Paul Kandik

Paul Kandik may have been a Hän First Nation man from the Eagle, Alaska area. In 1880, he travelled with French Canadian trader Francois Mercier and created the earliest known map of the region between Fort Selkirk and Anvik, near the mouth of the Yukon River, and including the Tanana and the Kuskokwim rivers. The map was drawn by Kandik and annotated by Mercier in several languages to record place names, travel information, trails, trading posts and food resources. There are also notations by Ivan Petroff for whom the map may have been prepared. Petroff was a census taker for the United States Government in 1880 and a one of the authors of Bancroft’s History of Alaska (1886).¹⁾