1

The town is called Forty Mile; the river, Fortymile.

2

Cornelius Osgood, the first professional ethnographer to write about the Han, says 1873, an error that almost everyone repeats, although Mike Rourke and others say 1874.

3

Osgood and others incorrectly say it was his brother Moise Mercier.

4

Or Johnny’s Village, as Frederick Schwatka and others have it.

5

Or a mile and a quarter below, according to Schwatka.

6

Osgood and the local people believe the location was on the island across from the present town site.

7

But Mercier was also quite specific when he wrote that he built Fort Reliance six miles above the Klondike River, when in fact the site is six miles below the Klondike. And he places Charley Village on the Yukon’s left bank opposite the mouth of the Kandik River, when it was on the right bank beside the Kandik’s mouth.

8

Several writers call it Belle Isle, which is the name of the next fort Mercier built.

9

Or he simply “reestablished” the original post, as the unreliable Mercier writes.

10

Linda Finn Yarborough, Recollections of the Youkon, pp. 83 and 89, respectively.

11

Published under the name Melody Webb Grauman by Cooperative Park Studies Unit, University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

12

Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1993. Earlier published as The Last Frontier: A History of the Yukon Basin of Canada and Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1985).