Category: Women

Posted on

Della Murray Banks


In January 1945 Della Murray Banks wrote an article in the Alaska Sportsman Magazine about her work on the Dalton Trail. She and her husband Austin Banks had made previous trips to the Chilkat area – in 1896 she was burned at Cook Inlet and lost two fingers on her left hand.
Back in Seattle, in 1898, they were hired by Denison Tucker and the infamous Homer Pennock to lead them to the Klondike on the Dalton Trail. Early on Mrs. Tucker and her sister Mrs. Hutchins decided to stay behind in Seattle so that they would not get their feet wet. (They also could not cook or eat off of tin plates).
In July 1898 the party of about 10 people arrived in Skagway to see the town under martial law following Soapy’s death and subsequent goings-on. Della and her husband went over to Pyramid Harbor to stay instead. They found the English proprietor of the hotel celebrating the Santiago victory. Tucker hired two packers, Jack Noon and Tom McAvoy (who died on today’s date, December 16, 1918).
They used a couple of horses, Polly and “Swift”. They found a mule bit for the horse along the way, and near the summit of the Chilkat Pass, they traded that for a regular bridle found hanging in a tree. By the time they arrived at Dalton Post, Della was riding on a fine saddle and with good bridle, both acquired from the dead animals they passed along the way!
Della cooked on the trip and they paid her $50 a month. In the photo above she is cooking supper, as she puts it, “for our famished outfit. Each meal required ninety biscuits, which I could bake fifteen at a time in our sheet-iron stove. My knees became calloused from kneeling on the rough ground, kneading dough and making biscuits. Conveniences? There were none.”
Would you do this for $50 a month?

Apparently she did not even get that, as the consummate con man, Homer Pennock swindled Mr. & Mrs. Banks. The town of Homer was named by Della Murray Banks, (the first white woman in Homer) before she realized that she and her husband had been swindled. The name stuck, but Della and Austin did not stick around.

collection of her letters are at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley; The Homer Spit, Coal, Gold and Con Men, was
written by Janet Klein, and published in 1996

Posted on

Mary Matilda Moore Kearns


Mary was the daughter of Skagway’s Police Chief in 1907. She was born either in 1882 or 1885. On this sad day, December 11, 1907 three days after giving birth, she died and left behind two newborn twin baby girls: Mary Matilda and Matilda T. Kearns. Her parents, Charles and Matilda Moore brought the girls up. Her daughter Mary M. lived to be 90 and died in Spokane in 1997.
Mary Matilda Moore Kearns is buried in the Gold Rush Cemetery.
The photo above is from 1911 but is not of Mary and Matilda, just a couple of twin girls with a Buick Speedster somewhere else, but is a good depiction of the time.

1910 census; Skagway death record

Posted on

Hattie Maria Corrin Lockwood Strong


And speaking of nurses:
Hattie Maria Corrin was born in South Coventry, Connecticut on this day, October 23, 1864. She was educated in private schools and enjoyed a comfortable existence until the business recession of 1877 and the death of her father a few years later drastically affected the family’s fortunes. The family moved in with relatives and Hattie contributed to their support by giving piano lessons.

She was married in 1888 to Lester B. Lockwood and moved with him to Tacoma in what was then the Territory of Washington. Her only child, Lester Corrin, was born there in 1892. In 1897 the marriage failed and she found herself alone with very limited financial resources and a young son to support.

The Alaska Gold Rush was in full swing and in casting about for some means of supporting herself and her son, she and a friend, a professional nurse, decided to establish a combination hospital-hotel in Skagway for sick and injured miners. The two women pooled their resources to purchase building materials and medical supplies. En route to Alaska they were shipwrecked in a blizzard outside Skagway, losing all their provisions and barely escaping with their lives. She supported herself for about three years in Skagway in a variety of jobs, including nurse, assistant to a physician and steamship ticket agent, until the rigors of the life in Skagway affected her health. She returned to Tacoma, where she found employment as the supervisor of a mens’ club. Further decline in her health forced her to move to a milder climate and she used the small savings she had accumulated for her son’s education to move to southern California.

While convalescing in California, she met and in 1905 married Henry Alvah Strong, co-founder and first president of what is now the Eastman Kodak Company. Mr. Strong, a widower twenty-five years her senior, legally adopted her son and the marriage was an unusually happy one until Mr. Strong’s death in 1919.

Having made the transition from a life of struggle and hardship to one of considerable luxury, Mrs. Strong dedicated the remainder of her life to helping others less fortunate than herself. The list of her charitable activities and honors is far too lengthy to include here but includes the establishment in 1927 of a retreat near Paris for face-wounded veterans of the French Army (for which she received the Legion of Honor), the establishment of the Hattie M. Strong Foundation in 1928, and gifts of various buildings to hospitals, educational institutions and social service agencies in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. Today there is a Hattie Strong scholarship given to students in their final year of study for a Baccalaureate or Graduate degree.

This and similar stories of heroes and heroines of the Gold Rush make me wonder: were they heroes before they came up to Skagway or did Skagway and the experience here make them see the world for the challenges and possibilities? Certainly in Hattie’s case we see a woman who pitched and and made a difference in the world. Hats off to Hattie!

Hattie M. Strong Foundation site.

Posted on

Victorian Order of Nurses


One interesting story of the Klondyke is the expedition of four nurses from Ottawa. The Victoria Order of Nurses was started by Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, wife of the Governor General in Ottawa. She was heavily involved in the launching and further development of the VON for Canada. Lady Aberdeen had read with interest an appeal from Rev. Robert Dickey of Skagway, Alaska, in the Presbyterian periodical, The Westminster, calling for trained nurses to go to the Klondike. She sent Margaret Payson, Amy Scott, Georgia Powell and Rachel Hanna to Dawson. They were outfitted in “neat brown duck suits with bloomers and hobnail boots”. On May 14, 1898, two hundred men, six women and 60 tons of supplies embarked on the Islander for the Klondyke. They got off at Wrangell and went up the Stikine River the Cassiar Mountains and Fort Selkirk to Dawson. They were accompanied by Mrs. Cortlandt Starnes and Faith Fenton, a reporter.
Their work in Dawson and elsewhere is indescribable. Amy and Goergia left in 1900 and went to Africa to help in the Boer War, although Georgia returned to Dawson and married a mountie. Margaret stayed in Dawson and married a wealthy miner. Rachel also stayed on and then went to Atlin for 14 years.
The picture above shows 5 women onboard the ship in 1898. Faith Fenton is definitely the second from the right as I have several other photos of her that match.

The Right Way On by Olive; The Story of Klondike Nurses online.

Posted on

Harriet arrives in Skagway


Although we have covered Harriet Pullen before, it was on this day, September 8, 1897 that she arrived in Skagway full of hope for a new life. She left behind a bankrupt farm and four children to join her husband here to scratch out a living. Starting a restaurant in a tent and cooking meals, her husband ran a string of horses across White Pass. After earning enough money, she bought a log cabin and then sent for her boys to help her.
Soon after, she and her husband split and sold the packing business. She told people that she was a widow. She purchased a large frame house from Captain Moore and named it the Pullen House. All that is left today is the chimney, which is now more clearly seen since the city has cut down all the trees in the area in the past month. Nasty trees, who needs them?

from Alaska: Saga of a Born Land by Borneman

Posted on

James Edward Lilly

Mr. Lilly had a grocery from the time he came in 1897 to 1900. He worked with his sister, Francis, and his brother, John at the Lilly Brothers hay feed and flour. By 1901 they had moved to the Yukon. James was also a lawyer. James was born in 1861 in Champaign Illinois, he died on this day, August 27, 1912 in Alaska.

This Barley fond shows a skit with people holding banners of various businesses in town in April 1900. You can see the Lilly Brothers banner in the lower left.

1900;1902;family chron; Univ of IL record online; Fairbanks news list

Posted on

Ester Clayson Pohl


Hettie, or Ester was born in 1869 in Seabeck, Washington in a logging camp. The physician who delivered Esther Clayson’s youngest sister was a woman and inspired Clayson to enter the University of Oregon’s Medical School in 1894. Her father was an English seaman who had jumped ship in 1864 and brought his family to join him three years later. His attempts to support his family as a lumber merchant, hotel manager, newspaper editor, and farmer were not entirely successful. After such unsteady beginnings, young Esther Clayson decided that she had no desire to be the helpmate of an Oregon farmer or pioneer hotel keeper. For a while, she could not decide between a career in theater or medicine. While theater seemed unreal to her, medicine was “drama in its highest form.” After graduating in 1898 from Medical School she married a fellow doctor, Emil Pohl. They joined the rest of the Clayson clan in Skagway soon after. As they arrived there was a meningitis outbreak.

Hettie and her husband, Emil set up the Union Skagway Hospital to treat the many sick men. The Pohls were indeed heroes of the town in that year.

The Clayson family had a large general store called Clayson’s. After the murder of her brother, Frederick Clayson on December 25, 1899 in the Yukon, the family eventually moved down to Washington. The doctors Pohl stayed in Alaska for a few years, but Dr. Emil Pohl himself died in 1911 in Alaska from either spinal meningitis or an encephalitis epidemic. After Emil’s death Ester married George Lovejoy in 1912 and relocated to Portland Oregon.
In 1907 Dr. Pohl was the first woman to direct a city department of health, the Portland Board of Health, in Oregon.
In 1919 she was co-founder and first director of the Medical Women’s International Association.
In her lifetime, Dr. Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy transformed the Portland Board of Health in Oregon by regulating the milk supply, providing funds for school nurses, and gaining Portland a national reputation for its high standards of sanitation. She also helped to establish the Medical Women’s International Association and the American Women’s Hospitals which, under her leadership, grew from an emergency committee for war-relief into an international service organization operating in thirty countries.
From 1911 to 1920, Esther Pohl Lovejoy continued her support of women’s suffrage, the League of Nations, and Prohibition, even running for a seat in Congress. She was an outspoken campaigner, publicizing the plight of poor farmers in the Northwest and calling local bankers “bandits” who charged ruinous interest rates in order to profit from the farmers’ misfortunes.
Dr. Ester Clayson Pohl Lovejoy passed away on this day, August 17 1967 in New York at the age of 98.
Her life is a shining beacon and an inspiration.

National Institute of Health: Changing the face of Medicine – Celebrating America’s Women Physicians – online; Murder in the Yukon; Klondike Mission, Sinclair; The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science by Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Joy Dorothy Harvey.

Posted on

Winnifred Marion Telfer


Happy Birthday to Winnifred Telfer born on this day, August 9, 1919 in Skagway. Her mother, Mary Peterson, was the matron of the White Pass Hospital since 1915 when she met Eric Telfer. Eric was an accountant for White Pass. They married in November 1917. Eric took lots of pictures in the years the family lived here and Winnifred donated them to the Canadian Archives. Some photos were of hockey teams, the one above is of the women’s curling team in 1922, Mary Telfer may be in this picture. The family moved south in 1930.

Winnifred stayed in British Columbia most of her life and became a famous artist.

Archives Canada – Eric Telfer fonds. census.

Posted on

Harriet Matilda Pullen


photo by Henry Alaska Dedman

Happy Birthday Mrs. Pullen!
Hattie Smith was born on this day, August 5, 1869 in Hope, Dane County Wisconsin. she married Mr. Pullen in 1880 and the clan moved to La Push Washington.
When the call of gold came, Harriet packed up and came to Skagway where she lived the rest of her life. She saw it all, horses that could not be off-boarded at Dyea – she jumped on their backs and rode them off through the water to the beach. She made pie tins out of flattened cans and started selling pies. With the money she made there she built a hotel that became the pride of Skagway, the Vanderbilts, President Harding and movie stars stayed there.
I first read of her in an article in Reader’s Digest in the 1960’s as one of their “Most Unforgettable Characters”. Quite a lady!
She died on August 8, 1947 in Skagway and is buried near her home on the east side of the railroad tracks.