Alexander Choquette

Alexander "Buck" Choquette (1830–1898) was a French-Canadian prospector and adventurer who was the discoverer in 1861 of the gold strike which led to the Stikine Gold Rush.

He was born Taddée Choquette in St. Benoit de Mirabel (Deux-Montagnes) in a farming family. His parents were Julien Choquette and Magdeleine Rastoul. His father was a farmer and also a lieutenant in the loyal militia of St. Eustache who took part in the Battle of St. Eustache against the Patriotes (December 1837). His two cousins, Damien Masson and Luc-Hyacinthe Masson, where well known Patriotes. His uncle Basile Choquette was also a captain in the loyal militia of St. Eustache, directed by Maximilien Globensky.

Choquette left home on foot in 1849 at the age of 19 and set out first for work in Montreal, then traveled via Duluth, Minnesota, to Independence, Missouri, where he joined one of the many wagon trains bound for the California Gold Rush. Arriving too late to stake a claim, Choquette found work as a mucker or panner. He worked his way north through the Shasta diggings, and then the Trinity, Scott and Klamath Rivers, reaching the Oregon Territory and making it to the Fraser goldfields in 1858. Failing to find his own strike there, in 1859 and 1860, he prospected a while on the remote Nass River and other rivers north of that without much success.

Then, on a trip to Victoria, he encountered a group of Stikine Indians, who were a subgroup of the Tlingit; suspecting the Stikine and rivers farther north were richer in gold the further one went north, he persuaded them to let him ride in their canoes to Fort Stikine (today's Wrangell, Alaska), in what was then still Russian America. No longer a Hudson's Bay Company post, the former fur post was under the control of the powerful Chief Shakes, and had become known as Shakesville. Shake's daughter Georgiana became Choquette's wife, a great honour in prestige-conscious Tlingit society. With his wife and ten men of the Stikine people, and the chief's blessing, Choquette traveled up the Stikine River, whose mouth is near Wrangell, and found gold at a location near Telegraph Creek, about 150 km (93 mi) up that river, at a place marked on the map today as Buck Bar. News of his strike reached Victoria and thousands of men traveled via the Stikine and overland via another route up the Stikine River and what became Hazelton.

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