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From Primedia Publications
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Skagway, Alaska (cont.)
Gold rush days come to life.
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.

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.
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