Yukon who is who

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Aagé

Aagé was born to Gus’dutéen and Kaachgaawáa, one of eight children born into the Deisheetaan clan of the Tagish people. Her family travelled in the Tagish, Bennett, Nares, and Marsh lakes area. ((Deb Vanasse, Wealth Woman: Kate Carmack and the Klondike Race for Gold. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2016: 13.)) Aagé’s Tagish family had strong ties to the coastal Tlingit at a time when contagious diseases were ravaging the coastal population. An older brother and a sister died after moving to the coast to live with their spouses. Aagé was sent to the coast to marry the husband of her deceased sister, but he died before she reached him. She became the third wife of his brother, L’unáát, a prominent headman of the Chilkoot Tlingit. Sister Shaaw Tláa (Kate) was married to a Tlingit man, Kult’ús. They lived in a communal long log structure that housed ten to thirty people. In 1887, L’unáát died during the Packer War over the lucrative rights to control the business of packing prospectors’ supplies over the Chilkoot Pass. Aagé returned home to the Yukon, but she had to leave Susie, one of her daughters, on the coast. ((Deb Vanasse, Wealth Woman: Kate Carmack and the Klondike Race for Gold. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2016: 28-29, 75.))\\ Sed Wilson was a prospector who attempted to cross the Chilkoot Pass in the winter and ran into trouble during a blizzard, losing his food and supplies. He stayed with the Tagish, and married Aagé. In 1889, Sed and Aagé followed an increasing number of prospectors headed to the Fortymile River. They were prospecting near the south fork of the Fortymile when Kate and her husband George Carmack arrived in the late summer.  Sed and George were not friends, and they chose different paths when the fall steamer failed to bring in the winter’s supplies. Sed and Aagé decided to winter at Franklin Gulch on the Fortymile River, while George and Kate took the steamer New Racket down to Gordon Bettle’s post near the mouth of the Tanana River. Sed and Aagé harvested caribou from the herd that went through that fall, and in the spring, Sed started mining again recovering from six to seventeen dollars in gold every day. Not a fortune but enough to keep him interested. Aagé’s third daughter, Mary (Minnie), was born in 1891 and Aagé died within nine months of her daughter’s birth. Sed Wilson decided to leave the north in September 1892, and he left Mary with the Forty Mile missionaries William and Selina Bompas. Wilson was in Dawson in 1900 when Carmack asked him to send something to support his daughter who was living with Kate and Carmack’s sister Rose in California. ((Deb Vanasse, Wealth Woman: Kate Carmack and the Klondike Race for Gold. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2016: 76, 85-87, 90-91, 187.))