Mr. Tom Gordon, a trader, moved from Barrow with his family and Mrs. Mary Agiaq Gordon's relatives and friends and their families. One of them was Mrs. Mary Agiaq Gordon's younger brother Andrew Akootchook, who helped to choose the place in 1919, because of its good harbor and convenient and accessible location for hunting on land and sea. Tom Gordon built a trading post with the help of his Eskimo crew and settled down on Barter Island. There were a few families that settled near Gordon's trading post about a mile to 12 miles around the Island, but the place was never a village. There had been a large village at one time, many years back which had been abandoned. Only the ruins are there. The people of that ruined village were whalers because there were whale bones: heads, jaw bones, vertebrae, vertebrae discs, ribs, and shoulder blades among the ruins.

The Akootchook family used to tell us that from the old village site the vertebra discs were placed on the beach all the way from the village to the edge of the shore as steps for a walkway. The story goes that the people were driven from their village to the Canadian side, by our people through fighting. To this day the people from Canada and Greenland confirmed this by telling the people the same things, that they were driven east by the Alaskan Eskimo.