Cruising to Alaska

Contemporary Review, Jan, 2003 by James Allan Evans

When we woke up the next day, the Norwegian Wind had already docked at Skagway. Or Skaguay, as the natives spell it. 'Skagway', spelled with a 'w', is an emendation of the United States Post Office. Skagway's year-round population is about 750, and it has no resident doctor or dentist, but it does have six policemen. Skagway's brief era of fame began on 17 July, 1897, when the steamer Portland docked in Seattle with gold from a strike in the Canadian Yukon, and an imaginative reporter wrote that she had more than a ton of solid gold aboard', taken from the Klondike which no one had heard of until then. Times where hard, and the report sparked a gold rush to the Klondike where a few got rich and most did not. From Skagway there were two mountain passes into Canada from the Alaska Panhandle: the White Pass and the more famous Chilkoot. The United States had purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867, but it had neglected to provide it with a proper government, with the result that in Skagway, law and order was in the hands of a gambler from Colorado named 'Soapy' Smith. His career ended in an exchange of bullets. The man who killed him also lost his life, but it was generally agreed that the sacrifice was worth it. But once the gold seekers crossed the Canadian border, the Northwest Mounted Police took control, and their idea of law and order was very different from what prevailed in Skagway. The gold seekers seemed to welcome it.

The narrow-gauge White Pass and Yukon Railway from Skagway to Lake Bennett in Canada was built by a group of British financiers led by Sir Thomas Tancred while the Klondike Gold Rush was still in full swing, but even though it was completed in only two years, the rush was over by the time it was finished. The little railway had to make a living transporting lead and zinc ore from mines in the Yukon to the Skagway dock. It came into its own again during the Second World War, when its little steam engines hauled in supplies for the United States Army which was building the Alaska Highway, and after the war, it branched into container ships and highway tractor-trailer units. But in 1982, world metal prices fell, the Yukon mines closed down and the trains stopped rolling on the little WP&YR. Then came the cruise ships. The WP&YR began to run excursion trains in the summer of 1988, and they found a ready clientele. In winter, the railway falls asleep again, and so does most of Skagway.

We boarded the train at the dock. Leaving Skagway it passed a cemetery with markers for the graves of gold seekers who got no further, and then, four miles out, the railroad began its climb, from sea level to 2,865 feet. The men who built this railway had to hang suspended by ropes from vertical cliffs, blasting and hacking out a roadbed. Yet deaths were remarkably few, and most of them were due not to accidents but to an outbreak of spinal meningitis, and another of scarlet fever. At Mile 16, a tunnel had to be blasted through the mountainside with gunpowder. But the job was done, and the WP&YR is now recognized as one of the thirty-six engineering achievements that have been declared International Civil Engineering Landmarks. The WP&YR brochure points out that it shares that distinction with the Eiffel Tower.