David DuBose Gaillard


Before the construction of the railroad, Gaillard led a team of engineers up to the White Pass to survey a route.
Gaillard was born in 1859 in Fulton, South Carolina. After graduation from West Point and promotion to first lieutenant in 1887, he married Katherine Ross Davis. The couple had one child, David St. Pierre Gaillard. By 1903 he was a Captain in the Army Corps of Engineers and in 1908 he led the Army Corps in building the Panama Canal.
Gaillard was in charge of the notorious Culebra Cut through the backbone of the isthmus. Men who worked with him said he gave 12 hours every day to the Culebra Cit, besides which, he took his share in the labor of general administration of the Canal Zone. He checked up expenses, even on small things and once it was computed he had saved the Government $17,000,000.
He succeeded, but did not live to see the job finished. Suffering from what was thought to be nervous exhaustion brought on by overwork, he returned to the United States in 1913. In fact, Gaillard suffered from a brain tumor.
Lieutenant Colonel David DuBose Gaillard died at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore on this day, December 5, 1913. He was 54 years old. He is buried at Arlington National Cemetery. The Panama Canal opened nine months after his death, and Culebra Cut was renamed Gaillard Cut in his honor.

Skagit River Journal website; NY times article 1903.

Michael James Heney

Having often referred to Mr. Heney, I looked back and found that I have never done a post just on him. So here is the brief biography from Wikipedia:

“Michael James Heney was born on October 24, 1864, near Stonecliffe, Renfrew County, Ontario. He was the son of Thomas Eugene Heney and Mary Ann McCourt, Irish immigrants. His family farmed in the upper Ottawa Valley.

At age 14, Heney ran away from home to work on the newly announced Canadian Pacific Railway. Though he was soon found and brought home by his older brother Patrick Heney, he stayed home only until 1882, when he left home to work on the Canadian Pacific Railway in Manitoba. He started as a mule skinner and gradually worked his way up through all the aspects of construction. In 1883 he was included in a survey crew, spending the next three years learning more about construction as the Canadian Pacific Railway worked its way through the mountains of British Columbia.

At 21, Heney was ready to set up as an independent contractor. He returned east to earn the engineering degree his father wanted him to have, but was too impatient and was soon back in the west. By 1887 he had moved his operations to Seattle, working on the final stages of the Seattle, Lake Shore and Eastern Railway. The career of the “boy contractor” was launched. Many construction projects in Washington, British Columbia and Alaska followed.”

A chance meeting with the London financiers at the St. James Hotel in Skagway led to his most famous achievement, the building of the 110 mile track from Skagway to Whitehorse. Built in a record two years and two months it still runs today but only on the Skagway to Carcross length.

At the pinnacle of his career, Heney left Cordova, Alaska to complete some business arrangements in Seattle. On his way back north, his ship hit an uncharted rock and sank. Heney went under deck to rescue his horses, but the last boat left without him when he returned on deck. So he swam to a boat and held on to the stern while it was rowed ashore as there was no room on it. I read another account that said he swam back to help women swim to safety. In either case, shortly thereafter he developed pulmonary tuberculosis and died within a year, on this day, October 4, 1910 in San Francisco. He is buried in Calvary Cemetery Seattle.

The photo above shows him later in life with his cigar. I think it exemplifies his character more than the more common studio photo of him. He had a number of similarly strong men working for him who pushed the thousands of workers to finish the White Pass project. Seldom have I seen anything negative written about him, but I believe there was another side to management. Similarly, there has never been anything written about his private life. Heney never married nor did he have any women friends. I have seen references to his deep grief over the loss of two of his co-workers, Robin Brydone-Jack and Hugh Nelson Foy during the building of the railroad. During the reconstruction of the White Pass Depot building by National Park Service workers in the 1970’s, they found negative grifitti about Heney written on the boards under the subfloor. I believe he was a man driven to accomplish great things and was the inspiration if not the embodiment of Ayn Rand’s character of Howard Roark in The Fountainhead. However, that does not mean that he was loved by all. In those years, businesses did not have to worry about safety, insurance, worker’s compensation, or benefits. White Pass did have a hospital and they did bury their workers who died during construction. However, they did not tolerate strikes, and being a railroad town, workers and their families over the decades were at the mercy of the WP management.

Wikipedia; Minter.

Leonard Scofield Sugden


Doctor Leonard Sugden was born in June of 1873 in Scotland. He first came north on a whaling vessel and practiced in Juneau. In 1897, he headed for the Klondike but had to winter at Marsh Lake, where he built a cabin and worked as a doctor for the NWMP. When the real gold rush began in 1898, he helped pilot boats through Miles Canyon and the White Horse Rapids. Dr. Sugden stayed in the Yukon. He was the inspiration for Robert Service’s poem, the Cremation of Sam McGee when Service heard of the story of Dr. Sugden hauling a corpse to Tagish and contacting the family in Tennessee to get permission to cremate the remains.
Sam Steele mentioned in his memoirs that Dr. Sugden once hauled a woman 100 miles on a sled to get her to medical help and safety.
Dr. Sugden married in 1906 and moved to the Kluane area where he mined, hunted big game and bought a Prizma movie camera. With it he produced, in 1915, a film called The Lure of Alaska which played to rave reviews across America and Europe.

The film includes shots from the Seattle harbor and along the coast of Alaska and features scenes of Juneau, Sitka, Skagway, a midnight baseball game in Dawson City, a caribou herd swimming in the river, and icebergs calving from glaciers. The movie also includes scenes of Sugden piloting a raft through the Whitehorse Rapids.

The New York Times in 1917 wrote:
“Seldom have nature pictures been such a combination of thrills and wild beauty. They are a notable accomplishment of the camera and Dr. Sugden’s nerve.”

Unfortunately, Dr. Sugden’s life of adventure ended suddenly in 1923 when he fell off a barge into the Stewart River near Mayo and drowned. He was 50 years old.

A CKRW Yukon Nugget by Les McLaughlin

Samuel Hall Young

One of the most famous of preachers, Samuel Hall Young was born in 1847 in Butler Pennsylvania and became a Presbyterian Missionary. He was recruited in Pennsylvania by Sheldon Jackson. Hall was a sickly child and saw going to Alaska as an adventure. It would either make him famous or kill him. He came to Alaska July 10, 1878 and was never afflicted with the headaches and pains which he described as “living at a poor dying rate” ever again.

He was the author of Alaska Days with John Muir (Hall was the owner of the little dog Stikeen who hiked with Muir). He was appointed superintendent of Presbyterian missions in Alaska.

He was hit by a streetcar in Clarksburg, West Virginia on this day September 2, 1927.

Read the entire story here:

http://scenicwv.org/sketches/HS12%20Samuel%20Hall%20Young.pdf

Seen above is a photo of him taken in 1914.

Mission Klondike, Sinclair; Mills; Sheldon Jackson book; Fleming Revell Co NY in 1915; 1927 “Hall Young of AK: the Mushing Parson” Autobiography; 1916 The Klondike Clan a tale of the Great Stampede.

Edward Frederick Doree


E.F. Doree is quite famous or infamous among union and union-busters. Edward was born in Philadelphia in 1889 to Swedish immigrants Frederick and Maria. The family moved to Coeur d’Alene and from there to Skagway after 1900. Frederick and his son Edward worked for White Pass and lived in company housing. Edward had 5 siblings ranging in age from 3 to 16 – Edward was the oldest. According to his daughter who wrote a book in 2004, here is the story:

One day there was a railroad accident and Edward lost the fingers of one hand. He was fired. His parents requested some compensation from White Pass and instead were told to clear out of White Pass housing, they no longer worked for the railroad.
This created a fire in the heart of Edward Frederick Doree. He moved to Washington and became an organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World more commonly known as the Wobblies. He once mocked the idea of rural work as wholesome and benevolent with the famous joke that in the wheat states, the “eight-hour work day” prevailed—“eight hours in the forenoon, eight hours in the afternoon.”
The IWW fought for the rights of workers—common laborers, migrants, immigrants, black workers—unprotected by the craft unions. In the face of beatings, kidnappings, and lynchings by vigilantes, company detectives, and hired guns, the Wobblies organized in mining and lumber camps, the wheat fields, on docksides and in textile factories. A meteoric career from its beginnings in 1906, the IWW arose with free speech fights, peaked with a membership of over 100,000 workers in 1917, and was devastated in 1918 by the imprisonment of its leadership for violations of wartime legislation.
Doree was a key IWW organizer, union head, writer, and defense committee officer who experienced all of this first-hand. From 1918 to 1922, Doree was one of over a hundred Wobblies imprisoned in Leavenworth Penitentiary when the government cracked down on these activists.
Doree wrote many letters and his writings provide a different view of American labor history. The most interesting irony is that while White Pass saved the money to compensate the Doree family in early 1900’s, by their actions, labor gained a hero. Thousands of companies and millions of workers from that time to present have benefited from the simple rights that unions won for the worker. I will classify Doree as another one of Skagway’s heroes, despite the lack of recognition he has received.

Wikipedia; “A Wobbly Life: IWW Organizer E.F. Doree”, 2004, by Ellen Doree Rosen

Howard Atwood Kelly


While perusing Jeff Smith’s book today I found a reference to a doctor that I had not previously known of in Skagway. He was writing in his journal on March 25, 1898 about the shell games on the Skaguay and Dyea trails: “The most prominent feature of the landscape is the activity of the shell-game men and thier cappers. How any one can be deceived by these crooks is a mystery, but many are. They look evil, and are evil. Great numbers lose heavily and a good many have had to give up their journey and turn back, all funds being lost…Shell-game tables extend from Dyea to Sheep Camp and one comes across them every hundred yards or so…”
Well, when I looked up Dr. Howard Atwood Kelly wasn’t I surprised to find that he is not only the founder of the modern science of gynecology, but also one of the four founders of the Johns Hopkins Hospital where he stayed until 1919! Turns out he is another hero who passed through Skagway. Kelly was born on February 20, 1858 in Camden, New Jersy and died on January 12, 1943 in Baltimore.

John Philip Clum


We know of John Clum by his title, Postmaster of Skagway, but he had quite a life of adventure both before and after living here. He was a friend of Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday in Tombstone, Arizona where Clum married Belle Atwood in 1881. His daughter Caro was also born there on Christmas Eve, 1883.

From Tombstone, he arrived in Skagway on March 26, 1898 and immediately set up the Post Office with himself as Postmaster and Postal Inspector. As mentioned before (March 17, 2010), he did away with the mail service from Dyea to Skagway, McGreely’s Express.
Belle passed away in 1912 in Alaska and John died in Los Angeles in 1932, on this day, May 2 at the age of 81.
Gary Ledoux has written two books on John Clum and his life.

“The men who made the west are fast going and no one that I know of did more to make the West than John P. Clum.” Harry Carr, Reporter – Los Angeles Times, May 1932

Yesterwest.com – an entire website dedicated to the history of John Clum and his influence in Tombstone, Arizona by Gary Ledoux; Pennington p 334; familysearch; postalmuseum.si.edu/gold/clum.html; Alaska marriage records.

William Ogilvie


Ogilvie was born on this day, April 7, 1846 on a farm in Gloucester Township, Ottawa of Irish and Scottish immigrant parents. After learning the skill of surveying, he worked locally as a land surveyor. Later he qualified as a Dominion Land Surveyor and was first hired by the Dominion government in 1875. From 1887 to 1889, Ogilvie was involved in George Mercer Dawson’s exploration and survey expedition in what later became the Yukon Territory. With the packing help of Skookum Jim Mason, along with George and Kate Carmack, he surveyed the Chilkoot Pass, as well as the Yukon and Porcupine rivers. Ogilvie established the location of the boundary between the Yukon and Alaska on the 141st meridian west.

During the Klondike Gold Rush, he surveyed the townsite of Dawson City and was responsible for settling many disputes between miners. Ogilvie became the Yukon’s Land Surveyor and Commissioner to the Yukon Territory between July 5, 1898 and March 1901 when he resigned due to poor health.

He later wrote “Early Days on the Yukon” published in 1913. He died November 13, 1912 of poor health in Winnipeg.

“The Yukon Territory”; Wikipedia

Arthur Murray Jarvis


Arthur Murray Jarvis was born on this day, April 6, 1862 in Toronto, Canada.

In 1896, Charcoal, a Blood Indian killed another native man and then went on a shooting spree ending with the deliberate and bloody murder of NWMP Sgt. Wilde Wm. Brock. NWMP Inspector Arthur M. Jarvis followed Charcoal until he was caught and subsequently tried and hung in 1897.
Then, later in 1897, when hundreds of prospectors headed for the Klondike gold fields through Fort Chipewyan and the fur trade river system, Jarvis was sent on a long winter patrol to prevent conflicts. Jarvis was the first Canadian government official to enforce Canadian laws in the Fort Chipewyan region.

In 1898 he was sent to the Dalton Trail Post also known as Pleasant Camp located near Haines. The post was designed to maintain order during the Gold Rush, control the surge of people to the area, and establish a border custom station. Inspector A.M. Jarvis led eighteen North-West Mounted Police from April to October, 1898. Under his supervision, they collected custom fees, captured several criminals, and witnessed the remnants of the U.S. Reindeer Relief Expedition pass through to the Klondike. He established the boundary line on that trail and built a fort at the base of the Chilkat trail there. He was with the NWMP at the spike ceremony in Carcross for the completion of the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad in 1899.

In January 1900 the Secretary of State for War for Canada accepted the offer of Lord Strathcona to form a unit to go to South Africa for the war. Among those mounted rifle officers was Major A.M. Jarvis. For his valor in battle down there he was awarded the “Companions of the Order of St. Michael and St. George”.
Jarvis retired from the NWMP in 1912 after 31 years of service. In 1915 at the age of 52 he went to England and signed up to serve in World War One in France and Flanders. Jarvis was appointed Lieutenant-Colonel, Assistant Provost Marshal. For his service he received the “Commander of the Order of the British Empire”. Arthur M. Jarvis died in 1930 in Toronto.

Chambers: The Royal Northwest Mounted Police a Corp History, online; Who’s Who, Vol 57 1905;

Father Pascal Tosi


Pascal Tosi was born on April 25, 1837 in Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy. He was one of the first two Jesuits missionaries to set foot in Alaska. As the first Superior of Jesuits in Alaska (from 1886 to 1897) he is regarded as the founder and organizer of the Church in North-Alaska.

Ordained a (diocesan) priest in 1861, Tosi entered the Jesuits the following year in order to be sent to the ‘American mission’. In 1865 he arrived in the United States to serve on the Rocky Mountain Mission. For two decades he proved to be an able missionary to the Indigenous Peoples of the American Northwest.

When in 1886 Archbishop Charles John Seghers set out for northern Alaska on what was meant to be a reconnaissance expedition, he had with him as travelling companions Pascal Tosi and French Jesuit, Louis Robaut. The two were supposed to stay with the archbishop only on a temporary basis. The Jesuits had no intentions at the time of opening a new field of missionary activity in Alaska. However, the murder of Archbishop Seghers (November 1886) changed the situation, and their thinking on the matter. (see my earlier blog on Bishop Seghers)

Tosi and Robaut spent the winter of 1886-87 in Canada at the confluence of the Yukon and Stewart Rivers. When in early 1887, upon entering Alaska, they learned of the death of Archbishop Seghers, Tosi considered himself to be in charge, at least for the time being, of ecclesiastical affairs in Alaska. The following summer he made a trip to the Pacific Northwest to consult with the Superior of the Rocky Mountain Mission, Joseph M. Cataldo, who formally appointed him Superior of the Alaska Mission and entrusted him with the task of developing that mission.

In 1892, he made a trip to Rome. There Pope Leo XIII, moved by Fr. Tosi’s account of the state of the mission in Alaska, told him in their native Italian, Andate, fate voi da papa in quelle regione! (“Go and make yourself the Pope in those regions!”).

On July 27, 1894, the Holy See separated Alaska from the Diocese of Vancouver Island and made it a Prefecture Apostolic with Tosi as its Apostolic Prefect.

By 1897, Tosi was physically worn out by a tough daily life and strenuous labors in an extreme climate. He was succeeded both as Superior of the Alaska Mission and as Prefect Apostolic in March of that year by French Jesuit Jean-Baptiste René (1841-1916). From St. Michael, on September 13, 1897, Tosi sailed, reluctantly, for he hoped to stay on in northern Alaska, for what turned out to be a brief retirement in Juneau. As the ship left the harbor, a salute of four guns was ordered as a manifestation of the universal esteem in which he was held.

Tosi died in Juneau on this day, January 14, 1898 and is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery under the false name of Father Tozier.

Wikipedia; LLORENTE, S. Jesuits in Alaska, Portland, 1969;TESTORE, C.Nella terra del sole a mezzanotte. La fondazione delle missione di Alaska. P. Pasquale Tosi S.J., Venice, 1935; ZAVATTI, S., Missionario ed esploratore nell’Alaska: Padre Pasquale Tosi, S.I., Milan, 1950.; Newadvent.com