So a descendent of Mr. Heney has said that the previous photo of Heney in which he is smoking a cigar is not actually M.J.
Coming from a descendent, I have to concur and so have removed the offending photo and am now replacing it with one of him at a luncheon given to him by his workers, seen above. Heney is on the far right with a natty little beard. Notice how the workers on the left look just a little uncomfortable though.
Albert Graham Mosier
Mosier was born in 1866 in Des Moines Iowa. He attended Iowa State School of Engineering at age 16 and graduated in 1885 at age 19. He worked for railroads in Iowa until he moved to Seattle in 1888. The Seattle Lake Shore and Eastern hired him to work on the route near Snohomish. He went to Alaska in 1896 to report on a disputed waterway, but got involved with the gold rush and stayed, surveying from White Pass to Skagway, working for Captain Gaillard (who we looked at a couple of days ago).
The route that the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad takes today is a result of his survey in 1897.
In 1898, Mosier went to Dawson by way of St. Michael and the Yukon and spent ten years in the Klondike and adjacent territories, making his mark as one of the most successful drift miners in the region.
He returned to Washington in early 1924 just before his wife died, and he never returned to Alaska. Albert was a U. S. Deputy Mineral Surveyor and a U. S. Deputy Surveyor in Alaska in 1914. He died on this day, December 8, 1955 in the town that he platted: Sedro Wooley, Washington.
Seen above in his 80’s still using his surveying equipment.
Skagit River Journal website; glosurveyorsnotes.pdf; webpage on him as Washington pioneer.
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.
Train Talk
What Trains Say
On my travels I picked up a great little brochure in an antique store which lists all the “Railroad Slang” and the meaning of the train horn toots. I will post some of those.
Red Onion in railroad terms means a railroad eating house. Who knew?
Seen above is the Bennett Station eating house.
“What Trains Say” by the Association of American Railroads.
Hallelujah Conductor
Calvin Eugene Shelly was a conductor on the White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad. He had come to Skagway from Chicago but was born in 1864 in Akron, Ohio. He came here with his wife Mary and their two sons Allen and Robert.
He attended the Peniel Mission and was “beautifully saved at the mission. He received the name of “Hallelujah Conductor” for he was always praising the Lord….One night during testimonies, he said this –“I have been a year paying for a dead horse, and now I am clear before God and Man.” He meant that he had been a year paying and making restitution for things he had done in the past.” – as Mable Ulery put it.
Their home was on 7th between Broadway and Spring which is just an open lot now. When we moved here in 1998 I remember there was a controversy because someone bulldozed the house one day and hauled it off. It was that action which prompted the city to make it necessary to get permission to bulldoze historic buildings and not just do it in the night. True, it was just a dilapidated house nearly 90 years old, but it was part of the fabric of historic Skagway.
Speaking of historic, seen above is Lep in his conductor’s togs.
Calvin passed away on December 28, 1945 in Burlington, Washington.
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.
Floods in Skagway 1919
This major flood happened in Skagway in September 1919. This is when the train tracks crossed the Skagway River and ran on the west side of the river and then crossed back to the east side up the way.
“Passenger Trains Between Skagway and Whitehorse Stopped by Flood
Last Friday rain started to fall in torrents in the mountain surrounding Skagway and by the following morning the Skagway river was a raging flood, filled with trees and driftwood, that carried all before it. Four bents were washed out of the railroad bridge near the car shops and eleven bents out of the railroad bridge at four mile post. The weather reached the decking of the first bridge and the driftwood pilling up against it threatened at one time to cause the whole structure to go out, but a flat car with a derrick aboard was put into operation and the trees and logs hoisted over the bridge and dropped into the stream below. The government bridge across the Skagway river at Twenty –Second street was damaged to the extent of having the center span carried away.
At the height of the flood there was a White Pass train stranded between the first and second bridges, but since then the first bridge has been repaired sufficiently to get the train into the yards shops.
After the rain started to fall it continued to pour down almost without cessation until yesterday afternoon, when it commeneed to let up, and the weather was reported to be clearing and river falling.
Section men from Carcross, Pennington, Bennett, Log Cabin, Summit and Glacier were rushed over to Skagway to assist in the work of controlling the flood and are still there.
Yesterday afternoon a telephone message was received here from General Manager II. Wheeler at Skagway, saying that the Skagway river was threatening the track near Boulder and asking that a work train be made up here and rushed over with a load of sacked gravel to use in checking water’s inroads. The train, consist of an engine and three flat cars left here at 7 o’clock this morning to load 500 sacks of gravel at the 98 mile post.
A train was run from Whitehorse Tuesday and the passengers and mail transferred at the washout. They connected with the Princess Alice, which sailed from Skagway Wednesday night. There have been no train since then and it now seems probable there will not be until Saturday or Sunday.
There is a lot of perishable and other freight for the interior now in Skagway which cannot be moved until regular train service is resumed, which will likely be first of next week.
Whitehorse Weekly Star, Friday, September 19, 1919
Charles Spurgeon Moody
C.S. Moody was born in 1867 in Kirkwood Illinois. He came to Seattle in 1889 to work in banking. He then came to Skagway around 1897 and worked with Hawkins to purchase land for the railroad. He and some investors started the First Bank of Skagway which later went broke in 1899. He was involved in some lawsuits after that. He moved to Washington and started another bank and worked as a special deputy state bank examiner for other banks that went under in 1917.
In his book Alias Soapy Smith, Jeff Smith says that some people believed Moody to be one of Soapy’s “silent partners.” In Seattle, where Moody went in August of 1898, he strongly and emphatically denied the story that he was run out of Skagway by the citizens who thought he was involved with Soapy. He said “All talk detrimental to my reputation was started by my enemies…” (Seattle Post-Intelligencer 08/05/1898, p. 6)
Still, there was no money or gold from Soapy’s estate when his wife Mary came to Skagway to claim his effects. Certainly there was a conspiracy to clean out his estate by some. Perhaps Moody was an innocent that was thrown in with the other clan members. In any event, he returned to Skagway for a short time until the bank went under.
Charles Moody stayed in Washington, married and had a family and died on April 28, 1956.
Klondike Centenial Scrapbook, p.94 ad; Minter; Victoria Daily Colonist 6.6.99;Rootsweb posting; Washington death record.
List of Lawyers
Here is a list of 59 lawyers or attorneys in Skagway in the early days:
Acklen, Adams, Agner, Barnes, Bennett, Blackett, Bowman, Boyce, Burton, Carrier, Cassidy, Church, Corliss, Dautoff, Day, Dixon, Dillon, Elliot, Erwin, Goldschmidt, Grant, Gunnison, Hall, Hamilton, Hartman, Harding, Hartners, Helmcken, Hills, Jennings, Knapp, Lightfoot, Lilly, Lovell, Marquam, McEneny, Miller, O’Donnell, Ostrander, Paulsell, Perkins, Pratt, Price, Rasmuson, Sehlbrede, Shackelford, Shorthill, Shoup, Smith, Stevens, Taylor, Tupper, VanHorn, Webb, Weldon, Wilcoxen, Williams, Winn, Young.
Most had some other profession such as retail, lumber, teaching, hospitality, secretary, tax collection, judgeship, mining, hay & grain and engineering. Some worked for Soapy (Van Horn, Weldon, Dixon, and O’Donnell) and some worked for White Pass (Elliott, Harding, Cassidy, Hartman, and Helmcken).
Seen above is a likely set of characters.