Chief Shakes

Chief Shakes is a hereditary leadership title of the Naanyaa.aayi clan of the Stikine Tlingit at Wrangell, Alaska, passed down through at least seven holders from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. The Shakes chiefs controlled the mouth of the Stikine River and grew wealthy and powerful on the trade that moved between the coast and the interior Tahltan country.

The Chief Shakes of the gold rush era was Shakes V, Kaawishte, who held the title from about 1840 until his death in 1878. It was under his authority that the prospector Alexander 'Buck' Choquette came to Fort Stikine; Choquette married Shakes's daughter Georgiana, and it was with the chief's blessing and a party of Stikine men that he made the 1861 strike at Buck Bar that touched off the Stikine Gold Rush. When the Cassiar rush of the 1870s sent thousands more miners up the river, Wrangell boomed as their gateway, and the Shakes leadership navigated the upheaval that steamboats, miners and the 1867 Alaska Purchase brought to Tlingit territory.

Shakes V was succeeded by Shakes VI, Gush Tlein, who led from 1878 to 1916 through the later Cassiar years and the Klondike stampede. The Shakes Island tribal house and totems at Wrangell, reconstructed in the 1930s and restored since, remain the visible legacy of the lineage.