship in New York state when he was a teenager. MacDonald joined the Royal Northwest Mounted Police in Regina, after he was turned down by the Canadian Army for service in the First World War. MacDonald had nine months of training with the Police, including calvary drill, and was posted to the Yukon in 1917. He spent the winter of 1917-18 in Dawson.2)
By the spring of 1918, the allied forces in France needed more calvary and the Mounted Police encouraged many men, including MacDonald, to fight in the war. In 1919, his temporary leave from the Police was over and MacDonald reached Regina and applied to return north. He was posted to Ross River where there were rumours of unrest.3) He embarked on the steamer Thistle and had to row the last 50km to Ross in a small lifeboat because of low water. For more than a year he went on 640km patrols with fur trader Del van Gorda as his guide.4)
In the spring of 1920, MacDonald was ordered to take over command of the Carmacks RCMP detachment, but after only four days he was ordered to start a patrol into the Champagne and Snag areas to investigate more rumours of trouble. These rumours were usually about trade disputes. In the winter of 1920, MacDonald was assigned to Whitehorse and did patrols by dog team as far away as Little Atlin Lake, Lake Laberge, and over to Champagne. He slept in a small canvas tent and ate hardtack and bully beef. In 1921, McDonald was assigned to take federal census in the Kluane area. He travelled by horseback, canoe and covered some ground by walking.5)
Jack retired from the RCMP in 1921 and, calling on his previous experience in the coal mines, was hired in the Wernecke Camp as a driller. He quickly moved on to the Guggenheim operation where a number of his friends were employed. The working conditions at both camps was dismal with lots of dust and arsenic. After a couple of months, he started work at Palmer’s store and put in time at the Chateau Mayo.6)
In 1923, he left the Yukon to do a brief stint with the CPR investigation department in Vancouver and then worked in the Britannia Mines near Squamish. He was back in Mayo by the spring of 1926 and spent the next four years mining and working for the Mayo businesses. In 1930, silver prices were down and gold was up so MacDonald moved to Dawson and went to work for Yukon Consolidated Gold Corp (YCGC). He worked through the depression as a boilerman or a driller and spent the winter months in a variety of hotel jobs. He met his wife, Florence Kunze, in Dawson through her brothers who he knew from Mayo and they were married in 1933.7)
In the late 1930s, MacDonald went to work for the territorial government as a machinist and road foreman. During the construction of the Alaska Highway, MacDonald drilled water wells for the string of airports that parallelled the road and then worked briefly at the Whitehorse oil refinery. He went back to Dawson and worked as a driller for in the mines until 1949 when he started with the National Employment Service. He remained with them for eleven years, the longest time he had ever spent at one job.8)
MacDonald and Florence and their two children settled in Whitehorse in 1949. Jack was the truancy officer for the territory and the motor vehicle licence inspector and then Whitehorse’s first bylaw enforcement officer, a position created in 1961. Tired of civic employment, MacDonald went to White Pass and worked as a hostler until his retirement in 1970. In 1973, Jack and Florence were named Sourdough Rendezvous’ Mr. and Mrs. Yukon. In the late 1970s, he was invited to the official opening of the new Ross River detachment, more than fifty years after he established the first post.9) In 1978, Jack travelled to Faro to speak to the Pelly River Historical Society about his sixty years in the Yukon. In 1970, he started to devote his time to the preservation of Yukon history and the development of the MacBride Museum.10)