Skookum in Tagish means enormously strong, and the young man named Keish earned the new name Skookum Jim, hauling hundred-pound packs up the infamous trail over Chilkoot Pass.
In 1892, near Dyea at the foot of the Chilkoot trail he killed a bear with his bare hands.
Skookum packed supplies up the rugged Chilkoot with his friend Dawson Charlie and they became partners. In 1886 they packed for George Carmack and Carmack wintered in Skookum’s home; married Skookum’s sister. When she died, he married another sister, Shaaw Tiaa, who became Kate Carmack.
Skookum Jim travelled, in 1896, through far northern Yukon with Kate and George and Dawson Charlie. They stopped to fish in Rabbit Creek, and one of them found a gold nugget—in later accounts each claimed credit for the find.
No matter.
The Carmacks, Skookum and Dawson Charlie had made the strike that started the Great Klondike Gold Rush.
In 1898 they travelled to Seattle to spend some of their wealth. When Carmack dumped sister Kate for another woman and took all the money with him, Skookum Jim broke off with Carmack too.
Skookum got his penniless sister and her daughter Graphie back to Carcross; built them a small house. He also helped with groceries and he paid Graphie’s tuition at the Whitehorse Mission School.
Skookum had a wife, and he built for her a larger frame home in Carcross. They lived there for just a few years. Skookum had always enjoyed his booze, and as the years passed, he enjoyed it more and more. His business judgment, never the best, deteriorated.
In 1904 he sold his claims on Rabbit Creek for $65,000. The next year, the same year that Graphie left for Seattle and never returned, Skookum’s wife left him. Then Dawson Charlie fell off the bridge in Carcross and drowned.
Skookum and Kate, Keish and Shaaw Tiaa, ended their lives in Carcross as the last remnants of their family.
Like Kate, Skookum Jim rests in the Carcross cemetery.
Life was hard back then. You had to be unbelievably tough to survive.
Indeed
Sounds like carmack was a bit of a scoundrel
I think he went well beyond “a bit of”
buddy was down bad for marrying his sister like damn.