It's only been 110 years since white civilization came to Alaska. There were a few scattered towns in the Southeast before that -- Juneau, Sitka, and Wrangell, for example -- but until the Klondike gold rush, the great mass of Alaska was populated only by Natives who had never seen a white face. Then, in a single year, 1898, the population exploded. That year still stands as the greatest in Alaska's short but eventful history, for the influx of those people set the patterns of development ever since.
In the gold-rush years of 1897 and 1898, Skagway and its ghost-town twin city of Dyea were the logical places to get off the boat to head off on the trek to the gold fields near the new city of Dawson City, Yukon Territories. Skagway instantly grew from a single homestead to a population of between 15,000 and 25,000. No one knows exactly how many, partly because the people were flowing through too quickly to count and partly because there was no civil authority to count them. This was a wide-open boomtown, a true Wild West outpost that in its biggest years was completely without law other than the survival of the meanest.
Then, almost as quickly as it started, the rush ended and the town deflated.
But Skagway survived by showing off where it all happened. In 1896 there was a single log cabin in Skagway, in 1897 the word of the Klondike strike made it to the outside world, and in 1898 Skagway was a huge gold-rush boomtown. In 1899 the gold rush was ending, and in 1903, 300 tourists arrived in a single day to see where the gold rush happened. By 1908, local businessmen had started developing tourist attractions, moving picturesque gold-rush buildings to Broadway, the main street, to create a more unified image when visitors arrived on the steamers. By 1920, tourism had become an important part of the economy. By 1933, historic preservation efforts had started. Today, more money and more than 20 times as many visitors come through in a year as made the trip to the Klondike during the gold rush.
With 862 residents and more than 900,000 visitors annually, the "real" town has all but disappeared, and most of the people you'll meet are either fellow visitors or summer workers brought north to serve them. Most of the tourists are from cruise ships -- it's not unusual for several ships to hit town in a single morning, unleashing as many as 9,000 people at once up the wharf and into the one historic street. There are plenty of highway and ferry travelers, too, and outdoor enthusiasts come to do the Chilkoot Trail, just as the stampeders did.
Is it worth all those visits? Skagway, spared from fire and recognized so long ago for its history, may be the best-preserved gold-rush town in the United States. What happened here in a 2-year period was certainly extraordinary, even if the phenomenon the town celebrates is one of mass insanity based on greed, inhumanity, thuggery, prostitution, waste, and, for most, abject failure. While Canada was well policed by the Mounties, Skagway was truly lawless -- a hell on Earth, as one Mountie described it. Soapy Smith ruled this scam-pire with a team of con artists and toughs who milked the suckers for every dollar available. Half of the stories about Soapy are probably lies, but here's one too good not to repeat: He set up a telegraph office for suckers to wire their money home, but with no telegraph line. Such was his influence and high repute in the newspapers he controlled that the governor offered to put Smith officially in charge as a territorial marshal and rode with him in the 1898 Independence Day parade. Four days later, Smith was shot dead in a gunfight with Frank Reid, who led a vigilante committee upset over one of Smith's thefts. Reid died of wounds sustained in the shootout, too, but Soapy Smith's gang was broken. Of course, the gold rush was about to end anyway.
In 1976 the National Park Service began buying many of Skagway's best old buildings for the Klondike Gold Rush National Historic District, and now it owns about 15, having completed restoration in 1999. Broadway is a prosperous, freshly painted 6-block strip of gold-rush-era buildings. A few that look like real businesses turn out to be displays showing how it was back then. Other buildings restored by the Park Service are under lease to gift shops and such. Sadly, those historic businesses not preserved by the Park Service have been lost to the onslaught of cruise-ship oriented shopping: A curio shop operating since the gold rush was converted a few years ago, and in 2002 the longest-operating hotel in Alaska, which dated from the earliest days, became a T-shirt shop.
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