#24: Puttin' the Happy in the Birthday!

Remember when it was so important to be six and a half, six and three-quarters? I don't know about you, but I'm sixty-six now, and I don't measure my years like this anymore. I measure them in decades.

I've had some pretty cool birthdays, but one of the most adventuresome was seven years ago when I turned 59, one year shy of rolling into my sixth decade. I was driving motor coaches out of Skagway AK and on May 29, 2011, I opened my eyes to the Alaskan sunlight that had been pouring through the crack in the blackout curtains since 4:30 a.m. I no sooner got my teeth brushed and pants on when Shari two doors down the hallway texted, "Happy Birthday. Coffee's on."

"Want to go geocaching?" she asked when I arrived, cream from the community refrigerator in my hand for the both of us. "There're geocaches in Skagway!"

Two passions Shari pursues. Crosswords and geocaching. Who would believe there is such adventure in each?

We invited two others to join up: Stanley, my roommate, and Teri from the dispatch office. After a good breakfast, the four of us headed out to the lot behind our hotel and under my window to receive instruction from Shari on how to geocache, me side-tracked with a birthday call from a son.

Standing below my window, talking to Blake

Instruction from Shari

"Geocaching is pretty simple," Shari repeated when I hung up and started to pay attention. People all over the world hide things for other people to find. You can both hide a cache and find one. Into a small tin, baggie, box, or whatever, you insert a small surprise and a cache log where you write down your name and where you're from. The rules are simple. You must leave something new behind or leave what's there, there; and, always always, sign the log before re-hiding the cache.

The game is the pursuit. The reward is the finding. Which involves a gizmo sort of like a compass. I'm not sure how it all works, but out in the parking lot we turned in circles, waiting for the needle to pick up and point.

Shari's neon yellow gizmo guided us northeast through the parking lot, across the road you see in the picture, and up past Captain William Moore's cabin three blocks away. We paused for picture-taking. Teri told us that if we put one foot forward and turn sideways we'd all look skinnier. Really?

Me, Stanley, and Shari posing our skinny angles

Do you think?

We moseyed on, heading north and deeper into the picture you see, behind the trees and over to an abandoned White Pass engine and box cars. Stanley poked her nose is one of the box cars. "Hey!" she said. "This is great place to come make out!"

I looked and said, "Hey! This is a great place to live!"

"A great place to live!"

Our needle started going a little wonky. Shari told us that when we're within 25 feet of the cache, it'll do this. You have to just start snooping around. So snoop around we did. Teri found it. Who'd o' thunk it was there? In a crevice of one rusty hunk of metal.

For Teri, Stanley, and me it was thrill. Shari stood by with a grin. We gave Teri the honor of pulling out her find, and the excitement of seeing what was inside took me back to childhood with my sisters, when we tried to drum up adventure, getting by on a whole lot of imagination. This took no imagination. Just look at what we found!

Stanley, Teri, Shari

Our cache!

Me signing the log

AB Building -- Arctic Brotherhood

Our next little adventure took us to a "virtual" geocache at the AB Building on Broadway, Skagway's main road. This is the most photographed building in all of Alaska--though don't ask me how anyone actually knows this. We had to find the date on the building, easy; a plaque on the wall, easy peasy; and something else inside. I don't remember.

Outside again, I wanted a photo of Stanley standing in the same spot a prospector once wearily posed under a heavy pack before setting off to find gold six hundred miles to the north. So here's Stanley doing her thing, not weary at all and with a whole lot of sass. And ass.

"There's a  cache on the way to Dyea," Shari told us. "Shall we go out there?"

"Yes, please."

Dyea is the "other" gold rush town of 1898. Today it's a ghost of a place, silenced and secreted away in a century's growth of forest claiming the ground that rises out of sea. Glacial rebound in the area is about an inch a year, which in Dyea reveals itself significantly because the inlet is long and shallow. What had in 1898 been a dock, is now tide flats. What had been shoreline is now woods.

Both Skagway and Dyea were trailheads for the two routes over the Coastal Mountains, into the Yukon and fantastical gold. Prospectors who chose to go by way of the Chilkoot Pass instead of White Pass rowed four miles from Skagway, or they steamed into the long shallow bay of Dyea on a steamer out of San Francisco or Seattle. Today you drive. The road is a circuitous nine miles and around AB Mountain, around Long Bay, up the mouth of the Tyea River, over the bridge, and back down into Dyea.

Along the gravel road beside Long Bay we braked hard. An eagle had serenely perched itself on the branch of a Sitka Spruce and was looking down Long Bay without a care in the world. Suddenly, a second eagle swooped in, the two lifted together and circled south, landing in a tree behind us. I'm never not amazed at how tiny a sound these majestic birds have. One might except a mighty shriek. Not so. We tumbled out to take a better look...and to listen. 

Back in the truck and coming around the north end of the bay, the needle jumped in Shari's gizmo. Shari found the cache hanging off a tree, quite soggy. Whoever hid this cache, didn't understand that Skagway and Dyea are in the Tongass National Rain Forest, and it took some time for Shari to peel back the wet paper so we could all sign the log.

Finally, Dyea. I love the place. Teri had never been.

The first stop was Slide Cemetery where 63 men lost their lives on April 3, 1898, in an avalanche that caught them under a 30-foot cloud snow. Today the cemetery a somber place, a quiet place, where sunlight dapples in through the spruce and onto gigantic, prickly devil's club.

Stanley, Teri

It is, of course, hard for Stanley to remain reverent for long. Or was it me who suggested that one of us really needed to crawl into a sunken hole and have an eulogy said? Whatever, it was Stanley who of course jumped in.

Here Lies Stanly, A Pirate Who Died Not at Sea But Under the Snow
A Story of Woe Too Sad To Be Told

Where the town of 10,000 once was is now forest, with few reminders of its former hustle bustle, the very air electrified by hope and energy and con artists.

1998  >  2018
Middle building on the left is all that stands. And see how big the row of planted trees is now?

So tell me, now that I've gotten you to Dyea, is there a more satisfying place in the world?

The Old Wharf, 1897, 1898, 1899

Creek running down into Lynn Canal

I find Dyea to be a place where there is no boundary between me and the space touching my skin. I am the space, in limitless time, in the very breath of God.

And dare I get so mundane as to say, where else can you find a glacier fed creek bed full of gold? Winking up all shiny and yellow, and drawing me at least down into the frigid water?

It was of course fool's gold and I hobbled out with feet so cold I couldn't move my toes.

Driving back to town in company of new friends--and my first but not last geocaching adventure behind me--my 59th birthday seemed a magical thing. But the day was not yet over.

Back at the hotel, Jazz, a young girl from Michigan, had baked me not one cake but two! Two? Yes, two for all the HAPA drivers there to celebrate. And Davey had his own birthday gift for me. Just to catch you up, the year before, just two days before my 58th birthday, a preacher in town had told me I was too old to fit in. It was Davey I'd found in my tears, it was Davey who'd wrapped me in his arms and decried the preacher man who'd dare say such a thing. So what better way to end my birthday, another year older than the year before, with Davey singing me "Happy Birthday"?

I've had seven birthdays since that day, but as nice as they've been they don't quite measure up to the one where adventure and friends in AK put the Happy in my Birthday!

#20: Skagway Gets A Facelift: Gold Rush to Tourism

(reposted and updated)

Sixth Avenue: Looking west from Broadway
Today Hotel Mondomin sits kitty-corner, today's Eagles Bldg

Skagway began as a gold rush town with mud-sticky streets and a rash of tents and shacks: A “scrap heap” one early tourist described her at the turn of the last century. But once her mud-and-puddle youth was over and early adolescence in full swing, the inevitable "teenage" self-consciousness forced a sprucing up. And her get-rich-quick psyche matured into a more realistic psychology of economic sustainability: Tourism.

           

Paradise Alley

In 1907 she rooted out many of the old gold rush shacks, and business­ owners moved the better buildings to Broadway, relocating them along the railroad track. Shops and saloons, restaurants, hotels, and sundry offices from Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Avenues were shifted ninety degrees and then reset to face the main thorough­fare, their Victorian false storefronts aligned to make a tidy wall. Curlicues, bright paint, some recessed doorways, elaborate lathing, these ornate facades anchored signs that swung over Broadway to announce the various establish­ments, often displaying decorations like boots and horseshoes, clocks and barber poles to distinguish one from the other. Fire towers and churches were left on the cross streets. Brewery chimneys—amidst the hodgepodge of cigar shops, saloons, and cribs (tiny shacks where the lower class prostitutes plied their trade)—were confined to the alleyways with names like Hiroshima, French, and Paradise, an altogether shady business in the shadows, brisk and uninterrupted. But out of sight.

By 1910 the town’s once heady population of 10- to 20,000 (depending on who you listened to) had dribbled to 872. But if the Skagway Commercial Club is to be believed,  she was coming into her own as a port of tourism, editorializing that she was “the natural headquarters for tourists and sightseers..., richer than the imagination can paint, greater in majesty and beauty than the far-famed Switzerland, and unsurpassed in loveliness of nature.” Nested between mountains at the mouth of a glacial river, approachable only by ship, and her only road out a narrow-gauge train track snaking up from the narrow valley floor to the fabled White Pass, she was a gem in the wilderness.

The Rapuzzi Family
Outside Their Washington Grocery Store

Yet there was still a cluttered and disorderly feel about town: mismatched boardwalks, too many seedy alleyways, empty lots vacated by yesterday’s hordes. In an online book published by the Parks Department, Robert Spude wrote that in order to walk down Broadway the pedestrian’s path would meander around the fruit crates at Rapuzzi’s store, by the sandwich sign at the Alaska Steamship Office, under the canvas awnings—some with signs on them—and through a host of space defined by the overflow and overhangs, openings and closing, of each narrow building.

Not the polished look a tourist-flirting Skagway was after.

She evened out her boardwalks, consolidated the red light district to just Paradise Alley between Sixth and Seventh Streets and closed the gap between the beach and Third Avenue by plucking two- and three-story buildings from other parts of town. When in 1914 the Red Onion Saloon and Brothel was hauled by a single horse from Sixth and State to its present location on the corner of Second and Broadway, Skagway found herself a mature, pretty little town with Victorian false storefronts corseted in tidy rank, flanking the railroad tracks and with the blush of youth and health in her face.

Broadway 

The wear of time began taking its toll, however;  the sting of winter winds chafing her cheeks, peeling her paint, gravity sagging her storefronts and slanting her floors. The Depression years all but did her in and Skagway’s Chamber of Commerce began talking of a face lift. Not until June 1976, though, did a congressional bill establish the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, a necessary first step if Skagway was to undergo not only a much needed face lift but reconstruction as well. A decade passed. Finally, when she was 86 years old (her downtown core absorbed by the park and well past her prime) she got the first of her reconstructive surgeries in a ongoing historic preservation project that makes today’s Skagway “one of the best preserved examples of the turn-of-the-last-century architecture.” This is the Skagway we see today.

Notice. No franchises. No golden arches, no Walmart, no Kentucky Fried. Not even a theater. Nothing to disrupt the illusion of yesteryear. Well, one disruption—Radio Shack down on Fourth, better known to the locals as the tanning salon, single booth in the back. Okay, one other disruption. But not in the historic district. The Harley Davidson shop up on 8th and Broadway falls into a block that simply has to “look” historical. Besides, it's not really a Harley Davison. It only sells T-shirts. And there is one other teensy-weensy exception. On the window right across the street from the old train depot you’ll see a Starbuck’s logo. Don’t let it fool you. This is just another place to shop where Mr. Star and Mr. Buck, I hear, are still selling their lattés and espresso. The rumor going around town is that when they landed in Skagway in 1897 they discovered their entire ton of goods to be nothing but 2,000 pounds of coffee. They’re still trying to get rid of them. But leave these three exceptions out of it—Radio Shack, Harley Davidson, and Starbucks—the rest of the town is  authentic, which makes walking down Broadway and some of the city’s side streets a step back in time. You can tromp the wooden boardwalks and touch the walls of living history. What do they tell?

They tell a lot. Echoes beckon, linger, and whisper in every doorway, up the stairs, and all around. 

“a gem in the wilderness”

 ______________________

If you're interested in more on Skagway, you can purchase my book Skagway: It's All About The Gold. Click on the cover image in the left sidebar.

#12: Gold Rush To Tourism: Skagway Undergoes A Facelift

Sixth Avenue: Looking west from Broadway
Today Hotel Mondomin sits kitty-corner, today's Eagles Bldg

Skagway began as a mud-sticky street with a rash of tents and shacks--a “scrap heap” one early tourist described her at the turn of the last century. But once her mud-and-puddle youth was over and early adolescence in full swing, with inevitable "teenage" self-consciousness, she began sprucing up. And her get-rich-quick psyche matured into a more realistic psychology of economic sustainability: Tourism.

Paradise Alley

In 1907 she rooted out many of the old gold rush shacks, and business­ owners moved the better buildings to Broadway, relocating them along the railroad track. Shops and saloons, restaurants, hotels, and sundry offices from Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Avenues were shifted ninety degrees and then reset to face the main thorough­fare, their Victorian false storefronts aligned to make a tidy wall. Curlicues, bright paint, some recessed doorways, elaborate lathing, these ornate facades anchored signs that swung over Broadway to announce the various establish­ments, often displaying decorations like boots and horseshoes, clocks and barber poles to distinguish one from the other. Fire towers and churches were left on the cross streets. Brewery chimneys—amidst the hodgepodge of cigar shops, saloons, and cribs (tiny shacks where the lower class prostitutes plied their trade)—were confined to the alleyways with names like Hiroshima, French, and Paradise, an altogether shady business in the shadows, brisk and uninterrupted. But out of sight.

By 1910 the town’s once heady population of 10- to 20,000 (depending on who you listened to) had dribbled to 872. But if the Skagway Commercial Club is to be believed,  she was coming into her own as a port of tourism, editorializing that she was “the natural headquarters for tourists and sightseers..., richer than the imagination can paint, greater in majesty and beauty than the far-famed Switzerland, and unsurpassed in loveliness of nature.” Nested between mountains at the mouth of a glacial river, approachable only by ship, and her only road out a narrow-gauge train track snaking up from the narrow valley floor to the fabled White Pass, she was a gem in the wilderness.

The Rapuzzi Family
Outside Their Washington Grocery Store

Yet there was still a cluttered and disorderly feel about town: mismatched boardwalks, too many seedy alleyways, empty lots vacated by yesterday’s hordes. In an online book published by the Parks Department, Robert Spude wrote that in order to walk down Broadway the pedestrian’s path would meander around the fruit crates at Rapuzzi’s store, by the sandwich sign at the Alaska Steamship Office, under the canvas awnings—some with signs on them—and through a host of space defined by the overflow and overhangs, openings and closing, of each narrow building. Not the polished look a tourist-flirting Skagway was after.

She evened out her boardwalks, consolidated the red light district to just Paradise Alley between Sixth and Seventh Streets and closed the gap between the beach and Third Avenue by plucking two- and three-story buildings from other parts of town. When in 1914 the Red Onion Saloon and Brothel was hauled by a single horse from Sixth and State to its present location on the corner of Second and Broadway, Skagway found herself a mature, pretty little town with Victorian false storefronts corseted in tidy rank, flanking the railroad tracks and with the blush of youth and health in her face.

Broadway 

The wear of time began taking its toll, however;  the sting of winter winds chafing her cheeks, peeling her paint, gravity sagging her storefronts and slanting her floors. The Depression years all but did her in and Skagway’s Chamber of Commerce began talking of a face lift. Not until June 1976, though, did a congressional bill establish the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, a necessary first step if Skagway was to undergo not only a much needed face lift but reconstruction as well. A decade passed. Finally, when she was 86 years old (her downtown core absorbed by the park and well past her prime) she got the first of her reconstructive surgeries in a ongoing historic preservation project that makes today’s Skagway “one of the best preserved examples of the turn-of-the-last-century architecture.” This is the Skagway we see today.

Notice. No franchises. No golden arches, no Walmart, no Kentucky Fried. Not even a theater. Nothing to disrupt the illusion of yesteryear. Well, one disruption—Radio Shack down on Fourth, better known to the locals as the tanning salon, single booth in the back. Okay, one other disruption. But not in the historic district. The Harley Davidson shop up on 8th and Broadway falls into a block that simply has to “look” historical. Besides, it's not really a Harley Davison. It only sells T-shirts. And there is one other teensy-weensy exception. On the window right across the street from the old train depot you’ll see a Starbuck’s logo. Don’t let it fool you. This is just another place to shop where Mr. Star and Mr. Buck, I hear, are still selling their lattés and espresso. The rumor going around town is that when they landed in Skagway in 1897 they discovered their entire ton of goods to be nothing but 2,000 pounds of coffee. They’re still trying to get rid of them. But leave these three exceptions out of it—Radio Shack, Harley Davidson, and Starbucks—the rest of the town is  authentic, which makes walking down Broadway and some of the city’s side streets a step back in time. You can tromp the wooden boardwalks and touch the walls of living history. What do they tell?

“a gem in the wilderness”

They tell a lot. Echoes beckon, linger, and whisper in every doorway, up the stairs, and all around.
______________________
If you're interested in more on Skagway, you can purchase my book Skagway: It's All About The Gold by clicking on the cover image in the left sidebar.

#11: Skagway's First Cabin and William Moore's Dream

Skagway's First Cabin
photograph by Brenda Wilbee

Twenty-one-year-old Ben Moore filed the 160-acre commercial homestead along Skagua Bay of SE Alaska in 1886, but it that is now Skagway, AK. The property was his, but it was his father’s dream. He knew gold lay beyond the mountains somewhere to the north, and to all who’d listen the old man predicted have a pack trail through pass, followed by a wagon road, eventually a railroad track. Few agreed. 

“Well, I hope the undertaking you folks have started here will fulfill your expectations," was one remark, "but I am afraid you are losing time and energy here in this." Ben writes: “These were the same discouraging remarks we always heard about our Skagway Bay wharf and land location.”

Ignoring the naysayers, Ben and his dad worked diligently (though sporadically) to “prove up,” but were often diverted by the need to fund themselves. They piloted steamships or worked in the sawmills and salmon canneries. William Moore appealed to financiers and hired help whenever funding came in. Father and son bumbled along like this for ten years. Finally, in April of 1896, Ben decided to move his family up permanently. He wrote:

My wife and I  worked together fixing up the log house, chinking it better, putting in a good window, a back and a front door a rough floor, and making pieces of rough bunks and furniture out of poles.

Shortly afterward, his father announced good news: He’d gotten substantial financial backing from an English company. In exchange for a half interest in the property, they’d receive a cash advance of $1800. Under the newly formed Alaska and Northwest Territories Trading Company (A&NWTT Co), Ben headed for Juneau to purchase 6,000’ of lumber, a couple of cows, two horses, chickens, pigs, some blacksmith’s tools, shingles, groceries. He returned with George Buchanan, formerly of Enumclaw, WA, along with two native youths, John Jack and Dick Hindle.

Four months later Skookum Jim found The Gold on August 17, 1896.

Skagway 1896
Library of Congress LC-USZ62-122304 4-75

"Mooresville" had just gotten started, boasting only the small cabin, a lean-to blacksmith shop, a bunkhouse, and a rudimentary wharf. It would be a year, however, before word could get to the Outside. Ben and his father--and the newly formed A&TWTT Company--used that time to get their ducks in a row.

Compelled now by a sense of urgency and with an additional $50,000 from London, coupled with supervisors and hired hands sent up from Victoria, "Moorseville" started to take shape: An expanded wharf, a saw mill, another bunkhouse; the trail widened along the river’s west bank, bridges going in over the creeks and across the river up the east side. A frenzied time.

Captain Moore, now seventy-five years old, wrapped up his affairs and arrived mid-May to a hive of production under management of his British-appointed directors. He headed up the trail with two helpers. By July he had ten to fifteen men on the job. Mid-month, on the 14th, he declared White Pass Trail open. On July 29, the stampeders arrived. Ten years he’d waited. Ten years.

Two hundred miners tumbled off the Queen onto his dock. Within a days, hundreds more. Within a week, a thousand more flooded his beach with all the flotsam of selfish humanity. A fellow by the name of Frank Reid borrowed some surveying equipment and proceeded to plat “Skagway” on top of “Mooresville.:

Broadway,  August 1897, Skagway, AK

The Moores and their A&NWTT Co. objected. They posted notices. They sent their wharf manager with warnings. But their complaints were run up a flagpole of indifference and left to snap in the wind.

Ten years it had taken Captain Moore to see this day—sorry fruition. He and his London backers filed a lawsuit for full recovery of their stolen property; it would take three years to resolve.

Today we have the cabin still marks the start of "Moorseville/Skagway," but there is no memory now of the bitter acrimony. Inside, however, its walls are lined with faded newspapers and yellow columns of small print that whisper tales of other unsavory greed and theft. This is, after all, a gold rush town.

But it's not the  end of Ben and William's story.

Not by a long shot. One cabin became many, and in the end the Moores owned 25% of the assessed value of every merchant on the land they stole.

________

If you're interested in more on Skagway, you can purchase my book Skagway: It's All About The Gold by clicking on the cover image in the right sidebar.

#10: Before Skagway, Skagua

"Here we will cast our future lots and try to hew out our fortune."
sketch by Brenda Wilbee

Skagua is Skagway's bigger history, beginning when no one lived in it, not even the native Chilkoot of the Tlingit Nation. The natives preferred the more sheltered inlet two bays to the west—and their little village of Dyea at the foot of their ancestral trade trail. A man had to be daft, they figured, to settle in Skagua. Who but a crazy man could put up with such a ferocious wind whipping off the pass at forty and fifty miles an hour, with the bite of the arctic in its teeth?

Skookum Jim, Ben Moore, Capt Wm Moore
sketch by Brenda Wilbee

Such wind did not stop Captain William Moore. A seasoned steamboat builder and gold miner, Moore had made and lost at least three fortunes—Peru, California, Colorado, Washington, BC, Alaska. He knew too that the big gold was yet to be found somewhere in the Canadian Yukon way up north. When, in 1887, an Interior Tagish man by the name of Skookum Jim showed him a “secret” trail through the formidable mountains—uncontrolled by the Chilkoot—Captain Moore visualized a new kind of fortune. He’d plant a town, open the trail, charge a toll, sell city lots, build a wharf, charge docking fees. He was not too old to make another fortune; only this time he’d mine the miners who would surely be stampeding through.

His son Ben Moore wrote in his diary dated October 20, 1887:

[We] arrived at Skagway Bay at 10 a.m. and ran our canoe up in the creek about a quarter of a mile, then put up our tent and camped at the foot of a little bluff on the beach, where a small creek comes down and joins the large creek on the right-hand or east side of the bay.

He later wrote about that day:

I have never forgotten my father’s words to me. ‘Here,’ said he, ‘we will cast our future lots and try to hew out our fortune,’ as I struck my axe into our first tree. Later we reconnoitered up the valley a way and put up notice of location for one hundred sixty acres upland, and measured off six hundred feet for a wharf site and placed our notice on the same. We ran across numerous old deadfall traps for bear and other animals, a short distance up the valley. My father also said on this occasion: ‘I fully expect before many years to see a pack trail through this pass, followed by a wagon road, and I would not be at all surprised to see a railroad through to the lakes.’

Son Ben filed the 160-acre homestead under his name and for the next ten years father and son “proved” up, building a rudimentary cabin, wharf, sawmill, platting city lots, and widening the trail. They worked tirelessly, coming and going for ten years, adding a bunkhouse, a cookhouse, earning money as needed by piloting steamships or working in the sawmills and salmon canneries. Ten years they worked and waited, preparing for the invasion of stampeders who would storm the beach once the gold was found.

Ten years late none other than Skookum Jim found the gold.

It took a year for news to get out. But by July, 1897, the rush was on. The first 200 miners tumbled off the Queen onto Moore Wharf on July 29, 1897. Within days, hundreds more swarmed the beach. Within weeks, thousands.

Skagway's First Stampeders / July 29, 1898
sketch by Brenda Wilbee

Skagway evolved into a city like any other, with villains and heroes and entrepreneurs. The Moores made their fortune, as did a lot of other people. Today, more than a hundred years later, Skagway remains a viable town, growing out of its gold rush roots. And while only a handful of gold rush towns exist intact, Skagway is one.
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If you'd like to know more about Skagway, you can purchase my book by clicking on the cover in the left column of this blog.

#9: John Healy: An Irony In American and Canadian History

Healy and Wilson Trading Post, Dyea AK, 1885

Johnny Healy is an interesting man in Skagway history. He said she'd never amount to anything. He also has an interesting history with Canada and her Mounted Police.

A whiskey trader, Indian fighter, entrepreneur, he came to Dyea, AK, in 1885 and started a trading post at the foot of the Chilkoot Trail--the famous torturous path twisting up though the steep Coastal Mountains. A trickle of gold prospectors had been using the trail, headed into Canada's Far North and her promised rumors of gold strikes. Healy saw an opportunity to cash in with a strategically placed spott. So he and pal Wilson built Healy and Wilson. A year later Captain William Moore and son Ben arrived, setting up their homestead next door in unoccupied Skagua, 1886.

"A waste of time and resources," Healy told them. "Nothing will come from such dark and windy desolation." The future, which any nincompoop could tell, lay in Dyea and the Chilkoot Trail.

We all know just how wrong Healy was. Skagway is a now pretty little town that sees close to a million visitors each summer while Dyea’s ruins lie buried by a hundred-year-old forest. What most don't know, though, is that Johnny J. Healy was one of the driving forces behind the creation of Canada's Mounties in 1873/74. Yes, true.

Fort Whoop Up, Canada West
the flag is not America's stars and stripes

Healy was a rather notorious whiskey trader in Canadian history, working out of Montana during the late 1860s and early 1870s. He ran the nefarious Fort Whoop Up post in what is now Alberta, Canada. His whisky—watered down with red pepper, ink, Jamaican ginger, tobacco, and black strap molasses—was decimating the Blackfoot. To establish law and order and protect the First Nations, the Canadian government formulated the now famous Northwest Mounted Police in 1873 to drive Healy and the other traders back across the border. Their primary target, Fort Whoop Up—and Healy.

When the Mounties arrived after a six-month trek in 1874, their collective resolve sharpened by an epic journey of deprivation and hardship, they expected one heck of a fight. All they got was Dave Akers—a fur trapper the fleeing Healy had left in charge.

The irony is that years later Healy, after having made his way to Dyea, partnered in 1892 with big money in Chicago to create the North America Transportation and Trading Company in Canada's Yukon of the Far North. But it was becoming a dangerous place up there as more and more gold was being found by the steady trickle of American prospectors. He, among others, began writing Ottawa, asking for police protection from this growing element of American lawlessness. One more time, in 1895, the Mounties showed up. This time not to run him out, but to protect him.

The ultimate irony is not that Healy once ran from the Mounties and then begged their protection, but that he ultimately took credit for the relatively peaceful settlement of Canada West. "The Mounties got on well with the Indians," he boasted, "because I already whooped 'em."

If anyone's interested in more about this interesting and arrogant man, his autobiography is now available, Life and Death on the Upper Missouri: The Frontier Sketches  by Johnny  Healy, edited by Ken Robison.

(http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/life-and-death-on-the-upper-missouri-john-j-healy/1115688131?ean=9780615782867)

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My own book, Skagway: It's All About The Gold is available for sale. Click on the cover in the left column.