Jane Gaffin is a Whitehorse-based freelance writer who specializes in mining.

Wilfred McKinnon, who pronounced his nickname Wilf to sound like “Wolf”, was built with a short, stocky physique. He had a disposition of childlike delight, a twinkle in his eyes, and a cute, soft-spoken remark always at the ready.

Later, his Yukon prospecting friends joked that he could afford to have a sparkly personality. “He’s worth several million and managed to keep it because he wasn’t married,” they laughed.

Wilf McKinnon was born on September 24, 1904, in Nova Scotia at Louisburg, a French fort rebuilt into a tourist attraction. Two of his brothers became sailors while another brother stayed in the area to go coal mining.

In 1926, mineral deposits were being discovered and mines were coming into production. A career in prospecting sounded like an exciting adventure to the young man of 22 years old.

McKinnon first prospected in the East, then migrated toward Flin Flon, a mining town situated halfway up the province of Manitoba near the Saskatchewan border, where Hudson Bay Mining and Smelting had a copper smelter.

Small, yet high-grade, ore deposits had been discovered in the vicinity, too, but were not economically feasible to mine in the 1930s.

Since it was tough for an independent prospector to latch onto a grubstake to support his endeavors, McKinnon joined Hudson Bay in 1938. Prospectors worked for wages, coupled with the added incentive of a 10-percent interest in whatever they found worthy of a mine.

McKinnon prospected five seasons in northern Manitoba and into the treeless Barrenlands of the Northwest Territories, 250 miles (400 km) north of Churchill, Manitoba. The crews were searching for gold and base metals.

McKinnon found the O’Brien gold deposit plus a base metal deposit at Padli Post on a lead from St. Joseph Exploration. He had an interest in the property that was too small to be economically attractive at the relevant time. The additional expense of building a mill was a disincentive to the project.

Hudson Bay owned its own airplane in those days. McKinnon was a member of the prospecting crew flown into the Yukon in 1943. He spent most of the next 30 years scouring the ground and cracking rocks around the Teslin area.

It was only in 1942 that the Alaska Highway was built. The only Yukon mine then was Keno Hill Mining which was reorganized into United Keno Hill in 1948.

Keno Hill Mining was mainly concentrating on mining and finding more vein deposits on Keno Hill and Galena Hill. Except for Keno Hill’s relatively small exploration staff out looking for additional deposits on nearby turf, no company was properly canvassing the vast Yukon.

The Hudson Bay Company took care of that deficiency by coming into the Yukon during the war years. It was doing a great amount of good, serious, air-supported field work with its 10 top-notch prospectors brought in from Flin Flon. They got with the program covering lots of Yukon ground and were not choosey about which economic minerals they found in their investigations.

By 1952, a several-member staff was manning a Hudson Bay office in Whitehorse.

Hudson Bay had taken a lead-zinc-copper property at Swift River, near the Yukon-British Columbia border, to advance exploration stage with drilling. But grassroots prospecting was Hudson Bays’ forte.

With the increased popularity of helicopters as transportation vehicles in the early 1950s, Hudson Bay’s far-reaching think was to put men into otherwise inaccessible areas and pick them up in more accessible areas. Sometimes, these tough guys had to walk home, prospecting along the way.

McKinnon stayed with Hudson Bay for 15 years. In 1953, he struck out as an independent prospector before forming an exploration company with two partners. Bill Walstrom was a retired ore sampler from Hudson Bay and Tom Creighton, founder of Hudson Bay’s Flin Flon mine, had been McKinnon’s boss for 12 years.

In 1952, McKinnon was credited with finding Hudson Bay’s 9-million-ton lead-zinc-silver Tom deposit, located about eight miles (13 km) southeast of MacMillan Pass on the Yukon-Northwest Territories border and accessible by the North Canol Road.

Presumably, the Tom was a namesake of Hudson Bay’s exploration manager, Tom Creighton. Besides McKinnon, the three other prospectors on site for the discovery and staking were Arthur “Slim” Lindsey, Les Saville and Mel Monson. But they never realized any rewards from the Tom, except for wages. The deposit was never mined and ultimately was shelved as mineral inventory some 45 years later.

McKinnon was about 69 years old when he came from the Teslin turf into the Whitehorse area. He was living in a cozy Bachelors’ Cove cabin west of town near the Porter Creek residential subdivision. A group of small houses were nestled among the trees where a half dozen seasoned prospectors resided on the homestead property belonging to brothers Peter and Harry Versluce,

McKinnon seemed healthy from all those years of walking and climbing mountains. His complexion was a good colour. But he was moving a little slower. He occasionally commented on the gout acting up again in a foot. He blamed the malady on his taste for red meat and red wine.

More likely, he was suffering the aftermath of a lifetime of working and sleeping in the cold, which he preferred. In the field, if the mercury dipped to well-below zero, others complained that the temperature was “cold” was a comfort zone for McKinnon. He had a built-in biological thermostat stoked higher than the average person’s and would say the temperature was “cool”, “just right for sleeping”.

On February 23, 1976, he was reminiscing about his prospecting career, beside the wood stove in his cabin. Less than six months later, after a brief stay in the Whitehorse hospital, following a heart seizure, Wilf McKinnon was buried in the Grey Mountain cemetery on Friday, August 13, 1976.

He would have celebrated his 72nd birthday on September 24, 1976.

His death was unexpected. To lighten the emotional load, his closest friends were telling funny stories at a mini-wake in the Travelodge bar.

Every prospector has had at least one memorable hotel incident to relate. Peter Versluce, a natural-born storyteller, recounted one of McKinnon’s.

McKinnon and Versluce were staying in separate rooms in the Devonshire Hotel, their home away from home when they had to go to Vancouver.

McKinnon had been in Toronto, where he had been conducting a business deal over a Mexican property in which he held quite a bit of interest (The rest of that tale was never told!)

“Wilf, who couldn’t stand hot hotel rooms, always cooled the room down with window wide open,” began Versluce.

Regardless of where he reposed—tent, home or hotel room—he slept in the raw on top of the covers so he could “sleep cool”, as McKinnon had described it.

“He had the window open,” continued Versluce. “A draft was blowing through the end of the hotel. All was quiet. In the middle of the night, he got up, evidently to go to the bathroom. But he opened the wrong door.

“Instead of opening the door to the bathroom, in his groggy state, he opened the other door into the hallway. The draft from the open window slammed the door shut. He was locked out of his room without a stitch of clothes on.”

He couldn’t go padding around the hotel to find Versluce on another floor. Hoping not to disturb everybody on his floor, he rapped on the door of the room next to his. Bound to know, it was a woman who opened it.

He explained his plight. Obviously, the cool-headed lady wasn’t jarred at the sight of a naked male loose in the hallway in the wee hours of the morning. She went back into the room and phoned the desk clerk to come upstairs with a key to let the male guest back into his room.

“Wilf said that more embarrassing than the woman answering the door was his trying to reach into his pants’ pocket, which wasn’t there, to give the desk clerk a tip,” Versluce concluded his contribution to the wake.

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Whitehorse-based prospector Allen Carlos sponsored this piece.