SKAGWAY is one of my favorite Cities. Years ago there was a radio program called "Sargent Preston of the Yukon", which I listen to for many years. . Sargent Preston was a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. His territory was from Whitehorse to Dawson City to Skagway during the Klondike days.
Skagway is the oldest incorporated city in Alaska (incorporated in 1900. The first white residents were Capt. William Moore and his son J. Bearnard, who settled in 1887 on the eastside of the Skagway River valley. Skagway owes its birth to the Klondike Gold Rush. Skagway, and its nearby neighbor (a well-established Tlingit village) followed the White Pass, and Chilkoot trails to the Yukon goldfields.
In August of 1896 gold was discovered on the Klondike River. When steamers arrived in San Francisco and Seattle laden with two tons of gold, the nation was electrified. In July 1897, the first boatloads of stampeders bound for the Klondike landed at Skagway and Dyea. The prospectors anchored off Moore's homestead. Within months the population of Skagway exceeded 20,000.
By the summer of 1899 the stampede was all but over.The newly built White Pass & Yykon Route railway reached Lake Bennett, supplanting the Chilkoot Trail from Dyea. Dyea became a ghost town. Its post office closed in 1902, by 1903 its population consisted of 1 settler.Skagway's population dwindled to 500. But Skagway persisted, both as a port and as terminus of the White Pass & Yukon Route railway, which connected the town to Whitehorse, YT, in 1900.
Skagway's major tourist sites are Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, and the White Pass and Yukon Route railway.
We arrived from Juneau in Skagway at 7:00 am on Friday July 10th, 2009. The dock we used was the same dock which other ships had used in the past. Since there was no formal registry office earlier, the registation took place on the opposite side of the landing dock. The rocks showed what ships arrived and their Registry.
We did not intially sign up for a scheduled tour of Skagway. However, one of my goals was to visit the Gold Rush Cemetery. In order to visit it, we found a local tour outside the ship on the dock which gave us a tour of the City and the Cemetery. The images in this section are those I took just walking around or on the tour. I've put both together and treated them as one.
Skagway's most famous graveyard is the Gold Rush Cemetery. Records indicate that the first burial occured here early in 1898. With the exception of two familes, the cemetery was no longer used after 1908. One Hundred and Thirty-Three gravesites have been located here but burial records are available for only sixty of these.
One of the reasons I wanted to visit the Gold Rush Cemetery was to see the burial place of a con-artist and outlaw by the name of Jefferson Randolph Soapy Smith. His gang cheated prospectors, terrorized the town folk, and basically made life in Skagway unpleasant. Soapy Smith's life ended when he became a victim of a true Wild West-style-shoot-out on Skagway's wharf in July 1898. Soapy was a familar figure and noted bad actor in Denver for almost twenty years, He spent several years in Creede Colorado trying out and improving his plan of a con game. He was run out of Colorado and headed for Alaska during the Klondike Gold Rush days. He was killed by Frank Reid in a duel in Skagway on the Juneau Company wharf. Both are buried in the Gold Rush Cemetery.
In 1995 we took the Optional Tour of a ride to the top of White Pass on the the White Pass Train. It took several hours to go up and come down.
After the ride on the White Pass Train we took a helicoper ride to land on a Glacier.
