Charles W. Thebo
Charlie Thebo was in Montana in the early 1880s. In 1884, he and Michael Ozarat thought they could make money selling horses to new homesteaders in Manitoba. They took horses across the border but did not pay duty on them. Ozarat supposedly claimed some of the horses were stolen and then sold them. It was a complicated swindle involving the Mount Royal Ranche. Customs seized Ozarat’s 105 horses and charged him with larceny, but the evidence was insufficient and he and Thebo were acquitted. Ozarat went on to become a respected rancher in the Cypress Hills area.1)
In the late spring of 1897, Pat Galvin was in a party with Thebo that travelled out of the Yukon via the Dalton Trail. In the spring of 1898, Thebo started assembling a herd of two thousand animals to ship in over the Dalton Trail in June.2) Apparently 1,000 of these cattle were purchased by Galvin. He was getting into the river freighting business and purchased the steamer Yukoner in St. Michael. Galvin planned to bring 600 tonnes of goods up the Yukon River for the mining settlements, and then go further up the river to collect the cattle.3)
Thebo set up a store and a sawmill next to the North-West Mounted Police post below Five Finger Rapids in the summer of 1897.4) This was the end of the Dalton Trail where some cattle drivers were slaughtering their herd and taking the meat down to Dawson on rafts they built at the site. Thebo purchased a waterfront lot in Dawson for his business. Galvin was late buying the boat and the Yukoner got frozen in on the way up the river.5)
That fall, Thebo had a herd of cattle corralled by the Yukon River just above Fort Selkirk. He slaughtered the cattle at a place that come to be known as Slaughterhouse Slough and loaded the meat onto rafts for the trip to Dawson.6) Some of the meat thawed and spoiled on the trip.7) A hundred and twenty-eight quarters of beef were sacrificed to the river when one barge got stuck on a bar and had to be lightened. Galvin went out of business, and Thebo took over the Galvin Syndicate.8)
In September 1899, Thebo advertised having Yukon’s largest supply of freshly slaughtered beef, pork and mutton. He kept the butcher shop in Dawson for several years after the gold rush.9) In 1904, Charles Thebo purchased the sternwheeler Schwatka from the Canadian Pacific Railway. He sold the boat in 1907 to the Northern Navigation Company.10)