Anna DeGraf aka Anna Girndt née Lötsch (1839 - 1930)
Anna DeGraf was born in Saxony. She arrived in America, following her husband, in 1867. He lost everything in the panic of 1873 and she was penniless in New York with small children. The family moved west, changing their name, and Anna’s husband was murdered near Yakima, Washington. Her home and dressmaking business burned in the Seattle fire of 1889. In 1892, her son, George, left home at age twenty-three saying he would see his mother in fourteen days, but she never saw him again. After three weeks, she heard that he may have been in Juneau and she decided to go after him. Tales of gold being found in the north were already circulating in the south. Anna stayed in Juneau for two years, earning her living as a seamstress. Joe Ladue, a miner in the Sixtymile area, had a sawmill on Miller Creek. He told her that a boy named DeGraf had stopped at his sawmill. Anna found some travelling companions, including a baker and his wife, a Customs agent from Juneau, and a miner called Montana, and joined their party in 1894. Anna was among the first white women to cross the Chilkoot Pass.1) She was 55 and did the trip with a badly healed broken leg.2)
Anna arrived at Circle City in October 1894 where there were already six white women and she and the baker's wife made eight. The community had about two dozen Indigenous men and women and between 600-700 miners in from the creeks for the winter. Anna worked for two white women who owned a restaurant for a short while and then found work looking after a sick child. She then worked as a seamstress for McQuesten at the Northern Commercial Co. making canvas tents and shirts. In the summer of 1895, some dance hall girls came down the Yukon River and the miners began to treat their Indigenous wives badly. Anna left Circle, after spending two winters there, and returned to San Francisco where her daughter lived.3)
She ran a boarding house until the Klondike stampede made her restless enough to go north again, this time to Dawson. Her boat was stopped at Hootalinqua by weather for six weeks and Anna had to return to San Francisco. She started again for Dawson in the spring of 1899, this time taking provisions to start a little store. She took things she thought women would need and her sewing machine. In Dawson, she had a fire in her cabin and lost everything. She met a friend from Seattle who gave her employment in the Alaska Commercial Co.'s fur department. She stayed in Dawson for seven years, going outside every two years to buy shop supplies.4) In 1917, she was enticed back to San Francisco by the birth of her great-grandchild.5)
Anna wrote her memoirs at age eighty-five. She was active until age ninety as the wardrobe lady for the Pantages Theatre.6)