The Klondike Big Inch Land Promotion

In the mid-20th century, one ad company had a wacky plan to actually dole out land deeds as part of a cereal promotion. How did they manage it? And was the land worth anything? Read the show notes here.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class from house
stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Holly Fry and I'm Tracy V. Wilson. And Tracy
have a question for you. Sure when you were a kid,
did you love the freebees that came in cereal? Well,

(00:23):
my mother had very strong opinions on which cereals were appropriate,
so many of the cereals that were sold with toys
and them were not also serials we were allowed to eat. Ah.
That makes me so sad. So in case some of
our listeners do not know, sometimes cereal, particularly serial aimed

(00:45):
at kids, will sometimes come with a toy or another
novelty item in the box as part of like a
marketing promotion to boost sales. And I live for that
stuff as a kid, and I might still live for
that stuff as an adult. Uh. My husband and I
like a lot of crazy things and toys, and like,
you put a Star Wars pen in a box and
we'll be eating that cereal for however long it takes

(01:07):
to get all the pens. But this is not a
new concept. Pretty early from about the middle of the
twentieth century onward, the serial Wars sort of really started
to heat up in different promotions were tried to outdo
one another, and at one point in the mid twentieth century,
one very famous company had a very wacky plan to
actually dole out land deeds as part of a serial promotion,

(01:30):
and that's what we're going to talk about today. Sergeant
Preston of the Yukon was a radio show from the
fifties and then it made this transition into television. It
started actor Dick Simmons as the sergeant, and the radio
version had featured voice actor Paul Sutton. There was also
a husky dog named Yukon King and a trusty horse
named Rex, and the show's exploits were usually about exciting adventures,

(01:54):
most commonly with the Sergeant of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police taking his team of sleds through the Yukon in
pursuit of some bad guys. The TV series ran on
CBS TV from nineteen fifty five to nineteen fifty eight
and it was sponsored by Kuwaker Oats. So the actual
attribution of who had this idea for this extremely novel

(02:17):
promotion is a little bit fuzzy because different versions of
the story credit different people. In some versions. Ad executive
Bobby Smith came up with the idea. For example, his
biography credits him. Uh, sometimes it said that it's actually
Smith's son who gave him the idea, and then yet
other tellings of the tale it was a last minute
bolt of inspiration to addmin Bruce Baker, who was a

(02:40):
partner at ad firm Werry, Baker and Tilden, which is
where Bobby Smith works. So they're all kind of linked together.
But it's not. There's not entirely um one version of
the story that's consistently told. There's always a little bit
of wiggle in them. We do know that one of
these Chicago admin came up with the brainchild of offering
lay end deeds in cereal boxes. The previous ad campaign,

(03:04):
which they stated that the grains had been fired from guns,
was really no longer doing it for people. The idea
of guns firing the cereal was no longer appealing. Yeah,
and that that is actually uh, that ad campaign is
kind of based in the chemistry of how the the
puffed wheat and puffed rice came to be made in

(03:25):
their puff form. But uh, the other thing that Quaker
was really having to deal with was that other cereal
companies were cranking up their own ad campaigns, and they
were adding sugar to the cereal, which is something that
the Quaker company was not in favor of. And they
had these bounty cartoony mascots to try to appeal to kids. So,
for example, Tony the Tiger, which lives on today and

(03:47):
we all recognize, had debuted in the early nineteen fifties
and Kellogg's frosted flakes had become increasingly popular with kid consumers.
That part is really funny to me because if you've
heard our episode about John Harvey Long, you know he
was also not in favor of the sugar in the cereals. Yeah,
he lost control of that one. They have this in

(04:09):
common with my mom and a piece written for Canadian
magazine in the nineteen seventies by Jack McIvor. Baker is
the hero of this piece, racking his brain in a
bathroom at three o'clock in the morning to try to
come up with some way to salvage the Quaker account. Yeah.
I feel compelled to mention that I could not put
my hands on an official full text copy of this article. Uh,

(04:30):
it's reprinted sometimes an edited form by multiple tourism groups
in Canada, and I did find a citation for it,
so we know it existed, UH, but I never actually
got the full text document from the official UH magazine,
So just know that going forward. I just wanted to
acknowledge if you go looking at the show notes and
you go, hey, I never found this real article. That's

(04:51):
why Baker was interviewed for the piece, and he said
that he had the idea for the giveaway while he
was under pressure to come up with something that was
cheap and moved cereal. Once he had the idea, he
took the five am train to Chicago, grabbed his art
director and whipped up a presentation which he said to
have delivered to Quaker at eleven a m. That same morning.

(05:14):
And the Quaker company had some trepidation about this whole
wacky scheme. They envisioned the whole campaign becoming this nightmare
of paperwork and expense as they tried to parcel out
millions of tiny pieces of land, particularly to children, and
sort of the legal issues surrounding all of that. They
really were just very hard to sell on this idea.

(05:40):
It was pretty much the only idea on the table though,
so to complete with all the sugar and all the
cartoon characters. Bruce Baker and one of Quakers executives flew
to Yukon to scout out the possibility of actually bringing
this wild idea to reality. Yeah, they were going to
tie in that whole Canadian mount story into this, this

(06:02):
idea of giving away land. Uh. And so once Baker
and the Quaker executive landed in Canada, UH, they met
with a lawyer in white Horse, and things got a
little bit smoothed over at this point because the Canadian lawyer,
whose name was George Van Rogen, who incidentally went on
to become a senator in Canada. He advised that it
was not actually going to be necessary to register each

(06:23):
individual square inch that they intended to give away in
this promotion. That they could just sell it in one
large parcel and then they're just such tiny increments you
didn't even have to bother with all of that. Ben
Rogen was delighted to be working on a novel project
instead of just drawing up people's wills and whatnot, So
he helped find a lot for the visiting Americans to

(06:44):
look at and to consider purchasing. So the men headed
to Dawson City, which was a gold rush town, and
then they traveled by boat upriver to inspect property in
Kwondike and the plot of land that they specifically looked
at was a lot fort to forty three grouped you
and it was nineteen point one one acres UH. It
featured six hundred and forty feet of riverfront on the

(07:06):
west bank of the Yukon River, and it was one thousand,
three hundred and one ft deep. And the Klondike Big
Inch Land Company Incorporated was eventually established for the purposes
of this promotion, and it is that company that paid
a whopping and one thousand dollars for this tract of land.
So once the land had been acquired, deeds were printed

(07:29):
in Each deed was on a seven by five inch
piece of paper and that made it thirty five times
larger than the actual land pieces that they represented. UH.
And the wording on these deeds was really carefully written
to be entirely legal. I believe um van Grog van
Rogen did continue to help them with this since they
were working on, you know, legal issues both in Canada

(07:50):
and in the States where the promotion was going to happen.
And this was the reason that they put so much
effort into making sure every word on this piece of
paper was at written legally sound was allegedly because the
serial industry at this point had become really rather cutthroat,
and they were really concerned that a competing company was
going to try to like just comb through all of

(08:13):
this uh copy that was on the document to find
any incongruity or any way to call foul on this
Quaker Klondike project and consequently shut it down. The deeds
also made it clear that they did not come with
mineral rights to the land. Nobody wanted anybody to be
showing up looking to mind their one square inch of

(08:33):
land for gold. The owners of these tiny parcels also
had to allow for easement, which is accessed by other
people who might need to find their one inch plot.
So basically it made it so that the deed holders
property could be stepped on without legal recourse. On January seven,
this promotion began, and they ran ads, of course on

(08:54):
the television show, but papers across the United States also
ran ads touting that purchase is of Quaker puffed wheat
or Quaker puffed rights could lead to the ownership of
actual Yukon land, and these tiny land grabbers could fill
out a form and they could send it in with
a box top, and in return they would receive one
of these deeds that have been so carefully uh compiled,

(09:16):
issued by the Klondike Big Inch Land Company, and that
entitled the holder to one square inch of Klondike land.
There was a whole lot of romance around the marketing
of all of this. The promotion copy touted in the
gold Rush. Men fought the wildest country on Earth and
the most savage of climates to get to the Klondike
where your land is. During the winter, the only way

(09:40):
to the gold fields was by mushing for a week
after week. The more fortunate were aided by dog teams
pulling sleds. No one knows how many brave men died
along the frozen Yukon River that runs past your land.
And there was also a map of the Yukon territory

(10:01):
in these ads, and it had this arrow that pointed
to a spot in the words indeed makes you owner
of land right here, which just delighted me and sent
me into fits of laughter when I saw it. Also
included was a brief description of how a lust for
gold had driven men into this wilderness hoping to strike
it rich. And there were heroic descriptions of the mounties

(10:22):
that patrolled this land and how they always get their man,
so that also tied in with the television show. Additional
wording included talk of the harsh cold, the dangerous grizzly
bears and wolves, and the moose and caribou that might
traps across your land. The phrase your land was consistently
used in all the promotional materials, drawing kids into the

(10:45):
sales push with this empowering language that sparked their young imaginations.
And it is no surprise that this campaign worked Like
gang Busters. Stores were actually having this problem where they
would sell out of their puffed cereal style each day,
and kids were begging their parents to purchase multiple boxes
so that they could grow their land holdings. And I

(11:07):
can't help but think of like kids lying on their
beds dreaming about the huge plots of territory they were
slowly amassing through these minuscule, little one inch deeds. And
the first month of the campaign, Quaker received tens of
thousands of box top requests. But then there was a
snag In February nineteen fifty five, just weeks after the

(11:27):
campaign had kicked off, the Ohio Securities division, Quaker had
a large operations center in Ohio, ruled that the company
could not legally trade a box top for a deed
to Yukon Land without a state license to sell fore
in territory. And so at this point the promotion was
really in full swing and it was already seeing incredible success,

(11:51):
and so Quaker did not want to shut this down.
So instead of halting the promotion and distribution so that
they could wait for a license to come um, the
company kind of managed a little loophole. They opted instead
to give away the deeds in the boxes. And because
this eliminated the exchange of the box top, which could
be perceived as a sales contract, and when it came

(12:13):
along with the filled out coupon, this made it perfectly legal.
It was a free giveaway, they weren't selling land, and
it meant that this promotion could just keep right ongoing
because it was so successful that they really did not
want to stop the momentum. All in all, Quaker, through
the Klondike Big inch Land Company, gave away twenty one
million deeds to Klondike property, and while the enthusiasm for

(12:37):
Quaker Puff cereals and their gateway to property ownership was
still fresh in the minds of kids, there was actually
a second tie in promotion that came up because as
they were running out of their land deeds, they wanted
to kind of keep things going. So kids could then
mail in twenty five cents to UH the Klondike Big
Inch Land Company and they would receive what was called

(12:58):
a small quote poke pouch of genuine Yukon dirt. UH
and Van Rogen was also involved in this as well.
He assisted in the acquisition of this dirt. He basically
had like a business acquaintance kind of sift up lands
um smooth sand from the bottom of the Yukon River,
and he made it clear like there couldn't be anything,

(13:19):
no pebbles in it, no um, nothing dangerous. It really
just had to be the cleanest possible sand. And then
they had to have this soil and sand truck to
Alaska because they couldn't mail it from Canada without a
lot of postal complications, so the postmark was actually from
Alaska and not from UH Yukon Territory, but no one

(13:39):
seemed to mind. And in one interview, I noticed that
Van Rogen said, like, I think a lot of Americans
think Yukon is part of Alaska anyway, So nobody seemed
to notice that the postmark wasn't from the area where
they said that the dirt was coming from. Ten years
after the promotion, on January twenty second, nineteen sixty five,
the Klondike Big Inch Land Company was dissolved. The Canadian

(14:01):
government took possession of the land due to non payment
of thirty seven dollars and twenty cents worth of back taxes. Yeah,
that figure shows up in a lot of various sources,
although it never says where it's whether it's Canadian or
u s currency. Not that there's a huge issue at
that point anyway, It's such a small amount, and the
Klondike Bigas Land Company had really just been maintained kind

(14:22):
of to deal with these various queries that people would
send periodically about their land. But it really after just
a few months of this big promotion, it had ended,
and it wasn't really they weren't continuing to give away
deeds after that point, which is why there's that big
gap between when they give away the dirt and then
when the Klondike Company is dissolved and none of those

(14:43):
individual one inch plots were ever officially registered, so those
serial box deed holders were never really recognized as having
property in the eyes of the Canadian government. The land
that was once owned by Quakers Clondike Holding Company has
since been used for the Dawsons to a golf course.
So what's interesting is that, uh, these Klondike deeds continue

(15:07):
to sort of rear their heads. Uh. The land Title
office in white Horse, Yukon continues to get a handful
of inquiries each year from people who have held onto
their deeds or they found them in you know, a
family uh box. And there was an article in the
Montreal Gazette in nine six that characterized these inquiries as
pretty much come being grouped into one of these four

(15:30):
major types. There are general inquiries wondering if the land
has any value, tax queries from people worried that they're
not up to date on any taxes owned on their
square and land parcels, lawyers who find deeds from the
Klondike Bigage Land Company in the papers of the deceased
and are trying to settle estates, and hopeful types who

(15:50):
are wanting to know if they can rent the land
for income. Yeah, it's interesting, and I wonder how this
whole thing would play out if they attempted it today,
where it's like you have land, the one inch piece
of land. No you don't, not really. I think it
would maybe meet with some some bigger resistance. But um,

(16:10):
there have also been these various wacky efforts made around
these teeny parcels. At one point there were a couple
of men who had a combined four square inches of
land uh, and they attempted to declare it as free
and independent land under the name the Republic of Zandido,
which did not really play out. Another person sent Quaker

(16:31):
string and toothpicks so they could build a fence around
his property. Uh. One man had three of these deeds
and so he had a three it's three square inch
land parcel and it was really his intention that it
should be donated and used as a national park. According
to Verne Thomas, a representative from a Quakers legal department,

(16:53):
in the early nineteen seventies, one man collected deeds from
all over, eventually amassing ten thousand eighty of them, and
this added up to about seventy five square feet. He
then tried to have the square inches consolidated so he
could take possession of his tract of land, and he
requested that his parcel be carved out near the water.

(17:14):
But these were all of these various requests of what
to do. We're pretty much met with a form letter
that said, hey, that was a promotion. You're really paying
for the excitement. Uh. And in ninety one Thomas, who
we mentioned just a moment ago, told a reporter quote,
the deeds are worthless. They have never been of any
value except as a promotional gimmick by our merchandizing people.

(17:35):
They really made a very clear pr going forward that
they were really selling the romance and the excitement of
this concept, not the actual land. While the official statements
made by Quaker indicate that the deeds were never meant
to have any intrinsic value and we're really meant to
just be a fun promotion. If you do still have

(17:56):
an original certificate, it does have some value because the
Stalgia dealers and eBay purchasers will take them off your hands.
And the last several years the certificates have gone for
anywhere from ten dollars to forty dollars on the secondary market,
and in the early two thousands a man named David
McDonald who had collected several of the deeds on the
many plots as a child, and he held onto them

(18:18):
into adulthood, and a lot of people did. There were
people that really squirreled these away, uh, you know, in
their safe papers, thinking that they were going to pay
off one day. Uh. But David McDonald set out to
make a documentary about the Klondike Land and the Quaker
Company's ad campaign after he had inquired with the Canadian
government about the whole thing and got the same form

(18:39):
letter as everyone else. When McDonald started researching his film,
he discovered that many kids just like him had grown
up hanging onto their deeds in the hopes that one
day they would make some money off of them. And
those adult kids or sometimes their families. In the cases
where the original deed holders have died, we're told by
Quaker that they had no actual Yukon property. Yeah. I

(19:02):
tried to hunt down a chance to see McDonald's film,
which is called Serial Thriller, but I did not manage
to um to get to see it, which is a
big foodie on my part. Because it sounded so fun.
I just love this idea that there were there was
such an odd little giveaway, like here's some land for you,
but not really. Uh. You'll often hear it or see
it written up in the various articles that have come

(19:24):
up through the years, because periodically they will sort of
rise to the top. Someone will make an inquiry and
get re irritated and say I was promised land, but
they'll get the form letter this is not really I
think Quaker wishes this had never happened, like it was
very good for sales uh at the time, but it
really has been kind of an ongoing paint and it

(19:44):
took us for them. They fought. Like I said, they
continue to get mail every year from people thinking that
it's time to cash in on their land. It reminds
me of I think it was a soft drink promotion
within the last decade or so in which people were
gonna send in bottle tops, and you know, the more
bottle tops they could get bigger prizes. And as a

(20:05):
joke in the ad, there was one that was a
like a fighter jet or something and that cost fourteen
million bottle tops or something, and people actually took it
seriously and tried to get that many bottle tops to
get their fighter get. Yeah, that's crazy if it's the
promotion I'm thinking of. I think they capped the number
of bottle top like you had to digitally enter it,

(20:27):
and they capped the number you can enter each week,
so that you could really never get to the magical
number to cash in. Uh. But yeah, it's It's one
of those things people love a free giveaway. I love
freebees as much as anybody I send away for all
the crazy stuff because it cracks me up when it
comes in the mail. But it's one of those things
where you cut Most people kind of go into it

(20:48):
knowing this isn't really worth wild stuff, like it has
no actual value, it's just fun. Or like if you
if you adopt a wild animal at a wild animals
that doesn't belong to you, you don't get to go
pet that animal. It will bite your faith. We don't

(21:08):
want that. I'm just I'd laugh so hard with people
thinking about their one inch of land and what they're
gonna do with it. I actually kind of like the
guy who tried to make the seventy five ft of
the land be a real thing, because you could build
a tiny house on that be pretty happy out in
the middle of nowhere. Yeah, there was allegedly. I didn't

(21:29):
research it deeply. I saw it in my research and
didn't look terribly hard at it. There was allegedly a
game show at one point that had people try to
find the square inches, like a specific square inch of
one of these deeds. Like it's like the challenge of
the game show, Like this wasn't the regular thing. It
was a random challenge as part of their regular series
of challenges. But uh, they had laid out the parcel

(21:53):
of land where basically they just did like a simple
numbering scheme where they started at like the top left
corner of the land if you were looking at it
on a map, and went, you know, one through however
far it could go by inches, and then started a
second row and just kind of went chronologically. So theoretically
people that went looking for their particular inch, because each
inch was numbered on these certificates, could theoretically find it.

(22:16):
But to the best of anyone's knowledge, no one ever
actually did that, Like, no one ever pinpointed their one
square inch of land. It makes me almost want to
go looking for one of the the certificates just for
my own collection of weird things because it's so funny.
But you can't see images of the certificates online. Uh,
And we will link to some of those in the
show notes. And also one of the things I wanted

(22:37):
to mention that will be in the show notes is
um Um the commercial for Quaker where they talk about
the cereal being shot out of guns. Because it's quite
wacky cartoon featuring a cannon and some kind of revolutionary
style costuming, and it's worth a look. But now we're
going to move on to listener a Hill and this

(22:59):
comes to us. It is about our Suliman the Magnificent episode,
and it comes to us from a listener named Suleiman
and he says, greetings ladies. Finally an episode drives something
to add. I have so many connections to your last
episode on Suleiman the Magnificent. First among them, my name
is also Suliman. I was named partially after this Sultan.
It's strange to hear my name spoken so often, not

(23:21):
about me, as I almost never run into anyone with
that name. I also was fortunate enough to visit Istanbul
when I was a boy, and later would live in
Vienna for five months in college for a study abroad.
You briefly mentioned that Suliman's architect made two mosques in Istanbul.
I was able to visit both and have some interesting
facts about the Sulimani mosque. It is a very large

(23:41):
mosque which has six minarets or towers for calling to prayer.
This number is very high and strange. Our tour guide
told us that this was because Suliman had actually asked
his architect to make gold minarets. At the time, however,
the words for gold and for six were either the
same or very similar, and Sulimans are architect knowing that
someday the city might be sacked and gold towers would

(24:03):
be destroyed for the value, decided to make six instead.
From what I remember, mid Mar Snon had a host
of other architectural innovations and works that would make him
a great podcast topic. I love the show and really
enjoy the way YouTube present material. I would love a
podcast on the history of cookbooks. Julia Child, one of
my heroes, has a small video on this which I
find hilarious. I also love Julia Child, and as a

(24:26):
random factoid there, I think it no longer exists. There
used to be a video game online, an MMO, in
which you could hear my voice in one of the
way background characters, where you would concoct things for your costumes,
doing a very bad Julia Child impersonation, because I love
Julia Child and I used to watch her episode with
the Chicken Sisters over and over. But that is so cool,

(24:49):
suliman one, that you have a connection to our episode
by name and to you. I certainly would never have
known the gold and six combo of you know, sort
of language juggling on the part of the architect, which
is so fun. So if you would like to write
to us with any such fascinating facts or to talk
about Julia Child, which I will happily do at anytime,

(25:10):
you can write to us at History Podcast at how
stuffworks dot com. You can also connect with us at
Facebook dot com, slash missed in history, on Twitter at
misst in history, at missed in History dot tumbler dot com,
and on pinterest dot com slash missed in history. Uh.
If you would like to learn a little bit more
about what we talked about today, you can go to
our parent website and type in the words owning property

(25:33):
in the search bar, and uh, you'll come up with
an article that is how to find out who owns
a property. Unfortunately, since none of these individual people were
registered for their Klondike property, they would not show up
in such a an investigation. Uh. If you would like
to visit us at missed in history dot com, you
can do so. You'll find our episodes, show notes, and
all kinds of goodies. Uh. And you shouldn't visit us,

(25:56):
or did you have a hankering for other knowledge outside
of history or otherwise? You can look that up at
our parents site, which is how stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is
it how stuff works dot com. M M m