How Skagway Turned the Gold Rush and Soapy Smith Into a Tourist Town

Soapy Smith, a Denver confidence man of the gold rush era, became a tourist attraction in the decades after 1898, and a National Park Service article by Susannah Dowds, Assistant Historian at Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, traces how the town turned its history into tourism. The article was written in November 2015 and first given as a radio talk.

Skagway has nearly 1 million visitors in summer. NPS photo/S. Millard.

A seasonal town

Skagway history is usually told through the Klondike Gold Rush, and its images are everywhere: the town's police patch shows a miner panning, and Alaska license plates show stampeders climbing to the Chilkoot summit. Summer tourism, a market that grew after the rush, still supports the economy. Its rhythm is plain: in 2015 unemployment ran from 21.7% in January to 4.5% in July, and Broadway goes quiet after the last ship day in September. The rush is built into many tourist offerings, and the event itself drew tourists as early as 1898.

Tidying up, then moving buildings

After the rush, Skagway was dotted with hastily built cabins that the fortune seekers left behind. They were considered an eyesore, and community efforts took the empty shacks down. As early as 1899 the Chamber of Commerce held a "Skagway Clean-up Day" to clean yards and streets for the coming tourist season. Businesses also turned from the rough false fronts of the rush toward double recessed doors and ornamental designs. The White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad Depot, finished in 1900, shows the newer, more sophisticated taste, with a Greek revival façade, display windows, embossed tinwork and recessed doors.

The White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad Depot in downtown Skagway. NPS photo/S. Spatz.

Buildings also moved. In the rush, the business district centered off Broadway on 4th, 5th and 6th Avenues, but when the railroad was completed, businesses relocated. Many buildings on Broadway today came from somewhere else, among them the Red Onion Saloon, the Golden North Hotel, the Pack Train Saloon and the Eagles' Hall. As a result today's Broadway looks much as it did in 1915.

Broadway, Skagway, 1916. NPS, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park Library.

Broadway, Skagway, 2013. NPS photo/R. Karpilo and S. Venator.

From stampeders to cruise ships

In the years before World War I, the threat of conflict discouraged fashionable European tours and attention shifted to other vacation spots. More cruise ships sailed the Lynn Canal, and Skagway's businesses began catering to them. Laura Berton, who first passed through in 1907 on her way to teach kindergarten in Dawson City, found when she returned in the 1930s that the drab little town had become a village devoted to the memory of its top moneymaker, the late Jefferson R. "Soapy" Smith. In her account, Smith had fleeced visitors in life, and now townspeople did it in his name: a bar with life-sized dummies of him charged fifty cents admission, his grave was fenced against souvenir hunters, and the blood stain on the wharf where Frank Reid shot him was said to be freshened regularly. There were postcards, and a giant painting of his skull on the cliffs above town.

The streetcar man

Berton's description touched on one of many gold-rush legends that live on in Skagway. Jeff Smiths Parlor, where tourists were charged admission to see Smith, was the brainchild of Martin Itjen, a tourism promoter known for streetcar tours in the 1920s and 1930s. He met visitors at the dock and for two hours entertained them with "intentionally bad poetry" about his own experiences as a fortune seeker in 1898 and the notorious characters of the time. In one verse he mocked the gambling, the dance halls and the way the sucker's money was won, then said he now earned an honest living driving the Skagway streetcar. He claimed to be an authorized Ford dealer and an undertaker, and hoped to be a doctor before long.

Itjen never became a doctor, but he was mechanically gifted and tinkered with many machines, as was his protégé George Rapuzzi, born and raised in Skagway. On the back of the streetcar, Itjen attached a mannequin of Soapy Smith that puffed a cigar using the exhaust. Rapuzzi showed his aptitude young, rigging a lever with two tacks to spike a customer who spat tobacco on his mother's store floor. That skill later went into Jeff Smiths Parlor, where a Soapy Smith mannequin turned to greet visitors each time the front door opened. The parlor closed in 1976, but the Park Service has restored the building on 2nd Avenue to the 1960s with mannequins of Soapy Smith, "Dangerous Dan McGrew" and the "Lady that's known as Lou", and visitors can tour the quirky museum.

Jeff. Smiths Parlor Museum in historic downtown Skagway. NPS photo/S. Spatz.

Layers of history

Since the gold rush days of 1897, Skagway has become a town that welcomes thousands of ship passengers each summer. Over more than a century residents have shaped Skagway's folklore and appearance to introduce newcomers to the area. When winter comes and Broadway is quiet, the article says, you may be able to look more closely at its buildings and imagine the layers of history, "intentionally bad poems" not included.

Sources

• National Park Service, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, "Buildings, Community, and Tourism", by Susannah Dowds, Assistant Historian; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Laura Berton's account is paraphrased from her memoir as the article quotes it.