| On the train, we passed the old Skagway Gold Rush Cemetery just outside of town. The woman on the train told me that it was a couple of miles from the station. Since we had plenty of time before the ship sailed, I decided to hoof it up to the cemetery. The walk took about thirty minutes each way. |
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| Jefferson Smith's grave. Boo! I'll tell you more about him later. |
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| Frank Reid's grave. Yea! I'll tell you more about him later too. (Here's a hint. He killed Smith.) |
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| Reverend Archibald John Campbell, MD. I'm not really sure who he was. I cannot find any information about him, but he was a minister and a doctor, so that's pretty good, huh? He was also born in Scotland, for what that's worth. |
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Behind the
cemetery is a beautiful 300-foot waterfall. It is Reid Falls. Yep, named
after Frank Reid. He was the good guy. More on that later. Click here for 25 seconds of the water actually falling. |
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| Martin and Lucy Itjen. Martin Itjen was responsible for making Skagway a tourist town after the turn of the century. And I don't think that's really the largest nugget in the world. |
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| On the way back, I walked through the residential part of town. This is the Skagway City School. It's remarkable, but this small school is PK-12. |
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| Wait, I walked out of town and when I came back the city turned back to the gold rush days! So this was Skagway back in the olden days. I think that building on the right side of the street with the dome (center of the photo) is... |
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| ... the Golden North Hotel. At least it looks a lot like it in that old picture. If you believe in that sort of thing, people say it's haunted. But there is no such thing as ghosts, so no it isn't. |
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| But there are such things as whores. Alright, they are probably replica whores. They are hanging out at the Red Onion Saloon. Can you make good money playing a whore for tourists? |
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| The Mascot Saloon. It's a museum now. |
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| The guy in black at the end of the bar is Jefferson "Soapy" Smith. He got his nickname in Denver where he sold bars of soap for $5. The trick was that he told people that each bar had a ten, twenty or a hundred dollar bill wrapped in the package. And as with any good con, he had an accomplice who would purchase a bar and amazingly enough tear it open and discover a $100 bill. This seems to be the 19th century version of the internet Nigerian bank scam. |
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| There's old Soapy. He showed up in Skagway in 1897 to pull the same kind of scams on the Alaskan miners. By July 1898, Soapy and his gang were getting out of hand. A local man had been robbed of 12-15 lbs. of gold and the citizenry had finally had enough. A vigilante group was formed to deal with the problem and a local engineer and surveyor, Frank Reid (remember him?), became its leader. |
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On July 8,
1898, Soapy Smith and Frank Reid had a shootout at the dockside. Both men
shot. Smith was shot through the heart and killed instantly. Reid was
mortally wounded and died twelve days later. This marker commemorates that
duel. In fact it is very close to the police station. I don't know if they
build the station near this spot for a reason, but they might have. The
marker reads:
FATAL DUEL |
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| That might be the best of the glaciers that I saw on the trip. I don't know
its name, but it's somewhere south of Skagway. Click here for an early morning whale hunt the next day from our balcony. Look for the splashes of water at approximately :04 (center), :19 (center), :31 (left) and :40 (center). Those are the whales. Also be sure to pay attention to the thrilling commentary from my father and my sister. |
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