Document 80: Letter to P. B. Weare, North American Transportation and Trading Company,
from Harry L. Kepner
Kepner/Crane microfiche collection, Folder 8, Archives, University of Alaska Fairbanks.
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Yukon River.
Steamer John J. Healy, August 26, 1897
Mr. PB Weare [of North American Transportation and Trading Co.]
Dear Sir, I quit the company [NAT&T] this morning so I will let you know my reasons, in the first place I am know [sic] bookkeeper....I worked the first year for forty dollars a month the roustabout deck hands got fifty and seventy five...and so about the best thing I could do was go to the mines....I tell you I am going to make a mark up here yet and it wont be at bookeeping. If I can't make anything in the mines I will take to the bush....
Everything is excitement up here but I haven't got the fever yet the people that are coming up are wild, to hear them talk you would think that they can just pick up the gold. I dont know where I will winter I think I will take up a claim at Manook Creek. I think that will be a future Eldorado one miner took three thousand dollars out of a hole fourteen by sixteen last winter. All the new comers are rushing to Dawson and everything has been staked a year ago up there....
Harry L. Kepner
—Harrison Kepner, of Chicago was Nora Crane's brother, and a friend of the Weare family which ran the NAT & T Company in Alaska. Kepner came north in 1896 to work for the company on steamships and at St. Michael.