Thomas William O'Brien (March 8, 1859 – August 24, 1916) was a Klondike gold rush entrepreneur who was best known for his Klondike Mines Railway and Klondike brewery businesses. He was also elected as a member of the Yukon Territorial Council, and was the first president of the Yukon Order of Pioneers, Klondike Lodge.
Early years
Thomas O'Brien was born on a farm in Oro-Medonte Township, Canada West to James O'Brien and Catherine Elizabeth Stevens. He went to school in the vicinity until the age of 14. He then moved to Toronto where he worked as a streetcar driver on the King Street line. O'Brien did not linger long in Ontario and headed west as a young man. He worked as a mail carrier on the Touchwood Hills route, via fort Qu’Appelle and established a homestead in the area. When the unrest in the Métis community boiled over into Louis Riel's rebellion of 1885, O'Brien took advantage of the conflict. He set up a wagon team that was hired by General Middleton to support his troops. Drawn back to the transportation business, he next worked as a contractor. laying railway track around Winnipeg. O'Brien then decided to once again head west. He sold out his interest in the contracting outfit and moved to Seattle, where, hearing about Alaska gold, he set his sights northward.
Time in the Yukon before the Klondike gold rush
Thomas O'Brien reached the Alaska/Yukon area in 1886. He tried his hand at prospecting, but this appears to have been a short-lived career. He prospected in the Fortymile region on the Beaver River with Chris Sonnickson, T. Evans, and ‘Old Herman’. However, like so many gold seekers, he found that wage work was more practical and found work in a saloon, where one contemporary described him as a "good-nurtured portly Irish saloon keeper". O'Brien was ambitious. He soon saved up enough to start his own trading house with his partner Billie Moran in Fortymile and moved the outfit to Circle City. O'Brien soon expanded into the production side of the business and started brewing with a whiskey gang. They ran one of the 31 illegal liquor stills that the North-West Mounted Police recorded in the Yukon Valley in 1894. There is some indication that O'Brien may have married and had children with a First Nations woman during this period. O'Brien appears to have abandoned this family when he moved to the Klondike, when gold was famously discovered there.
In the Klondike
In 1896, gold was found in the Klondike region and O'Brien and Moran moved their trading house to Klondike City. This was a settlement that sat just south of Dawson City at the confluence of the Klondike and the Yukon rivers. At this time, Klondike City was government reserve land that was available by lease only. O'Brien, like many of the professional prospectors in the region, was able to get in before the flood of stampeders and get claims on the rich creeks of Bonanza and Eldorado. In 1896, he purchased of claim no.1 on Eldorado Creek from Jay Whipple in a very profitable acquisition. From his many claims, and especially from claim no. 1, O'Brien pulled $250 000 of gold from the earth. With this cash, he greatly expanded his mercantile operations with Moran under the name Yukon Pioneer Trading Co. With his new found wealth, O'Brien diversified his company into numerous enterprises. O'Brien's mouthpiece in the Klondike was the Yukon Sun newspaper. O'Brien was the president of this paper and in its pages, advertisements for his businesses were common. A whole page is taken up by ads for his Yukon Pioneer Trading Co. and for notices that he was selling town lots for Fortymile. There also appears an advertisement for an O'Brien Club, described as a “gentlemen’s resort for prominent men,” which likely was connected to Thomas O'Brien. His paper ran into legal trouble numerous times, with allegations that it stole other newspapers stories from the telegraph wires and printed them first. O'Brien also had some business interests in Dawson City and was listed as the co-proprietor of the Monte Carlo Saloon.