Inwood to Skagway

Inwood, Iowa to Skagway, Alaska—Doctor Peter Dahl moved his family to an utterly different, utterly unique world. Wife Vera liked Iowa just fine, but “whither thou goest…” The move struck eleven-year-old Lew, ten-year-old Robert, and even three year old Roger as pure excitement.

Buffalo Soldiers in Skagway

In his memoir, After the Gold Rush, Robert remembered waking up on a train rolling through Montana to see the majestic Rockies on the other side of his window. Inwood seemed a long way away. Sailing from Seattle up the inside passage past Ketchikan, Sitka, Juneau, Wrangell he watched the deck as deep green forests, and gigantic coastal mountains slid by. Inwood memories receded further.

And, finally, the ship tied up to the wooden dock that protruded out from Skagway where the mountains dropped down out of Yukon Territory to a sliver of land at sea level. Dad raced out on the dock to greet them.

A collapsed economy in Iowa in 1926 pushed the Dahl’s away. A little narrow-gauge railroad that ran virtually straight up out of Skagway to Carcross, Yukon Territory reached out for them. The White Pass and Yukon Railroad offered the doctor a salary to come care for its employees and, over Vera’s objections, Doctor Dahl accepted.

The Dahls never looked back.

Four hundred ninety-two people lived in Skagway, half of them white and half First Nations. Mountains hemmed in the town so completely that residents rarely left it. One could reach one neighboring town, Haines, just fifteen miles away—but only by boat.

Skagway’s citizens had little communication with the outside world. In summer ships came to the dock and tourists flooded the little town. For the rest of the year a ship carrying food, supplies, newspapers and mail arrived every two weeks or so.

Some of the Dahl’s new neighbors had come with the Gold Rush at the turn of the century and stayed when everyone else left. A few had drifted north later. Those people had children, some grown up when the Dahl’s arrived.

The Dahls fitted in.

Robert’s Memoir