Buteau, Frank

Francois (Frank) Buteau (1856-1937) was born in Quebec. He immigrated to the United States in 1877 and arrived in Juneau, Alaska, in 1886. The following year he made his way to the Fortymile country to prospect for gold. Because he recovered more gold than anyone else in that region during the 1887 season, the other miners began to call him "King of the Forty Mile." As he ruefully noted in a memoir, that success was not repeated in subsequent seasons. He joined the stampede to the Klondike in 1896/97 and shortly thereafter was among the early stampeders to Fairbanks, Alaska, which became his home until his death in 1937. Buteau was a charter member of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, and in 1910 became a member of the Fairbanks Igloo of the Pioneers of Alaska. In 1890 he married an Alaska Native woman whose family resided in Unalakleet; she died in Fairbanks in 1920. The couple had one adopted daughter, Lucy, who died in 1929. (From Buteau's memoir "My Experiences in the World" [in Sourdough Sagas, ed. H. Heller, Cleveland, World Pub. Co., 1967] and obituary, Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 6 July 1937, p. 1.)

Lucy Buteau (1904-1929) was born in Kaltag, Alaska. In 1908 she was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Frank Buteau and moved to Fairbanks, Alaska. She graduated from Fairbanks High School in the spring of 1924, and attended the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines for the 1924/25 school year. At the college she was prominent in student activities and was a member of the girls' basketball team that traveled to Anchorage in January 1925. In May 1925 she married Theodore M. Morton of Fairbanks. In November 1929 she was found dead in her Fairbanks home of a self-inflicted gunshot. (From Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, 14 May 1925, p. 4, and 5 Nov 1929, p. 1.)