Building a Railroad into the Klondike

The White Pass and Yukon Route is a narrow-gauge railroad linking the port of Skagway, Alaska, with Whitehorse, the capital of Yukon. An isolated system, it has no direct connection to any other railroad. Equipment, freight and passengers are ferried by ship through the Port of Skagway, and via road through a few of the stops along its route.

In 1909, nationally known railroad writer Cy Warman published a 20-page article "Building a Railroad into the Klondike" in the periodical 'The Railroad Trainman'.

The line was born of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897. The most popular route taken by prospectors to the gold fields in Dawson City was a treacherous route from the port in Skagway or Dyea, Alaska, across the mountains to the CanadaUS border at the summit of the Chilkoot Pass or the White Pass. There, the prospectors were not allowed across by Canadian authorities unless they had sufficient gear for the winter, typically one ton of supplies. This usually required several trips across the passes. There was a need for better transportation than pack horses used over the White Pass or human portage over the Chilkoot Pass. This need generated numerous railroad schemes. In 1897, the Canadian government received 32 proposals for Yukon railroads, and most were never realized.

Construction started in May 1898, but they encountered obstacles in dealing with the local city government and the town's crime boss, Soapy Smith. The company president, Samuel H. Graves (18521911), was elected as chairman of the vigilante organization that was trying to expel Soapy and his gang of confidence men and rogues. On the evening of July 8, 1898, Soapy Smith was killed in the Shootout on Juneau Wharf with guards at one of the vigilante's meetings. Samuel Graves witnessed the shooting. The railroad helped block off the escape routes of the gang, aiding in their capture, and the remaining difficulties in Skagway subsided.

On July 21, 1898, an excursion train hauled passengers for 4 miles out of Skagway, the first train to operate in Alaska. On July 30, 1898, the charter rights and concessions of the three companies were acquired by the White Pass & Yukon Railway Company Limited, a new company organized in London. Construction reached the 2,885-foot (879.3 m) summit of White Pass, 20 miles away from Skagway, by mid-February 1899. The railway reached Bennett, British Columbia, on July 6, 1899. In the summer of 1899, construction started north from Carcross to Whitehorse, 110 miles north of Skagway. The construction crews working from Bennett along a difficult lakeshore reached Carcross the next year, and the last spike was driven on July 29, 1900, with service starting on August 1, 1900. By then much of the Gold Rush fever had died down.

About the author:

Cy Warman (1855 1914) was an American journalist and author known during his life by the appellation "The Poet of the Rockies". In 1880, after failing as a wheat broker in Pocahontas, Illinois, Mr. Warman migrated to Denver, Colorado where the Colorado Silver Mining Boom was in progress. There, Warman worked for the Denver and Rio Grande Western Railroad progressing from a "wiper" (charged with keeping the engine area clean) to locomotive fireman and later to railroad engineer. These experiences became the basis for many of his early writings.

Warman achieved national recognition in 1892 when, after riding from New York City to Chicago in the cab of the locomotive The Exposition Flyer, he wrote his first railroad story, "A Thousand Miles in a Night" for McClure's Magazine. This was the first of a series of widely popular "True Tales of the Railroad" articles written for McClure's.

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