Jonathan “Johnson” Wood (1854 - 1938)

Jonathan Wood and his brothers Walter Benjamin and Chief Isaac were born in the Ketchumstock/Mansfield Lake area in Alaska. [A now abandoned Hän community off the road on the Mosquito Fork.]1) Their father came from the Tanana River region. Isaac lived at Forty Mile when he was young and Bishop Bompas gave him his Christian name Isaac. Jonathon was a lay reader at the St. Barnabas Church in Moosehide, and Walter Benjamin presided at the Episcopal Church mission in Eagle, Alaska.2)

Jonathan Wood served as a catechist in Moosehide between 1908 and 1916 and also taught at the mission day school. In 1916, he moved to Fort Selkirk and his son Jimmy Wood took over teaching in the Moosehide school whenever Reverend Totty was away.3)

By 1920, Jonathan was the catechist at Forty Mile.4) He was back at Moosehide in 1923.5) He may have continued to conduct services at both churches as he is listed as being at the Forty Mile Anglican St James Church in 1933.6)

Jonathan Wood and his wife Ellen (d. 1948) had children Mary (Old Martin Simon), Magdalene May, Michael, James “Jimmy,” Martha, Moses, and Edward. Mary Wood and Old Martin Simon had six children including Joe Susie Joseph.7)

1)
Robert Jarvenpa, Northern Passage: Ethnography and apprenticeship among the subarctic Dene. Waveland Press, 1998: 22.
2)
Joy Isaac, Chief Isaac’s People of the River. 2018 website: http://chiefisaac.com/the_isaac_family.html
3)
Heather Green, “The Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in and the Great Upheaval: Mining Colonialism, and Environmental Change in the Klondike, 1890-1940. Thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy for the Department of History and Classics, University of Alberta, 2018: 153, 158-161.
4)
Manuscript “Summery of the Anglican Church in Yukon” by Archdeacon Allan Haldenby of Dawson in 1957 and updated by Lee Sax and Bishop Ronald Ferris in 1991.
5)
“The Anglican Church in Yukon.” Old Log Church Museum vertical files.
6)
“Diocese of Yukon.” Northern Lights, Vol. xxi, Whitehorse, August 1933, No. 3.
7)
Craig Mishler and William E. Simone, Han Hwech'in: people of the river. Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2004: 260.