Thank you very much to Yvonne Bessette who sent the following information.
It follows:
Re Colourful Five Per Cent photo of Galena Hotel, Keno City, 12 April 1928:
Information on Harry Yamasaki and the Galena Hotel from Dr. Aho’s book Hills of Silver.
Harry Yamasaki operated the Galena Hotel in Keno City in the 1920s. Harry, his wife Tome and their children were brought to Keno City from Dawson City by the Guggenheims. Harry and Tome had cooked for the Guggenheim’s Yukon Gold Co. in Dawson City.
When the Guggenheim’s Keno Hill Ltd. began operating at the top of Keno Hill in 1919, they built a tent camp there. In the summer of 1920 the Guggenheims built a tent-frame roadhouse in Keno City for the crews and hired Harry and Tome Yamasaki to cook for them.
In 1923, when the Guggenheims learned that they could not buy the land under the roadhouse because John Kinman held it as a mineral claim—and that they would no longer need the roadhouse because they were closing—they sold it to Harry Yamasaki as a hotel.
The Galena Hotel had seven- by eight-foot rooms with partitions so thin that even breathing could be heard in the next room. Yamasaki charged $1 a night for rooms, and plain but good meals were $1.25 a day.
Harry’s wife Tome was a sweet and kindly Korean War nurse who worked in her husband’s hotel and restaurant but also administered to the sick and injured in Keno for years, without accepting anything in return. After Mrs. Yamasaki’s tragic death, Harry and the three children returned to Japan.
The hotel was sold for $15,000 to Jam “Jimmy” Sugiyama, who ran the hotel for many years after that.
Anyone with information about this subject, please write Jim Robb: The Colourful Five Per Cent Scrapbook—Can You Identify? c/o the Yukon News, 211 Wood Street, Whitehorse, Yukon, Y1A 2E4, or e-mail through the News website, www.yukon-news.com.