Alexander 'Buck' Choquette
French-Canadian
1830 – 1898
Alexander 'Buck' Choquette was a French-Canadian prospector who found gold on the Stikine River in 1861 at what is now Buck Bar, setting off the Stikine Gold Rush. He married Georgiana, daughter of the Tlingit Chief Shakes, and traded on the river for decades.
Biography
Alexander 'Buck' Choquette was born around 17 August 1830 into a farming family at Saint-Benoît, Lower Canada (Quebec). He left home in 1849, crossed the plains by wagon train to the California Gold Rush, and worked north through the Shasta, Trinity, Scott and Klamath diggings before reaching the Fraser River goldfields in 1858.
Convinced that the gold country grew richer the farther north one went, Choquette travelled with a group of Stikine Tlingit to Fort Stikine, near present-day Wrangell in what was then Russian America. There he married Georgiana, daughter of Chief Shakes, a considerable honour in Tlingit society. In 1861, with his wife and a party of Stikine men and the chief's blessing, he ascended the Stikine River and struck gold near Telegraph Creek at the spot still mapped as Buck Bar. News of the find reached Victoria and drew thousands of miners north in 1862, prompting Britain to declare the short-lived Stickeen Territories.
Choquette spent the rest of his life in the North as prospector, trader and Hudson's Bay Company post operator, fluent in Tlingit and Chinook Jargon, grubstaking his old partner Joe Juneau during the Cassiar rush of 1874 and running a store on the Stikine that outfitted the prospectors who later made Alaska's first great finds. He died in 1898 while joining the Klondike stampede; accounts differ on details, with the Alaska Mining Hall of Fame recording that he died of pneumonia at Dawson City and giving his birth year as 1829. The Choquette River and Glacier, Choquette Hot Springs and Buck Bar all carry his name.