THURSDAY, JULY 18

THURSDAY, JULY 18:

     Went into town to get ourselves oriented.  Skagway is an unabashed tourist town, leveraging its history as a pivotal player in the Klondike Gold Rush and its very well preserved downtown district of buildings from the turn of the century.

                                         Fraternal brotherhood organization, Arctic Brotherhood, 
                                         established in 1899 for camraderie among the stampeders.
                                         Built of pieces of driftwood.                                               

      Much of the downtown area is so well preserved and maintained because it’s part of the Klondike Gold rush National Historical Park. 

                                             Original train depot, now National Historic Park's Visitor Center 

 In this case, a National Park isn’t as much about a special place as it is about a special historical time and journey.  As such, this Nat’l Park maintains sites here in Skagway, in the abandoned town of Dyea, across the river, and in Dawson, Canada (the U.S. & Canada have a cooperative agreement), and even in Seattle, because these places were all important players in the Klondike Gold Rush.

     So we began our journey in the Park’s Visitors Center here, where we saw another excellent film which gave a great introduction and overview of the Gold Rush.  For people like us, who had a vague notion of this gold rush, what we learned in such a short time was great:  this was the greatest gold rush of all time (I forget how many hundreds of tons of gold was in total  extracted from the area), but it really only lasted 2 years – 1897-1899.  But in that time, 100,000 people set out for the Klondike region.  And not just down-and-out, rough-and-tumble guys, but doctors, lawyers, ministers, even the mayor of Seattle.  The country was in a deep recession, the gold reserves in the U.S. Treasury had plummeted, and in July of 1897, when the word broke in a Seattle newspaper headline, “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!,” people from all over the country, as well as 32 other nations,  staked everything on a chance to start over. 

     First, they had to book passage on a steamer (either from San Francisco or Seattle) which would take them up the Inland Passage as far north as they could go – which was Skagway, the gateway to the interior of Alaska & then the Yukon.  From here, they had a choice of 2 trails, both of which would end at Lake Bennett, the headwaters of the Yukon River; from there, they would sail 550 miles to the gold fields.  The story of the 2 trails here is a huge part of the story of the stampeding hopefuls.   They were both brutal:  both crossed the high Coastal mountains, often covered with several feet of snow and/or ice.  And both required carrying a year’s worth of supplies, or the North West Mounted Police wouldn’t let you enter Canada; they were trying to prevent starvation in the interior.    This amounted to about a ton of provisions; thus, most men had to make 40 or more trips up and down the trail, in sections, carrying  as much of a load as they could bear at a time, dropping it off, going back down for the next pack, etc.  (hence the need for partners -  one to keep watch over your supplies, one to travel the trail).  It took 3 months just to cross the mountains to the interior.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, most of 30,000 stampeders who had made it this far had to sit out the winter of 1897-98 by in tents frozen lakes, building boats for the voyage down the Yukon when the ice melted.  Unbelievable. 

      This afternoon we explored the more-used of the two trails, the Chilkoot Pass, and its environs.  First we had to drive about 9 miles over a rugged narrow road, where we would meet the Park Ranger who would guide us.  Had some nice views of the town on the way.

 

        The Chilkoot had been a Tlingit trade route for decades, used by them to travel to Athabascan Natives & others in the interior.  It was also used lightly with the Tlingit’s acquiescence,  by a few non-Native traders, trappers, prospectors, & explorers who would come through.  Nothing prepared the Tlingits for the onslaught of tens of thousands of gold seekers who would attempt to climb its 33 miles in 1897-98.  The trail included one notorious section, dubbed the Golden Stairs, which actually had steps carved out of the ice, and which gained 1,000 feet in ¼ mile. Despite these unbelievable obstacles, the gold seekers were crowded together like packed sardines on the trail.  According to one account, if a man fell out of step – e.g., to pause to shift his pack - and lost his place in the line of men tramping up the trail, it might take 3 hours for him to find a place in which to step back in.  John Muir was in Southeast when the stampede hit, and wrote that the Chilkoot during that time (as well as the other trail) “looked like anthills someone stirred with a stick.”

       The Chilkoot is still in existence, and hardy backpackers can get a taste of what those tough, determined prospectors experienced.  It typically takes 4 days to traverse the entire trail.  

 

 

      Besides the trail, the other focus of the ranger-led talk was the town that was here, Dyea.  It had been a Tlingit village and, like the Chilkoot trail, was overrun by non-Natives when the stampede started.  Within a year or less, the town had 5,000 people living there, rivaling Skagway.  It had dozens of different businesses – everything from banks to hotels to drugstores, and of course, outfitters.  It was these merchants, far more than the gold seekers themselves, who became wealthy during the gold rush.  Some of the buildings for these businesses were constructed in such a hurry that they didn’t even take time to lay a foundation!

       The Ranger told us of the fierce competition between Dyea and Skagway for the prospectors’ business. (The other trail originated in Skagway.)  Dyea was more affected by the river by which it was built, and its hugely fluctuating tides of 20 feet or more.  The most grandiose idea the townspeople had in order to overcome this obstacle and gain the advantage over Skagway was to build a gigantic pier which would cover the entire intertidal area.  You can still see the pilings when the tide is out.

      Alas, when the railroad was built in Skagway, and you could use that to get to the Yukon River, instead of either one of the trails, there wasn’t a chance for Dyea, and within a year, it was virtually abandoned.   Some residents moved to Skagway, some to other gold hot-spots in Alaska & Canada (e.g., Nome), and others back where they came from.  Archaeologists have tried to re-construct the town as it looked then, but it’s challenging, since virtually all of the buildings have long since disappeared.  Some people took their buildings with them when they left, intending to recycle the lumber; other buildings were torn down when homesteaders came to farm a while later, and others just succumbed to rot over the years.

 

                                                     One of the very few remaining store fronts in Dyea

     The Ranger was obviously fascinated by her subject, and passed it on to us.  It was a fascinating afternoon in a history lesson of the short life cycle of a boom town.

      And, oh yes, to make the talk even more interesting & memorable, as the Ranger was giving her preliminary talk before we started walking, not one, but two bears ambled to the edge of the woods for a few moments!  Everyone else in our group was in a frenzy to photograph them – but we didn’t feel the need J   Although Bill did manage one parting shot.

 

     And to make the walk more interesting was how different the woods looked from virtually every forest walk we’d taken for the last 7 weeks.  We’re not in the Rain Forest any more!  Skagway is in a rain shelter, so they don’t get nearly as much precipitation as the rest of Southeast does.  But what they do get in the winter tends to be colder.  What a difference that made in the forest – hardly any undergrowth compared to the lushness of the forest floor in the rain forest.  Looked almost stark, in comparison!  Or, you could say, it looks much cleaner & contained – as if someone had taken a big broom and rake to the soil.

 

                              A present-day Alaskan still exhibiting the frontier, indepenent  spirit, just as did     

                              the stampeders.  With a humorous twist.               

Grilled chicken for dinner, and posting some blog entries and reading and to bed.  Warm tonight.