Jim Bradshaw: Two very different Klondikes

\ As the family story is told, Samuel Marquart intended to find a fortune in the cold, rugged gold fields of the Yukon territory of northwestern Canada.
He was trying to get through a mountain pass between Alaska and Canada when he ran into a powerful snowstorm that convinced him he was meant for warmer climes.
Samuel was part of a stampede of prospectors who dreamed of finding a fortune after gold was discovered near Canada’s Klondike River in 1896.
Instead, according to a reminiscence by his great-grandchild Diane Marquart Moore, “when he encountered heavy snow at White Horse Pass [near the boundary of Alaska and British Columbia], he turned back without any regrets.”
Instead of moving to the Klondike River, he moved to the Mermentau.
He was from Iowa, but had seen the possibilities in South Louisiana well before the gold bug bit him. According to his obituary in the Jennings Daily News, “In 1889 he and his nephew, Dan W. Marquart, moved to Lake Arthur … where they bought an interest in the Lake Arthur Town Lot and Land Company.”
Samuel and E. L. Lee bought out three other partners in 1890 and the two of them “finished laying out the town of Lake Arthur and did a general real estate business until 1895, when they divided their interests in the town.”
Samuel may have heard about the charms of South Louisiana from Sylvester “Father” Cary or one of his apostles.
Cary was the prime mover in creating an “Iowa Colony” of thousands of farm families who came to southwest Louisiana after the railroad crossed the townless prairies in 1880. Southern Pacific vigorously courted settlers who would use its trains to ship crops from the sparsely populated prairies.
“The flatlands surrounding Lake Arthur must have reminded Samuel of the Iowa prairie, and when he arrived there, he immediately bought a tract of rice land, irrigated it with large steam pumps, bought more land, sold all of it, and, with a business partner named Lee, created the plan for the town of Lake Arthur.
At one time, he owned the majority of the property in Lake Arthur,” Diane recorded.
The Jennings obituary said Samuel  moved back to Iowa in 1897 “due to his wife’s poor health” and took his ill-fated stab at finding gold in 1898.
His wife died in 1901 and Samuel returned to Lake Arthur in 1903 to become the first president of the First National Bank of Lake Arthur and return to real estate dealings.
According to Diane’s account, his land deals “ made money much faster than he could have made digging for gold.”
According to his obituary, “Mr. Marquart was a very generous and public-spirited man admired for his sterling character by all who knew him. He was always ready to take a leading part in any enterprise for the up-building of the community, such as schools, churches, railroads, public park, etc.
"He donated to the town … City Park and Orange Park … [and] never refused aid or help to anyone who showed a willingness to better themselves. He advanced the means for many a person for obtaining an education who otherwise would have been unable to do so.
“He was strictly temperate in all things — except work — and was very energetic up until his last few years.”
He was Lake Arthur’s oldest resident when he died in May 1923 at the age of 84.
He was buried in his old home at Fontenelle, Iowa, “where he had made preparations for his burial beside his first wife.”
His succession lists dozens of town lots and several larger parcels of property that he held in and around Lake Arthur, possibly including an area southeast of Lake Arthur sometimes referred to as Klondike.
My maps do not show a community by that name, but in September 2022, the Jeff Davis Electric Co-Op reported outages in an area it called Klondike, and there is a Klondike Drainage Canal southeast of Lake Arthur. Diane wondered whether “the land … had been one of Samuel Marquart’s holdings, which he had named after the site of his failed search for gold.”
I can think of no other reason for part of balmy, marshy south Louisiana to be named after a frozen, mountainous part of Canada.
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.