Elsie Miller

Elsie, who was Southern Tutchone, was born into the Ta’an Kwach’an Nation at Mile 31 on the Old Dawson Overland Trail. This was about fifteen to eighteen miles from the Yukon River on the Takhine River. Her parents were Fanny (Tutsa Theda) from Winter Crossing in the Lake Laberge area, and Jim Smith from Haines, Alaska. They had nine children and Elsie was their oldest.

The family stayed in Whitehorse and at 31 Mile (Lu dayel). The grandmother had a cabin there also. They used coal oil cans for roofing and boards for the inside. Fanny knew all about Indian medicine and saved the life of the second oldest daughter, Mary, when she was sent home from Carcross very sickly. In about 1945, Fanny died in. The father, who was a trapper in Dawson, died earlier somewhere around Fort Selkirk

Else’s Ta’an name was Wha-tle. When the First Nations children went to residential schools, the government or the church gave them English names. They were no longer allowed to use their own names that their parents had given them. They used their English names for the rest of their lives.

In 1916, this little girl of six years was taken by the Anglican Church to the Chootla (laughing water) Indian Residential School, built in 1911 in Carcross. Bishop Bompas and Bishop Isaac Stringer established this first residential school in the territory. “Indian” children were forbidden to attend Yukon public schools. She was there until she was eighteen years old. She went home to visit her parents sometimes in summer, but never at Christmas or at anytime during the winters. So Elsie was taught to read and write in English as well as everything else in the curriculum at that time.

Elsie was never allowed to speak her own language. Her brothers Stanley, Fred, Billy and sisters Mary, Annie, Louise, and Marjorie soon followed her to that school. All of the students had chores to do. There was a winter’s supply of wood to bring in and to chop. There were cows, goats and horses so the students learned how to cut and bale hay and take care of the animals. There were big gardens to tend, laundry and cooking to do, in addition to all of the cleaning. Cutting ice on the lake for summer was another chore.

The residential school did not allow parents to hunt and trap for the students and be assured that their children were getting an “education,” which had been the basic social and economic binding. For the family, this had serious consequences for the families in the years to come. Education, once part of the family life, now became something distant and removed. It was a very difficult time for all of these families to lose their children and the children to lose their parents. It was an awful time for everyone.

As a young girl, Elsie learned to make moccasins from tanned moose hide, knitted and made clothes. With her family during the summer, they lived in their own way of a traditional life style as they had done for hundreds of years. Her friends were everyone who lived in the village. After finishing high school in 1928, Elsie returned to Mile 31 and helped her mother with her brothers and sisters.

She met her husband, James Miller (Jim), and they were married in 1931 in Whitehorse at the old Post Office that was on the corner of Front Street and Elliott Street. Her sister Anne was married at the same time to another Jim Miller. However, they were not related.

Jim was born December 26, 1882, in Denmark. He went to sea when he was only thirteen and became a shipwright. He worked on the fast sailing Clipper ships and sailed all over the world including around Cape Horn and Cape of Good Hope, twice. In 1904, after jumping ship in San Francisco, he worked his way up the Pacific coast and probably heard about the Klondike. He made his way to the Yukon to go logging for Aime “Happy” Lapage. Happy had a contract with White Pass to supply wood for the paddlewheelers that sailed the Yukon River.

Jim and Elsie moved to the village near Goddard Point at the lower north end of Ta’an Man (Lake Laberge). The remains of the log house that Jim built for them are still there today. There were about two or three families living there including Dennis Broeren and Jim Sam. Goddard Point was named after A.J. Goddard whose paddlewheeler went down in a bad storm in October, 1901, on a trip back to Whitehorse. The boat was swamped and water put out the fire in the boiler so they had no power. Goddard spent much of his time in the towing business between Lake Laberge and Whitehorse.

At the south end of the lake coming out of the Yukon River was, and still is, the main big traditional camp for the Ta’an Kwach’an of about twenty families in the heart of their traditional territory. The cultural facilities are at Helen’s Fish Camp on the west bank of Upper Laberge Lake. Jim Boss, who lived nearby, was the Chief of the Southern Tutchone Ta’an Kwach’an for more than forty years. He was born in 1871 to Mundessa and Lande. From them, came the family units of Boss, Broeren and Dawson. Family members may have helped to rescue the two survivors from the shipwreck of the A.J. Goddard. Chief Jim Boss did much to preserve his people’s rights.

This is where Frank Slim met his wife. Frank Slim, born in 1898, was the famous riverboat captain for the British Yukon Navigation Company (White Pass). As per the Indian Act at that time, it was illegal for “Indians” to obtain an education (including Captain’s papers) so Frank had to give up his status. This, again, was very hard on anyone who wanted to better themselves. These are the extraordinary people Elsie came from.

Jim and Else had four children born on the east shore meadow north of Goddard Point. The oldest was Mary, then Renie, June and son Jim, who was born in 1934. Jim Senior worked for White Pass as a deckhand. Elsie did homeschool with the children taking them to grade three. Near Thirty Mile River was a White Pass bunkhouse for the workers who came in every spring to clear the river with dynamite of big boulders that may have moved into the shipping lanes. There was a telegraph station nearby and Elsie would go there and send in her orders to Whitehorse to be relayed to Eaton’s Store. Later, when the boats were running, her orders would arrive. The telegraph station also sold some hardware things and groceries. The North West Mounted Police post was just across the lake on the west side.

Six years later, in 1940, the family moved to Whitehorse so the father could work at the White Pass dock down at the end of Main Street and the children could go to school. Because Elsie had married a white man, the children could go to the school on Lambert Street. They were not taken from her when they turned six and shipped off to a residential school far away. However, she did lose her status and so did the children. The children would not regain their status until some sixty years later.

They left Goddard Point a week before the ice breakup. Jim Senior built a sleigh and put a boat on top and the dogs pulled it to about the middle of the lake near the big island of Deep Creek, then up past the Jim Boss’s home where there was open water. He then put the boat on the bottom and fitted the sleigh into the boat and went up the river to Whitehorse. Jim put ropes around his shoulders and pulled the boat while Elsie used a long pole to push the boat away from the shore. They put in at the White Pass shipyards where the park is today.

They lived across the Yukon River from the shipyards where Jim Senior had built the floor and sides for a wall tent. They stayed there for a while. A daughter, Phylis, was born and died at three months old. Elsie taught the Ta’an language to her children and spoke in that language to them. The fact that she was able to keep her language is incredible.

Together with the children, she would go out hunting squirrels, gophers, pick berries and fished. Elsie would wash the clothes in a square metal tub with a scrubbing board after heating the water on a wood stove. Elsie kept a big garden of mostly vegetables to feed the family all year. In her whole adult life, she was never allowed to vote. Elsie would have loved to do that, but there was too much work to do much of anything else! But, she did have her children with her and lots of family and friends.

The next winter, 1942-1943, the family went back to the slough just south of Lake Laberge to safeguard two of the White Pass sternwheelers, the new Casca and the Klondike, that were frozen in the ice for the winter. There was the threat of a Japanese invasion in the north during WWll. White Pass was asked to move some of their boats to safer places as they were the largest transportation company in the north and the boats would be needed if an invasion happened. The army thought the shipyards might be a prime target. White Pass built two cabins there for the watchmen. The cabins were not insulated, just a little wood stove to keep them warm in the Yukon winter. The remains of the cabins are still there today. This was close to where the “Olive May” went down and the boiler was later used by Dr. Sugden as a crematorium for a man’s frozen body. Dr. Sugden and Robert Service were roommates later so this would explain the inspiration for Robert Service’s poem “The Creation of Sam McGee.”

In 1943, the family moved back to Whitehorse and lived at the south end of Whiskey Flats in a walled tent for a couple of years. Sadly, 1944, Elsie died of TB (tuberculosis) in the TB wing of the old hospital on Second Avenue where YTG is today. The whole wing was used only for the Natives and it was full of patients. There was no medicine back then to help her. She was only thirty-four years old. Elsie left behind two girls, six and eight years old; a son Jim, who was ten; twelve-year-old daughter Mary and Jim, the father.

Elsie was buried in the First Nations cemetery at the north end of town in the traditional way. Her husband could not be buried with her, so Jim Senior was buried in the Pioneer Cemetery on Sixth Avenue in 1959. He was seventy-seven years old.

The uncles and aunts would help with the children, taking them along with them when they went hunting up Grey Mountain, Fish Lake and Alligator Lake with dog packs. In 1946, Jim bought a two-room house for twelve hundred dollars at the corner of Third Avenue and Hawkins Street. Later they moved the house to the corner of Seventh Avenue and Strickland where Jim fitted logs around the outside of the house and filled the space between with sawdust. Young Jim thought they were in heaven because it was so warm.

This hard working resourceful and loving woman was my husband’s mother and I never got to meet her. She never got to see all of her grandchildren.

My husband, Jim, is now a Ta’an Kwach’an elder. He worked as a crew member at the age of fourteen on the sternwheelers and would pass Goddard Point many times. He also spent time in southern Manitoba at the sanatorium with TB. Later, he worked in Whitehorse for White Pass in the Highway Division. Jim worked for a total of twenty-seven and a half years for White Pass so in a way, he followed in his father’s footsteps. Of the family only Jim and his sister Renie are with us now.

Jim remembers his mother warmly as a “Wonderful Person.”

The nine children of Fanny and Jim Smith

-Elsie married Jim Miller
-Mary married Dick Charlie
-Annie married Jim Miller (no relation)”
-Louise married Jim Kudwat, from Haines, Alaska
-Stanley married Fanny, from William’s Lake, BC
-Fred married Kitty Smith (no relation)
-Marjorie married died at 18 or 19 years old
-Billy married died at 15 years old from a bad fall hitting his head.

The children of Elsie and Jim Miller

-Mary married Frank Chambers
-Renie married Art Smith
-June married Bill Bruton
-Jim married Judy Pasechnik