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Skagway, originally Moorsville, after Captain Moore, a visionary riverboat captain who was the first to settle on the floodplain of the Skagway river after his premonition that it would be a key transportation corridor to the mining areas of the Yukon.  In fact his Native American guide was one of the men that discovered the gold fields and when word got out the solitary Moore cabin soon became awash in an instant tent city of stampeders, most of which were of the inteligencia, who soon bypassed Moore's legitimate claim to the area, renaming the town with the original Native name Skagway, where the river meets the white caps.

Skagway became the secondary route to the gold fields, far inland.  The first was Dyea, gateway to the famous Chilcoot trail.  The Skagway route went through the adjacent White Pass, longer in distance but somewhat less challenging yet still far too grueling in those days for all but the most fit and hardy.  Men who brought wives and children, still smitten with the gold fever insanity, abandoned them to fend for themselves on an average wage that was in those days for women, the equivalent of our present early 21st century wage of three dollars an hour.

The two passes, the White and the Chilcoot, were written about by, among others, Jack London himself, who, financed by relations, also was among the numbers that made the horrendous trek in those days from the deepest fjord in North America to the Yukon gold fields.  It was described as a horses' graveyard, which perished on these routes in inordinate numbers, overworked and in conditions ill suited for their sustenance.  Those who learned to use dog teams fared far better.

In the end, the only ones who got anywhere were those who got there first and those who supplied the stampeders.  In spite of that realization, they still kept coming in droves.  And there is still gold out there.  How do I know?  I usually find myself, in my world travels, not far from potential gold fields.

This one guy had a gold hockey puck once... it was not actually gold, but rather it was goaled; it was used to score a goal.  There is a fabric that is not made of cloth.  It's a brick of gold -- that's a fab brick.

The town of Skagway, Alaska.
Copyright (c) 2005 by Paul A. L. Hall.  All rights reserved.