www.ucls.org 32 Folkways The Klondike Big Inch Land Co. By Jack Melver This article has been edited for clarity and length. In 1954, the breakfast cereal market was a highly competitive one. Some cereal manufacturers hired tigers and bears to promote their products, while others lured customers by stuffing their boxes with premiums – whistles and marbles, buttons and soldiers, and plastic airplanes. Quaker Oats tried toy cannons that actually shot cereal across the kitchen, and rings with prisms that could really burn holes in Mom’s tablecloth, but they hadn’t gone over too well – Mom, after all, was the one who bought the stuff. Advertising executive Bruce 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 starred Richard Simmons as a handsome, burly, mustachioed Mountie who always got his man and never got his scarlet tunic mussed. Sgt. Preston had a teamof huskies led by Yukon King (“On King! On, you huskies!”) The showwas broadcast by stations across the U.S. and Canada, and the kids loved it. Baker’s idea was this: Quaker Oats would buy land in Sgt. Preston’s Yukon Territory, subdivide it into square-inch lots, and give the lots away to buyers of Quaker cereals. It would be a legal transfer of land: every kid who dug to the bottom of the cereal box would find a deed to one square inch of Canadian Gold Rush land. They’d be “gold-embossed,” and have legalistic fine print on them, a corporate seal, and a place to put the new owner’s name. The kids would go crazy trying to get them! Quaker Oats would conquer the cereal market! The world! Quaker Oats hated the idea. It was impossible, the company’s lawyers told Baker. Registering the deeds would cost the company a fortune. Then we won’t register them, said Baker. Forget it, said the lawyers. But he wouldn’t forget it. In October 1954, Baker flew to the Yukon looking for land. He paid $1,000 for 19 acres of government property seven miles up the Yukon River from Dawson. By then, Baker had convinced Quaker Oats that the promotion would work. Lawyers John Baker and George Van Roggen drew up the deeds for the giveaway scheme. “They were very carefully worded,” said Van Roggen. “Everything had to be absolutely legal – the competition in the food business was so strenuous that your competitors would try to get you 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., to handle the promotion.
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