Doris Simpson, nee Callison (b. 1916)
Doris Simpson was born in North Dakota.1) In 1935, she and three of her siblings accompanied their father on an extended prospecting trip from Fort St. John to Telegraph Creek, British Columbia. Doris stayed at the Simpson homestead and met her future husband William “Bud” Simpson. They were married in Vancouver in 1937.2)
Doris came to the Yukon in 1943. An arrangement was made with White Pass so the Simpsons would purchase the Rancheria Lodge for what it cost to build. The Simpsons ran the Lodge in 1946 and purchased it in 1947. They served meals and had four small bedrooms off the café. They slept in one and rented the other three. When the weather was bad, people slept in the dining room and strangers shared rooms. They expanded the lodge in 1947 by moving the old camp cookhouse and turning it into rooms. It burned down in the winter of 1968/69. The Simpsons leased the lodge in 1967 for two years and that was the only time they were away in twenty-eight years.3)
The White Pass/British Yukon Navigation (BYN) bus ran once or twice per week and the bus driver was Louis Irvine. In 1946/47, the Simpsons paid White Pass a little rent and had a contract to service their trucks. There was plenty of business right from the beginning despite the conditions of the road; lots of military families were travelling out on holidays or on rotation. Convoys of trucks came up to build the DEW line. They sold gas from the time the lodge opened. Marsh Lake Lodge started before Rancheria but did not get operating until 1947. Porsilds started Johnson's Crossing about two years after the Simpsons started Rancheria and Clyde Wann built Swift River Lodge in 1948. The Simpsons may have had the first privately run lodge between Muncho Lake and Mile 1016 [Haines Junction].4)
Supplies came from Dawson Creek and Doris would give the BYN driver her shopping list. The supplies would come in the following week. Gas cost about 55 cents, a room was about $3, and a full meal $1 in 1948. They put in a beer parlour in 1950s.5)