SYMHC Classics: The Klondike Big Inch Land Promotion

Today we revisit a fun 2014 episode. 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?

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday, everybody. We have some heavier topics coming up
on the show over the next couple of weeks, so
we thought we would take today's Saturday Classic back to
something that's a little bit more on the lighter side,
and that is the Klondike Big inch Land promotion, which
was a serial promotion back in the fifties. So enjoy.

(00:23):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm 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,

(00:45):
my mother had very strong opinions on which cereals were appropriate,
so many of the cereals that were sold with toys
in them were not. Also serials we were allowed to eat.
Oh makes me so sad. So uh. In case some
of our listeners do not know, sometimes serial particularly serial

(01:07):
aimed 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 collect 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

(01:29):
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 doll out land deeds as part of a serial promotion.

(01:53):
And that's what we're going to talk about today. Sergeant
Preston of the Yukon was a radio show from the
fifties and that 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,

(02:17):
most commonly with the sergeant of the Royal Canadian Mounted
Police taking his team of sled dogs through the Yukon
in pursuit of some bad guys. This TV series ran
on CBS TV from nineteen fifty five to night and
it was sponsored by Kuwaker Oats. So the actual attribution
of who had this idea for this extremely novel promotion

(02:41):
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 admin Bruce Baker, who was a partner

(03:02):
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
land deeds in cereal boxes. The previous ad campaign, which

(03:27):
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

(03:47):
their puffed 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 is 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

(04:10):
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 Kellogg, you know he
was also not in favor of the sugar in the cereals. Yeah,
he'd lost control of that one. They have this in

(04:31):
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.

(04:53):
It's reprinted sometimes an edited form by multiple tourism groups
in Canada. And I did find a citation for it.
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 why Baker was

(05:15):
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. And the Quaker

(05:38):
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

(06:00):
very hard to sell on this idea. It's 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

(06:20):
whole Canadian Mounty story into this, this 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

(06:43):
actually going to be necessary to register each 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
his drawing up people's wills and whatnot, So he helped

(07:04):
find a lot for the visiting Americans to 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 up river to inspect property in Klondike. And
the plot of land that they specifically looked at was
Lot forty to forty three, Group two, and it was
nineteen point one one acres uh. It featured six hundred

(07:26):
and forty feet of riverfront on the west bank of
the Yukon River, and it was one thousand, three hundred
and one feet 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

(07:48):
the land had been acquired, deeds were printed 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, and the wording on
these deeds was really carefully written to be entirely legal.
I believe um van van Rogen did continue to help
them with this since they were working on, you know,

(08:10):
legal issues, both in Canada 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 accurate and
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

(08:32):
like just comb through all of 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

(08:54):
their one square into the land for gold. The owners
of these tiny parcels also had to allow out 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 nine, this promotion began, and

(09:23):
they ran ads, of course on the television show, but
papers across the United States also ran ads touting that
purchases 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

(09:44):
been so carefully uh compiled, 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

(10:06):
to get to the Klondike, where your land is. During
the winter, the only way 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

(10:30):
map of the Yukon territory in these ads, and it
had this arrow that pointed to a spot in the
words deep 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

(10:51):
heroic descriptions of the mounties that patrolled this land and
how they always get their man, so that also tied
in with the television show. Additional earning included talk of
the harsh cold, the dangerous grizzly bears and wolves, and
the moose and caribou that might trapes across your land.
The phrase your land was consistently used in all the

(11:13):
promotional materials, drawing kids into the sales push with this
empowering language that sparked their young imaginations, and it is
no surprise that this campaign worked. Like Gangbusters, stores were
actually having this problem where they would sell out of
their puffed cereal stock each day, and kids were begging
their parents to purchase multiple boxes so that they could

(11:35):
grow their land. Holdings, and I 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 five, just

(11:57):
weeks after the 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 or in territory. And so at this point
the promotion was really in full swing and it was

(12:18):
already seeing incredible success, 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, 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,

(12:40):
which could be perceived as a sales contract in when
it came 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 Against Land Company gave away twenty

(13:02):
one million deeds to Klondike property, and while the enthusiasm
for 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

(13:23):
then mail in twenty five cents to UH the Klondike
Big Inch Land Company and they would receive what was
called 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

(13:43):
um smooth sand from the bottom of the Yukon River,
and he made it clear like there couldn't be anything,
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

(14:06):
Alaska and not from uh Yukon Territory, but no one
seemed to mind. And in one interview I noticed that
Van Rogen said, like, I think a lot of Americans
think Yukon as 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,

(14:27):
the Klondike Big inch Land Company was dissolved. The Canadian
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

(14:50):
Klondike Big inch Land Company had really just been maintained
kind 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

(15:10):
then when the Klondike Company is dissolved. And none of
those individual one inch plots were ever officially registered, so
those Cereal 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 Klondike Holding Company
has since been used for the Dawson City golf course.

(15:32):
So what's interesting is that, uh, these Klondike deeds continue
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 box. And there was an article in the Montreal

(15:54):
Gazette in that characterized these inquiries as pretty much come
being grouped into one of these four 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 Big Inch Land

(16:15):
Company in the papers of the deceased and are trying
to settle estates, and hopeful types who 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

(16:38):
with some some bigger resistance. But um, 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, and they
attempted to declare it as free and independent land under
the name the Republic of Zandado, which did not really

(16:59):
play out. Another person sent Quaker 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

(17:21):
representative from a Quakers legal department, 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

(17:42):
carved out near the water. 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 nineteen seventy 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

(18:03):
promotional gimmick by our merchandising people. 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

(18:26):
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 an original certificate, it does
have some value because nostalgia 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

(18:49):
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 into adulthood, and a lot
of people did. There were people that really squirreled the
is 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

(19:11):
he had inquired with the Canadian government about the whole
thing and got the same form 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

(19:33):
holders have died. We're told by Quaker that they had
no actual Yukon property. Yeah. I 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,

(19:54):
like here's some land for you, but not really. Uh.
You'll often hear it or it written up in the
various articles that have come up through the years, because
periodically they will sort of rise to the top. Someone
will make an inquiry and get very irritated and say
I was promised land, but they'll get the form letter
this is not really I think Quaker wishes this had

(20:14):
never happened, like it was very good for sales uh
at the time, But it really has been kind of
an ongoing pain and that took us for them. They,
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

(20:35):
in which people were gonna send in bottle tops, and
you know, the more bottle tops they could get bigger prizes.
And as a 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

(20:55):
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, 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.

(21:16):
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 most people kind of go into
it 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

(21:37):
animal preserve that doesn't belong to you, you don't get
to go pet that animal. It will bite your face.
We don't 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 ft
of the land be a real thing, because you could

(22:00):
build a tiny house on that be pretty happy out
in the middle of nowhere. Yeah, there was allegedly. I
didn't 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 is like the challenge

(22:22):
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 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

(22:43):
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,
but to the best of anyone's knowledge, no one ever
actually did that, Like no one ever pinpointed their one
square to land. It makes me almost want to go
looking for one of the the certificates just for my

(23:05):
own collection of weird things because it's so funny. But
you can 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 to mention
that will be in the show notes is um um
the commercial for Quaker where they talk about the serial
being shot out of guns, because it's quite wacky cartoon

(23:26):
featuring a cannon and some kind of revolutionary style costuming,
and it's worth a look. Thank you so much for
joining us on this Saturday. If you have heard an
email address or a Facebook you are l or something
similar over the course of today's episode, since it is

(23:48):
from the archive that might be out of date now,
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Works dot com, and you can find us all over
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(24:10):
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