Families - Sitka Borough AKGenWeb

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BUCHANAN, Ethel (McGawn)

Alexander

In August 1913 Ethel and Lenoir Buchanan sailed up the Inland Passage to Sitka Alaska. They were school teachers and had jobs in Alaska to teach the native children in the school there. You can read about their trip and teaching in letters that my Grandmother wrote at the time. The letters were good enough that they were published in the newspaper in Three Oaks, Michigan, where Ethel's parents lived.

You can read about the trip, all the things they saw then, and teaching in the school in Alaska. By February 1914 their first child Gertrude Martin was born. She was born in the school house where they lived in apartment, delivered by her father.

Ethel McGawn was raised in a small town in Three Oaks Michigan. Her father was a Banker there and held other important positions over the years. She went to college in Cheney, Washington, and when there met her husband, Lenoir Buchanan. He was called “Big” because he was so tall. He was 6 feet, 6 inches tall Ethel was 5 feet, 2 inches tall. They were both graduated and teaching school in Washington. Ethel saw an ad in the Cheney paper asking for couples to teach in Alaska. Lenoir agreed and they applied for the positions. They took a Steamship from Seattle in the fall of 1913. Ethel was so enthralled with the trip she wrote letters home to her parents describing their trip. The letters were good enough that they were published in the newspaper in Three Oaks.

At Christmas time she decided to send her family in Three Oaks a large Salmon for the holiday. It was quite large packed in ice and transported on a train to her parents’ home. It was so large they did not know quite how to cook it so they built a large fire in their front yard and cooked it outside and gave away fresh salmon to almost anybody who came by and wanted it. Years later that is what many of the people in the town were remembering and talking about whenever they saw her.

Mr. Lopp was the Superintendent of the school. Lenoir was paid $100 per month; Ethel was paid $75 for the same work. In February of 1914, Gertrude was born in the upstairs of a state-run schoolhouse, where her parents were teaching native children in Sitka, Alaska. Her parents lived in the top floor of the schoolhouse. Ethel, her mother, taught grades 1 through 3 and Lenoir taught grades 4, 5, and 6. They did not have a lot of supplies and or books in the school for teaching the children. Lenoir wrote to the Sears Catalog company and asked for several of their catalogs. He used pictures for the catalog to teach the children English words.

Lenoir and Ethel together brought their baby into the world. Lenoir had originally assisted his grandmother in North Carolina when she made rounds working in the mountains there as a mid-wife. When the infant was a few days old a woman came up from the Native buildings and took the baby down to the village to be greeted by the people living there. She was passed around for many of the people to meet her.

When Gertrude was four months old, her mother became ill and left her father, taking a boat to Seattle WA, where she checked into a hospital. She woke up a few days after she had been there and heard the staff discussing who would take the cute little red headed baby after her mother died. Ethel left the hospital, took her daughter and boarded a train to Chicago. Ethel was still ill, and so on the train Gertrude was cared for by a number of people. Ethel's parents met the train in Chicago, took Ethel off the train into an ambulance. Ethel's mother, Gertrude McGawn, began walking around looking for the baby. She found a lady walking up and down on the platform with a baby and claimed her grandchild. Her grandparents took them home and began the process of helping to raise Gertrude.

JACKSON, Sheldon

Sheldon Jackson was born at Minaville, Montgomery County, New York on May 18, 1834. He was a son of Samuel Clinton and Delia (Sheldon) Jackson, and grandson of Samuel and Louisa (Heyer) Jackson, and of Dr. Alexander and Miriam (King) Sheldon. Samuel Jackson came from England about 1790. Dr. Alexander Sheldon was speaker of the New York state assembly for six terms and the last speaker to wear officially the cocked hat of the Revolution. He was descended from Isaac Sheldon, who settled in Dorchester, Massachusetts, early in the seventeenth century, and whose son Isaac is represented in history as removing from Windsor, Connecticut, in 1654.

Sheldon graduated from Union College in 1855 and from Princeton Theological Seminary in 1858. He married Mary Voorhees on May 18, 1858, his 24th birthday.

He applied to the Presbyterian Board of Foreign Missions for assignment to Siam or Columbia, only to be turned down because he was "lacking in physique." He stood just slightly over five feet tall. Undaunted, Jackson turned his missionary zeal toward the American frontier. In the course of his missionary career, Jackson would travel almost a million miles in Minnesota, the Rocky Mountain states, and Alaska. He went on foot and horseback, by railroad and stagecoach, by sailboat and canoe, and even by ox cart and reindeer sled. He survived severe snowstorms, shipwrecks and Indian uprisings. Three times newspapers reported his death prematurely and once they printed his obituary.

He was a missionary to the Choctaws, 1858-59, and Presbyterian home missionary in western Wisconsin and southern Minnesota, with headquarters at La Crescent, Minnesota from 1859-1864. During the fall of 1863, in the service of the Christian commission, he served in the hospitals of southern Tennessee and northern Alabama. Jackson was pastor at Rochester, Minnesota, 1864-69; superintendent of the Presbyterian board of home missions for western territories, 1869-70; superintendent of the board of home missions for Wyoming, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Montana, 1870-82; business manager of the Home Mission Magazine, New York City, 1882-84, and U.S. agent to supply the training schools for Indians at Carlisle, Pennsylvania, and Hampton, Virginia, with Native children from New Mexico and Arizona, 1879-80.

In 1877 Reverend Jackson came to Alaska and was the first Presbyterian missionary to do so. He never settled in Alaska, nor did he spend a great deal of time there as an actual missionary. But, Jackson adopted the neglected territory and until his death, became totally committed to the spiritual, educational, and economic well-being of the people of Alaska.

Jackson worked continually for admission of Alaska as a state to the union and laid the foundations for that to happen. Recognizing the importance of close contact with the nation's capital, he moved to Washington D.C. and was the first and perhaps the most effective lobbyist Alaska ever had. He educated Americans about the territory and helped establish a nature society. By publicizing Alaska's needs, he spearheaded passage of the Organic Act of 1884, hoping to include both civil government legislation and a proposed public educational system in the same act for Alaska. The act provided Alaska with a United States District Court staffed by a judge, a marshal, a district attorney, and four commissioners, all appointed by the President.

The act also provided the one thing that Sheldon Jackson wanted most -- federal aid for education in Alaska. Jackson soon nominated himself and received the official designation as the General Agent for Education for Alaska with an office in Washington, DC. He displayed the same energy towards establishing schools that he showed previously in organizing churches. Jackson organized a free school system for Native American, Eskimo, and white children. He succeeded in the next 20 years in bringing school facilities to all corners of Alaska. To get the task done, Jackson recruited missionaries to open schools in the isolated areas of the territory. Under Jackson's system, separation of church and state vanished in Alaska for a considerable period of time. Missionaries were paid from government educational funds to run their schools, while the goal of their teaching was not only to educate but to evangelize. Reverend Jackson soon found himself coordinating two types of schools. Several denominations had already started mission schools. Jackson drew up written agreements with the Interior Secretary designating them as "contract schools," sometimes receiving partial financial support from the government. In addition to mission schools that directed their efforts to the native population, Jackson started "public day schools" in Juneau, Sitka, and other cities with mixed populations. In spite of his powerful contacts in Washington, a large portion of the financial support for the schools in Alaska continued to be provided by religious groups. Jackson did not restrict his appeals to Presbyterians. Other Protestant denominations soon were involved in the Alaska missionary effort.

Active in Alaskan politics, Jackson aided in organizing Alaska's territorial government and establishing mail routes. He was the moving spirit in the "missionary" party. Another early Presbyterian missionary, John Brady, was appointed governor of the territory. Together with Brady, Jackson became such a strong force in Alaska that at times the territory was accused of being run by the Presbyterian Church.

With the decline of seal hunting, many groups of Aleuts and Inuits had fallen on very hard times. Concerned that the Aleuts were facing poverty and starvation, Jackson made what was probably his greatest contribution to the people he loved. In 1892, in an effort to supplement dwindling food resources, he introduced domesticated reindeer from Siberia into Alaska, 171 reindeer being imported that year. This move was bitterly contested by those who opposed helping the Aleuts. But his eventual success is credited with saving the Aleuts from extinction as well as creating a major meat industry. He made numerous trips into Siberia and imported nearly 1300 reindeer to bolster the livelihoods of Alaskan Eskimos. From 1897-98 Jackson was sent by the general government to Lapland and Norway, where he secured a number of reindeer and Lapp attendants. By further importations and the natural increase, the herd had grown in 1905 to 10,241 in number.

Jackson traveled extensively throughout Alaska, and collected representative items as he journeyed. He worried that native cultures and their arts and ways of life would vanish, with no records of their past. His collections became the foundation for a museum of natural history and ethnology in Sitka. Today the Sheldon Jackson Museum, located at Sheldon Jackson College in Sitka, houses many of Jackson's pieces, as well as other examples of Tlingit, Eskimo, and Aleut culture.

In the spring of 1895 Jackson gave $50,000 to establish a Christian college at Salt Lake City, Utah. He was commissioner to the general assembly of the Presbyterian Church in the United States seven times, and in 1897 was elected moderator. He assisted in the organization of two synods and seven large presbyteries. He organized the first Protestant (Presbyterian) churches and public schools in Alaska and assisted the missionary societies of the several denominations in the establishment of Methodist, Baptist, Episcopalian, Moravian, Quaker and Swedish Evangelical churches.

Although a public official, Jackson was still a minister of the Gospel. Between 1869 and 1900 he delivered over 3000 missionary addresses. He founded and was owner and editor of the Rocky Mountain Presbyterian, published at Denver, Colorado, 1872-82, and also founded and was owner and editor of the North Star at Sitka, Alaska, 1887-93. He organized the Alaska Society of Natural History and Ethnology in 1887; became vice-president of the Alaska Historical Society and also of the American Sabbath Union, and an officer and member at different times of about thirty scientific, historical and literary societies. He received the degree of D.D. from Hanover College in 1874 and that of LL.D. from Union University, Schenectady, New York in 1897.

He authored numerous published governmental and religious reports reports on education, missions, and economic conditions in Alaska, some of which are: Alaska and Missions on the North Pacific Coast (1880); Annual Reports on Education in Alaska (1881-1900); Difficulties at Sitka in 1885 (1886); and Annual Reports on the Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska (1890-1900).

Reverend Sheldon Jackson died in Washington, D.C. on May 2, 1909 following surgery. He is buried in the Florida Reformed Church cemetery in Minaville, New York along with his wife, children, parents, brothers, and sisters, - a multitude of kindred. He was present at the centennial of the formation of the church in 1908, and delivered an historical address.

Throughout his career, Sheldon Jackson was controversial. Supported financially by Presbyterian matrons in the East, he was ridiculed and feared by hard-drinking sourdoughs of Alaska. He was egotistical and often tactless, but persistent and aware of how to apply political pressure. His strongest supporters admitted that he was no angel; his severest critics were amazed at what he was able to accomplish.

Sources:
Herringshaw, Thomas William. Herringshaw's Encyclopedia of American Biography of the Nineteenth Century, Chicago, IL: American Publishers' Association, 1902, p. 523.
Johnson, Rossiter, ed. Twentieth Century Biographical Dictionary of Notable Americans. Volumes I-X. Boston, MA: The Biographical Society, 1904, p. 28.
Library of Congress. Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820-1910. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1999.
Minnesota Historical Society. Collections of the Minnesota Historical Society, Volume 15. St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society, 1872-1920.
Tower, Elizabeth A., Reading, Religion, and Reindeer: Sheldon Jackson's Legacy to Alaska. Anchorage, AK: 1988.

SHOUP, Arthur G.

SHOUP, Arthur Glendinning, lawyer; born Challis, Ida., Nov. 27, 1880, son of James McCain and Amelia Betsy (Ellis) Shoup; education, University of Washington 1899-1901; married Madge Kemp, San Francisco, Aug. 28, 1915. Deputy U. S. marshal, Alaska 1902-1910; admitted to Alaska bar 1913; member Alaska Legislatures 1913, '15; mayor of Sitka three terms; appointed by President Harding U. S. attorney, First Division, Alaska 1921, and reappointed by President Coolidge 1926, retired 1927; moved to San Jose, Calif. and became associated with Louis O'Neal in law practice; appointed U. S. commissioner, Northern District of California 1933, reappointed 1937. District food administrator during World war, also on various war boards; delegate Republican National Convention 1924; supt. Alaska Pioneers Home 1913-19. Member, American Bar Assn., California Bar Assn., Santa Clara County Bar Assn. (pres. 1935), Alaska Historical Assn., Pioneers of Alaska. Episcopalian. Elk. Home: 1176 Martin Ave. Address: First National Bank Bldg., San Jose, Calif.

Contributed 2024 Mar 14 by Norma Hass, extracted from Pan-Pacific Who's Who, 1941, pages 635-636.