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ISAAC, Tr’ondëk Hän (Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in) chief; b. c. 1850, probably in Alaska; m. c. 1890 Eliza Harper (d. 1960) in Alaska or the Yukon territory, and they had 13 children, of whom two sons and two daughters lived to adulthood; d. 9 April 1932 in Dawson, Y.T., and was buried in Moosehide, Y.T.

Isaac, whose parents and Indigenous name are unknown, was a member of the Tr’ondëk Hän, one of the semi-nomadic Hän peoples. Their territory encompassed parts of Alaska and the Yukon, and their seasonal camps centred on the Yukon River. Isaac’s leadership coincided with a complex period of cultural contact, triggered by the Klondike gold rush, that transformed the Tr’ondëk Hän’s lands and relationships.

Traditionally, the Hän led a subsistence lifestyle, making seasonal rounds that took advantage of the availability of salmon, caribou, and moose. They also had extensive and diverse trading contacts with other Indigenous peoples, and the white fur traders who arrived on the middle Yukon River easily grafted themselves onto this network. In 1847 Alexander Hunter Murray*, an HBC employee based at Fort Yukon, Alaska, noted that the Hän were sharp traders and described them as excellent dancers and singers. Other newcomers gradually arrived, including missionaries seeking converts to Christianity, prospectors looking for gold, and surveyors marking the invisible boundary lines that would divide Hän lands and families.

Isaac and his two brothers, Jonathon Wood and Walter Benjamin, were probably born and raised in Alaska’s upper Tanana region. Its remoteness – far from white settlements, which introduced diseases that ravaged the Indigenous population of the Yukon River valley – may have helped the brothers escape the epidemics that occurred during their youth. Isaac married Eliza Harper, daughter of hereditary chief Gäh St’ät (Abraham Harper, also known as Catsah), and he was baptized by the Anglican bishop William Carpenter Bompas* in about 1892, which is likely when he received his English name. (His brothers also embraced Christianity, and both became itinerant catechists.) At some point in the early years of his marriage, Isaac succeeded Eliza’s father as chief of the Tr’ondëk Hän.

After prospectors Keish* and Káa Goox* discovered gold on Rabbit (Bonanza) Creek in August 1896, stampeders from across North America rushed into the Tr’ondëk (Klondike) region and dramatically challenged the Hän way of life. They drove the Tr’ondëk Hän from Tr’ochëk, their fishing camp at the confluence of the Yukon and Tr’ondëk (Klondike) rivers, and then built Lousetown there and Dawson on the Klondike’s opposite bank. An uneasy winter followed as Chief Isaac, who knew western ways and spoke some English, negotiated with Bishop Bompas, North-West Mounted Police inspector Charles Constantine*, and surveyor William Ogilvie. They worked out an agreement whereby in the summer of 1897 the Tr’ondëk Hän resettled three miles down the Yukon River on one of their traditional campsites. The village they founded there, Moosehide, was the product of their chief’s diplomacy and would prove an important part of his legacy.

During the gold rush Isaac diligently advocated on behalf of his people while also providing hungry newcomers with supplies of food. In January 1898 the ethnologist and author Edwin Tappan Adney* accompanied the chief and several Hän families on a hunting trip up the Klondike River. The party sent about 80 moose and 65 caribou carcasses back to Dawson, where they fetched high prices. At other times, the Hän traded salmon to the settlers. After the gold rush receded around 1900, Isaac continued to engage with the white community that remained [see Frederick Tennyson Congdon; James Hamilton Ross; Alfred Thompson].

Isaac and his brother Walter visited Seattle in the summer of 1902. That Christmas the chief invited Dawsonites to a potlatch at Moosehide, and on 1 and 2 Jan. 1904 the Hän gave two well-attended demonstrations of their songs and dances in a Dawson theatre. During a drought in the summer of 1906, Isaac offered Yukoners the rain-making services of his medicine men after a California rainmaker failed to produce the precipitation needed to wash out the season’s gold. The chief sometimes attended and spoke at the Anglican church in Dawson, and he annually addressed attendees at local Victoria Day celebrations, always taking care to remind his new neighbours of the sacrifices that the Tr’ondëk Hän had made to accommodate them.

Isaac travelled widely throughout the upper Yukon basin, attending potlatches and meeting with other Indigenous leaders to discuss their shared interests. By 1912 he recognized that contact with white settlers was eroding his people’s cultural heritage. He gave the gänhook (ceremonial dancing stick) to relatives in Alaska for safekeeping and began imparting to them his knowledge of Tr’ondëk Hän songs and dances. In his later years Isaac retained a leadership role in Moosehide, where he and Eliza lived, and for a time he served as a special constable for the NWMP. He interacted regularly with Dawson’s residents and tourists, who found him charming, intelligent, funny, and skilled at making people feel at home. As a sign of respect, the community made him an honorary member of the Yukon Order of Pioneers. When Isaac died of influenza in April 1932, his funeral and burial at Moosehide were well attended by both Hän and white settlers. His son Charles Elijah Isaac succeeded him as chief.

Throughout his years as chief, and especially when coping with the challenges of the Klondike gold rush, Isaac provided stable and thoughtful leadership, often tinged with humour. Respected by both the Tr’ondëk Hän and the newcomers, he managed the chaos that emerged during a period of unprecedented change and provided critical stewardship of his people’s cultural treasures and principles of tr’òhudè (way of life). Isaac epitomized Indigenous leadership and demonstrated the power of maintaining connections to land, narrative, and tradition. His experiences inspired the Hän stories of Grass Pants, a comic figure who makes things right amid the confusion of contact with white outsiders. Isaac is still honoured among the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in, who in the 1990s retrieved their gänhook, songs, and dances from their Alaskan relatives and negotiated a treaty with the federal government, recovering their fishing camp at Tr’ochëk and creating institutions of self-governance. In 1993 the Tr’ondëk Hwëch’in held their first Moosehide Gathering, a biennial celebration of their cultural resurgence, with Chief Isaac present in spirit.

Jen Laliberte and David Neufeld