EXPLORATION ’93 — Native elder leader recalls prospecting in

As a prospector, Art John, Sr. has been around the block more than a few times.

“Almost 50 years for different companies all the time,” recalls the respected Kaska Indian elder. “I just take it easy now. Getting old. I’m 82.” John has prospected with the likes of Al Kulan and John Brock, helping pinpoint the rich lead-zinc deposits in the Anvil Range, around Faro, Y.T., many years before they were developed.

“I learned same time I worked,” explains John.

Short, broad and bespectacled, John sports a Ross River baseball cap as he relaxes at a picnic table at Coffee Lake last summer.

He has been busy on his small placer mine up the Lapie River but says the water was too high to allow him to operate, so he’s devoting a few days to a native cultural exchange.

A native of Whitehorse, John moved to Ross River, in the southeast Yukon, when he was two.

When, in the Second World War, the U.S. military built the Canol Road from the Yukon to the oil wells at Norman Wells, N.W.T., John worked as a guide and line-cutter, among other jobs. “We worked really hard all day, pretty well all night, for five dollars a day,” he recalls.

His association with the legendary Al Kulan began in the early 1950s and lasted until John’s employment with Welcome North Mines (Kulan was murdered in a Ross River bar in 1977). “I worked with him a long time,” John says. In 1951, Kulan hooked up with Bert Law, who was running the Silver Dollar Lodge on the Alaska Highway, according to Jane Gaffin’s book Cashing In. Kulan, in turn, hired John for several mineral forays in the early 1950s, around Little Salmon and the North Canol Road. John’s father-in-law, Joe Ladue, and Joe Etzel often joined them.

Relative fluency in English enabled John to serve as an intermediary between Kulan and other Ross River natives, who quickly learned how to identify minerals. For roughly a year, the two prospected without finds. Then John’s uncle, Jack Sterriah, directed them to a deposit at Vangorda Creek, which Sterriah had known as a boy.

“He tell us where, so we go there,” says John. “Sure enough it’s there.” Gaffin writes that Kulan, Law and Ted Chisholm staked those lead-zinc claims in the summer of 1953. They were optioned to Prospector Airways. But trouble brewed between that group and partial backer John MacIsaac, who claimed a 20% interest. The matter went to court in 1955 and two years elapsed before it was settled out of court.

John claims he and the other native prospectors of Ross River were promised $40,000 of the $150,000 claim price tag but never saw a penny. According to Gaffin’s account, the natives were to receive stock certificates, which were burned in a fire that destroyed their lawyer’s hotel and offices in Whitehorse.

John later spent a year prospecting for zinc and copper with Conwest Exploration in northern B.C. He moved with Conwest to the Dawson City area, eventually quitting the company to work for Spartan Explorations. Spartan was a home-grown Yukon venture incorporated in 1967 with John, Kulan, Allen Carlos, Pete Risby and others as participants. It had an ambitious exploration program in the late 1960s.

The early 1970s saw a staking rush in the Selwyn Basin area of MacMillan Pass, spurred by the Summit Lake discovery of Canex Placer.

That’s when Welcome North Mines, involving Carlos, Kulan and John Brock, came into being. John’s and Risby’s Godlin Lake claims found new life. John prospected for 10 years in the Northwest Territories with Brock and Welcome North. They found many lead, zinc and barite deposits which, although promising, were too isolated to be economic, John says.

John resumed trapping later in life, around Gravel Creek on the North Canol Road. “I was 65 years old when I moved in there and built cabin,” he says. “Ever since, I stay there.” (Nevertheless, John recently retired from trapping and hopes one of his children will take over.)

John remains optimistic about the mineral potential in MacMillan Pass, on the Yukon-N.W.T. border, although companies such as Cominco have pulled out. “They got barite too up there,” John says, adding: “They got schelite and lead and zinc.”

He hopes the Yukon Department of Highways will maintain the North Canol Road despite the drop in exploration.

— Patti Flather is a freelance writer from Whitehorse, Yukon.