The gold rush briefly made
Skagway the largest city in
Alaska, with a population that
fluctuated between 10,000 and
20,000. Its main street, which
some wag had dubbed "Broadway,"
was a mud rut bordered by
campsites, blacksmiths shops and
fly-by-night restaurants. There
were as many as 80 local saloons
where a
cheechako (Alaska
newcomer) could gargle down
strong spirits before embarking
for Dawson. Among the sidewalk
throngs were bogus preachers,
circus performers, and even a
trained dancing bear named
Alexis. Scarcely less visible
were cardsharps and harlots,
grifters and gunmen—a contingent
that gave Skagway a distinctly
anarchical repute. One observer
groused that Skagway was "little
better than hell on earth." No
wonder everyone who came to
Skagway back then seemed merely
to be passing through. As
quickly as they could.
Even now, Skagway hosts far more
transients than residents. At
last count, only about 700
people lived here year-round.
Yet from late spring through
early fall (the usual Alaskan
tourist months), up to five
cruise ships a day dock at
Skagway, disgorging 8,000 or so
travelers to flood the vintage
business buildings along
Broadway, sample beers at the
raucous Red Onion Saloon (once a
prominent bordello), and point
their video cameras in wonder at
the Arctic Brotherhood Hall, its
quirky 1899 facade decorated
with 10,000 pieces of driftwood.
Skagway has found its future as
a relic of the past. After 1899,
when the Klondike stampede
cooled, the town lapsed into a
quieter role as a shipping port
for the Yukon Territory. With
little in the way of community
development funds, it left its
turn-of-the-century public
architecture standing. Over the
last two decades, the U.S.
National Park Service has spent
more than $11 million restoring
Skagway to the way it looked in
the 1890s, when honky-tonk and
gunshots were the common music
of its streets.
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Furthering the illusion that
time has failed to pass here are
the men and women who on any
given summer morning can be
spotted marching down Broadway
on their way over the Coast
Mountains, just as their
great-grandfathers might have
done. The difference is that in
1897 and '98, gold seekers left
Skagway on the White Pass Trail,
a 45-mile course of switchbacks
and deep mud holes that proved
perilous to overburdened pack
horses (thus inspiring its
nickname, the Dead Horse Trail).
Parts of that path now lie
beneath the narrow-gauge tracks
of the White Pass & Yukon Route
railway (completed in 1900),
which runs from Skagway to
Fraser, British Columbia, and
has become as much a tourist
attraction as it is a means of
transport.
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| The
Skagway Museum at the
Arctic Brotherhood Hall
features an engaging
selection of memorabilia
and photographs that
portray what life was
like here in the 1890s. |
|
Hikers who dream today of
re-creating the stampeders'
pilgrimage instead follow the
Chilkoot Trail, which starts
nine miles from Skagway at what
used to be the town of Dyea
(since reduced to a memory and
some canting cemetery markers).
Some 4,000 trekkers a year
continue to use the trail,
although they usually reach its
end in three to five days,
rather than the months that an
encumbered Klondiker might have
taken.
Even without scaling peaks,
however, visitors can appreciate
Klondike stampede history. The
Skagway Museum at the Arctic
Brotherhood Hall features an
engaging selection of
memorabilia and photographs that
portray what life was like here
in the 1890s. And the Park
Service and the Skagway Street
Car Company conduct heritage
tours through the two dozen
blocks of downtown several times
a day. Crime and licentiousness
are always favorite topics for
the guides, who at every
opportunity invoke the name of
Jefferson Randolph Smith—more
familiar as "Soapy," thanks to
his fondness for a confidence
game that involved paper money
wrapped around bars of soap. His
felonious reign ended when, in
the summer of 1898, he tried to
crash a meeting of vigilantes
opposed to his activities and
wound up exchanging fatal
gunshots with Frank Reid, the
town surveyor. "Only three
people came to Soapy's funeral,
including the teamster hired to
haul his body away," says Steve
Hites, president of the Skagway
Street Car Company, who
dramatizes for his tour guests
the details of the town's most
famous gunfight. "But," Hites
adds, "two thousand people
showed up to eulogize Reid—it
was the largest funeral Skagway
had ever seen." The pair are
buried within 100 feet of one
another at the Gold Rush
Cemetery, about two miles north
of downtown.
Jeff Smith's Parlor, an oyster
bar that served as Soapy's
headquarters, can still be seen
on Second Avenue, just off
Broadway, where it sits dark,
cold, and uncared-for behind a
cyclone fence. People talk about
refurbishing it, but so far, it
hasn't happened. And maybe
that's for the best. There's
something oddly reassuring in
the fact that a building which
once could have properly been
called the center of hell on
earth is closed for repairs.
A
decade before, not a single
cabin had marred the forested
triangle of southeast Alaskan
flatland that would become
Skagway (its name derived from a
Tlingit Indian word meaning
"home of the north wind"). But
after steamships bore tons of
Klondike riches to San Francisco
and Seattle in July 1897, the
town began taking shape. Within
three months, it was littered
with tents and rickety wooden
structures housing 4,000 people.
Over the next two years, tens of
thousands more would land at
either Skagway or the
neighboring hamlet of Dyea, from
which a pair of parallel
trails—the White Pass route and
the more popular one through
Chilkoot Pass—led north across
Alaska's Coast Mountains. From
there, miners rode the Yukon
River another 550 miles to the
remote Canadian boomtown of
Dawson City, adjacent to the
gold fields.
