FRIDAY
& SATURDAY, JULY 19 & 20 (PART I):
On these
2 days, we traveled back in the footsteps of the gold seekers who chose Skagway
and the White Pass to try and make their way to the Yukon gold fields, rather
than Dyea and the Chilcoot Pass that we heard about on Thurs.
We
actually took 2 walking tours through town with Park Ranger tour guides, one on
Fri and one on Sat. They were
essentially the same tour, but we learned that the Rangers can custom-design
their own tours to some extent, emphasizing slightly different themes or
aspects of Skagway’s gold rush history that interested them. They’re free to do their own research and
interpretation, within guidelines. And
we so enjoyed the first that we came back on Friday to do another, and hear
perhaps a somewhat different angle.
Like
Dyea, Skagway was a village of a few people (although, unlike Dyea, not
Natives) up until the summer of 1897. And like Dyea, it also was a primitive
transportation corridor from the coast to the interior for a few traders. Within
2 weeks after the first steamship came up from Seattle, there were 5,000 tents
in the town! Within a few months, there
were 8-10,000 people, the streets of a town had been platted, and the tents had
been replaced with buildings. As with
Dyea, the people who inhabited the town weren’t themselves gold-seekers; they
came to Skagway because they saw an opportunity to sell their goods and
services to the miners – to “mine the miners.”
At the height of the gold rush, there were at least 150 businesses here
(the ones that the newspaper listed).
As one of our tour guides put it, it was an “entrepreneurial mecca,” and
attracted those with an independent and adventurous spirit. The flip side of this pioneer spirit, and
especially since the growth was almost literally overnight, was that it was a
really rough-and-tumble, totally lawless place.
No liquor licenses, so there were at least 80 saloons & bars. 
Not quite as many brothels.
[Above: Some brothels were unabashedly known, such as the one on the 2nd story of the Red Onion. ]
. [Below: Others were more discreet - like this small building known as a "crib" behind the larger building in front. The large buiding housed a business plus the owner's family, and he rented the two-room back building to two "working girls." They were reliable in paying their rent!]
A haven for scam artists, who became rich at the expense of lonely, gullible men on their way to the gold fields.
This lawless aspect of Skagway was one of the
“trash-talk” points that the good citizens of Dyea could use in their
advertisements and propaganda as to why prospectors should use their
town & trail, and not that Skagway, “the most hellish place on earth,” said
one visitor.
But there were real heroes here. One person’s story we heard a lot about was
William Moore. He actually lived in
Victoria, Canada, but passed through Skagway on his travels to and from the
Alaskan & Canadian interiors, in the 1880’s. He exemplified the independent, strong,
pioneer spirit that built Alaska – among his many enterprises was a mail route
he ran with dogsleds to the mining camps of the Yukon. At age 65! He was
a visionary who foresaw a “golden” opportunity for wealth & prosperity for Skagway in the
future. He predicted a major gold strike
in the Klondike area at some point, and saw Skagway as the entry point to get
there. So he homesteaded 160 acres here,
built a little cabin, and positioned himself for the wealth that he
foresaw pouring in here: he built a
dock, a warehouse, and surveyed and began chiseling out a new trail to reach
Lake Bennett, the headwaters of the Yukon River. He named it the White Pass Trail, after some
politician in Canada. Surviving
photographs from those years show a literally empty beach and shoreline from
the waterfront on up the valley, except one little cabin – his. 
Ten years
later proved him right. However, what
he didn’t foresee was the massive numbers of people who would come here. By sheer numbers, and no law enforcement,
they ignored his claims to his land, and overran most of it. But he still became a wealthy man and
eventually moved out of the area, like most did, when the gold rush ended.
His son, Ben, however, stayed, and built a
nicer, larger home for his family on the family property that was left. 
He apparently inherited his father’s visionary
tendencies, and predicted a time when tourists would come by boat to see the
beautiful country here, as well as to see a little bit of Gold Rush
history. Wonder what he would think if
he could see now the dock his father built, filled with cruise ships and
thousands of passengers a day!
A corollary figure we heard stories about was
Harriet Pullen. She was married, living
in Washington state, and had 4 small children.
Her husband had lost the family fortune during the recession; she was
another adventurous, fearless, independent soul, who happened to be
female. She told her husband that they
should come to Alaska to re-gain some of what they’d lost. He refused; she came by herself. Not exactly a shrinking violet, and in
Victorian times! As soon as she reached
Skagway, she took the first job she found
- cooking meals on the dock for William
Moore’s dockhands. On the side, she baked apple pies for the
boys longing for a taste of home. She
was shrewd, knew how to save and invest money, and in time was able to purchase
William Moore’s stately home, which she
turned into a hotel. The Pullen Hotel
was known as one of the classiest hotels in Alaska until her death in the
1940’s. Sadly, no one wanted it after
the war years, and it got torn down. You
gotta love these stories – they so exemplify how Alaska was built, and the
independent, self-reliant, pioneer spirit which typifies so much of the state
even today.
It was a lot of fun walking around town with these
Rangers. Their role here is really one
of being story tellers, as much as anything!
And you can tell that they love it, showing off “their” town and its
history. There are more than 100 buildings here which
are well over than a century old, built during and just after the Gold Rush. The National Park Service has acquired about
15 of them, and partners with the private sector in the community to preserve
and maintain the others. And some that
they own, they lease back to private citizens, who are free to sell their
wares. The buildings have been restored
to exacting standards, including the use of authentic paint schemes and
architectural detail. The result is a
downtown that is by far the most charming and attractive of any in Southeast
Alaska, right down to the wooden sidewalks.
The town
was built to sell goods & services to miners. And the miners would stay just long enough to
get outfitted, and then head up the other hellacious trail – the White Pass
Trail. This trail was less steep than
the Chilkoot, and the summit was lower, but it was 10 miles longer. It had been known to utilize pack
horses. So of course the miners bought
horses and loaded them down, hoping naturally to decrease the number of loads
they’d need to haul up. However, being
in such a hurry to reach the end of the trail and the river, they would
overload the horses and push them along
at an unreasonable speed. Plus, would
not feed them enough in an effort to conserve both money and weight. Consequently, horses died by the thousands
along this trail. One section is named
“Dead Horse Gulch,” where the carcasses of about 3,000 horses came to
rest. One of the sad stories of this
time.
Like their
compatriots who made the grueling climb up the Chilkoot Trail and spent the
frozen winter at Bennett Lake fabricating home-made boats for the 550-mile trip
down the Yukon, once they arrived at Dawson City, the mecca they‘d had in sight
since they left home, they were amazed to find a ready-made big city, once
again trying to part them from their money.
We’ll visit Dawson City on our way home, and will be interesting to see
what stories are there.
As for the gold seekers who began
their quest so full of hope and optimism a few months back, very, very few of
them found any gold at all, let alone made their fortune; virtually all of the
claims had been staked out months ago.
But as we heard over and over, in the end, that seemed to have mattered
very little, not to the stampeders themselves, nor to the larger story. It was a time of bigger-than-life dreams, and
these men wanted in on it. They
persevered through amazing conditions, tested themselves, and found out what
they were made of. A bank clerk from
Pittsburgh who’d never held a tool found a way to make his own boat. A drifter from California discovered himself
forming a fierce loyalty to his partner.
As one gold seeker said, “I came up here with 35 cents in my pocket and
didn’t make a dime. But I’d do it all
again for even less.”
As for
the bigger story – some of these folks stayed in Alaska, found jobs or started
businesses, and helped settle modern Alaska.
As for Skagway, it didn’t go the way of Dyea and vanish. Some other visionaries decided to build a
railroad which roughly skirted the White Pass Trail – one which would begin in
Skagway and go up to Whitehorse, Yukon.
That ensured Skagway’s stability, and even though most of the 10,000 people
who’d flocked here to make their entrepreneurial fortunes from the Gold Rush
left by the early 1900’s, several hundred stayed, no doubt in part because of the railroad. And more came to help build it. That’s why we’re able to visit a preserved
Gold Rush boom town in Skagway, and not in Dyea.
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