**Text of the article clipped from some currently unknown newspaper Feb 7, 1920 *** copy of article is below right

He was one who spent his life in breaking new trails up and down the western country.   He was born in the west of pioneer Canadian stock.  When he was old enough to walk he learned to trap and to shoot.   And if at 50 years he had the erect carriage and suppleness of of a youth, it was because most of his life had been spent in the open.

In 1898 Frank Mobley lived on the banks of the Saskatchewan River, near Edmonton.   He was among the first to reach the Klondike - mad it overland by foot and canoe with other adventurers, depending for food most of the time upon the accuracy of his rifle.

At the foot of the rainbow, Mobley, like many another, did not find the pot of gold and 1901 foiud im broke at Telegraph Creek.   A friend staked him and he went into Atlin, where he worked on the creeks and did odd jobs for the first few months.   Then he opened a small store and traded with the miners.   In those days Mobley freighted his goods to to the camps himself.

In the winter he used a dog team and in the summer pack-horses.   He won the confidence of the miners through square dealing, and his business grew.   Do not think Frank Mobley was a philanthropist, because old-timers in Atlin will tell you that such was not the case.   But many a “busted’ prospector was put on his feet through the generosity of Frank Mobley, who was always ready to grubstake a man who tried to put forth an honest effort.   And many a miner went into the hills with a sack of flour, sides of bacon, tobacco, and the like from Mobley’s store, and if he made good he came back and paid up - and if he didn’t make good he came back and Mobley would keep on grubstaking him until he did make good.

But if he was generous with the poor man, he was a hard-headed merchant wit the bigger companies and perhaps when the persons who wind up the estate check over Mobley’s books they will find that he lost little through bad debts where the companies, large or small, wildcat or otherwise, were concerned.

Someone asked Frank Mobley once about his most noteworthy adventure in the hills, and he told them of a trip he made one time back through the Teslin Lake district and over the divide into the Barren Lands.   He went for musk ox with a party of American scientists who wished to bring back to civilization a pair of young musk ox alive.   They travelled and good many hundred miles and finally came to a valley where the musk ox roamed in droves and were quite gentle.    They secured the young animals and found great difficulty in getting started on the way back.   The natives didn’t like the idea of the white men taking away the musk ox babies.    They knew what the white man had done with the buffalo and they crept up on the camp of the hunters and cut the throats of the captive animals.

Again Mobley and his party went back and again secured a pair of the animals ands started out.   They stood guard over their captives day and night and so were able to reach Teslin Lake with a fair chance of landing their prizes on the Pacific Coast.   At Teslin Lake they became over-confident and believing that they were so far from the valley where the animals had been captured that the natives would never follow, all hands rolled in the blankets and slept.   In the morning, so Frank said, they found that strangers had visited the camp, for their precious specimens of musk ox were dead from having their throats cut.   And so the party came back disappointed, carrying with them only some splendid specimens of heads and horns of the breed.

Frank Mobley will be missed in the legislature halls of Victoria.   One of the big plans he had in mind for his session was the encouragement of road construction, particularly in the northern part of the province.   Probably because he had seen so many miles of rough trails, he appreciated the more the advantage of good roads.    At any rate, he had a dream that some day motor highways would link his native prairies with the Pacific coast.

He will be missed in the Legislature, but his loss will be the more keenly felt in the mining camps and on the lonely northern trails and by the campfires, where men are judged not by their wealth, their eloquence or their family crest, but by their dealings man to man.

G.M.