A listing of early land transactions for the Fairbanks red light district provides a provocative introduction to the boomtown demimonde, but it is perplexing to find Irinia "Ellen" Pavloff Cherosky Callahan's name there alongside well-known whores. Ellen was a Native Alaskan, born with the status of a princess, whom the Athabascan people revered as an elder in her final years. Yet through intriguing circumstances, Ellen did own property in the Fairbanks restricted district during an era of frontier bigotry when Indian women were not even allowed to work there.

As a young woman, Ellen was as exotically beautiful as any lady of the evening. She was a Creole, however, one of those whose mixed Russian and Native parentage had made them the elite class during the last of Russia's Alaskan occupation in the nineteenth century, and she had no need to consider prostitution. Her father, Evan Pavloff, a half-Russian born at Sitka, was an influential Athabascan chief. Her mother, Malanka, came from Nulato, where Ellen was born about the time Russia sold Alaska to the United States in 1867. Before she was sixteen, Ellen wed Sergei Cherosky, the respected Creole interpreter for white traders who, with her brother Pitka Pavloff, discovered gold at Circle. Another brother, John Minook, made the major gold strike at Rampart and was the only Native allowed to file claims there.¹

THE CALLAHAN FAMILY IN HAPPY DAYS
From the left are Axinia, Helen, Dan, Ellen, and their adopted son, Dick, with an unidentified man in the background. When Fairbanks boomed, the family prospered there and Dan began a long political career that would eventually take him to the Alaska Territorial Legislature.
UAF, Helen Roselle Lindberg Collection, #93-151-443N.

Ellen was present at the Circle discovery that had been grubstaked by veteran trader Jack McQuesten. Her husband, while blind drunk celebrating their triumph, made the mistake of telling a number of white men about the find. And although Ellen and her brother Pitka made it back to build cabins, their claims were taken by outsiders. The Creoles, who lost their status and most of their rights as citizens after the United States purchased Alaska, never profited from the discovery.²

Ellen subsequently left her husband, taking their two children, twelve-year-old Helen and sixteen-year-old Axinia, to Circle, by then a lively boomtown. It was there "Big Dan" Callahan, a charismatic Irish teamster with a political bent, proposed that she become his wife. Mixed marriages were frowned on in frontier society, but Ellen and her parents were respected by many in Circle and Dan cared little for the conventions of "polite society."³

Born in Fort Dodge, Iowa, in 1865, Dan Callahan had worked his way west as a logger, a miner, and a freighter, arriving at the gold fields of British Columbia in 1892, then following various stampedes to Dawson and Alaska.⁴ He was a huge man, six-foot-two, weighing well over 200 pounds, as strong as a horse, known as a bully, and used to taking what he wanted. Many were afraid of him, but Ellen—although well under five feet tall— was not among them. Dan Callahan could be utterly charming. It was obvious that he loved her, and she wanted him.

In August of 1901, before their marriage, Dan was tried for raping a Circle miner's wife, a white woman named Ida Green. She charged that Dan had committed the crime after delivering letters from her husband and her cousin, who kept a roadhouse near Quartz Creek.

"Thinking him to be an honest and safe person, because of my husband's apparently knowing him, I did not hesitate to converse with him," she testified. "At the time he was in no manner rude or insulting. He came again during the evening and I did not hesitate to go riding with him the following evening." But once the outing was over, Mrs. Green claimed, Dan returned from putting his horses up and demanded a kiss. When she refused, he persisted, "threatening me with violence repeatedly, and succeeded in criminally assaulting me."⁵

In spite of her testimony, Dan Callahan was acquitted. The Irish teamster was so personable that few gave the rape charges much thought.⁶ Ida Green appeared in public as if nothing had happened. And Dan's wedding to Ellen Cherosky two months later was, according to the local paper, "the biggest time ever had in this camp."⁷

The newspaper referred to the teamster as "Dan'l 'King' Calahan," noting that he got the name by marrying the chief's daughter at Circle. "She is a squaw and has two daughters sixteen and twelve years old. She is also a sister of Minook of Rampart. The family are good workers, making the best parkies and mitts on the river. The 'King' sits with his feet on the table and smiles when he thinks of all the tons of flour and other things in the cache which go with the squaw."⁸

Despite that era's general disdain of interracial relationships, Dan entered enthusiastically into the match, apparently his first and only excursion into matrimony. Ellen's oldest daughter, Axinia, wed Nels Rasmussen, one of Dan's fellow teamsters. Dan quickly adopted Helen, Ellen's younger daughter, and the couple also took in Richard Funchion, a homeless, part-Athabascan boy from Nenana, about 200 miles southwest of Circle. About twelve years old, he legally changed his name to Dick Callahan and fit into the family comfortably.

The ambitious teamster moved his family to Fairbanks in 1904 when it showed signs of becoming a bigger gold camp than Circle. By 1906 he had acquired property in downtown Fairbanks, which was mostly bars, gambling dens, and dance halls. And because he had a knack for organizing voters, he was readily accepted as a spokesman by the owners, employees, and patrons of these establishments. At that time Fairbanks had no property taxes, so city operations were supported solely by license fees from such businesses and by the monthly "fines" collected from the quasi-legal prostitution operations. Naturally, the men involved in these businesses wanted control of the city they were supporting, so to make sure that they got it they elected Callahan and a slate of his choosing to Fairbanks's first city council. It was rumored that Dan Callahan controlled all the pimps in town, and apparently he united the vote of the demimonde in the classic manner of an Irish ward politician.⁹

Dan was also extremely popular with the general public and the press, for he was colorful, fun-loving, and larger than life. Who else, on St. Patrick's Day, would don a green felt suit to "glad hand" jovially around town? He had a wonderful way with kids; few of them could resist when "Big Dan" Callahan invited them to come drive his horses or try to catch his fighting roosters. And in the wild frontier setting, a large percentage of the population shared his strong dislike for law and order.¹⁰ There was general rejoicing when, in December of 1906, Dan culminated his longstanding battle with pompous Judge G. B. Erwin by getting the city council to cut the judge's salary of $200 a month by 50 percent. "If Judge Erwin is not satisfied, an equally well-fitted man could be obtained," he gleefully told the Fairbanks Daily Times.¹¹

One month later, Dan nimbly escaped charges of assault and battery after he publicly beat Patrolman Jack Hayes in the Seattle Saloon. Jack Hayes had been following the teamster, and Dan told the jury that he hated the cop so much he could not drink when Jack was present.

When the patrolman entered the Seattle Saloon, Dan began cursing him and Jack threatened arrest. Dan struck out with his fist, hitting the officer in the head and disorienting him so badly he couldn't wield his billy club. They clinched and rolled on the floor with Dan on top. Then Dan got possession of the club, handing it to a bystander, and the patrolman's only other weapon, his gun, dropped from his pocket to the floor. No one intervened as Dan pummeled Jack until he conceded he'd had enough.

TWO OF ALASKA’S MOST RESPECTED CITIZENS
The daughter Dan Callahan adopted when he married Ellen, Axinia and Helen Cherosky, would later become well-respected citizens. Axinia married Nels Rasmussen, a Circle-based teamster like her stepfather, and raised a large family there. Helen, who remained single, became a schoolteacher and the first Native woman in Alaska to own an automobile. She also was the first member of the Doyon Corporation under the Alaska Native Land Claims Act.
UAF, Helen Roselle Lindberg Collection, #93-151-442N.

The eye patch which Jack wore in court did not begin to cover the damage. Yet to the consternation of Judge Erwin, who presided, Dan had enough friends on the jury to hang it.¹²

When the city council quietly created a restricted district for prostitutes on Fourth Avenue in 1906, Dan added property there to his numerous real-estate holdings. He was purposely absent, however, when the council voted to outlaw pimps in December of 1907.¹³ He knew he couldn't buy the votes to stop the popular move, nor did he care to vote against it because Fairbanks was suddenly in the grip of rabble-rousers campaigning for law and order. The political climate was such that he did not run for council again until 1910, when he found himself the third-highest vote-getter.¹⁴

While Dan Callahan was popular, his wife, Ellen, had become genuinely loved. As gracious as she was beautiful, she had a fine sense of humor that allowed her to poke fun at herself. She showed a penchant for helping people in trouble and taking on strays of any race. Yet she easily made friends in the white community, even with people who generally had little to do with Native Alaskans. She worked hard at skin sewing, a craft at which she was a master, and she did her best to help her husband. But about 1910 the tiny woman—who stood only as tall as his elbow and was not fluent in English—did what none of Dan Callahan's political opponents had been able to accomplish: she stopped the big Irishman cold.

Although Dan still loved his wife, he was in the habit of beating her up when he came home in a bad mood after making his round of the bars. When he sobered he became so remorseful that she put up with it for a while, but she came to resent the punishment. Finally she issued an ultimatum: if it happened again, she would get a divorce.

The idea struck Dan as hilariously funny. No Indian woman would ever succeed in divorcing a white man, he told her, laughing, especially not a popular politician like himself. He repeated the story to numerous cronies, and then forgot it.

The next time he beat Ellen, raising a lump like an egg, she waited until he was sleeping off his drunk, then dressed in her best and went straight to the court. Judge Erwin, who was the leader of the opposition party and whose salary Dan had halved, proved anxious to help. Because Dan had told everyone about Ellen's threat and the cause of it, she had an excellent case. Judge Erwin realized that getting divorced by an Indian woman would certainly damage his rival's political prestige, and he helped her file for it.

Dan failed to take the pending court action seriously until he came home one evening, determined to turn Ellen from their house, only to discover that he no longer owned it or anything else. A year or so earlier, when he had feared a lawsuit, the Irishman had transferred everything—his townhouse, mining claims, several fine teams of horses, numerous sleds and wagons, and property in the red light district—to his wife's name to limit his personal liability. In the presence of supportive family and neighboring white men, Ellen now reminded him that he had no legal title to any of it. As an act of generosity, she would give him a cabin at the other end of town and one good team with full equipment with which to continue his trade as a teamster. Nothing else! And she made it stick.¹⁵

She also withdrew from his bed. "A white woman is good enough for him!" she declared to her well-respected little Creole family.¹⁶

Thus did Ellen Callahan become the owner of two houses of ill repute in Fairbanks. They were small but there was such a demand for space in the red light district that they rented for double the average rate. A year or so later, Ellen sold the property to a couple of local prostitutes. She invested the returns in a highly successful fur-sewing enterprise that made her a financially independent businesswoman.

Meanwhile, Dan Callahan's power was waning, for the city no longer depended solely on license fees and fines from vice, but was also supported by property taxes. In the wake of a crippling miners' strike and a decline in gold production, a number of bars and gambling operations faltered or folded. Reformers rushed to replace representatives of the demimonde in the city's power structure, and when Dan ran for city council in 1911, he lost by a heavy margin. Following an unsuccessful (and unpopular) attempt by reformers to close the Line, he regained his council seat in 1913 and held it the following year. But after sitting out the next election, Dan was roundly defeated in 1916, perhaps because voters realized that he was finally on his way to jail.¹⁷

On January 7, 1916, May Williams charged him with felonious assault, testifying that he had choked her, twisted her wrists, and thrown her violently against the door of her house. Dan, who had been unarmed, quickly got out of jail on $1,000 bond and stayed out. In part because May was a veteran prostitute known from Dawson to Seattle, Dan was found not guilty.¹⁸

By mid-February, however, Dan was back in federal jail on charges of statutory rape, this time without the option of bail. He had been arrested with W. H. Wooldridge, a wood contractor, and Robert Jones, a cab driver, apparently following a barroom party and a murky interlude at the Rose Machine Repair Shop.

Dan hired Leroy Tozier, a crack criminal lawyer who had worked for Alexander Pantages in Dawson before passing the Alaska Bar. Ellen, with her usual generosity, testified in court that the defendant was impotent.

DAN CALLAHAN
Surviving a conviction and imprisonment for rape, the veteran politician returned to his hometown of Fairbanks, where he successfully ran for the Territorial Legislature. Old-timers prefer to remember his Irish charm instead of his brushes with the law.
Courtesy of Candave Waugaman. UAF, Dorothy Loftus Collection, #80-84-105N.

His adopted son, Dick, appeared as a character witness. But this time the affable politician did not have enough friends on the jury to hang it, and the charges were serious. Unlike the earlier trials involving women of questionable repute, whose testimony was paid little respect, his accusers were two local girls not employed on the Line. They were both young, and one had a well-respected mother who lent credibility to her testimony.

Dan was the last of those accused to be tried. Robert Jones, defended by Tom Marquam, Dan's political rival, was found not guilty after his jury deliberated eight and a half hours.¹⁹ W. H. Wooldridge was acquitted on the rape charge but, in a decision that surprised the community, he was found guilty of attempting the crime and sentenced to from eighteen months to ten years in federal prison. ²⁰

Dan sweated out his jury for twenty hours as rumors flew. One was that the count stood eleven to one for acquittal; another account had one vote for acquittal and eleven for conviction—which turned out to be closer to the truth.²¹ On April 11, 1916, Dan Callahan was sentenced to twelve years at the federal prison on McNeil Island.

Released for good behavior, Dan returned to Fairbanks in time to run for city council in 1921 and, although he lost by a considerable margin, he did not appear discouraged. On the contrary, he changed his political affiliation from Democrat to Independent and ran for the Alaska Territorial House of Representatives, campaigning for full citizenship for women, their right to sit on juries and hold public office, and also for good roads. Dan won with 561 votes, 117 more than his competitor, Hosea Ross, the local undertaker,²² who failed to overcome Big Dan's unique campaign slogan, "Vote for Hosea and bury the town."²³

During her ex-husband's 1922 campaign, Ellen Callahan vacationed from her business in Fairbanks to visit her daughter Axinia, son-in-law Nels, and their eight children in Circle. She could afford the break. She had, in fact, become the most successful independent Native businesswoman in the region, and she'd invested her profits so widely in charities that she was considered a one-woman welfare agency. Ellen's success was not exactly what Dan Callahan had envisioned when he invested in the whorehouse lots that staked her enterprise, but few ill-gotten gains were ever put to better use, and he was pleased with her success.