The present pole shows Thunderbird with wings spread wide above a pair of seated Bear figures. At the tips of the wings are animal heads in profile, likely referencing the Lightning Serpents or Sisiutl.

Small in scale but reconginizable in composition, the pole belongs to a group of Nuu-Chah-Nulth carvings made on western Vancouver Island in the 1930s and 1940s for the growing curio trade.

What gives this example its particular interest is the stamp that it bears, which reads, “GENUINE INDIAN MADE / BEAR TOTEM STORES / WRANGELL ALASKA.” It tells us not where the pole was made or by whom, but where it entered the market.

Walter C. Waters, a Canadian-born settler who arrived in Wrangell during the Klondike Gold Rush, opened The Bear Totem Store in 1922. By the 1930s it had become one of Wrangell’s principal tourist attractions, filled with baskets, carvings, regalia, model poles, and full-size totems.

A deeply problematic figure, Waters’s importance to the early market cannot be separated from the harm of his methods. By one account, he was involved in grave robbing, and he certainly profited from the removal of valuable cultural belongings from their family, house, and clan contexts. Yet his Bear Totem Store also became a major force in the curio trade, bringing Northwest Coast works before tourists, collectors, and museums.

He helped make Wrangell into “Totem Town” and brought Northwest Coast art to the attention of tourists, collectors, and museums. His shop also blurred geography and context, gathering works from different communities and traditions into one highly marketable display.

By 1932, he was even publishing Harry Prosper Corser’s Totem Lore of the Alaska Indian, and the Land of the Totem, a tourist-facing book that gave the Bear Totem Store the air of an authority as well as a shop.

The little stamp on this pole, therefore, carries a surprisingly large history. It places a Nuu-chah-nulth carving within the tourist economy of Alaska, the promotional world of Waters’s Bear Totem Store, and the early twentieth-century market through which many Northwest Coast works first reached southern collectors and institutions.

References: See Ronan Rooney, “Troubled Waters: The Store That Sold Out Wrangell,” Wrangell History Unlocked, 31 May 2024, https://www.wrangellhistoryunlocked.com/blog/troubled-waters. Accessed 9 July 2026. For undated images (c. 1930s?) of the works outside of southern Alaska restored and standing in front of Walter C. Waters’s Bear Totem Store at Wrangell, Alaska, see Marius Barbeau, Totem Poles, Bulletin No. 119, Vol. II: Totem Poles According to Location, Anthropological Series No. 30 (Ottawa: Department of Resources and Development, National Parks Branch, National Museum of Canada, 1950), p. 850-1, fig. 554 & 555.