Kate Carmack, or Shaaw Tlaa, was the sister of Skookum Jim Mason and wife of George Carmack. Born to a Tagish family in the southern Yukon, Kate first married a Tlingit man from the coast. When he died in the late 1880s, she returned to Tagish and married George Carmack whose wife, one of Kate's sisters, had also just died. George gave her the English name Kate.
They lived first around Tagish and Dyea, then went north to Fortymile and later to the Fort Selkirk area. In Fort Selkirk in 1893, Kate bore her only child to George Carmack -- Graphie Gracie. In 1896, they were joined by Skookum Jim and Kate's two nephews, Dawson Charlie and Patsy Henderson, in the Klondike. That summer, Jim, Charlie, and George Carmack discovered gold on Rabbit Creek.
In 1899 Kate went south with George to Washington and California, living for a time with his sister. In 1900, George Carmack abandoned his wife and had her sent back north. Kate, left penniless, returned to the Yukon with her daughter and lived in Carcross in a cabin that Skookum Jim built for them.
In 1909, George Carmack arranged to have Graphie spirited away south without her mother's knowledge. With her daughter gone, Kate remained alone in the cabin her brother had built. She died of influenza on March 29, 1920.
