Kate Carmack

Shaaw Tláa, also known as Kate Carmack ( – 29 March 1920), was a Tagish First 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)

Early years Born near Bennett Lake, she lived near Carcross, Yukon with her parents and seven siblings. Her father, Kaachgaawáa, was the head of the Tlingit crow clan, while her mother, Gus’dutéen, was a member of the Tagish wolf clan. Her name in Tlingit means "gumboot mother". As a young woman, she married her first cousin, Kult’ús.

In the early 1880s, Shaaw Tláa's husband and their infant daughter died of influenza in Alaska, at which time she returned to her village. It was here, in 1887, that her brother Keish (Skookum Jim Mason) and nephew Dawson Charlie (K̲áa Goox̱) started a packing, hunting, and prospecting partnership with George Washington Carmack, an American. She became Carmack's common-law wife within the year and took the name Kate Carmack. George Carmack married Marguerite Laimee in 1900 in Olympia, Washington.

In recognition of her presence when the first gold nugget was removed from Bonanza Creek, Carmack was inducted into Canada's Mining Hall of Fame in 2018. Her contributions includes helping her family members survive by providing food and clothing. Her husband, brother, and nephew were honored for their gold discoveries by the Mining Hall of Fame two decades prior to Carmack.