Stories and Folklore from Skagway, Alaska
Built in Philadelphia, engine No. 59 was a Baldwin 4-6-0 purchased new in 1900. This ten-wheeler had a long-boiler that had substantially more heating surface area. The grates and fireboxes were relatively small, however. It was scrapped in 1941.
Steamlocomotive.com; whitepassfan.net
This photo of men working on the railroad line says Dedman Studio Skagway, but it looks like it is alongside the Yukon River with the Steamships. My guess it is Whitehorse, or possibly Carcross.
Henry was born on this day, February 27, 1863 in Port Chalmers, New Zealand. His father John Darling founded the Union Steamship Company which ran steamships from New Zealand to Vancouver, later known as the Canadian Australian line. Henry was schooled in London and then apprenticed to John Gwynes, an engineer there. He then went to India and worked for the British India Steam Navigation Company and the British & Burmese Company of British India. In 1891 he came from Glasgow, Scotland, to British Columbia as the superintending engineer in charge of the building of three steamships for the Union Steamship Company.
Around 1899 he became the general manager of the British Yukon Navigation Company, Ltd., organized by the White Pass & Yukon Route. By 1902 he and his family of four sons and two daughters, living in Vancouver, started their own business in wholesale paints, oils and varnishes. Henry Darling must have died in Vancouver April 6, 1926. The photo above was taken in 1925 and contributed by his great grandson Mark Darling.
British Columbia. from the Earliest times to the present vol 4 1914.
some information and photo contributed by Mark Darling, 2018.
more information can be found at:
https://changingvancouver.wordpress.com/tag/henry-darling/
Charley Moriarity or Moriarty (otherwise known as the “Snow King”), was the head of the track-laying gang on the White Pass. He was a silent, red-headed Irishman and had a great capacity for working himself, and getting others to work.
Many people have been given credit for putting in the last spike on the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad at Carcross on Sunday, July 29, 1900.
In the book “On the White Pass Payroll” Graves describes a list of people attempting to drive the last spike with pathetic results. After all the pomp and ceremony, he states,
“Then everybody cheered and a continuous clicking noise announced that the films yet remaining in their Kodak’s were being used up, and there was a lot of hand-shaking. In the middle of this the corner of my eye caught the “Snow King” sneaking up with a spike puller which he stealthily applied to the dilapidated last spike. Poor thing, it didn’t take much pulling z- it was glad to go, and Charley quietly marked the hole with a piece of chalk for the subsequent attention of his track men. I was rather pleased with the evidence of strict attention to business even in the midst of pleasure.”
Now here is not the way an engine should be….J.D. True in the foreground.
This Case and Draper photo of the train in 1905 shows how much of the landscape was “scalped” for building and firewood. I don’t know exactly where this was, somewhere on the other side of the pass in Canada.
The date on this photo was 1900 and based on the snow level it must be September or October. I did not previously have a record of a car “on the ground” as railroaders put it. I don’t have any records of anyone dying on this date by accident, so perhaps it was just an “Ooops”.
Hamilton Ross Robinson was born in Anson, Maine in 1872, but left his wife and two daughters behind to work on the railroads up north. In 1898 Heney hired him and put him at the front saying he was a “veteran at the game of railway building”. Robinson had worked across Canada building railroads and had most recently worked on the Stikine River building track to Telegraph Creek. He became the White Pass master of transportation and was ambassador to Canada from White Pass. He was known as the “Master of Horse” as head of the grading gang. He later opened the Robinson Roadhouse which is a roadside pulloff on the road to Whitehorse today. He returned to Maine where he died in 1926 at the age of 54. Whiting described him as a mountain of a man with huge calloused hands, which is evident from the photo of him above.
Here’s that photo that I posted before, it was mislabeled to be Heney in the middle, but actually that charming mug is the governor, Wilford Bacon Hoggatt! This is a scan from the same book, Grit, Grief and Gold by Whiting.
George Johnson was born about 1875 probably in Alaska. He was a packer to the railroad camps along the White Pass line in 1898-1899. He was described as being half Native.
On January 2, 1899 May Burke witnessed the shooting of George by Jesse Rounds, a prostitute at White Pass City because George was harassing her.
(This location, along the White Pass route about half way to the top of the pass, is now owned by the National Park Service, but there have been no plans to do anything with the area.)
Six months later, May Burke was arrested at the Summit for “disturbing the peace”. Apparently these railroad camps were lively places.
George died on this day, January 4, 1899 and is buried in the Gold Rush Cemetery.
A wild Discouraging Mess, page 70; Skagway coroners inquest
