C heechako!  This is the northern word for a newcomer, - a northern tenderfoot.

It appears in the Yukon stories of Jack London and the poems of Robert Service.

Robert Service, famed Yukon author, perhaps made this word famous worldwide when he published a third book of poetry in 1909, called “Ballads of a Cheechako”.

The word was imported from the Chinook peoples into the English of the north during the Yukon gold rush that began in 1896. The famous photograph shown here shows the cheechakos climbing to Chilkoot Pass in their quest for gold.

In Chinook “cheechako” means “newly come” the two parts of the word deriving from Chinook and Nootka native peoples, respectively.

Now extinct, Chinook was a language spoken along the Pacific coast by native peoples and the white traders and settlers who dealt with them.

We call our website by this northern name so that virtual newcomers can feel right at home enjoying our northern paintings and photography.