Two Photographs of Native American Women; Circle, Alaska

Unknown: Unknown, 1940. First State. Very Good Plus. [10.125x8.875in print, 14x11in board] Two original silver print images of Alaskan Athabascan native women in non-native dress in a spring time landscape setting. Pencil and ink writing on back. The print of a single young women is identified, in pencil as Mary Elijah, and there is no identification on the print of two women, which suggests a mother and daughter. Both prints appear to be taken in same place and time. CS. Circle, Alaska is a community on the Yukon River and Birch Creek (approx. 160 miles northeast of Fairbanks). It was established in 1893 when gold was discovered and served as a supply point for the gold miner camps in the area. the community grew to be the largest mining town on the Yukon river by 1896. The Klondike Gold Rush (1896-1899) was a modern stampede that shifted the miners to the further to the east to along the Yukon River and the future Dawson City area. The Nome Gold Rush in 1899 continued to reduce the population population and importance of Circle City.

The Alaskan Athabascan native peoples are the largest native groups in the interior of Alaska and have a current population of 45,000. From the Smithsonian Learning Lab. "When I was growing up in the 1940s and '50s, our family moved in every season - to spring camp for ducks and muskrats, to fish camp in summer, and to hunting and fur-trapping sites during fall and winter. That kind of traveling life was once universal in Athabascan country, from the Arctic Circle to Cook Inlet in Alaska and across the western interior of Canada. It's a vast territory, hundreds of thousands of square miles covered by boreal spruce and birch forest. The rivers that cross it were highways for dog sledding in winter and canoe voyages in summer. Today the rivers, along with air and snow machine travel, still link our scattered communities, but roads reach only a few.