Kenny McLaren

Kenneth 'Kenny' McLaren was a Canadian prospector who headed north in the great stampede year of 1898. With his partner, the German-born Fritz Miller, he left the crowded Klondike trail at Bennett and struck out across the ice of Taku Arm and Atlin Lake to prospect the virtually untouched country on the lake's eastern side.

On Pine Creek the partners found workable placer gold, and on 30 July 1898 they staked and recorded their discovery claims. The news caught the tide of gold-seekers still funnelling through the coastal passes toward Dawson, and thousands diverted to the new diggings. The town of Atlin rose almost overnight on the lakeshore, and the surrounding creeks, Pine, Spruce, Birch, McKee and others, sustained what is usually called British Columbia's last great gold rush, with the district producing steadily until the boom faded around 1908 and hydraulic operations carried on afterward.

As with his partner, little else is reliably recorded about McLaren's life. Accounts of the Atlin discovery focus on the strike itself, and the discoverers' later fortunes went largely unchronicled; his birth and death dates are unknown. He is buried in the Atlin Pioneer Cemetery alongside Miller, where a 1973 provincial marker commemorates the two men whose short detour from the Klondike trail created a lasting mining district.