YUKON-CHARLEY RIVERS Yukon Frontiers Historic Resource Study of the Proposed Yukon-Charley National River

¹Billington, Westward Expansion, pp. 370-91.

²Francois Mercier, untitled manuscript found in Father Francis Monroe Papers, Oregon Province Archives of Society of Jesus, Gonzaga University, Spokane, Washington, translated from French by Linda Yarborough; and Mathews, The Yukon, p. 77.

³Kitchener, Flag Over the North, p. 148. The book is a great fund of information but it is poorly organized, has no footnotes, index, nor bibliography. There are enough inaccuracies to question all data that has no other reference. Mercier manuscript.

⁴Mercier manuscript; Kitchener, Flag Over the North, p. 147; and Petrov, Population and Resources of Alaska, pp. 67-9.

⁵Mercier manuscript; Kitchener, Flag Over the North, p. 148.

⁶There are many accounts of McQuesten, Harper, and Mayo. The three primary sources: Mercier manuscript; Leroy N. McQuesten, Recollections of Leroy N. McQuesten of Life in the Yukon, 1871-1885 (Dawson City: Yukon Order of Pioneers, 1952); and Erinia Pavaloff Cherosky Callahan, "A Yukon Autobiography", The Alaska Journal 5 (1975): 127-28. The best secondary sources include: Ogilvie, Early Days, pp. 87-91; Brooks, Blazing Alaska's Trails, pp. 312-30; Mathews, The Yukon, pp. 84-97; Kitchener, Flag Over the North, pp. 149-55; and Old Yukon, pp. 96-105.

⁷McQuesten, Recollections, p. 4; and William H. Dall, "A Yukon Pioneer, Mike Lebarge" National Geographic Magazine 9 (1898): 138-9 describes Lebarge as "An indefatigable traveller, a delightful companion enroute or by the campfire, full of expedients whatever befell, tactful, and adroit in his dealing with the natives, generous and helpful to the inexperienced—in short, a capital voyageur of the best type."

⁸Mercier manuscript.

⁹Ibid., he also describes the buildings and how they were constructed.

¹⁰Mercier manuscript; Billington, Westward Expansion, pp. 370-91.

¹¹Mercier manuscript; McQuesten Recollections , p. 6; and Mathews, The Yukon, p. 91-2.

¹²Petrov, Population and Resources of Alaska, pp. 60-2.

¹³Mercier manuscript; and McQuesten, Recollections, p. 9. Secondary sources and local tradition has placed the building of Belle Isle in 1874 and on the island off the present city of Eagle. McQuesten and Mercier specifically state that neither of these are true.

¹⁴Mercier manuscript.

¹⁵Callahan, "A Yukon Autobiography", p. 127.

¹⁶McQuesten, Recollections, p. 11.

¹⁷Brooks, Blazing Alaska's Trails, pp. 318-20.

¹⁸Rumors had Michael Byrnes on the upper Yukon in 1867 but cannot be proved. George Holt's trip in either 1874 or 1875 was recorded in Customs records and The Alaskan, a Sitka newspaper. In 1880 The Edmund Bean party and the James Winn party arrived fully documented in the Mercier manuscript, Brooks, Blazing Alaska's Trails, pp. 321-25; and U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Naval Affairs, Reports of Captain L. A. Beardslee, U.S. Navy, Relative to Affairs in Alaska, 47th Cong., 1st sess., 1882, pp. 59-65.

¹⁹Sherwood, Exploration of Alaska, p. 99.

²⁰Ibid p. 101; and Hudson Stuck, Voyages on the Yukon and Its Tributaries: A Narrative of Summer Travel in the Interior of Alaska (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1925), p. 32.

²¹Lt Frederick Schwatka, "Report of a Military Reconnaissance Made in Alaskain 1883", Compilations of Narratives of Explorations in Alaska, U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Military Affairs, Senate Report 1023, 56th Cong., 1st sess., 1900, p. 315.

²²Sherwood, Exploration of Alaska, p. 102.

²³Callahan, "A Yukon Autobiography", p. 127.