SKAGWAY
When I left Dave Nanney at the Chilkat Eagle Bed and Breakfast to catch the forty-five-minute ferry ride to Skagway, he had a worried mother-hen look on his face. “Just remember, Skagway was totally about the almighty dollar when the Harriman Expedition got there back in 1899, and it’s still all about the almighty dollar now,” he said.
In 1899, Skagway was a magnet drawing a personality type never in scarce supply in Alaska: those who dream of getting rich quickly. In contrast to the orderly if oppressive corporate Treadwell Mine at Juneau, Skagway was a free-for-all. Muir had visited the new port city in 1897, on his sixth trip to Alaska, and described the scene as “a nest of ants taken into a strange country and stirred up by a stick.”
Muir had arrived in August and was witnessing the start of the Klondike Gold Rush. Word of a major strike in the Canadian Yukon the previous year had circulated south during the winter, and the arrival in San Francisco and Seattle of two ships carrying gold in the summer of 1897 inspired subtle headlines like these from the July 17 Seattle Post-Intelligencer:
GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!
Sixty-Eight Rich Men on the Steamer Portland
STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!
Some Have $5000, Many Have More, and a Few Bring Out $100,000 Each
THE STEAMER CARRIES $700,000
Special Tug Chartered by the Post-Intelligencer to Get the News
I had smiled at Nanney’s concerns about Skagway—after all, the town’s population was less than half that of sleepy Haines, so how bad could it be? But as the ferry pulled up to the dock, I immediately grasped his point. Skagway is wedged tightly between two rows of mountains. At its compact waterfront were four massive white cruise ships, parked like felled skyscrapers. Downtown Skagway was an Old West theme park, with false-front buildings and people dressed as gold rush characters posing on the street for photographs. The main thoroughfare was lined with shops catering to cruise ship passengers and could serve as the setting for a climactic movie shoot-out between rival turquoise-jewelry dealers. Because much of the town is part of the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, there were also a lot of NPS rangers on hand. I joined the fringes of a tour group being led through downtown by a perky ranger named Sandra.
“What’s the biggest reason people have always come to Alaska?” she asked the crowd.
“Scenery?” someone suggested.
“Yes, but the Grand Canyon has scenery, too.”
“Wildlife?”
“Not exactly. A lot of places have wildlife.” Several seconds of uncomfortable silence followed. “What about money?” Ranger Sandra finally asked, her eyes flashing wide as she held up a wad of fake bills. “Ten thousand people just arrived here today because Skagway is famous for gold. A lot of young people come here every summer hoping to make a lot of money by selling things to people like you, who paid a lot of money to get here.” She waved her bills over her head. “Money! Money! Money!”
Ranger Sandra reached into her ample portfolio of visual aids and pulled out a large photograph that is one of the most famous images in Alaskan history. A single-file line of would-be prospectors, each laden down like a pack animal, inches its way up the steep, snowy Chilkoot Pass. To cross into the Canadian Yukon, where all the gold was, the Mounties guarding the border required each miner to have a year’s worth of food and gear—about two thousand pounds of stuff. Multiple trips were needed to haul everything up, and that was just the start of the odyssey. Once prospectors reached the headwaters of the Yukon River, a 550-mile water journey lay ahead.
“The Panic of 1893 had set off a nationwide depression,” Ranger Sandra continued. The Panic of 1893 was one of the worst economic crises in U.S. history, driving unemployment in some urban areas above 25 percent. “It certainly didn’t hurt that newspapers in Seattle and Chicago and New York were making a lot of money printing advertisements that promised anyone could get rich if they came to Alaska!” Some of the greatest fortunes made during the Klondike Gold Rush were amassed by those who “mined the miners”—the suppliers and hoteliers and steamship owners.
More than a hundred thousand sufferers of Klondike fever made their way north in an almost unbelievably short span of time. At the start of the summer of 1897, the port town of Dyea, a neighbor of and competitor to Skagway, had a single building. A year later, Dyea had four thousand residents, 150 businesses, and two newspapers. By the end of 1899 it was a ghost town again, and it remains so today.
The gold rush was already waning when the Elder arrived in 1899, but an excited mob on the dock greeted the steamship: “Hotel runners flourish their cards and call out the names of their various hostelries,” John Burroughs wrote. “Women and girls, some of them in bicycle suits, push to the front and gaze intently at the strangers.” (Burroughs may have been overreacting; a bicycle suit is about as revealing as a pair of mechanic’s overalls.) Boys swarmed the Elder’s deck the moment the boat touched the pier, only to be “swept ashore again” by the crew. The two-year-old town was littered with fresh tree stumps, Burroughs wrote, “but the people already speak of the ‘early times,’ three years ago.”
Getting to Skagway was relatively simple if one could afford passage north from San Francisco or Seattle. It was at the back end of town, where the mountains began, that things became difficult. “Of all the routes into the Klondike, the Skagway Trail across the White Pass, more than any other, brought out the worst in men,” writes historian Pierre Berton. The path into the mountains looked deceptively easy, a gentle incline through what one Harriman team member called Skagway’s “suburbs.” Within a few miles the trail became a steep, twisting ascent on a muddy path. Horses that arrived in Skagway having never borne a load suffered the most. “They died at the rocks, they were poisoned at the summit, and they starved at the lakes,” wrote Jack London, who made the White Pass journey in late 1897. “They fell off the trail, what there was of it, and they went through it; in the river they drowned under their loads or were smashed to pieces against the boulders.” Before long the White Pass route was nicknamed the Dead Horse Trail.
A new engineering marvel promised to put an end to the suffering. Edward Harriman probably didn’t think much about building a railroad to Siberia, but the man who had spent his previous summer tinkering with grades and curves on the Union Pacific took a keen interest in Skagway’s new White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad. Twenty-one miles of track had been grafted onto the inhospitable trail with phenomenal speed. Two thousand laborers were laying down a mile or more of rail per week. The railroad had not yet been completed when the Elder arrived, but Harriman had arranged for a ride as far as the summit of White Pass. Any passengers who looked back toward town could have taken in breathtaking views of the Lynn Canal fjord.
The scenery immediately outside the windows was a mixture of the sublime and the terrible. The train rolled through a morgue of animal carcasses—packhorses that had dropped dead during the previous two winters and had not decomposed in the high-altitude chill. The artist Frederick Dellenbaugh recoiled from two animals whose legs stuck straight up like a dead beetle’s. Team members admired the engineering feat as the train crossed trestles hundreds of feet high and followed a path gouged into the face of the inhospitable mountain. Burroughs brooded on the “cataclysmal” scenery and felt as if “I were seeing for the first time the real granite ribs of the earth.” As if to prove he could find a familiar face anywhere, partway up the mountain Hart Merriam spotted a group of scientists making the slog up the trail and shouted, “There are some of my boys!” A trio of colleagues from the U.S. Biological Survey were heading to the Alaskan bush to study life under the frugal field conditions familiar to scientists. The train backed up and the wildlife biologists enjoyed a strange and welcome ride to the top.
At the end of the line was a bleak, rocky expanse covered in mosses and lichens, and a desolate cluster of canvas huts known as White Pass City. A tattered American flag flapping in the cold rain marked the disputed boundary between the United States and Canada. Inside one of the huts, railroad officials had prepared a sumptuous meal for their esteemed visitors. Harriman asked Edward Curtis to photograph the assembled guests, but the poor midday light made the task impossible. The return trip down to Skagway was halted momentarily when someone noticed that Harriman was missing—the railroad man had wandered off to have a look around.
What the builders of the White Pass line did not know at the time was that the party in Skagway was closer to its end than its beginning. Gold fever in the Klondike was breaking; by 1900 Nome would be Alaska’s new destination for fortune seekers. William Dall, the dean of Alaska experts, declared in The Nation that Skagway was Alaska’s “town of the future,” but for reasons other than gold. His prediction about the White Pass railroad was premature but prescient: “It will not be long before a ride to the summit will form a part of every well-conducted tourist trip.”
Seven A.M. is rush hour at Skagway’s cruise ship dock, when the white giants moor and disgorge their thousands of passengers for a day of gold rush fun. I lingered in my comfortable hotel bed and watched the smiling Anchorage newsreaders rattle off the day’s top stories. The state had just broken another record for warmest spring. Towns as far away as Nome, which receives just a tiny fraction of the tourists Skagway sees, were eagerly preparing for the August maiden cruise of the Crystal Serenity through the Northwest Passage. Oil prices had climbed above fifty dollars, their highest level in almost a year, but not nearly enough to solve the ongoing budget crisis in Juneau. Police were investigating an illegal moose shooting near Denali. Bristol Palin had gotten married again.
With its corseted waitresses and fake streetcars, modern Skagway may have felt like a Gay Nineties amusement park, but unlike at Disney World, it wasn’t hard to get a peek at the machinery that made it function. Just a block off the main drag at 8:55 in the morning, one could see twentysomethings with wet hair hustling to work from their dormitory-like lodgings, juggling jumbo coffees and smartphones. Two brothers from Mumbai whom I met at the gym said they’d come for the summer on H-1B work visas. Their airfares would be reimbursed only if they completed their contracts. The Skagway library was empty on the inside but bustling outside as cruise ship workers on break for the afternoon used the free Wi-Fi to make Skype calls home in a half-dozen languages.
The train ride up the White Pass route was fun, if ridiculously overpriced—an adult day pass to Universal Studios Hollywood is cheaper. When we returned to town, the day’s cruise ships had already boarded for departure, and Skagway had emptied. The view down vacant Main Street toward the mountains was rather pretty.