This Tlingit totem was carved around 1790 to honor a tribal woman named Chief-of-All-Women and it was placed in the village of Tongass on the Alaska coast. In 1899, a group of leading Seattle businessmen on a goodwill tour of southeastern Alaska stole the totem and brought it back to Pioneer Square. The businessmen were indicted for the theft, but the case was later dismissed. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, which sponsored the tour, eventually paid a $500 fine to the Tlingit Tribe. After rot and fire damaged the original pole in 1938, Tlingit craftsmen including several descendants of the carvers of the original pole, carved a replica and donated it to Seattle to replace the original.
In this photo, the totem pole towers over a group of men waiting for the streetcar in Pioneer Square.
Caption information source: “Seattle’s Totem Poles,” by Viola Garfield, Thistle Press, 1996. Caption information source: “Stolen totem pole unveiled in Seattle's Pioneer Square on October 18, 1899,” by David Wilma, HistoryLink, retrieved from https://www.historylink.org/File/2076
