Today, I have something special to share with the blog. As I said in an earlier blog entry, last year I was lucky enough to receive several audio files (taken from cassette) of an interview with my great-grandmother Edith Feero Larson. The interview was conducted sometime around 1980 by a man interested in Gold Rush-era Skagway. Over the last few months, I have transcribed the interview and now I can share part two of the interview (you can see part one here). I've put it on video because I just think it's amazing to hear her tell about her experiences in her own voice. Below is a transcript of today's video. I hope you enjoy it.
And Then the Gold Rush Started…
And then the gold rush started. We were living in Larchmont. The gold rush started and he wanted to go but he had no money. So two men of Tacoma, who had done business with him when he was in the transfer business, volunteered to help him get to Alaska. Alaska was a pretty cheap - you could get up there pretty cheap. You could ship a horse for five dollars. And he had two horses left at that time. One was so darn mean that nobody would have it. He couldn’t give it away and he couldn’t sell it. So he decided to take it with him. The other horse was a good gentle horse and he could leave that horse down here which he never did claim him again. And this horse he carried up, he left on this little steamer Edith, just crowded. He had this horse on it and he got into Skagway. They went through the rough places on the trip. They could see all kind of dead horses around floating on the water which was killed by the rock of the ship and the falling down and the others trampling them cause they was crowded in as all. Unloaded this horse on the beach, which they had to do. They had to load them into the water and swim them to shore. And when he got it on the beach a man stepped up and he said, “Mister, I’ll give you $175 for that horse. I’ll hire you. If you can handle that horse, you can handle mine. I’ll give you $5 a day and your keep”, which was a goldmine to a man who had been working for 50 cents a day and feeding his own horses. So he went to work for this man, which was the first man to bring pack horses into Skagway. And he worked for him for a while. Turn that thing off. I’ve got to drink my coffee.
Shipping Over the White Pass
They were driving pigs over the White Pass trail. The rest of the wagon trail was built. It was a trail of 97 and they moved down on to the river in the winter of 98. In the spring of 97 they moved up onto the wagon road. In the fall of 97, they moved on up to the railroad. So you see how fast the country grew. The surveyors landed in Skagway in March of 98. In August of 98, the train was running as far as White Pass city, that’s the first 13 miles out of town. And the White Pass railroad is the only railroad, so I have been told, that ever paid for itself, mile for mile, as it was built. See, people, if you could haul your freight from here, two miles, you didn’t have to pack it. So even for two miles, they’d haul, they’d pay the freight on that horse. It cost them from 50 cents, anywhere from 50 cents to a dollar, maybe more if you hired a pack train because if I have a load and you have a load, they take my load for 75 cents maybe, and you come along and you say, “Well, I want to get over. I’ll pay you a dollar a pound.” Well, you leave my load and then take your load. Somebody else may walk up and say, “I’ll pay you a dollar and a quarter for a pound.” Well, your load is left. That’s the way packers packed their freight. Dad had one price and he charged it and he didn’t take somebody else in the place of them. Most of them would leave your load because it was more money for them. But when the train came along they could get that first pound that first mile, they’d take it. They’d get the second mile, they’d take that to pay the freight. It made the packing much cheaper.
The Horse that Got Away
And in August they were running the trains as far as White Pass city. My oldest brother got sick in White Pass city in August and mother brought him down on the train to Skagway. (She) left us kids up in the old hotel to go down on the pack train. So when we were coming down, them packers thought they’d keep track of us kids but not letting us have a halter or a bridle on the horses. So they took them all off. They didn’t know that us kids had been taking the horses to water and that and there and wherever we wanted them to go so we could drive anyhow. We got around the corner at Rocket Point and a little old engine came round at said, “Toot! Toot!” so the horse my brother was on was gone. And they never stopped that horse until he got clear into town. We kids went after him and them packers never dared tell mother what- that they had taken the bridle and halter off them horses. They never dared tell them. If father had known it they wouldn’t have had no job. That’s the way life goes, you know. We kids were smart. But we had more fun than the kids today.
The Dead Pig
But this pig that I was going to tell you about, when they were driving the pigs over, we lived over in that little old hotel. And they lost a lot of their pigs on that first 13 miles. Pigs can’t stand that rough ground. So that big-hearted guy says to my little brother, he says, “Hey sonny, I’ll give you a pig if you take care of it.” So he gives Frank a pig and he says, “You gotta take care of it and keep it warm and it’ll be alright.” Frank then crawls way in under the bunkhouse and we fixed a nice bed for the pig and put it to bed and fed it. And the next morning, the pig was dead. The pig was already half dead when he gave it to him. So we didn’t have pig. He had dead pig.
The Lynch Party
And it was in White Pass city, when we lived there that they were going to lynch the doctor. He hadn’t been at the, what they call the camp in the clouds. At that time it was way up on top of the hill. It was really in the clouds. And there was a lot of men up there who were sick and he hadn’t been up there. Well, the main hospital, at that time, was in White Pass City, at the foot of the hill. And we kids saw these men going down with their axes, their saws and guns and their lanterns and everything else. We thought, “That’s a lot of fun.” They were going to do something and we were going to go see. And mother came out of the door just as we kids were coming down the trail. She stopped all the fun. But they turned over that night, they turned over the beds, they turned over everything in that hospital, trying to find the doctor. One man got smart and he rode horseback as fast as he could down into town and told the doctor what was going on. The doctor was down having a good time in town. Before daylight, the doctor was in the camp in the clouds. Now you’ll see what lynch parties will do.
The Singing Man
Another thing that struck me in those days was when we were standing on the bridge going over towards to the wagon road from the hotel. He heard a man singing. And it sounded so nice. You couldn’t see anybody yet. Pretty soon, round the corner comes a man sitting sideways on a horse. He wasn’t stradling in the horse. He was sitting sideways. And he was singing “There’ll be a hot time in my home when I get there.” He was happy. And that has always stuck in my mind, the happiness that was in that voice coming around the mountain. That is something that you don’t always find.
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