“There's stuff like that
on my trapline!”

In February 1957 Fred Caley, Daw-
son merchant and inveterate grub-
staker, was showing Arthur Anderson
some asbestos samples from Cassiar
Creek, located some thirty miles
northwest of Dawson City in the Yukon.
Anderson knew what it was. He and his
father had picked up samples of asbes-
tos from Clinton Creek in the 1940's.
They even had samples in their trap-
per’s cabin.

Anderson studied Caley’s samples
carefully and said “There’s stuff like
that on my trapline, up on Snowshoe
Hill, near Clinton Creek.” That was the
beginning of Clinton Creek mine—butit
was not the start of the story. The Clin-
ton Mine saga really began on Cassiar
Creek in the middle fifties.

Actually there had always been an
interest in the Yukon’s Cassiar Creek.
In fact it is believed that Cassiar Creek
was named by early placer miners who
had come north from the Cassiar gold
creeks in northern B.C. In the late
1920's this interest was renewed. Gold
claims were staked and showings of
asbestos were also noted, but they
raised little interest at the time. It was
not until the middle nineteen fifties that
activities of a positive nature began to
occur—the casual stirrings that so
often trigger enterprise of great worth.
6

The catalyst on this occasion was
two Yukoners, Willie and Walter De-
Wolfe. Their father, Percy DeWolfe,
who was known far and wide as “the
iron man of the north”, ran the winter
mail by dog team between Dawson,
Yukon and Eagle, Alaska. His sons had
been working in the Cassiar Creek
area and it was there that they saw the
asbestos. Willie and Walter gathered
some samples and took them to their
friend Fred Caley in Dawson.

Caley inspected the samples care-
fully. He knew what asbestos was and
its potential value. Without wasting any
time Caley, his son Bob, Mitch Negano,
Willie and Walter DeWolfe, all from the
Dawson area, drove along the Sixty-
mile road in a land rover and staked on
Cassiar Creek about three miles up-
stream from its confluence with the
Yukon river.

It was around this time that the word
“asbestos” was being bandied about
throughout the north’s mining circles.
Cassiar’s mine in northern British
Columbia had been in production since
the fall of 1953 and, because of this,
interest in the magic mineral was run-
ning high throughout the North—
particularly in the Yukon.

Alec Berry, who had already been
credited with bird-dogging the Cassiar,
B.C. property, was now devoting his
attention to asbestos in the Yukon. In
fact there was not much going on in the
Yukon mining scene that was unknown
to Conwest Exploration Company’s
field representative Alec Berry. His
mining reports to the members of the
Whitehorse Board of Trade were high-
lights of the meetings and listened to
with keen interest by miners and
non-miners alike.

Ao I have not teen
property , the foregoing inforantion hea bean piven to

Be by the two fellows which I Had out,