Yukon who is who

John W. Zaccarelli (1881 - 1918)

John Zaccarelli was born in Pravia, Italy. When he was young his family moved to Vancouver Island, near Nanaimo. He sixteen when he heard about the ship Excelsior bringing “a ton of gold” to Seattle. He booked passage north on the SS Islander, leaving Vancouver in July 1897. He arrived in Dawson in 1898 and eventually opened a store in the downtown. The Zaccarelli store on King Street between First and Second Avenue carried a complete stock of stationary, fruits and vegetables, imported cigars, and confectionary. He and Elizabeth Dooley married in 1903 and they had two boys, Thomas and Ralph. Zaccarelli produced sold post cards with northern themes, and in 1908 he published Zaccarelli’s Pictorial Souvenir Book of the Golden Northland. In 1918, he had sold his Dawson property and was moving to Oakland [or Berkeley], California. The family had chosen a place to live on a trip out in 1917 and Elizabeth and the boys were already gone. John boarded the sternwheeler Whitehorse and connected with the train to Skagway.¹⁾ There he met his sister Mrs. C.J. Vifquain and her daughter Joy. ²⁾

John had purchased a ticket on a steamer south along the British Columbia coast, but he traded his ticket to a lawyer named Austin Fraser so he could travel with his sister and niece. All of the passengers and crew died when the SS Princess Sophia sank in October 1918 after being stuck on Vanderbuilt Reef in the Lynn Canal. Austin Fraser was spared this fate only to die two weeks later of the Spanish flu.³⁾ Elizabeth Zaccarelli and their children returned to Dawson in 1919. Tom eventually moved to Oakland while Ralph moved his young family first to Mayo and then to Whitehorse in 1964.⁴⁾