Dr. George Chismore was perhaps the first European doctor to visit the Forks of the Skeena (Hazelton). Born in New York in 1840, Chismore came out to California in 1854, mined for a while and then entered medical school in San Francisco in 1860.
He joined the Western Union Telegraph company as a doctor and came north with the Overland Telegraph crews laying a telegraph cable to Europe through British Columbia and Russia. He arrived in Victoria with supplies for the telegraph on the bark Onward in mid-July 1866. He was at the Forks of the Skeena, later known as Hazelton, when the project was cancelled not long after, in 1866.
One of his colleagues there was Chas. Morison, with whom he became friends. Morison recounted how later, at Wrangell, that when they were dealing with the results of tribal wars that Chismore taught him how to stitch up wounded First Nations.
After the cable was successfully laid across the Atlantic, the Overland telegraph to Alaska was cancelled. Chismore returned to California in 1867 and joined the US Army as an assistant surgeon, serving in Alaska.
On a short leave of absence from the army in 1870, he returned to the Skeena River, later writing about his journey in The Overland Monthly (November 1885 edition). He described visiting Kil–a-tam-acks (Gitanmaax, Hazelton) and Kis-py-aux (Kispiox). “One of the finest Indian towns I ever saw,” he wrote of Kil-a-tam-acks. “It contained thirty houses and had a population of about six hundred.”
After five years service with the army he returned to California and, apart from his travels, spent the rest of his life there, dying in 1906, much beloved and described in the headline announcing his death as “one of California’s greatest men”.