05/27/2026
Meet Miriam Mathers (maiden name Miriam Davidson).
Some of you may have heard of this extraordinary woman as she was quite well known for decades and her story became even more popular after her death.
She was known as "The Goat Woman" and Sumas, if you can believe it, was a small part of her story.
Miriam was born in Nebraska in 1883 and later trained as a registered nurse in Iowa. In 1917, she married Thomas Mathers, and the couple lived in Wyoming, where Miriam homesteaded and raised livestock. After separating from her husband, suffering the loss of several children in childhood and later the death of her adult son Charles in 1941 Miriam decided to begin a new life in Alaska.
In 1943, at nearly 60 years old, she left Wyoming with a homemade covered wagon that she built herself, horses, goats, and a cat named Tubby.
She eventually made her way to Sumas and attempted to cross the border in 1946. Border guards officially denied her passage because of livestock and paperwork restrictions but the local newspaper reported that she was, in part, unofficially denied because "no white woman had ever made the overland journey".
Refusing to give up, Miriam later traveled to Alaska by steamship and eventually homesteaded on the Kenai Peninsula, where she became known as “The Goat Woman.”
She died in Alaska in 1950, but her unique journey remains one of the more unusual pioneer stories connected to Sumas.
