Hotham Inlet

Hotham Inlet, also called Kobuk Lake, opens into Kotzebue Sound on Alaska's northwestern coast. Before European chart-makers named it, the surrounding waters were part of an Indigenous landscape linking river valleys, coastal camps and routes across Bering Strait. At nearby Sisualik, near the mouths of the Noatak, Kobuk and Selawik rivers, an annual trade fair brought different peoples together.

Archaeological evidence places this gathering in the late Thule period, about 1400-1750. In the eighteenth century it fitted within the seasonal hunting and gathering rounds of the region's Inupiaq nations. Visitors included Chukchi and Siberian Yupik, North Slope Inupiat, Koyukon Athabascans and traders from farther south. The fair usually occurred between late June and August, with river and sea-ice breakup governing travel. In 1826 Frederick William Beechey named the inlet after Admiralty lord Henry Hotham. The European name marked an exploration episode within a much older regional history of mobility, exchange and social gathering.