Robert Service still says it best:
THE TRAIL OF NINETY-EIGHT
Gold! We leapt from our benches. Gold! We sprang from our stools.
Gold! We wheeled in the furrow, fired with the faith of fools.
Fearless, unfound, unfitted, far from the night and the cold,
Heard we the clarion summons, followed the master-lure–Gold!
Men from the sands of the Sunland; men from the woods of the West;
Men from the farms and the cities, into the Northland we pressed.
Graybeards and striplings and women, good men and bad men and bold,
Leaving our homes and our loved ones, crying exultantly–”Gold!”
Never was seen such an army, pitiful, futile, unfit;
Never was seen such a spirit, manifold courage and grit.
Never has been such a cohort under one banner unrolled
As surged to the ragged-edged Arctic, urged by the arch-tempter–Gold.
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The statue, by White Horse artist Chuck Buchanan, captures the detail and spirit of those 1897 times. The dedication plaque on the statue pretty much says it all:
SKAGWAY CENTENNIAL STATUE
Skagway was originally spelled S-K-A-G-U-A, a Tlingit word for “windy place.” The first people in this area were Tlingits from the Chilkoot and Chilkat villages in the Haines-Klukwan area. From a fish camp in nearby Dyea, they used the Chilkoot Trail for trading with the First Nations people of the Yukon Territory. The windy Skagway valley was favored for hunting mountain goats and bear, but no one settled here until 1887. That June, Skookum Jim, a Tlingit from the Carcross-Tagish area, encountered members of the William Ogilvie expedition, a Canadian survey party that came north to map the country. Captain William Moore, a member of the party, was persuaded by Skookum Jim to follow him up a lower pass through the mountains, while the others took the Chilkoot route. Leaving this beach, the two journeyed up the Skagway Valley to Lake Bennett, meeting the other party seven days later. The two men were excited and extolled the advantages of this new route through the mountains. Olgilvie at once named it for Sir Thomas White, a Canadian government minister. Moore had visions of a port city served by a railroad, and he returned to the valley with his son Bernard in October 1887. They built a cabin and a wharf, and waited. A small number of prospectors had been entering the north country searching for gold since the 1870s. It was only a matter of time until a great stampede would bring many more. In August 1896, Tlingits Skookum Jim and Dawson Charlie, along with George Carmack of California, discovered a large amount of gold in Rabbit Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River, some 600 miles from here. The creek was renamed Bonanza, and when word of this strike reached the outside world in July 1897, the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-1898 was on!
For centuries the Tlingits controlled these passes. The tide of stampeders forced them to give up control, but native packers still guided would-be prospectors over these mountains, and they were paid handsomely for their work. This sculpture represents a typical scene at the start of Chilkoot or White Pass trails in August 1897. The Tlingit packer, in his 40s, his centuries of knowledge about the route from his ancestors. He wears traditional clothing, made of moosehide and bear fur, and carries a pack made from the skin of a mountain goat, held to his back by a tumpline strapped around his chest. He leads a 30-year-old stampeder, just off a ship from Puget Sound, who is determined to reach the gold fields. His pack is a wood-frame box, and outside are strapped his hunting knife, shovel and gold pan, which he hopes will gather riches before winter. With eyes wide open and an eager smile, the stampeder has no apprehension about the rigors of the trail ahead.
Sculptor: Chuck Buchanan
Statue Design Input: Si Dennis, Sr., Richard Dick, Marian Katzeek Kelm, Roy Minter, Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park, John Svenson, Dr. Bob White.
Skagway Centennial Committee: Clay Alderson, Jeff Brady, Irene Henricksen, John McDermott, Carl Mulvihill, Stan Seimer.
Centennial Park: Architect – Jones and Jones; Survey – David Miller; Contractor – Hunz and Hunz; Funding – City of Skagway, White Pass & Yukon Route, donations.
Dedication * July 13, 1997
Seal – with silhouettes of 3 White Pass climbers:
GATEWAY TO THE KLONDIKE 1897-1898
1997-1998 CENTENNIAL
SKAGWAY
ALASKA
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ABOUT SKAGWAY & THE GOLD RUSH:
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From wikipedia to travel sites, the internet is rich with sources of information regarding Skagway. Start at the Official Skagway website history (
visit link) and the WP&YR Railroad site (
visit link)
Winding away from the readily findable, there's a 1990s article from Sunset Magazine that entertained me and caught the spirit of the place: (
visit link)
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ABOUT THE ARTIST:
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CHUCK BUCHANAN: SCULPTOR OF BRONZE PROSPECTOR STATUE
by Jane Gaffin (http://north-land.com/ypa/ChuckBuchanan.html)
Chuck Buchanan is an impressive Yukon artist who works with a variety of indigenous materials such as horn, antler, bone, stone and wood and has a cavalcade of achievements to his credit.
Some of his coveted carvings are part of the Yukon government's permanent art collection.
For his own theme park, he chiseled a hundred years of Yukon history into a 4,000-pound beige marble boulder, rounded and smoothed from sliding down a mountain during an ice age. "It's beautiful to work with," enthused Buchanan who transported the stone five miles along the highway on a front-end loader to its resting place at Heritage Park.
He's also fabricated Fibreglas wildlife mounts for museums and parks and has created life-size Fibreglas human figures. He casts bronze busts like the one of legendary policeman Sam Steele displayed in front of the Whitehorse detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) and another of poet Robert Service that graces the lawn of the Yukon Visitors' Reception Centre.
Buchanan is very knowledgeable about bronzing, which is an ancient metal alloy composed of copper and a smidgen of tin and has been used for many millennia to craft art pieces. His vast sculpting experience and knowledge about metals accounts for why his first heroic-size piece came together in record time and why he was able to meet the pressure-cooker deadline to unveil The Goldseeker statue as a highlight during the Canadian Mines Ministers' Conference held in Whitehorse on September 21-22, 1992. [got you hooked? click on the link to read the full article -- it's worth it!]