1909 Cathcart Trip - Skagway, Alaska

Anna, Celia & William Cathcart
 ca 1910

16 year old Celia Cathcart is traveling with her parents, Anna and William Cathcart, and "grandmother." We're assuming this was Emma Sconce. Friday, July 9, 1909 the party boarded a ship in Seattle, Washington and headed north to Canada and then Alaska. Celia is my father's mother.

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Thursday July 15

Thursday morning we reached Skagway after 4 day voyage. This is a town of considerable size, but evidently not prosperous, as there are a great number of empty houses and store rooms. Several glaciers are to be seen from the town, likewise a little falls high up on the mountainside. The names are up-to-date and a little high-sounding, no matter if they are a little deceiving. Such appellations as Fifth Avenue, Broadway, and Delmonico are a trifle misleading. At 9:30 we took the White Pass and Yukon Railroad for White Pass. This route proved a very scenic one. The road is winding and very mountainous. Three engines were used the greater part of the time. The air was very fresh and pure but quite cold, being right off the snow-covered mountains. Numerous waterfalls of great height added much to the beauty of the route. The cantilever bridge, a great architectural masterpiece, spans the turbulent mountain stream at one place. A little brown animal was seen scuddling up the mountainside, which was called by some a raccoon. A gopher was also noted. At the summit [sic] of White Pass, the boundary between the U.S. and Canada, an altitude of 3000 ft was attained. At Lake Bennett, we stopped 20 minutes for lunch. The road from there on was less interesting, being nothing but lakes and mountains. The mountains were beautifully colored, however, in delicate reds and yellows, with patches of green vegetation here and there. In the middle of the afternoon, we noticed a great light across a valley, the light much resembling a rainbow.

Later on, Miles Canon [Canyon] was entered, at the foot of which lay the flourishing village of White Horse. We had but little time here, as our ship “The White Horse", the best of the river boats, left at 7:30, carrying before it a scow loaded with cattle, sheep, pigs, and chickens being shipped to Dawson. The cattle had come from Calgary. For some time we sailed on the crooked 30-mile river, then entered the Lewis (?) river, the Yukon not being reached until Ft. Selkirk. The waterway was winding and tortuous, and required a good pilot. The current being very swift, we made rapid progress down the river. Numerous Indian graves were passed, and quite a lengthy stop was made at Hootalinqua, a little town of log cabins, where many Indians resided. Back of the town were said to be gold mines of great extent. In the afternoon, the weather grew very hot, 108° in the shade being recorded. The journey continued until Saturday night with nothing exceptional occurring except for the boat's passage through the Five Finger Rapids. This swift part of the river is so-called because the rocks on one side of the bank extend across to the opposite side in such a manner as to resemble a hand. The passage is so narrow that when our boat went through, the rear side of it knocked against the rock, damaging it somewhat severely. 

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ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Skagway, Alaska - image ca 1909

image shows steamship in lower middle & long wharf leading to the town

"Once news of the great gold strike in the Yukon spread throughout the country in the summer of 1887, a stampede to the far north began. The shipping companies, glossing over the perils that awaited travelers, settled on a route that took ships along the southeastern Alaskan coast and through the long Lynn Canal directly to a hectic new tent town—Skagway, Alaska. Skagway was the entry point to the White Pass, a gap over the mountains that led to the Yukon River and into the Klondike gold fields. And while the Pass was a daunting journey, an obstacle course with narrow, twisting trails leading to a sky-high summit, all through that first year people flocked to the settlement whose name was inspired by the Indian word Skagus—the home of the North Wind." source   By 1909 when the Cathcart family visited, Skagway was no longer a gold rush boomtown. Prospectors had moved on to west Alaska where gold had been found in Nome. 

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White Pass and Yukon Railroad - Celia mentions the air was "fresh and pure." Click here to read what an author had to say about "tasting" Alaska's climate back in 1909. 

"You can just taste the Alaska climate," said an old Klondiker, on a White Pass and Yukon train. We were standing between cars, clinging to the brakes—sooty-eyed, worn-out with joy as we neared White Horse, but standing and looking still, unwilling to lose one moment of that beautiful trip.

"It tastes different every hundred miles," he went on, with that beam in his eye which means love of Alaska in the heart. "You begun to taste it in Grenville Channel. It tasted different in Skagway, and there's a big change when you get to White Horse. I golly! at White Horse, you'll think you never tasted anything like it; but it don't hold a candle there to the way it tastes going down the Yukon. If you happen to get into the Ar'tic Circle, say, about two in the morning, you dress yourself and hike out on deck, an' I darn! you can taste more'n climate. You can taste the Ar'tic Circle itself! Say, can you guess what it tastes like?" (Alaska - The Great Country by Ella Higginson, 1908, p 262)

White Pass and Yukon Route was built in 1898 during the Klondike gold rush. It links Skagway, Alaska with Whitehorse, Yukon, Canada. "According to the WP & YR website, in 1898, this narrow gauge railroad was built in only 26 months at a cost of 10 million dollars. It is an International Historic Civil Engineering Landmark, a designation that the Panama Canal, the Eiffel Tower and the Statue of Liberty also hold. The WP&YR railroad climbs almost 3000 feet in just 20 miles and included a steel cantilever bridge, which was the tallest of its kind in the world when it was constructed in 1901." source Click here for photos of the bridge. You can take the same ride today. Click here

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White Pass White Pass International Border - "2,865 feet above sea level, finds you at the White Pass Summit, the official border between the United States and Canada.  During the Klondike Gold Rush, there was a contingent of Royal Canadian Mounted Police stationed here to ensure every man, woman and child had a year’s worth of supplies before they continued on their arduous journeys." source

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Lake Bennett - Bennett, British Columbia

"Lake Bennett, darkened once by the rafts of gold-seekers, but disturbed now by no more than a ruffling wind or the spatter of water-drops behind a string of ducks rising to fly. Bennett, British Columbia, Canada is an abandoned historical town next to Lake Bennett. It was built during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897–99 at the end of the White Pass and Chilkoot Trails from nearby ports of Skagway and Dyea in Alaska. Gold prospectors would pack their supplies over the Coast Mountains from the ports and then build or purchase rafts to take them down the Yukon River to the gold fields around Dawson City, Yukon." source 

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town - White Horse  - "1901     Whitehorse developed quickly from a jumble of tents to a sizeable town. The settlement was originally located on the east bank of the river, at the terminus of Norman Macauley's tramway, but moved to the west bank with the completion of the railway. The first survey of the settlement, in 1899, shows what the Yukon Sun newspaper referred to as "a very cleverly laid out town."

      At the turn of the century, "white horse" was a common term for a standing wave or whitecap. The rapids just upstream from the town got their name this way. Although the community had commonly been known as Whitehorse - often spelled as two words - by prospectors and traders, the White Pass & Yukon Route wanted to change the name to Closeleigh, after the company's British backers, the Close Brothers. The Territory's Commissioner, William Ogilvie, ruled that the town's original name should be kept, since it was so well established.

      By the spring of 1900 there were wholesale houses and retail mercantile esatblishments, a hardware store, six large hotels, two drug stores, a brick yard, 2000 feet of warehouses on the waterfront, three churches, an athletic club and an electric light plant. Tents, log houses or clapboard buildings were found on practically every lot." source 

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White Horse in Five Finger Rapids 1920
source

ship "The White Horse" - Here's some fascinating information on the ship Celia and her family took up the river to Dawson. "The Whitehorse (originally the White Horse) had a much longer and more colourful history on the river, being built in 1901. She was described as a wooden sternwheeler, 167 feet long, with a 34.5-foot beam and 4.5-foot hold. Her gross tonnage 986.65 tons, registered as 630.69 tons. She had two decks, was of carvel build, and had a straight head and square stern, with two bulkheads. She had accommodation for 64 people.

    The engine room was 34.5 feet long, housing 2 horizontal engines made in 1898 by B.C. Iron Works, and originally installed in the Stikine River steamer McConell. The engines had two cylinders with a 16-inch diameter and 72-inch stroke, producing 17 NHP.

    In 1901 the British Yukon Navigation Company was in its heyday, and the White Horse was one of three large sternwheelers built that year (the others being the Dawson and Selkirk). The crew took only 43 days to build her, and after being christened with champagne by Miss Tache, daughter of the Public Works Superintendent, she was launched on May 29 1901.

    During her 54 years on the river, there were many adventures. In June 1902, she was declared a "plague ship" and quarantined in the river downstream from Dawson for 16 days. Arriving at Dawson June 2 with a crew of 34 and 125 passengers, a 2nd class passenger was diagnosed as a suspected case of smallpox. The disease never appeared, however, and the White Horse was allowed to go back into service.

    Navigation on several parts of the river were tricky, and in both 1909 and 1914, she hit the wall while descending through Five Finger Rapids, doing fairly extensive damage to the railings. In 1935, she was sent out to rescue the Yukon, which had been damaged by ice on Lake Lebarge and beached. The Whitehorse was guided through the ice during that mission by the company's airplane.

    As gold mining slowed down, more and more effort was put into promotion of the tourist trade, and the White Horse was modified many times to increase passenger comfort. On June 19 1916, with the Casca, she took the first of BYN's successful Midnight Sun excursions to Fort Yukon." source

jht - Celia mentions the ship hitting the rock - "The passage is so narrow that when our boat went through, the rear side of it knocked against the rock, damaging it somewhat severely." 

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Fort Selkirk - established as a trading post in 1852. Photos here

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Click here for a description of the same route the Cathcart family took. 

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See July & August for more posts about this trip. Or click on label Alaska.