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Gold Bottom Creek

End of Kuthai Lake

A long time ago there was an eagle nest on Four Crown Mountain that had a Golden eagle nest on it. An Indian fellow wanted to get some eagle feathers from this nest. In the old days people used young eagle feathers for making snares. This is because the young feathers are soft and can be tied together. A young eagle was in the nest at this time. The fellow did something wrong and the eagle kicked the fellow out of the nest. There is a blood stain down the mountain to this day. This blood is visible from the north end of Surprise Lake.

There are two sites where Tlingits used to collect paint. One site is shéix'w hini (red/orange creek) called Horsefeed Creek in English. There is another site located on a creek upstream as well. These sites were used by the Tlingits to obtain paint for pictographs such as the one of the canoe on the Taku River. This paint was also collected and then used to barter with in Alaska as it was not readily available there. The red paint was mixed with black (charcoal) or alkali (white) to create different colors. This paint may also have been used to stain the glacier at the lower Taku to get it to melt (there is a Tlingit story about this). People would paint their faces for ceremonies or warfare. During ceremonies, if people didn’t have a mask they would use paint. This paint was considered to have protective power because it came from Mother Earth. It was the slaves that collected the paint. The slaves would use babiche as rope to lower themselves into the canyon to scrape the stain off the rock. Sometimes during heavy rain the Nakina River flows a reddish color possibly due to the red stains at shéix'w Hini washing into the creek. There is a Tlingit song about this event. Jackie heard the song sung by the elders when they used to sit outside the Raul Hotel in Atlin in the early 1940’s

Important Gaat (Sockeye) spawning lake.

rocky outcropping wooded area near Polaris Mine

Located on the Upper Taku River