Stranded (2 page)

1896–1898

SKAGWAY, ALASKA

The
Princess Sophia
and the
Star Princess
were two very different ships, operating at two very different times. One sank with all hands in what would become the worst maritime disaster in the history of Alaska and British Columbia, while the other was spared that ignominious fate — though just barely. That they both encountered danger in the same stretch of Alaska's 140 kilometre-long Lynn Canal is the bond that unites them.

The view at Lynn Canal seems to offer up the perfect postcard picture of Alaska. Enormous mountain ranges border either side, their snow-capped peaks glistening in the sunlight, dwarfing the glistening white superstructures of the cruise ships that regularly ply these waters during the summer months as their guests head “north, to Alaska.”

Few will know that Lynn Canal is actually the deepest fjord in North America, extending 610 metres below its picturesque surface. In fact, most cruise-ship passengers will never see some of its most distinctive — and notorious — features. Vanderbilt Reef, Eldred Rock, and Poundstone Rock are typically passed in the wee hours of the night, as ships make their way to and from the gold rush town of Skagway. Tours up the scenic White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad are popular with the tourists, so cruise ships stay in Skagway as late as nine or even ten p.m., sailing into the darkness that envelops the canal as they begin their return journey south to Juneau.

The winds that blow through Lynn Canal can be fierce, developing out of nowhere and striking with surprising intensity. The surrounding mountains offer little protection from these gusts, which race up the canal and slam into the town of Skagway. On these days, where the wind whips at your face and churns up dust and debris along the waterfront of the town that Jefferson Randolph “Soapy” Smith used to rule in its heyday, the conditions faced by the crews that brought the prospectors, and later tourists, up Lynn Canal can be fully understood.

Skagway Harbor as seen in 1916. The basic layout of the harbour remained largely unchanged from 1898 until the end of the Second World War.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-DLC-ppmsc-01916.

The White Pass & Yukon Route railroad was completed in 1900 and originally ran between Whitehorse and Skagway. Today it makes tourist runs up to Carcross, Yukon Territory, and back — sometimes still using traditional steam power.

Like any disaster, the
Princess Sophia
tragedy has more than one facet. Compounding the remoteness of Skagway and the ever-changing weather conditions in Lynn Canal was how quickly travelling up the canal became a necessity. Few lighthouses were installed until well after 1900, and regulations governing cargo, passengers, and even the vessels themselves couldn't be drawn up as fast as the passenger trade grew.

Today cruise ships plying Alaskan waters are harshly regulated, so much so that John Binkley, the head of the Alaska Cruise Association, famously quipped in 2008 that pumping the state's own drinking water into the ocean would constitute pollution under the 2006 regulations governing the discharge of grey water and effluent.
[1]

At the height of the gold rush, the passenger-ship trade was a completely different story. Regulations were few and far between, and certainly no one on land or at sea was terribly concerned with the consequences of pollution. They were, however, concerned with that other
P
word:
profit
. And in the last dying years of the nineteenth century there was no shortage of profit to be made in Alaska. Many called it “the rush,” but the truth of the matter was that a single discovery on a lazy Sunday morning sparked an all-out frenzy that would consume much of the Klondike for decades to come.

On Sunday, August 16, 1896, three prospectors travelling down Rabbit Creek in the Klondike suddenly struck it rich, finding four dollars' worth of gold while engaging in the mundane task of washing their dishes in the stream near their campsite. Knowing an opportunity when they saw it, Skookum Jim, his nephew Charlie Dawson, and
brother-in
-law George Carmack staked their claims the very next day at the police outpost at Fortymile River. Fuelled by a modest network of explorers and prospectors who were all in the area at the same time, word travelled south with surprising speed. Based on nothing more than
word-of
-mouth stories passed down from one prospector to another, claims on Rabbit Creek were snatched up by the end of that month. Few who bought in went home disappointed; the pay streak was so rich that the prospectors figured a name change was in order. Almost overnight, Rabbit Creek became Bonanza Creek.

The success prospectors found on Bonanza Creek alone might have been enough to spark a gold rush, but when gold was discovered on nearby Eldorado Creek — and in larger quantities than those present along Bonanza — it created an all-out frenzy across the United States and Canada that spurred people to head north in droves. They were lured to Alaska and the Yukon by visions of untold wealth literally resting on the surface of riverbeds (indeed, some of it was). By the summer of 1897 the Klondike gold rush was in full swing. Demand for travel north was outstripping supply by a long shot, and for most would-be prospectors a single dilemma stood between them and the biggest payday in history: how to get there.

Skagway in 1897, before the gold rush, bears little resemblance to the town that would pop up literally overnight. At this time it was a small beachhead camp known as Mooresville.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-122304.

To say that Alaska and the Yukon in the late 1800s were the epitome of the Wild West is an understatement. In order to facilitate the gold rush, entire towns went up overnight. Places like Dawson City, Dyea, and Skagway simply didn't exist before 1897. In 1898 Dawson City had a population of 40,000 inhabitants; the year before just a handful of homesteaders had staked their claims there. Skagway, once a small collection of humble shacks on a beach known as “Mooresville,” had nearly 10,000 residents by that summer, along with a main street, hotels, saloons, and the one of the highest concentration of brothels for miles around. Entire towns were being developed faster than law-enforcement officials could keep up with them, leading Samuel Steele of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to describe Skagway during the height of the gold rush as “little better than a hell on earth.”
[2]
Prospectors coming ashore could expect to be greeted by any number of con men, swindlers, and outright crooks, while those fighting for a space on the returning ships were lucky if they made it on board with their findings intact, having run Skagway's unrelenting gauntlet of brothels, bars, and rigged gambling houses. Gunfights in broad daylight were common, and pistols were practically a prerequisite.

Simply obtaining passage from places like Seattle and Vancouver to the relative lawlessness up north was often as dangerous an experience as the early pioneer towns were themselves. To capitalize on the increasing demand for steamship travel north, anything that could float was pressed into the lucrative passenger trade streaming to and from Alaska, and operators were free to set fares as they saw fit. With little to no regulatory oversight, unscrupulous operators sprang up like the mosquitoes that tormented so many Alaskans, eager to suck them dry at every turn. In 1896 passage on a tramp steamer heading north could cost as much as $40 (roughly $1,100 in modern currency) for a private cabin between Seattle, Juneau, and Dyea, or a bargain $25 if you wanted to travel in a steerage berth. Those fares would nearly triple by the winter of 1897. But all was not lost; for that price you could also bring on 150 pounds of free baggage.
[3]

Aboard these semi-derelict ships — many of which had been laid up for years before being pressed into service in 1897 — maximum passenger limits were blatantly disregarded, and vessels were often crewed by a motley assortment of drunks and seamen of dubious distinction in order to get paying customers to the gold as quickly as possible.

The
Clara Nevada
was one such ship. Built in 1871, the
151-foot
-long vessel made only one voyage north, in late January 1898. The
Clara Nevada
was well past her prime, having served the United States Coast and Geodetic Survey (USCGS) as the
Hassler
between 1872 and 1897. Her subsequent purchase and refit by the Pacific & Alaska Transportation Company (PATC) had seemingly involved little more than changing the name on her bows and slapping a coat of white paint on her hull. But the Maguire Brothers — the shady duo behind the PATC — were intent on getting her into service as quickly as possible, before the competition found out. Purchasing her for a fraction of her total worth in July 1896, the Maguire Brothers insisted the payment take place via mail so as to avoid any unwanted publicity.
[4]

For anyone paying attention, all the warning signs that this was going to be a disastrous maiden voyage were there. Upon backing out of her berth in Seattle on January 26, 1898, she immediately ran full astern into the revenue cutter
Grant
, scraping her hull along the length of the other ship in a shower of sparks and steel screaming in protest before simply continuing on her way into Puget Sound as if nothing had happened. Fights among the crew — most of whom were reportedly drunk on a
round-the
-clock basis — were commonplace, and passengers found their accommodation to be completely unsuitable. Things had deteriorated so much on board that several passengers had a petition drawn up and ready to be presented by the time the ship reached Port Townsend, Washington, in order to convince customs officials to place them aboard another ship. That probably wasn't a hard sell; witnesses report that the
Clara Nevada
crashed into the pier at Port Townsend as she came alongside.

The ship was in such poor mechanical condition that it took her captain, C.H. Lewis — a man who, months before, had made a dubious name for himself by trying unsuccessfully to sail a wooden paddle steamer out into the open Pacific in pursuit of gold — nearly two hours to successfully berth his ship once she had arrived in Skagway. Owing to the fact that the ship's
bridge-to
-
engine
-room telegraphs were no longer operational, Lewis had to bark orders across the deck to another officer, who in turn yelled at the chief engineer, who then shouted commands down to the second engineer who mechanically controlled the ship from the engine room. If passenger reports that the officers and engineers were continually drunk throughout the voyage north are taken at face value, the situation on deck likely bordered on the absurd as the
Clara Nevada
moved repeatedly in and out of port in Skagway, trying unsuccessfully to dock. Once again, docking manoeuvres seemed to be completed only once the ship had physically struck the dock, just as she had back in Port Townsend.