Mary Mason

Mary was a Coastal Tlingit woman maybe born near Haines – probably Klukwan in 1874. I say maybe because her mother was living there and talked to Angela Sidney about Daisy, her granddaughter years later. They were members of the Raven Clan who bore the name Lukaax.adi.

Mary is famous because of her husband, Skookum Jim or Keish Mason. They were married around 1893, and Daisy was born June 22, 1895. Jim died in 1916 in Carcross and Mary died on this day, December 28, 1927 in Alaska, perhaps Haines or Skagway. Daisy died only a few years later in Seattle but she was also buried in Carcross with her father. I do not know where Mary’s grave is, I would assume in Carcross also, I will look for it the next time I am up there. The plaque above is in Carcross and was put in in 2000.

 

Life lived like a Story p. 101 and note #45;

1901 Canadian census in Carcross; news acct from list in NPS library

Auto Accident 1955


On this day, October 4, 1955 there was an auto accident on mile 34 of the Haines Highway. The two men killed were Lee Edward Donnelly age 55 and Paddy Duncan, age 90. They were both fishermen and Paddy had once been a Tlingit Policeman which is odd considering that in Klukwan he once murdered a man while drunk.
“December 4, 1936 Paddy Duncan, Indian of Champagne Landing, is charged with the murder of Harton Kane in October 1936, is sentenced to hang March 23, 1937.” This from “Strange Things Done” by Coates.
Paddy was sent to the penitentiary but then parolled. He came back to Haines in 1949. He was a passenger with Donnelly when the vehicle he was riding in left the highway and turned over.

Here is a photo of the Klukwan band from the early 1900’s.

Coates; Cheechako news article October 1936.

Sophie Matthews


On this day, September 27, 1938 Sophie Matthews died and was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery. She was 76 years old, a Tlingit native born in Klukwan in 1862 and her native name was Kxa Gis Ooh. She married William Edward Matthews who came to Skagway in 1888 from St. Louis Missouri and was a farmer.
Their son William Clarence Matthews also married a woman named Sophie who died young, at 26, in 1921 and is buried in the Cemetery in Dyea. See her grave in the picture above. Their two daughters, Julia and Mable died as little girls in 1920 also probably from the influenza epidemic and are buried together in Dyea. There are quite a few descendants of the Matthews clan that still live in Skagway.

Skagway death record.

Louis Stoowukhaa Shotridge


Louis Shotridge was born on this day, April 15, 1886 in Klukwan a native village near Haines to George Shotridge (Yeil gooxhu) and Kudeit sáakw. His Tlingit name was Stoowukháa, which means “Astute One.” He was perhaps murdered in 1937, but that is at the end of this story…

Louis was named after a (Presbyterian) missionary in Haines, Louis Paul. The name Shotridge derived from Louis’s maternal grandfather Chief “Tschartitsch,” this being a Germanicized spelling of the Tlingit name “Shathitch” or, in contemporary Tlingit orthography, Shaadaxhícht.

Shotridge was educated at the Haines mission school, where he met his wife-to-be, Florence Dennis (Kaatkwaaxsnéi), whom he married in a traditional Tlingit arranged marriage; she was of the Lukaax.ádi clan. Florence became an accomplished weaver of baskets and Chilkat blankets and performed her technique at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in Portland, Oregon, in 1905.

Perhaps inspired by contact with the ethnologist Lt. G. T. Emmons, Louis accompanied Florence to Portland to exhibit and sell Tlingit artifacts from Klukwan. Forty-nine were sold to George Byron Gordon of the University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, who subsequently hired him to collect more, thus beginning a lifelong career for the Shotridges as artifact collectors, art producers, and culture-brokers.

In 1912 the Shotridges visited Philadelphia and met the anthropologist Frank Speck, who introduced them to Canada’s leading anthropologist-linguist, Edward Sapir. They began to work with Sapir as well, providing him with essays, information, and objects.

In 1914 the Shotridges met Franz Boas in New York and worked with him on recording information on Tlingit language and musicology. Boas included Louis in his lecture audiences and eventually in his weekly round-table discussions among anthropologists at Columbia University.

Starting in 1915, Louis worked for seventeen years as Assistant Curator at the University Museum, making him the first Northwest Coast Indian to be employed by a museum. Louis was an ethnological assistant and expert on the traditions of his people, the Tlingit nation of southeastern Alaska.

By the 1930’s Louis was also active in the Alaska Native Brotherhood and served as its Grand President. He made a living from fishing, odd jobs and the sale of an occasional artifact. In 1935, he took a job as a government stream guard. His responsibility was to prevent fishing in closed areas, and it was an unpopular duty among Native fishermen.

In 1937, Shotridge was found on the ground near his cabin in Redoubt Bay, about 16 miles south of Sitka. He had a broken neck and had apparently lain there for several days before a local schoolteacher found him. He was taken to a hospital in Sitka where he died 10 days later.

Robert De Armond, an Alaska historian who was a young man then, served on a coroner’s jury that investigated Shotridge’s death. The jury concluded that Shotridge had fallen from the roof and ruled it in accident. But even De Armond isn’t convinced that it was.

“The story among the Natives has always been that he was killed by people from Klukwan,” he said. “They were very clever at making it look like an accident.”

Though there was no proof of foul play, De Armond said there were several instances of Native men dying under mysterious circumstances about that time. Some had been suspected witches. Perhaps a Klukwan fisherman was in Redoubt Bay, found the fishing slow and spotted Shotridge.

“I think it was some of the Klukwan people who were angry at him for having sold so much of the material to Pennsylvania,” De Armond said.

“It was one of those mysteries that never will have a real answer.”

Wikipedia; death record of Richard Shotridge; “Collecting the Past” by Marilee Enge online.