Chief Ano-Tlosh Head Chief of the Taku Tribe [and] Tlinget-Clutchman.

£550 · Offered by Maggs Bros Ltd

Two fine portraits of a Tlingit chief and his wife, taken in Alaska by a frontier photography outfit. William Howard Case and Horace H. Draper both arrived in Skagway in 1898 on the trail of the Klondike Gold Rush. Initially operating from a tent, they went into business together, and were enlisted by the White Pass and Yukon Route companies to produce a suite of images detailing the region along their new railway lines. The resultant fine photographs showcased the natural beauty of the landscape, the mines and industries of the area, and the Indigenous people of this part of Alaska. This pair of portraits are of important members of the Taku branch of the Tlingit people. Chief Ano-Tlosh (also recorded as Anotklosh) is shown in half length, wearing a carved wooden headdress bearing two faces, with a crown of whiskers or baleen above, and ermine trim. He is wrapped in an ornate Chiklat blanket, customarily woven from cedar bark and mountain goat wool, decorated with traditional Tlingit ovoid pattern forms. These elaborate blankets were highly labour intensive to create, and thus were symbols of status within Indigenous Alaskan society. The second portrait, captioned “Thlinget-Clutchman” depicts a woman in three-quarter profile, also half length, her hair worn loose. She is wearing the same blanket as in the portrait of her male counterpart, and the contemporary ink annotation identifies her as “Ana-tlash’s wife”. Case and Draper expanded from their mobile tent to a photographi

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