Together with partners Arthur Harper and Captain Alfred Mayo, he founded Fort Reliance and a wide network of trading posts in the Yukon, often providing a grubstake to prospectors.

He was the most successful financially of the trio, becoming a multi-millionaire by 1898 and buying a large Victorian mansion for his family when they moved about that time to Berkeley, California.

McQuesten joined other adventurers in the Yukon, becoming partners with traders Arthur Harper, an immigrant from northern Ireland, and Alfred Mayo, of Irish descent from Bangor, Maine.

McQuesten and his two partners each married native Athabascan women of the Koyukon people, strengthening their ties among the local culture.

In 1874 Harper married a young woman he called Jeannine, who had not gone to a mission school and preferred to teach her children traditional ways.

[2] In 1894, McQuesten founded Circle City, Alaska, which developed the largest log cabin district in the North Country.

With the frenzy of the Klondike gold rush in 1897, he feared food shortages in Circle City and decided to leave Alaska.