The original pole belonged to the Kinninook family, a Tlingit clan of the Raven moiety. It was carved to honor Chief-of-All-Women, who had drowned in the Nass River while traveling to visit a sick sister. Her family hired a carver and told him the stories they wanted represented on the pole. When it was finished, they held a potlatch and raised it in their village on Tongass Island -- one of the few totem poles ever dedicated to a woman. For more than a century it stood there, until the Seattle Post-Intelligencer sponsored a "goodwill tour" of 165 prominent citizens to Alaska in August 1899. When the steamship City of Seattle stopped at the Tlingit village at Fort Tongass, the residents were away for the fishing season. The businessmen chopped the pole down, sawed it in two, and floated it back to the ship. They paid McGillvery $2.50 for his labor.

The Tlingit were shocked to find the pole gone when they returned from the fishing season. The Kinninook family demanded legal action through the governor of the District of Alaska, and William E. Kinninook filed a $10,000 damage claim against the City of Seattle. The city council refused to consider it. Meanwhile, the rival Seattle Daily Times gleefully attacked the Post-Intelligencer, publishing a cartoon that labeled the pole "Robbing Indian Graves a specialty." The P-I fired back, diagnosing its competitor with "totempolitis, a new and fearful disease." But the joke turned serious when a federal grand jury in Juneau issued indictments against eight members of the expedition for theft of government property, including the P-I's editor, the Chamber of Commerce secretary, a bank manager, and an Episcopal rector. The P-I hurried to negotiate a settlement of $500. A member of the expedition later admitted, "We were so frightened we would have paid any amount."

The stolen pole stood in Pioneer Square for nearly four decades, losing its Tlingit associations and becoming what a 1910 article called "the totem pole that made Seattle famous." It appeared on postcards and brochures for the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. Then, in October 1938, an arsonist set it ablaze. When the damaged pole was taken down in April 1939, inspectors found it riddled with dry rot beyond repair. In a turn both ironic and fitting, the damaged original was shipped to Saxman, Alaska, where Tlingit carver Charles Brown directed a team of carvers -- including members of the Kinninook family, descendants of the pole's original owners -- to create a replica from red cedar harvested at Kina Cove near Kasaan. Because the timber came from Forest Service land and the carvers were federally paid, a special act of Congress was required to transfer ownership to Seattle. The replica was dedicated with tribal blessings and raised in Pioneer Square on July 24, 1940.

Read from top to bottom, the pole tells three Tlingit legends from Chief-of-All-Women's lineage. At the top sits Raven, who in Tlingit mythology "did everything, knew everything, and seemed to be everywhere at once." Below are a woman holding her frog child, the woman's frog husband, Mink, another Raven with Whale carrying a seal, and at the base, Raven-at-the-Head-of-Nass, also called Grandfather of Raven. The first legend tells how Raven stole the sun, moon, and stars from a chief by transforming into a needle, being swallowed by the chief's daughter, and being reborn as her son. The painted figures -- black, red, and blue-green in the traditional Tlingit palette -- stand as a reminder that totem poles are not decorations but narrative monuments, and this one tells a story that predates Seattle's founding by a century.

The pole was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1977, and totem poles have become synonymous with Seattle -- from the city's former hockey team, the Seattle Totems, to the poles in Victor Steinbrueck Park near Pike Place Market. But the Coast Salish people native to the Seattle area never carved totem poles. In 2018, Seattle City Councilmember Debora Juarez, a member of the Blackfeet Nation, called for a review of all totem poles on city-owned land for cultural sensitivity. The review revealed that some, including those in Steinbrueck Park, were carved by non-Native artists. As of 2023, the Pioneer Square pole still stands, a Tlingit creation in Coast Salish territory, a monument to both indigenous artistry and the complicated ethics of how it arrived.