Stories and Folklore from Skagway, Alaska
On this day, January 31, 1904, Thomas E. Briggs, a White Pass engineer, died of typhoid in Skagway. He was buried in the Gold Rush Cemetery by White Pass at the direction of Superintendent John P. Rogers (not to be confused with President Clifford Rogers). There were various epidemics of Typhoid in both Dawson and Skagway from 1898 through 1904.
1905 directory; Skagway death record;Crisis and Opportunity:Three White Women’s Experiences of the Klondike Gold Rush by Carolyn Moore
Dr. Whiting is not to be confused with Superintendent Whiting of White Pass. Dr. Whiting worked for White Pass also, and was assistant to Mike Heney. He had a Saloon also, on the side.
He helped to quell the workers strike in 1898 by hitting White on the head with a shovel (see blog on John Robert White from October 13, 2009) and he helped in the autopsy of Soapy Smith (see blog on Sept 16, 2010 on Dr. Cornelius).
Fenton was born in 1866 in Quincy, Plumas County, California. He attended Stanford University and graduated in 1891. He died on this day, January 16, 1936 in Richmond Beach, Seattle, Washington. A descendent pointed out that the line drawing above is not Dr. Whiting, but his father, also named Fenton Whiting.
In 1933 he wrote: Grit, Grief and Gold: A true narrative of an Alaska Pathfinder. (Peacock Pub. Seattle); 1900 census; familysearch; Plumas County history online.
Happy Birthday to Dr. William Gabie, born on this day, January 12, 1878 in Kazabazua, Ontario, Canada. He attended McGill University in Montreal and graduated in 1907. In 1909 he received his medical certificate from Alaska and by 1915 was the Superintendent of the White Pass Hospital.
He and his wife Luella moved to Washington in 1920 where he applied for a certificate there. Luella was from North Dakota and I found a reference to a Dr. Gabie delivering lots of babies in New Salem, ND in the 1930’s, but not sure about whether it is the same doctor. In any event, he passed away in 1936 in Seattle at the age of 57. Seen above is the old White Pass Hospital.
Happy New Decade!
1910 census, 1915 directory; family website; WW1 Registration; WA death record; medical license at WA records.
Dr. Keller was a dentist in Skagway from 1899 to about 1922. He also published the Daily Alaskan from about 1905 to 1915 according to the directories.
He was born in St. Paul Minnesota in 1860. The 1880 census in St. Paul Minnesota shows Mrs Aunice Keller with eight children that ran a lumber business. Her husband must have died in 1879 because the youngest child was still a baby.
Louis married Martha in 1891 and moved to Skagway in the Gold Rush. He was President of the Fraternal Order of Elks in 1900 and was a member of the Arctic Brotherhood in 1907. He was also president of the Chamber of Commerce in 1903. He was elected Mayor of Skagway in 1922 but became ill with throat cancer and died on this day, November 30, 1922 in Seattle. He and Martha had no children.
Louis’ brother, John Michael also moved to Skagway and started a drug store, “Keller’s” which is still run, but as a jewelery store today. John also helped to run the newspaper with Louis and Martha.
Seen above, in hard times before restoration efforts in the 1980’s is the store.
1900;1902;1905, 1915 directories; Skagway Museum Record
Dr. John Baughman was a Physican and assayer. He was born in Barberton, Ohio on March 10, 1856. I read somewhere that his family was Jewish which would add to my growing list of Jewish families in Skagway in the gold rush, but I cannot find that source again, so just a possibility there.
After graduating from college as a doctor, John Baughman married Mina Barber in Manistique, Michigan on February 25, 1897. Struck with gold fever Dr. Baughman joined the stampede to Dawson in 1897. Expecting to practice medicine there, he found the profession barred from him because he was not a Canadian citizen, so he joined in the search for gold.
Later her returned to Michigan where he brought his wife to Skagway in 1899. Dr. Baughman practiced medicine in Skagway until 1905. Their first son, Paul was born here in 1899 but died in 1904. Their second son born in 1903 also died in 1903 and both are buried in the Gold Rush Cemetery. Their daughter Dorothy, born around 1905 lived a long life and is buried in Juneau.
After leaving Skagway in 1905, the family moved to Seward where Dr. Baughman was a doctor for many years and established the Pioneer Hospital, ministering to a large section of Alaska. While in Seward, he was Game Warden of the Third Division for eight years. He also operated a drug store. The Daily Alaska Empire obituary said he was Alaska’s oldest physician when he died on Thanksgiving Day, November 25, 1937 in Juneau. He was a life member of the Masonic Order, affiliated with the organization for 45 years. He is buried in the Juneau Evergreen Cemetery.
1902 directory; Juneau Evergreen records; family search; The Daily Alaska Empire–Friday, 26 November 1937-Page 1 & Page 8.
Charles Davis was born in 1840 in Ohio and claimed to have fought in the Civil War. He was a prospector and a laborer in Skagway from before 1910 to his death, on this day, November 22, 1938. His peculiar cause of death was detailed in Robert Dahl’s book. He said his father, Dr. Dahl, told the nurses to bathe him because he smelled bad since he never bathed. Davis thought that bathing would cause death. In his case it did.
He is buried in the Pioneer Cemetery.
1910; 1920 1929; Dahl book; Skagway death record
And speaking of nurses:
Hattie Maria Corrin was born in South Coventry, Connecticut on this day, October 23, 1864. She was educated in private schools and enjoyed a comfortable existence until the business recession of 1877 and the death of her father a few years later drastically affected the family’s fortunes. The family moved in with relatives and Hattie contributed to their support by giving piano lessons.
She was married in 1888 to Lester B. Lockwood and moved with him to Tacoma in what was then the Territory of Washington. Her only child, Lester Corrin, was born there in 1892. In 1897 the marriage failed and she found herself alone with very limited financial resources and a young son to support.
The Alaska Gold Rush was in full swing and in casting about for some means of supporting herself and her son, she and a friend, a professional nurse, decided to establish a combination hospital-hotel in Skagway for sick and injured miners. The two women pooled their resources to purchase building materials and medical supplies. En route to Alaska they were shipwrecked in a blizzard outside Skagway, losing all their provisions and barely escaping with their lives. She supported herself for about three years in Skagway in a variety of jobs, including nurse, assistant to a physician and steamship ticket agent, until the rigors of the life in Skagway affected her health. She returned to Tacoma, where she found employment as the supervisor of a mens’ club. Further decline in her health forced her to move to a milder climate and she used the small savings she had accumulated for her son’s education to move to southern California.
While convalescing in California, she met and in 1905 married Henry Alvah Strong, co-founder and first president of what is now the Eastman Kodak Company. Mr. Strong, a widower twenty-five years her senior, legally adopted her son and the marriage was an unusually happy one until Mr. Strong’s death in 1919.
Having made the transition from a life of struggle and hardship to one of considerable luxury, Mrs. Strong dedicated the remainder of her life to helping others less fortunate than herself. The list of her charitable activities and honors is far too lengthy to include here but includes the establishment in 1927 of a retreat near Paris for face-wounded veterans of the French Army (for which she received the Legion of Honor), the establishment of the Hattie M. Strong Foundation in 1928, and gifts of various buildings to hospitals, educational institutions and social service agencies in the United States, Europe, Asia and Africa. Today there is a Hattie Strong scholarship given to students in their final year of study for a Baccalaureate or Graduate degree.
This and similar stories of heroes and heroines of the Gold Rush make me wonder: were they heroes before they came up to Skagway or did Skagway and the experience here make them see the world for the challenges and possibilities? Certainly in Hattie’s case we see a woman who pitched and and made a difference in the world. Hats off to Hattie!
Hattie M. Strong Foundation site.
One interesting story of the Klondyke is the expedition of four nurses from Ottawa. The Victoria Order of Nurses was started by Lady Ishbel Aberdeen, wife of the Governor General in Ottawa. She was heavily involved in the launching and further development of the VON for Canada. Lady Aberdeen had read with interest an appeal from Rev. Robert Dickey of Skagway, Alaska, in the Presbyterian periodical, The Westminster, calling for trained nurses to go to the Klondike. She sent Margaret Payson, Amy Scott, Georgia Powell and Rachel Hanna to Dawson. They were outfitted in “neat brown duck suits with bloomers and hobnail boots”. On May 14, 1898, two hundred men, six women and 60 tons of supplies embarked on the Islander for the Klondyke. They got off at Wrangell and went up the Stikine River the Cassiar Mountains and Fort Selkirk to Dawson. They were accompanied by Mrs. Cortlandt Starnes and Faith Fenton, a reporter.
Their work in Dawson and elsewhere is indescribable. Amy and Goergia left in 1900 and went to Africa to help in the Boer War, although Georgia returned to Dawson and married a mountie. Margaret stayed in Dawson and married a wealthy miner. Rachel also stayed on and then went to Atlin for 14 years.
The picture above shows 5 women onboard the ship in 1898. Faith Fenton is definitely the second from the right as I have several other photos of her that match.
The Right Way On by Olive; The Story of Klondike Nurses online.
Born October 11, 1956 in Portland Oregon and died November 1, 1923, Dr. Charles Cornelius is often pictured as the doctor who did the autopsy on Soapy and Frank Reid. He was elected coroner of Multnomah County in Oregon in 1894. He came to Skagway in 1898 just in time for the spinal meningitis epidemic and the Soapy shootout.
He returned to Portland, retired and then built the Cornelius Hotel there.
He is seen at the right in the photo above as Dr. Whiting pokes around.
Portland, Oregon – Its history and builders in connection with the antecedent explorations, discoveries and movements of the Pioneers that selected the site for the Great City of the Pacific, by Joseph Gaston, 1911 p. 439
Hettie, or Ester was born in 1869 in Seabeck, Washington in a logging camp. The physician who delivered Esther Clayson’s youngest sister was a woman and inspired Clayson to enter the University of Oregon’s Medical School in 1894. Her father was an English seaman who had jumped ship in 1864 and brought his family to join him three years later. His attempts to support his family as a lumber merchant, hotel manager, newspaper editor, and farmer were not entirely successful. After such unsteady beginnings, young Esther Clayson decided that she had no desire to be the helpmate of an Oregon farmer or pioneer hotel keeper. For a while, she could not decide between a career in theater or medicine. While theater seemed unreal to her, medicine was “drama in its highest form.” After graduating in 1898 from Medical School she married a fellow doctor, Emil Pohl. They joined the rest of the Clayson clan in Skagway soon after. As they arrived there was a meningitis outbreak.
Hettie and her husband, Emil set up the Union Skagway Hospital to treat the many sick men. The Pohls were indeed heroes of the town in that year.
The Clayson family had a large general store called Clayson’s. After the murder of her brother, Frederick Clayson on December 25, 1899 in the Yukon, the family eventually moved down to Washington. The doctors Pohl stayed in Alaska for a few years, but Dr. Emil Pohl himself died in 1911 in Alaska from either spinal meningitis or an encephalitis epidemic. After Emil’s death Ester married George Lovejoy in 1912 and relocated to Portland Oregon.
In 1907 Dr. Pohl was the first woman to direct a city department of health, the Portland Board of Health, in Oregon.
In 1919 she was co-founder and first director of the Medical Women’s International Association.
In her lifetime, Dr. Esther Clayson Pohl Lovejoy transformed the Portland Board of Health in Oregon by regulating the milk supply, providing funds for school nurses, and gaining Portland a national reputation for its high standards of sanitation. She also helped to establish the Medical Women’s International Association and the American Women’s Hospitals which, under her leadership, grew from an emergency committee for war-relief into an international service organization operating in thirty countries.
From 1911 to 1920, Esther Pohl Lovejoy continued her support of women’s suffrage, the League of Nations, and Prohibition, even running for a seat in Congress. She was an outspoken campaigner, publicizing the plight of poor farmers in the Northwest and calling local bankers “bandits” who charged ruinous interest rates in order to profit from the farmers’ misfortunes.
Dr. Ester Clayson Pohl Lovejoy passed away on this day, August 17 1967 in New York at the age of 98.
Her life is a shining beacon and an inspiration.
National Institute of Health: Changing the face of Medicine – Celebrating America’s Women Physicians – online; Murder in the Yukon; Klondike Mission, Sinclair; The Biographical Dictionary of Women in Science by Marilyn Bailey Ogilvie, Joy Dorothy Harvey.