Conceived in Lawlessness

The town of Skagway was conceived in lawlessness and nurtured in anarchy.

Pierre Berton, Klondike Fever

Critical to Soapy Smith's legend is the premise that before July 8, 1898, Skagway was a town in which there was no law or order, and where chaos ruled. An examination of this, most basic principle requires going back to the beginning of Skagway's history.

Skagway was first used as a seasonal camp by local Tlingit peoples. They referred to both the river and the bay it emptied into by the word Shghaghwei, which means "wrinkled," or "rugged," and refers to the appearance of the water when the wind blows. Later stories applied the name Skugua to a beautiful woman whose husband insulted her. She disappeared into the side of a mountain in retaliation. When the cold wind blows, it is the icy breath of Skugua blowing down from the mountains. Either way, the word refers to the ubiquitous Skagway wind. English speakers would debate whether to spell the word Skaguay or Skagway until well into 1899, but the matter was first decided by the United States Postal Service on November 11, 1897, when it designated the Skagway post office.

* * *

Adventurer William Moore and his son, Bernard (Ben), came to the Skagway River Valley area in the fall of 1886 and settled in early 1887. The elder Moore anticipated a gold rush to the interior and envisioned building a trading post at the base of White Pass and improving a pack trail over the summit. As a Canadian citizen, William Moore could not make a legal homestead claim; however, Bernard, who was naturalized in 1896, could, and did. In 1888, Bernard posted a location notice for a 160-acre homestead, which he revised in 1896 by posting a notice for a trading and manufacturing site. Shortly thereafter, the Moores sold an interest in their homestead to the British investors, the Alaska & Northwest Territory Trading Company (A&NTT Co.), with the support of the Close Brothers Company, a London firm incorporated in West Virginia. At Skagway, the A&NTT Co. began constructing a lumber mill, wharf, and trail over the White Pass into Yukon Territory. In May 1897, the company sent its first workers—most of whom had British accents—to Skagway Bay.

As William Moore had foreseen, on July 11, 1897, the steamer Portland landed in Seattle with more than a ton of gold on board, all taken from tributaries of the Klondike River in Yukon Territory. Three days behind her, the Excelsior sailed into San Francisco boasting equal amounts of gold. On July 21, 1897, the S.S. Queen steamed into Skagway harbor bearing two hundred passengers wanting to cross the Chilkoot and White Passes and head to the Klondike regions. Within a week, several more ships from West Coast cities landed at Moore's Wharf, filled with passengers. Among them was a civil engineer from Oregon named Frank Reid.

Reid was born in Peoria, Illinois, in 1844. He and his brother, Dick, became orphans before reaching manhood and put themselves through college by laboring in the orchards and riverboats along the Mississippi River. They both got their degrees in engineering in 1873, at which time they headed off for the Dakotas, where they worked as surveyors. By the 1880s they had found their way to the Willamette Valley in Oregon, where Dick married and settled down. Frank came and went with various jobs, but always found his way back to his brother's home and family.

Reid came to Skagway on July 28, 1897, on one of the first steamers arriving in Skagway Bay, traveling with a Mr. Hilts, who wished to open a saloon. The first tasks he undertook for Hilts were to purchase flour and bacon and to tend bar while Hilts returned to Juneau to gather more supplies for his enterprise. By August 5, a committee of about a hundred townspeople came to Reid, knowing he was a surveyor, and asked him to begin laying out a townsite. He began his survey at the southeast corner of the town's largest store, Burkhard's Hotel and outfitters. This corner he called Lot 1 of Block 1. The hundred or so citizens who asked for the survey called this beginning point the corner of Broadway and McKinney Street, after Dave McKinney of their group. It later became known as Broadway and Fifth.

In his haste to plat Skagway, Reid brushed aside the Moore claim. A protesting Bernard Moore was allowed to fence off five acres around his cabin and pasture, which the citizens' "committee" asked Reid to survey and eliminate from the street grid. The A&NTT Co. was also allotted room for its lumber mill and access to the Moore wharf. To complicate matters, Bernard's father, Captain Moore (who had no rights to the claim), had initially given leases to the first businesses putting up tents on the Moore homestead. He was up on the White Pass working on the trail construction when the decision to stake a townsite was made. He returned to Bernard's claim aware of its questionable validity, but no contemporary sources mention him trying to stop the citizens' committee—just the opposite. He had a financial interest in the trail, the sawmill, and the wharf, and made good money collecting docking fees. In early July, he had placed an advertisement in a Juneau newspaper urging people to use his pack trail over the White Pass.

Captain Moore, who occupied a bunkhouse on one of the surveyed lots at the northwest corner of State and Fifth, was told he could stake that lot. No one seemed to pay any attention to Bernard Moore's claim to his 160-acre homestead, which included five buildings at what would become the northeast corner of Fifth and State. These prime lots would later become occupied by early arrivals such as attorney J. G. Price, steamboat captain J. M. Tanner, and by a structure that would become the city hall. Newly arriving townspeople ignored the larger homestead boundaries because of the mistaken impression that both Moores were Canadian and therefore could not homestead under United States law. Apparently no one believed Bernard when he said he was a naturalized American citizen.

On September 16, 1897, almost a month after the first stampeders arrived in Skagway Bay, Moore filed an application for the patent for 160 acres of land as a trading and manufacturing site under Alaska's homesteading laws, land that constituted about a quarter of the booming city of Skagway. It amounted to everything south of Eleventh Avenue, including all of the downtown businesses, which by that time numbered around five hundred. A total of 196 lots had been filed with U.S. Commissioner John U. Smith, for which he had collected fees of five dollars each, and each owner considered his claim legitimate. In addition, the U.S. Customs Office had exempted twenty-four lots...