Harriet Pullen

Harriet "Ma" Pullen (August 13, 1860 – August 9, 1947 ), was an American entrepreneur and hotelier in Skagway, Alaska. After running a freighting company, she bought a house and converted it into the luxurious Pullen House Hotel.

Early life She was born to Andrew Jackson and Mary Jane Stewart Smith in Mount Hope, Wisconsin, on August 13, 1860. (Eldest son Dan would later become the first appointment to West Point from Alaska and an All-American football right tackle in 1909, as well as a colonel in World War I. She left her children with friends in Seattle and traveled to Skagway to earn enough money to support them. In her spare time, she took discarded tin cans and beat them into pie pans. She baked and sold apple pies to prospectors passing through on their way to the Klondike Gold Rush. A women's suffrage bill was the first bill passed by both the House and Senate of the Alaskan Territory, being signed into law on March 21, 1913. After the bill passed, she used a wagon, called the "Pullen House Bus", to help women reach polling locations in Alaska. Pullen supported temperance and her wagon had a sign that read, "Vote Dry and Protect Your Home."

When she died in 1947, she was buried near her hotel.

Her great-granddaughter Eleanor Phillips Brackbill wrote a biography about her, The Queen of Heartbreak Trail: The Life and Times of Harriet Smith Pullen, Pioneering Woman.