 Perhaps inspired by contact with the ethnologist Lt. G. T. Emmons, Louis accompanied Florence to Portland to exhibit and sell Tlingit artifacts from Klukwan.Forty-nine were sold to George Byron Gordon of the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia, who subsequently hired him to collect more, thus beginning a lifelong career for the Shotridges as artifact collectors, art producers, and culture-brokers.In 1912 the Shotridges visited Philadelphia and met the anthropologist Frank Speck, who introduced them to Canada's leading anthropologist-linguist, Edward Sapir.