William Judge

Father William Judge (April 28, 1850 – January 16, 1899) was a Jesuit priest who, during the 1897 Klondike Gold Rush, established St. Mary's Hospital, a facility in Dawson City which provided shelter, food and any available medicine to the many hard-luck gold miners who filled the town and its environs. For his selfless and tireless work, Judge became known as "The Saint of Dawson".

Biography Judge was born into a religious family in Baltimore, Maryland. His brother Charles became a Sulpician. Upon joining the Jesuits in 1890, at the age of forty, William Judge volunteered to go to Alaska. He served for two years at Holy Cross Mission, on the Yukon River, before being assigned to a smaller mission at Nulato, Alaska. There he built a church and taught the native children. He was then reassigned to the small mining town of Forty Mile, Yukon. He established a mission there in 1894. When gold was discovered in the Klondike, practically the entire community relocated there. He followed, arriving in Dawson City in March 1897.

Popular culture A fictionalized version of Judge appears in the Discovery Channel miniseries Klondike, portrayed by Sam Shepard. The miniseries depicts Judge as being older than his real life counterpart, who died at the age of 48. He is played by Clive Geraghty in the TG4 series An Klondike, which, in addition to also portraying him as older than the real Judge, changes his nationality to Irish and presents him as establishing a church and hospital in the fictional town of Dominion Creek before dying in 1898 instead of 1899.