Kate Carmack

Shaaw Tláa, also known as Kate Carmack (c. 1857 – 29 March 1920), was a TagishFirst Nation woman who was one of the party that first found gold in the Klondike River in 1896, and is sometimes credited with being the person who made the actual discovery, although her biographer, Deb Vanasse, has concluded that her brother Keish (Skookum Jim) was the one that actually found the gold, and that Kate stayed behind at the family fish camp at the mouth of the Klondike River while her husband George Carmack, her nephew Kaa Goox, and Keish were away prospecting. According to Vanasse, in August 1896 Kate met prospector William Douglas Johns at the fish camp, and he asked her if she would see him a pair of moose hide mittens. This Kate agreed to, and Vanasse wrote “she stayed up all night cutting and stitching the mittens, for which her visitor paid with a large black silk handkerchief, a bargain that, according to him, pleased Kate greatly. (Vanasse, Wealth Woman, Kate Carmack and the Klondike Race for Gold, University of Alaska Press, 2016, 123)