Yeilxaak
chief of Klukwan
Yeilxaak, also spelled as Yeilxáak and sometimes known as Ilkhak, was a powerful chief of the Chilkat Tlingit at Klukwan. He is the earliest chief of Klukwan to have encountered Europeans.
Meetings with Europeans
It is not certain when his rule started, but he was both the head of the Gaanaxteidee clan and the chief of all of Klukwan Tlingits by 1788. During this year, during a trading visit at Yakutat, he met the Russian explorers Izmailov and Bocharov. These men recorded his name as Ilkhak.
According to Alejandro Malaspina's Spanish expedition in 1791 and to Tlingit oral histories, Yeilxaak became the rival and enemy of X'unéi. X'unéi, whose name was recorded as Juné by Malaspina's expedition, was a powerful chief of the Yakutat Tlingit and the head of the L'ukwnax.ádi clan. Yeilxaak was killed in 1791 during the long and bloody war between the L'ukwnax.ádi clan of Yakutat and the Gaanaxteidee clan of Klukwan.
Family
In Cora Benson's genealogy, Yeilxaak was the son of K'uxshóo I and Yeidukdatán. His two sisters were Nuwuteiyi and Kaaguneteen.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q64668386. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1788 and 1791.
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This entry incorporates text from “Yeilxaak” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.