How did Skookum Bay get its name?

 In the old days when my dad, Don Baughman, and step-mom, Anne, operated Bow Narrows Camps they would travel to Red Lake from Mentor, Ohio, the first week of May and settle into the Red Lake Inn while they waited for breakup. 

With nothing much to do, they would drive around and look at the lake ice from various locations. It was during these little sightseeing trips that dad made a discovery. Every year the ice went out in Howey Bay seven days after it disappeared from Skookum Bay. 

Skookum Bay is a long, narrow, creek-like bay that you cross on a small bridge on Forestry Road. 

When I came back to the business in 1992 I would get telephone reports from Dad as he watched the bay. Our home in Nolalu, near Thunder Bay, is just a six-hour drive from Red Lake so there was no point in me waiting at the Inn with Dad and Anne. 

Finally, Dad would say the ice was gone in Skookum and so I should arrive in Red Lake seven days later. I would do so and would find Dad and Bob Uhrina from Red Lake Marine launching the Banana Split -- the camp's large trip boat. The ice was breaking and either we could go directly to camp that day or wait until the next to give the big ice pans a chance to blow against one shore  and leave a clear passage on the other.

After Dad passed, I would try to get reports from Red Lake residents on how Skookum Bay was melting. I even phoned people who worked at the Forestry Point and had to cross the bridge every day. None ever paid any attention to the bay and its ice. That's how I came up with my alternative method of calculating ice-out which I have documented here on the blog.

I've always wondered about how Skookum Bay got its name. I have read enough Jack London novels and Robert Service poems to recognize that Skookum is a west coast name or at least a far northwest name. There were lots of Skookum references in the Klondike gold rush. That rush took place in 1896 and was the second largest in history. The biggest was the San Francisco gold rush of 1849. The Red Lake rush in 1926 was the third-largest.

Could someone from the Klondike gold rush with a name like Skookum Joe have lived on the bay in Red Lake? It's possible.

But what does Skookum mean anyway? I found an interesting website called Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. that tells how First Nations had a special trading language called Chinook Jargon which let them do business with each other, especially the west coast nations. Non-indigenous people came to use this language as well and some of those terms are still used by us. Anyway, one of those Chinook jargon words is Skookum meaning big or powerful.

Skookum Bay is neither which makes me wonder if someone like "Skookum Joe" might have lived there. Anybody know?