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Schemers and Dreamers

More often than not the schemers and dreamers left behind ghost towns like this one

Schemers and dreamers, over a century and a half, created ways to travel and transport material through the great subarctic North—a few ways. This difficult piece of the world fought back at every turn. But over time a stream of adventurous; brave; inventive; and, above all, greedy schemers came to do battle with it.

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The very first schemers in British Columbia came to install wire. Almost as soon as Samuel Morse invented the telegraph, men dreamed of using it to link continents. Dreams morphed into schemes. And schemes almost always morph into competition.

An American subsidiary of Western Union proposed to run telegraph wire from San Francisco through British Columbia, Yukon Territory and Alaska to and under the Bering Strait where Russians could take over and run it on through Siberia to Europe. Another company proposed to simply go under the Atlantic to Europe.

Installing telegraph line

The trans-Atlantic schemers won the race. But the Canada route men labored for two years through short summers and long bitter winters, inland from the Pacific Coast and then north. They left behind, not only a half-completed telegraph line, but also a trail. They departed in 1867.

In the early 1870’s a short-lived gold rush inspired another set of schemers to pick up where the telegraph men had left off. They put steamers on a series of lakes, connected the lakes with a series of trails and transported prospectors to the gold fields on the Omineca. When the gold petered out, the schemers disappeared. But they gifted British Columbia with 200 miles of road.

The first prospectors to use the trail rode an old steam sternwheeler up the lakes. The prospectors didn’t find much gold, but they paid their fares to the schemers. And that was the point. The schemers made enough money to replace the old steamer and still make a profit. And that was good because on the way home it simply came apart in one of the lakes.

On the Omineca River

More on the overland telegraph

Dropping It In

No plane could land here

Dropping it to the soldiers in the woods, that’s how flying anything to them usually ended. If they happened to work near a lake or river, the incoming plane could land. But more often they worked in deep woods. The flying part worked well, the dropping not so much.

Bush pilot Les Cook flew a transfer pump for a D-8 to the 340th. At about 4 pounds you could hold the pump in your hand. No big deal. Les dropped it into a bag of mail and dropped the bag of mail to the soldiers.

More on Les

The trick was getting it from here to the men in the woods

The pump, on top of the mail, survived the drop in good shape. The mail became instant confetti resulting in a very disappointing mail call.

Les brought a quarter of fresh beef—precious cargo for men used to much poorer fare. A quarter of fresh beef, dropped from a plane going a hundred miles an hour, bounces. It bounces several times.

The cooks managed to salvage about half of it.

Steel drift pins weighing twenty-five pounds apiece came packed in wooden cases.  (I have no idea why the soldiers needed drift pins weighing that much, don’t ask) Les and a helper loaded several cases along with several cases of canned vegetables. Les pushed it all out the door and headed for home.

Hitting the trees, both drift pin cases and canned vegetable cases burst open. The drift pins rammed into the trees like some sort of ancient, medieval weapon. The cans of vegetables burst to scatter their contents over the scene.

Several cans of beets had nestled among the canned vegetables. Beat juice coated the trees and the medieval weapons, looked exactly like blood.

The plane that did it all in Yukon–Les Cook’s

I wish I had a photo.

More on Les Cook

Pushing Over a Tree

Bulldozers gathered in the woods

Pushing a tree over isn’t a skill most of us need to acquire. But then most of us aren’t working as “catskinners” on the Alaska Highway Project in 1942. If you know which levers to pull and which pedals to stomp, you just line the big cat up with its blade out front, pile in on the tree trunk and then knock it down. Right? Well… No.

More on Bulldozers on the Alaska Highway

Ideally you push the tree down relatively gently. In Yukon even ninety-foot-tall trees tend to have a shallow root system. Ease up to the tree, raise the big steel blade as high as you can, ease into the tree and when you’re in contact, apply power. The big treads turn, throw back some dirt, and, if you’re lucky, the tree eases over, its roots snap and pop coming out of the dirt, and the tree topples.

Pushing one over

But luck isn’t always with you. Sometimes the roots go a bit deeper. You ease up, apply power, the treads spin…  and spin… and spin some more. The tree just stands there.

Now you have a problem. The only way to topple this one down is to apply all the awesome power and momentum your D-8 can muster.

You back up and run the dozer at the stubborn tree and you ram it as hard as you can. The trunk goes over. A D-8 caterpillar is hard to resist.

But, as often as not, the treetop whips back. The trunk falls forward, the top flies back—in the direction of guess who. Stay on the seat and you’re not going to like the outcome. You bail out and leave the treetop and the dozer to argue without you.

You carry an axe and saw because when the treetop and the dozer stop arguing, you have to cut up the tree and clear it off the dozer before you can get back in business.

Clearing the road

Inevitably a shavetail, a young second lieutenant, will decide you need to wear a steel helmet, as though that would change the outcome when the treetop landed on your head. And a steel helmet makes it tough to look up and keep an eye on the treetop. Unless the earnest young officer stands right beside you, you ignore his silly instructions.

How catskinners learn today

In the spring, mosquitoes boil out of the ground as a tree uproots and crashes down. Sometimes a mother bear and a cub or two emerge—cubs bewildered; mother enraged.

Luckily even a bear won’t tangle with a D-8.

More on Caterpillar in WWII

Gangplanks and Leonard Cox

 

The most memorable gangplank put him on one of these.

Gangplanks punctuated Leonard Cox’s time with the 340th Engineers. A gangplank in Seattle carried him onto the ship that took him up the inside passage to Skagway. He didn’t know it, but his regiment would defend America by helping build the Alaska Highway through Northern Canada.

More from the 340th

The Army drafted Leonard out of Kokomo, Indiana shortly after Pearl Harbor, put him through basic training and then shipped him to the brand new 340th Engineering Regiment. At Skagway he and his fellows climbed off the ship and moved to tents at the airfield. Leonard stayed only a few days before the regiment dispatched his company up the mountain to Yukon and on to Whitehorse.

Leonard remembered seven cars and four engines on the train and the high railroad bridge. “That was about my highest high during the eighteen months there.”

At Whitehorse the most memorable of his gangplanks carried him to the deck of a paddlewheel boat headed up the Yukon River to Nisutlin Bay at Teslin.

The trip from Whitehorse to Teslin took seven days, and Leonard and his buddies enjoyed every minute of it.  With nothing to do they loafed, admired the scenery and watched the boatmen work. Every few miles the boat would pull to the bank. Local Indians, paid by the steamship company, cut and stacked wood that the boatmen loaded up to run their boiler.

The “good” Yukon

 

They travelled upstream—not a big deal when the quarter mile wide river presented a slow, steady current. Periodically, though, the river narrowed abruptly, sometimes to as little as 100 feet. Narrowing the Yukon to 100 feet turned it into a raging cataract, a force more powerful than the steam engine.

The “bad” Yukon

Heading into a narrow stretch, the boatmen pulled close to the bank. One jumped ashore, pulled a cable to a tree and secured it. On board the engine did its utmost, the paddlewheel churned, and the boatmen supplemented its power by turning a hand winch, pulling in the cable.

With the cable winched in, having gained a few feet, the boatmen anchored securely, cast another line ashore and repeated the process. The amazed soldiers watched as the boat moved, infinitely slowly, a few feet at a time, through the narrow patches.

Their seven-day trip to Teslin covered 150 miles.

Paddlewheel Graveyard in Dawson

Bad Guys Came to Skagway Too

White or black, this is where bad guys went

The good soldiers of the 93rd

Bad guys came to Skagway sprinkled in among the 1200 good soldiers of the 93rd.  Bad guys came sprinkled among the good soldiers of the white regiments on the Alaska Highway Project too. But a bad black soldier got a lot more attention from the Army.

In white regiments bad guys were just that—bad guys.  In black regiments, bad guys were proof of the wisdom of the Army’s racist policies.

About 3 pm one afternoon at the end of April, a furious Colonel Johnson ordered a roll call, in formation, for all of his companies. The regiment stayed in formation until every soldier—out on detail, sick in quarters, on guard duty—every soldier was accounted for.  Rumors swirled through the regiment.

About 10:00 am the next morning, Johnson summoned Captain Boyd, commander of Company C. In the Colonel’s office a local trapper clutched the dog tags of a soldier who had brutally raped his elderly wife. To Boyd’s horror, the dog tags identified a member of his C Company.

 The previous morning the soldier had slipped away and walked up the mountain.  When he knocked at the door of the cabin in the woods and asked for a drink of water, the trapper’s wife invited him in.  She vigorously resisted his attentions, but he was younger and stronger…

A cabin like this one

Finished, the bad guy ran through the woods toward the airfield.  Following his trail, the trapper found the chain and dog tags hanging on a bush.

If you’re going to be a bad guy, don’t leave these hanging behind

The accused soldier was examined by the Regimental Surgeon, tried by a General Court Marshall and sentenced to 40 years confinement.

 

Segregation came to Skagway in 1942.

The Skagway Hotel might have welcomed a black soldier. The Army didn’t give them a chance.

Segregation meant that soldiers, at least the black enlisted soldiers, in Skagway in 1942 lived separate, not just from their officers, but from everyone else as well.  Six year old Carl Mulvihill spotted black soldiers quartered across the alley from his house. Excited, he waved and called. They ignored him. Only later did he learn that their officers had strictly forbidden them to talk or visit with white neighbors.

Our friend, Pvt Leonard Larkins came to Skagway with the 93rd

More on the man in the photo–Leonard Larkins

Twenty-two in 1942, Sgt. John Bollin of F Company landed with the 93rd in Skagway.  He had known segregation in Louisiana and at Camp Livingston.  “We didn’t exist before the war and we don’t exist now in a war.” It was the same in Skagway.

Sgt. Albert France of A Company, “one thing I remember quite well is that segregation existed even though we were a part of the United States Army”.

In Skagway as in Louisiana, the army embraced outright discrimination and made it policy. White residents of Skagway didn’t know quite what to make of that. They reacted to the blacks with curiosity—cautious curiosity.

On one occasion, residents, checking the credibility of a white southern officer who fancied himself a comedian, asked a group of black soldiers if they had tails.  An exasperated soldier dropped his pants and asked, “Do you see it.”

Private Paul Francis remembered being marched to the movie theatre in Skagway.  For the first time in his life he didn’t have to sit in the balcony. The only patrons, black soldiers could sit where they liked.  Francis understood that he remained segregated. But, still, “It was a special time alone.”

Black men could come to the movies, they couldn’t come with white men.

Private Joseph Haskins of the 93rd told John Virtue, years later, “It was modern day slavery for the Negro troops.  They kept you where they wanted you.  We wasn’t allowed to go into villages.”

Black soldiers had come to Skagway before…

Peeing in a Coffee Can?

Dusty’s “no no”

Peeing in a coffee can, an art “Dusty” Hannon had no interest in mastering, led her to carry her very own chamber pot on the train to Carcross. Well, of course. Everybody in Skagway and in sister town Carcross, for that matter, knew “Dusty”, accepted her logic. Skagway welcomed and took its true flavor from the unique characters who made their way to it over the years.

Skagway had a normal side.

More on Skagway

A man named Kirmse offered a jewelry store, his friend Henry Ask, a grocery and dry goods store.  You could get a shave and a haircut at Selmer’s barbershop.  A Mr. Rasmussen moved from Sweden to Skagway and opened The Alaska Bank, an actual concrete structure.

Bush pilot, Verne Bookwalter, needed an air strip so the town cleared stumps, rocks and abandoned shacks from a field along the river. Harriett Pullen’s Pullen House became a Skagway Institution. In 1926 the railroad brought Dr. Peter Dahl and his wife Vera to town. Dahl worked from a small office at the White Pass Hospital, a two story 12 bed hospital on Broadway St.

The Train out of Skagway

But Vera Dahl, the doctor’s wife, became best friends with Dusty Hannon (whose nickname came from her oft repeated, “well that’s not so dusty”). The ladies travelled regularly on the train up to Carcross for marathon bridge sessions. Dusty carried her chamber pot up on the train. We’re not sure how Vera addressed the problem.

Dusty’s Solution

“Old Man Davis” who claimed to have fought in the Civil War, made his own, unique contribution to the atmosphere in Skagway.  He never bathed because he considered bathing an unnatural activity, incompatible with good health.  Winds blew frequently in Skagway and residents knew to be up wind when they encountered Davis. (107)

Ed Gedney, errant son of an upper-class New York family made his way to Skagway—no one knew how or why. Sober, Ed was charming.  Drunk he was a staggering, falling down disaster. (108)

From mid-June through August, Steamships loaded with tourists piled into the harbor three to four times a week.(119)  A sheer rock cliff bordered the dock where they tied up, and it was covered with painted emblems. Among the emblems a white skull represented Soapy Smith, the most famous con man and gangster of the Gold Rush days.

Soapy’s grisly emblem on the ship wall

After mid-September, the ships came less frequently. Trains up to Carcross ran only two to three times a week and snow drifts blanketed the tracks. Mail to Skagway that came almost daily during summer came only twice a month in the winter. The little town entered a period of almost total isolation.

More on Soapy Smith

Towns Sprang from Nothing

 

What the Gold Rush Looked Like

Three towns sprang from nothing in 1896, created by Skookum Jim and his partners. They created them from a distance, from Dawson up on the Klondike. But, fittingly, Skagway, Carcross and Whitehorse sprang up in Jim’s old stomping ground.

Defending Skagway

First the town of Skagway.

A boom town of mythic proportions sprouted on the precarious strip at the mouth of the Skagway River, the boundary between the towering mountains of the coastal range and the water of the Lynn Canal.

When the gold rush ended, as suddenly as it had begun, the saloons and brothels emptied and the little city almost, but not quite, disappeared.  The detritus of the boom remained—empty buildings, some of them only shacks, scattered across the little bit of flat land at the edge of the fjord.

Left to Those Who Decided to Remain

The gold rush left Skagway with a harbor, a narrow-gauge railway to the Yukon interior, an enduring place in the legend of the rush—and a few people who, for a variety of individual reasons, chose to remain.

Freight into the Yukon came through Skagway and up to Carcross and Whitehorse on the railroad.  Tourists came in the summer to explore the legendary country of the great Gold Rush.  The railroad had to have engineers and brakemen and conductors and mechanics and management and it took people to keep the docks open.  The WP&YT headquartered in Skagway, so its employees lived there.

The Railroad

Harriett Pullen had originally brought her three young sons to Skagway with the miners, making a living by selling pies.  She remained behind when they left and opened a hotel.

Joseph and Theresa Rapuzzi had originally migrated from Italy to Seattle.  When Joseph went to try his luck in the Klondike, Theresa remained behind with their five children.  Joseph didn’t strike it rich, but he found a home for his family in Skagway.  Theresa, ‘Ma’, Rappuzzi, ran the Washington Fruit Store.

Their son, Charlie, drove trains over the pass.  Their daughter, Della was secretary to the General Manager of the railroad.  Son George worked for the WP&YT as a machinist.  And son Louis became Federal Deputy Marshall for Skagway and the surrounding area in 1930.

More about the Gold Rush

A Taste for Exotic Furs—And Gold

 

Skookum Jim’s Claim–the start of it all

A taste for exotic furs swept across the civilized world. Exotic furs grew on exotic animals and a lot of them lived at the far northern reaches of the American Continent.

More on Furs

On that remote portion of the globe, Native Americans, First Nations if you’re in Canada, had developed a tribal civilization in peaceful isolation. They had nothing anybody else wanted, so nobody bothered them.

But they had exotic animals with exotic furs. And people would pay for those furs. A few adventurers made their way north into that desperately inhospitable, dangerous region. A few idealistic missionaries followed them, determined to convert the natives to Christianity. Canada sent a few Mounties to keep order.

Three quarters of the way through the 19th century, civilization across Northern Canada and Alaska, consisted of native tribes, trappers, missionaries and a sprinkling of Mounties.

Then small gold strikes occurred in Sitka and Windham Bay. In 1880 Joseph Juneau and Richard Harris made a significant strike in Juneau. If people had to develop a taste for exotic furs, a taste for gold came built in.

Jim after he got rich

A trickle of especially hardy prospectors began making their way North to join the trappers and the missionaries and the Mounties—and the First Nations.

The few early prospectors blended in.  They rested, refitted and even made homes at the trading post towns and villages.  Some took native brides.  And they taught the natives the value of gold.

Down on the Alaska Peninsula the Tlingit tribe controlled the difficult routes over the coastal mountains into Yukon.  They used those routes—one over the White Pass and the other over the Chilkoot—to trade with the tribes of the interior.

In the 1890’s Tlingit native, “Skookum Jim”, worked as a packer hauling goods between the coastal and interior Tlingits over the Passes. But Jim and his friend, “Tagish Charlie” had learned to value gold.

The work was just as hard as it looks

In 1896 George Carmack, a prospector from Seattle, talked Jim and Charlie into an expedition north to the Klondike, to Rabbit Creek. And on August 17 the three men made the massive gold strike that would reverberate around the world.

More on the Klondike Gold Rush

 

Defending Skagway

The Lieutenant’s Responsibility, Peaceful Skagway

Defending Skagway, Alaska from the marauding Japanese posed more problems than you might think. Luckily, to one young Lieutenant’s eternal relief, it turned out that Skagway didn’t need defending.

In June 1942 Lt. Darrel M. Schumacher of the 340th Engineering Regiment cooled his heels in Skagway. He and his men would walk to the Teslin River as soon as the 93rd built them a trail. In the meantime, they waited.

More on Skagway

Then the Japanese bombed the American Naval Base at Dutch Harbor in the Aleutians, bombed it twice. And, adding insult to injury, they occupied American Territory at Kiska and Attu.

More on the Aleutians

The Skagway a Japanese Pilot Might Have Seen

Down in Skagway Lt. Schumacher felt the weight of awful responsibility. Clearly the Japanese had come for Alaska. He proposed to evacuate women, children and old men to safety, called a town meeting to organize the evacuation. The Lt. hadn’t reckoned with Alaska attitude. The citizens of Skagway came from stern stuff.

The Lieutenant outlined his elaborate plan and the town reacted. They had, they informed him, but one old man, “and he could beat the (censored) out of me.”

If they wouldn’t evacuate, he had no choice. He would have to defend them in place. His soldiers had Springfield rifles and a few 37mm guns.

Unfortunately, they had no ammunition, but soldiers at Chilkoot Barracks, a few miles away by water at Haynes, Alaska might have some. Schumacher and his men quickly boarded a launch at the Skagway dock and headed for Haynes.

But soldiers at Chilkoot felt their own awful responsibility to defend the civilians of Haynes. And they shared Schumacher’s problem, had guns but no ammo. Hoping to borrow some from the soldiers at Skagway they had set out in their own launch. The two launches met at the halfway point.

Returning to Skagway the lieutenant learned that ammo lay in the hold of a ship at the Skagway Dock. He and his men searched frantically, but never did find it.

The Little Harbor At Skagway

Luckily, the Japanese juggernaut, busy 1,900 miles away at the very end of the Aleutian Island Chain, had no designs on Skagway.

Where would the Army be without Lieutenants?

More on Skagway History