Skagway Tourism: From 60 Boston Visitors in 1898 to 866,132 Visitors in 2012

Arriving by steamship was the easiest way to reach early Skagway (NPS, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, George and Edna Rapuzzi Collection).

Tourism was an early part of Skagway's history. This article was researched and written by Karl Gurcke, the park historian of Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, using Daily Alaskan newspapers of 1898, 1900 and 1908, a 1967 North Wind article, a 2000 master's thesis on historic preservation in Skagway and a 1996 book on the gold rush's legacy.

The first tourists

Cruises up the Inside Passage to see totem poles, the Treadwell Mines in Douglas and Glacier Bay began in the 1880s, so tourism was already established when the Klondike Gold Rush came. The first documented tourists in Skagway were reported in the Daily Alaskan on July 25, 1898, about a year after the town was founded: a party of 60 that left Boston on June 29, organized by G. S. Houghton, the principal of a boys' school. The reporter wrote of well-dressed visitors contrasting with rough-clothed Yukoners, and of the visitors' surprise at a city larger than they expected, with refined people to greet them. The railroad gave them a free excursion, with about 150 people on three box cars with temporary seats, which went as far as the rails were laid. On the return, the tourists were shown gold dust and nuggets, and some bought nuggets as souvenirs. Houghton said he would come again the next year.

The train once ran along Broadway and over the White Pass route. The old depot, at right, is now the park's visitor center (NPS, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, Whiting Collection).

Getting ready for summer visitors

By 1900 Skagway held its first annual citywide cleanup day to beautify the town before the tourist season. The railroad expected a very large summer business and advertised the scenery widely in the United States and Europe, competing with the Paris Exposition for wealthy travelers. The White Pass & Yukon route prepared two new observation cars with roofs and canvas sides, after using open flat cars with rough seats the season before. By 1908 tourists were visiting the grave of the outlaw Soapy Smith, and that July the Daily Alaskan reported that his wooden headstone had been stolen.

Martin Itjen

Skagway's ship's register at Moore's Wharf began to be developed in the teens, perhaps earlier, and the railroad used motion-picture travelogues to promote tourism. After a dip in the Great Depression, tourism recovered in the late 1930s, largely thanks to Martin Itjen. He arrived in Alaska in 1898 and became the town's undertaker, wood cutter, coal deliverer and Ford dealer, and its premier figure in tourism. By the 1920s he ran a tour of gold rush Skagway, using street cars he made from old train cars. In 1930 he built a larger second street car, and later bought and remodeled Jefferson Smith's Parlor into a gold rush museum on his tour. In 1935 he took Street Car Number 2 down the West Coast, appearing at movie theaters and staged events for Ford, Goodyear, Beech-Nut Gum and a San Francisco restaurant, and posing with the actress Mae West. The tour paid for Street Car Number 3. He ran the museum until he died in 1942.

Martin Itjen made street cars from old train cars and drove tourists around Skagway (NPS, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, George and Edna Rapuzzi Collection).

After the war

World War II travel restrictions stopped tourism, though soldiers spent their pay in town. After the war residents turned to tourism again, and by the late 1940s more tourists than ever were visiting Alaska. Residents had pondered a national park in Skagway since the 1930s, but Washington turned the idea down because the town was too close to Glacier Bay National Monument. In the 1950s residents took it up again, since a park would bring the tourists their economy needed, and on June 13, 1962, the town and surrounding area became a National Historic Landmark.

George Rapuzzi, born in Skagway in 1899 and a friend of Itjen's, reopened the parlor museum, which had been mostly closed since 1942. He moved it to Second Avenue in 1963 to be nearer the docks, remodeled it, reopened it by 1967 and ran it for another 10 to 15 years, until he died in 1986.

The National Park Service

In 1972 Skagway became the first city in Alaska to establish a historic district by city ordinance, and the next year created a Historic District Commission to protect its historic character. In 1976 President Gerald Ford signed the bill creating Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park. The Park Service then hired staff and bought historic buildings in the district, researched them, assessed their condition, stabilized them and restored them to gold rush appearance, and sent archeologists to Skagway, Dyea, the Chilkoot Trail and White Pass.

The work has paid off. Just over 49,000 people visited Skagway in the summer of 1982, and 866,132 in 2012, a far cry from those 60 pioneering tourists in 1898. The park offers walking tours and historic sites to visitors.

Sources

• National Park Service, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, "A Brief History Of Tourism In Skagway" (https://www.nps.gov/articles/klgo-skagway-tourism.htm); rewritten in hubnx's own words.