Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

This is the story of Chicken Billy and his ten-thousand-dollar potato patch. It is about a young American who became the poultry king of the Klondike, and then turned to farming with such success that he has had a field of potatoes that brought in ten thousand dollars in one year.

Chicken Billy is a representative type of the farmers of the Far North. I first met him yesterday afternoon when he called at my hotel here in Dawson. A rough-looking man of less than medium height, his face is bronzed by the hot summer sun of the Arctic and his hands are horny from handling the plough. He had brought some of his crops of hot-house vegetables into Dawson for sale, and he wore his working clothes—a flannel shirt open at the neck, blue jeans somewhat the worse for wear, and a pair of rough boots that reached to his knees.

Billy was born in Philadelphia and went to school there. He was still under twenty when he passed the examinations for appointment to the navy. He was so excited over his success that when he came into the hands of the surgeons to be tested as to his physical fitness his heart was throbbing at the rate of a hundred-odd beats to the minute, and the result was that the doctors said he had heart disease and pronounced him unfit for service.

Billy then worked at odd jobs, without great success, until one day he read in a newspaper about the gold strike in the Klondike. The article was headed “Gold at the Grass Roots,” and Billy tells me he decided to dig into the grass and take out a fortune. He had only seventeen dollars at the time, but with that he got to St. Paul and thence worked his way up to Skagway. He walked in over the Dyea trail and fought for his own with the miners of Dawson. He got some gold from his various ventures, but made no big strikes, and finally gave up mining to raise chickens. For this purpose he bought an island in the Yukon not far from the mouth of the Klondike, and built a henhouse of logs with glass windows facing the south.

For a while Billy prospered. His eggs sold for fifty cents each, and his fat chickens brought in forty or fifty dollars a dozen. He built up his flock until he had nine hundred chickens, and his fresh-laid eggs became so well known that he acquired the nickname of Chicken Billy. When he thought he was on the sure road to success, competition arose. The other poultry raisers cut prices, and chickens dropped to a dollar apiece. Billy began to lose money and so looked about for other kinds of farming. He is now raising only fancy chickens, and is devoting his energy to hogs and potatoes, with occasional crops of turnips and oats.

My visit to Billy’s farm was one of the most interesting trips I have had in the Yukon. We started up the river from Dawson in a gasoline boat about three feet wide and forty feet long. The boat had a big paddle wheel at the end attached to the engine by a long iron shaft. We had gone only two miles when this shaft broke and we had to row ourselves to the nearest island. Leaving the beach, we made our way through the potato rows from one farm to another. The first farm we visited was owned by a Swede. He had eleven acres under cultivation, half in potatoes, and half in oats. The oats are grown for hay, and some of it stood in shocks as high as my head, while that not yet cut reached halfway to my waist.

The owner told me that this oats hay often sells for sixty dollars a ton. When I asked what he expected to get for his potato crop, he fixed the price at ninety dollars a ton, saying that it might go as high as one hundred dollars. He told me of one crop from three acres that had yielded him thirty-seven hundred dollars. That was when the Guggenheim syndicate began to dredge out the gold of the Klondike. They were employing large numbers of men, and potatoes were scarce. Since then he has raised nothing but potatoes and oats. The next farm we visited produced potatoes and carrots. The woman in charge told me that the carrots paid as well as the potatoes. She said that she and her husband enjoyed their summer home on the Yukon. They live in Dawson in winter.

Leaving this farm, we found ourselves at the end of the island with the next one about a half mile upstream. This was Billy’s island, and a loud shout brought his helper after us in a canoe. Upon landing we first took a look at the hot-house, where cucumbers and tomatoes are raised for the markets of Dawson. This is one of the most interesting features of farming in the Far North. There are more than twenty-five big hothouses in Dawson itself, and they are all doing well, although Billy says his farm makes more profit than any two of the others.

Billy’s hot-house is about thirty feet wide and fifty feet long. It consists of a great pit walled with logs to the surface of the ground and above that a framework entirely covered with glass. The house is kept warm by wood fires, the ever-present gasoline tank having been made into a stove for the purpose. The plants are set out in beds upon low tables, which are connected with a network of wires. The vines of the cucumbers and tomatoes are trained on the wires. They climb up the walls and hang down from the roof. Many of the cucumbers are over ten inches in length and the largest tomatoes are bigger than the head of a baby.

Leaving the hot-house we took a look at the hogs. During the summer they are kept in enclosures out in the open and in the winter they live in the log henneries, which have been turned into pig pens. The buildings are warmed with good stoves, and the fires are kept up day and night. In the winter the pigs are fed upon potatoes and grain. Their food is cooked and served hot morning and evening. Every bit of manure is saved, Billy says, for the soil of the Yukon needs fertilizing, and this by-product is worth almost four times as much as in the United States.