Klondike Big Inch Land Co. Inc. was written in 1975 by Jack McIver for CANADIAN MAGAZINE. It’s a fascinating story that was written 37 years ago. I have edited it to make for easier reading.
This is a story about a bathroom, a Mountie, several hundred tons of breakfast cereal, a murder, 21 million square inches of Yukon Territory land, a severe case of frostbite, and a successful advertising campaign.
First, the bathroom. Back to the fall of 1954, to Lake Forest. Ill. and the home of Chicago advertising executive Bruce Baker. It was 3 o’clock in the morning. Baker, creative director for the ad agency of Wherry, Baker & Tilden, couldn’t sleep. He was a desperate man.
One of Wherry, Baker & Tilden’s clients was the Quaker Oats Co. The breakfast cereal market is and was a highly competitive one. Some cereal manufacturers had hired tigers and bears to promote their products; others lured customers by stuffing their boxes with prizes. Quaker Oats tried some promotional gimmicks but none caught the fancy of the buying public.
Baker had to come up with something that didn’t cost Quaker Oats too much.
Back to the bathroom: Baker wanted a promotional scheme that would tie in with Sgt. Preston of the Yukon, the radio (and later, TV) show sponsored by Quaker Oats. It followed the adventures of a Mountie and his dog, Yukon King, as they maintained law and order in the Yukon. Kids loved it. The conundrum was getting the kids to love Quaker Oats products. Or at least buy them…
An idea finally came to him – a great one. “I took the 5 am train in to Chicago and my art director and I went to work on it right away. By 11 o’clock, I was at Quaker Oats with the presentation.”
Baker’s plan was this: Quaker Oats would buy a parcel of land in Sgt Preston’s Yukon Territory, subdivide it into square-inch lots, and give the lots away to buyers of Puffed Wheat, Puffed Rice, and other Quaker cereals. It would be a totally legal transfer of land: every kid who dug to the bottom of his or her cereal box would find a deed to one square inch of Yukon property. Lawyers would draw up the deeds. They’d be “gold-embossed,” and have loads of legalistic fine print on them, a corporate seal, and a place to put the new owner’s name.
The kids would actually own a genuine piece of Klondike Gold Rush land – the land that Sgt. Preston and Yukon King lived and worked. They’d go crazy trying to get them! Quaker Oats would conquer the cereal market!
But, alas, Quaker Oats hated the idea.
It was impossible, the company’s lawyers told Baker. Registering the deeds to millions of tiny tots, even if it could be done, would cost the company a fortune. Baker suggested that they don’t register them. The lawyers reiterated their objection.
Baker was convinced that his idea was a winner and would not give up on it. In early October, 1954, Baker, his brother John (a lawyer), and a Quaker Oats advertising executive chartered a plane and flew to the Yukon, looking for land.
In Whitehorse, he received a legal opinion that it would be okay to parcel out small bits of land without individually registering each lease.
By then, Baker had convinced Quaker Oats that the promotion would work. Baker bought 19 acres of government property seven miles up the Yukon River from Dawson for $1000.
The examination of the land was not without incident. John Baker, the lawyer, kept a diary of their trip to the Yukon: “We arose at about 5:15 am., and after getting dressed found it was still dark. It was several degrees below zero. Finally Paul (Constable Paul LeCocq, a Mountie who accompanied them) appeared in his pickup truck. We bundled up as well as we could and went down to the river it’s a forbidding sight with ice cakes zooming by at about six miles per hour… We didn’t have enough weight in the bow and the wake sprayed up over Paul and froze as it hit him – his leather jacket was soon completely covered with ice. Paul told us a human being couldn’t last more than three minutes in the water. We manoeuvred upstream against the swift current for about 40 minutes and came to a point opposite the land in question.
Paul turned in toward shore and suddenly – Crash! – we smashed up on a rock. About 15 gallons of water came in over the stern and immediately turned to ice in the bottom of the boat. We then paddled in about 50 yards, went ashore, and examined the motor – the shear pin had broken and we had no spare…”
They made a hurried inspection of the Quaker Oats property – “fairly level with a beach of stones about 100 feet wide; quite thick with jackpine and spruce, poplar and birch” – and headed back, wet and cold, to Dawson, drifting with the current.” (Bruce Baker’s feet were so badly frostbitten, that complications led to the amputation of his right leg below the knee.)
They headed back to Chicago, ready to launch what became one of the most successful promotions in advertising history.
John Baker helped draw up the deeds for the giveaway scheme. They had to be carefully worded as to avoid the possibility that their competitors would try to block the promotion on any small technicality.
The deeds excluded mineral rights: although the area had, by then, been stripped of gold. They didn’t want deed owners trying to mine their square-inch properties. It was also stipulated that owners had to allow perpetual access, or “easement,” across their land to others who might wish to visit their own inches.
Quaker Oats formed a subsidiary, the Klondike Big Inch Land Co., incorporated in Illinois, to handle the promotion; Baker’s deeds could now be decorated with an official-looking corporate seal. Twenty-one million deeds were printed.
A master plan was produced to allow deed holders to identify where their parcel of land was located. If you wanted to find, say, lot number 11,935,000 you simply had to start in the northwest corner of the land, travel east 7,000 inches, go south 1,705 inches, and there you’d be standing on your inch.
The promotion was first announced on the Sgt. Preston network radio show on Jan. 27, 1955. At the same time, advertisements (“You’ll actually own one square inch of Yukon land in the famous gold country!”) appeared in 93 newspapers.
The public response outdistanced Baker’s wildest dreams. Quaker Oats cereal sold as quickly as the deeds could be printed and stuffed into the boxes. Grocers set up special Quaker Oats displays.
The promotion made the front page of a Buffalo newspaper: “There was a man on trial there for murdering his wife with an ice pick,” says Baker. “On about the third day of the trail, the defence attorney made a motion that be allowed to withdraw from the case. Apparently his client had told him that he owned all this property in the Yukon and the attorney assumed that payment would be no problem. Then he found out that the man’s property consisted of about 1,000 Quaker Oats deeds he had collected.”
Letters from new landowners flooded the Quaker Oats offices. “Where exactly,” thousands of children asked, “is my inch located?” “How much is it worth?” One youngster sent in four toothpicks and a piece of string and asked the Quaker people to erect a fence around his property. “Interest in the promotion,” says Baker, “was unbelievable.” A follow-up campaign offered cereal eaters a one-ounce “poke” pouch of genuine Yukon dirt” for 25 cents -it, too, was a success.
The sand was trucked to Whitehorse, packed into pouches, then sent overland to Anchorage, Alaska. It had to be mailed from there because of postal difficulties in sending it from Canada.
More publicity than Baker, sitting in his bathroom at night, had ever imagined. And, he pointed out, the promotion cost “next to nothing – about $10,000 plus printing costs.”
But all good things, alas, must come to an end. Or so Quaker Oats thought. The Sgt. Preston show went off the air in the late 1950s. The Klondike Big Inch Land Co., kept alive for a number of years to handle inquiries, was dissolved. And the 19 wilderness acres of Yukon land were repossessed by the Canadian government for non-payment of $37.20 in taxes, although a Quaker Oats spokesman in Chicago claims the company never received a tax bill.
Yes, Quaker Oats would like to forget the whole thing now. But it can’t. The Yukon land deeds weren’t, it seems, played with for a week and thrown away. People stuffed them into cookie jars, photo albums, drawers and safety deposit boxes instead. You don’t, after all, toss out a “gold-embossed” deed to land, even if it is just for one square inch. Who knows, it might be worth something, some day. And so, thousands of people – no one knows how many -squirrelled them away and forgot about them. For a while…
Quaker Oats received hundreds of inquiries every year, from kids who have grown up and rediscovered a deed, and from executors of estates – many of them attorneys – who have come across a Big Inch deed in a deceased’s belongings. How much, they all wanted to know, is this land worth now? Is the deed genuine? Are there taxes owing on the land? Where exactly is it located?
And Canadian authorities were not shielded from the inquiries. Ottawa refers all correspondence to the Quaker Oats Co. in Chicago. And Quaker has the unhappy – and the time consuming – task of telling them that the deeds are worthless, that the Klondike Big Inch Co. no longer exists, and that the Canadian government has taken back the land.
As Valentine’s Day approached, print and TV recounted stories of the total disconnect some males have when selecting gifts for the woman in their lives. It brought to mind a story of a married guest who had just completed a canoeing trip with us on the Yukon River.
Archaeologists unearthed a Chinese coin at a proposed gold mining operation in the Yukon. Distinct Chinese characters on the coin date it to around 1670 during the Qing Dynasty.
when Alaska was claimed by Russia. Russian interests traded with both Chinese merchants and the coastal Tlinglit people. The Russians traded Chinese items such as tobacco, tea, metal products for otter, beaver, and seal furs from the Tlingit. The Tlingit in turn used controlled routes to trade with interior First Nations peoples.