Canadian Historic Sites: Occasional Papers in Archaeology and History No. 26

St. Andrew's Presbyterian Church, Lake Bennett, British Columbia

by Margaret Carter

A Hectic Limbo

In late April, Grant (Fig. 21) left to go to Lake Laberge where the ice would clear earlier than it would at Bennett. There, he would build his own boat to travel to his new mission at Dawson. Meanwhile, Dickey (Fig. 22) was to stay in Bennett to await Grant's successor, then follow the miners into the creek area around Eldorado. As he waited, he lived in Grant's "manse" and applied for the lot in Bennett where the church tent was pitched.

21 Rev. R.S. Grant, first minister at St. Andrew's Church, Lake Bennett. (United Church Archives, Toronto.)

22 Rev. R.M. Dickey, second-minister at St. Andrew's Church, Lake Bennett. (United Church Archives, Toronto.)

One afternoon in mid-May, Dickey returned to the church tent and

found someone — 'apparently drunk' — in possession, and by carrying out the delusion for a few minutes I had an interesting exhibition of the good nature, sympathy and tact which characterizes Dickey in all his work. You may imagine his surprise when the supposed drunk suddenly sat up and announced himself as his successor at Skagway sent by the Committee.¹

The joker was the Reverend J.A. Sinclair (Fig. 23), newly arrived in the Yukon from his parish at Spencerville, British Columbia. As he had been in transit since Dickey's move in April, he had not heard of his relocation.

23 Rev. J.A. Sinclair, third minister at St. Andrew's Church, Lake Bennett. (Sinclair Papers.)

With Sinclair's arrival, Dickey was free to continue on to Dawson. He nevertheless stayed until July 1898 to initiate his successor in the ways of the Yukon mission field. One of his more pleasant duties was to introduce Sinclair to the Klondikers at the head of the lake: some of this occurred at a series of evening socials.² At a social in honour of Dickey's departure, Sinclair learned a lesson about the men he was to work with when an ex-wild west showman, Captain Jack Crawford, recited a poem he had composed on the state of Klondike madness. Ridiculing the dangers of the river journey ahead, the worries about families left behind, the hazards of the trail, the horrors of the food and the corruption around him, Crawford urged the Klondikers to forget their problems with a spirited "say 'never die'" (see Appendix A). His verse emphasized uncertainty, and it touched a responsive chord in most of the men at the gathering, for Crawford had a knack of reflecting the sentiments of those around him.³

This uncertainty was also evident in Sinclair's activity after Dickey left. As was stated earlier, Sinclair was appointed Dickey's successor at Skagway; however, when he arrived in the north he found that Dickey had moved inland to Bennett because Skagway had been declared American. When he arrived in Skagway, Sinclair had also found the manse and church Dickey built there occupied by an American Episcopal minister, a Dr. Campbell. Dickey had left the buildings in Campbell's keeping on the understanding that he would become the "resident Minister of the Union Church of Skagway" and maintain the interdenominational character in which Dickey had founded and operated the mission. Sinclair, however, found that Campbell reserved the right to restrict the use of the church to visiting ministers who wished to offer services in their own denominations. Campbell had also scheduled Episcopalian services at eleven in the morning, the best time, leaving to the other denominations the division of the eight o'clock hour.⁴ Sinclair was not prepared to see the Presbyterians so easily pushed out of the church they had constructed in Skagway. He sent for an American replacement, and resolved that until such a man arrived he would himself service Skagway, Bennett, and the 43-mile area in between.

This area comprised Sinclair's ministry from May of 1898 to May of 1899. During that time, portions of it were continuously occupied by construction gangs building the railroad from Skagway to Bennett (Fig. 24), and Sinclair visited the camps frequently as he made his rounds "by canoe, on horseback or on foot"⁵ (Fig. 25). As the rail-line progressed, he rode from Skagway to the end of the line and continued his cold march from there. He soon was known and trusted by both railway men and management, and this allowed him to successfully negotiate a dispute between them during the spring of 1899.

24 Railway contruction. Men at work secured by ropes. (Sinclair Papers.)

25 Interior, railway camp hospital, 1898. Sinclair visited the location regularly. (Sinclair Papers.)

No matter how much he travelled, Sinclair felt the services of one man were inadequate. By April of 1899 when he wrote to Rev. Norman B. Harrison who had been named his successor in Skagway, he was beginning to show signs of strain. "I shall probably spend one week at Bennett and then two here [Skagway]. This is the best I can do until you or someone else arrives. But that is far from doing justice to this important work. So I hope you will hurry."⁶ All the time Sinclair was occupied with Skagway he was attempting to keep the church going in Bennett. He managed this with the assistance of a layman, who held services there when he was not available. Nevertheless the task was a frustrating one.

Sinclair was always aware that if conditions remained favourable he would move to a parish in Bennett after he left Skagway. As a result, he watched developments in Bennett closely. During August 1898, he realized that the lot Grant had chosen for his "manse" was outside the area that was developing as the centre of town. In 1898 this began to shift away from Lindeman-Bennett rapids area on the southwest corner of the lake and towards the southeast corner where the wagon road on the White Pass trail was nearing completion (Figs. 26 and 27).⁷ It was the latter area where Sinclair selected a second property as the future location for his church. He petitioned the British Columbia government for the property, knowing that if a town stabilized in Bennett this land would be needed to build a church. When he returned to Bennett for his next visit in October, "I found the site built upon by Maitland Kersey of Dunraven Yacht race fame."⁸ Rather than cause unnecesary tension, he elected to select another on the government reserve⁹ and,

in order to prevent this being also 'jumped', I went for our large tent which was in the shack [Grant's manse], to hold down the lot, but I found the tent so cut up and so much of it gone as to make it utterly useless. The theives were found, tried, and sentenced, but this did not help us out of the difficulty.¹⁰

26 Bennett in 1898. (Provincial Archives of British Columbia.)

27 Lake Bennett, October 1899. (Sinclair Papers.)

"The difficulty" can be neatly defined as no tent in which to hold services in Benntt during the cold winter of 1898-99. Such accommodation had been unncessary during Sinclair's summer visits, but the coming of winter presented a serious problem. This was temporarily solved when the Portland and Northern hotels¹¹ offered their "dining rooms" — although each probably had only one room for bar, food and sleeping — as accommodation for services during Sinclair's visit (fig. 28). While the hotels satisfied the major requirement of "shelter," they were less than ideal as the location for a church. The constant arrival of dog teams yielded hungry travellers and prevented tables from being cleared for an early service; people were turned away from the buildings for lack of room. By the end of the winter, a combination of the inconvenience of the hotels, the receptiveness of the people he had been preaching to, and the solid prospects of Bennett as a major transshipment centre for the Klondike had convinced Sinclair that he should build a church in the town.¹²

28 Services were held in the Hotel Portland during the winter of 1898 and 1899. (Yukon Archives, Vogee Collection.)

29 Sketch of exterior of the church prepared by Sinclair in late May or early June 1899. (Sinclair Papers.)