Sam Holloway’s move to the Yukon 50 years ago was a matter of chance.
When your editor assigns you to interview someone you’ve long admired, it’s a major letdown when your quarry tries to give you the slip.
Fortunately, after a few days of resistance, Sam Holloway—writer, publisher, prospector, power company trouble-shooter and more—comes through with a welcome email.
“Sorry for being so contrary. I just have a fear of losing my privacy and my hermit lifestyle.”
Now 77, Holloway has been a fixture on the Yukon scene for half a century, but that almost didn’t happen. In 1974, he was kicking around Edmonton, unsure where he wanted to settle.
“So, I flipped a coin and said, ‘Heads, I’m going to Yellowknife. Tails, I’m going to the Yukon.’ And it came up tails.”
Holloway was born in the Ottawa Valley area, the eldest of nine children whose father had a small business cutting pulpwood for nearby paper mills.
“I grew up in a big swamp. We never had electricity or anything,” he says, but he was determined from a young age to be where there were mountains.
“I used to cut pictures out of magazines and calendars. I had a big scrapbook of pictures of mountains when I was a kid, and that’s where I am now.”
Holloway says a reporter once asked him why people stay in the Yukon, where it’s cold and isolated.
“I said, ‘Listen, you could take off for another land. Your kids could all end up in jail, the sheriff could come and get all your stuff, and on and on.’ All you have to do is go outside and walk around and say, ‘Look where I am. I’m a success!’”
Holloway has never measured success in material terms. Once, while he was hanging out in Saint John, N.B., he won a bet with a friend about who could last a year with the fewest possessions. Sam got by with a toothbrush and a disposable razor. The other guy also had a tape recorder and a book.
He has maintained a frugal lifestyle since moving to the Yukon.
“The first place I pulled into was the Carcross restaurant and gas station. They had all these old-timers sitting around, and I would listen to them. And one of them said that the key to living in the Yukon is to keep your expenses down, and don’t give a damn what anybody thinks of you. I took that to heart.”
After his wife died five years ago, Holloway sold their house at Army Beach and moved into a small cabin across the road.
“It’s only 350 square feet. I’ve got an electric toilet in there, the incinerator kind, so I don’t need a sewer system. My expenses are so low that I can get by nicely on my old-age pension. I actually have money left over at the end of every month.
“And I’ve got the same old trucks. I keep on monkey-wrenching them. I’ve got quite a few parts trucks in my yard. But if I moved to town, I’d be at that shelter, because I couldn’t afford the rent.”
But let’s roll back the clock a bit.
After training as an electrician in Toronto, Holloway worked for the Northern Canada Power Commission (NCPC) in the N.W.T. frequently being flown to various job sites as a trouble-shooter.
He spent one season on the McKenzie River (“We actually took the first drilling rigs in to where they started drilling on the North Slope [of Alaska].”), worked for a while as an underground miner in Keno, and tried his hand in the Yukon goldfields.
“I never was a real miner. I was a prospector. I had some pretty good plays, but when I look at those other guys, they’re just gravel processors, running to a sluice box and standing there looking to see what would turn up.
“I just couldn’t do that, so I would always give those claims away, or sell them. I just liked the looking part.”
Holloway enjoyed various partners he worked with, and climbing the mountains he used to dream about as a kid living in an Ottawa-valley swamp.
“Another guy and I once fetched an 8-inch dredge, over the top of a mountain, all in pieces. This thing weighed about 800 pounds altogether. We put it back together, and we thought we were going to get rich. But we didn’t even get fly-shits. Then we had to carry it all back again,” he laughs.
“Maybe I’m just an irresponsible guy, but I’ve had nothing but fun for most of my life. What I regret the most is that I didn’t realize back then how wonderful it all was.”
While he was working for the power company, Holloway began dabbling in poetry as a way to kill time while waiting for flights.
“Not poetry, but ballads … the old Robert Service kind. I actually put out a book of those ballads back in the ’80s. It’s still kicking around somewhere.”
He also wrote “a little gold-panning manual thing” in 1981, called Yukon Gold. “It still sells in the bookstore. I made more money off that book than I ever did from gold.”
In 1993, Holloway moved into fiction writing, with his first novel, The Bushman, coming out in 1993.
“It’s not very good, but we all learn as we go.”
His adventure-romance novel, To Seek For Eldorado, came out earlier this year. He also has three other novels in development, including Remittance Man, about two brothers from Toronto who head to the goldfields hoping to strike it rich.
Perhaps Holloway’s best-known literary impact so far has come from the two magazines he founded and edited—The Yukon Reader (1989-94) and its successor, The Yukoner Magazine, filled with stories about historical and contemporary Yukon people and events.
Both magazines were cranked out on a modest A.B. Dick sheet-fed press that had once produced Yellowknife’s first newspaper in 1947.
“I learned how to fix it, too. So that’s what made it possible. We had no printing bills, just the paper and the ink, and straight, honest storytelling about ordinary people.”.
At one time, The Yukoner boasted between 5,000 and 7,400 paid subscriptions worldwide, with each copy likely enjoyed by at least two readers.
“In many high-class outhouses, some copies have been read dozens of times in the years since,” Holloway claims, before launching into a lengthy anecdote about visitors from Outside being disappointed to discover he’s “just this little guy” instead of a big, hirsute Grizzly Adams type.
But that’s another story. And Sam Holloway has no end of them.
