Part three of the interview with great-grandma Edith Feero Larson is a bit long but I wanted to include it all together because it begins her and her family first coming to Skagway and ends with a tragic turn of events that you'll want to stick around for. Enjoy this amazing account of family (and American) history.
Welcome to Skagway
Another little incident that I don’t want to forget is when we went to the first hotel we stopped at in Skagway. Well, mother landed in Skagway with 25 cents in her pocket and four kids. Nobody knew where your next dime was coming from and nobody really cared. So the captain says to the lady, “I’ll go with you to the steamboat office and we’ll see if we can find Mr. Feero.” So we went up to the steamboat office and he went in and wanted to know if anybody there -- the steamboat office was just a tent -- if anybody there knew where Mr. Feero was and a man on the street yells in, he says, “Who do ya mean? Sandy?” Mother got mad. She says, “Is THAT what they call him up here?!” Well, he said, “You know we Tacoma people.” He was Si Tanner, he was later the marshall in Skagway. His son had gone to school with us when we lived on K Street in Tacoma and he said, “I know Mr. Feero. I’ll take the family up to my cabin and I’ll take the boy, leave them there and I’ll take the boy up to where he keeps his horses and see if he’s in town or on the trail.” So he took us up to his cabin, there was little log - little board shack. There was a bed in one corner, a stove in one corner, a little table in one corner, and a box on the other -- to sit on but we could sit on the bed. And he took Bill up to see if he could find dad at home. Well, he was up there and he didn’t know that mother was coming on that boat. Mother had written, “I’ll be on the City of Seattle or the next boat following.” He thought she meant this City of Seattle or the next City of Seattle. She didn’t. She meant the next boat and that’s the one she got on. And he wasn’t looking for us. He was down at the beach the night before when we went -- when the boat pulled past Skagway and went into Dyea. We went to Dyea all night. And when -- they didn’t land nobody there, he didn’t think there was anybody for Skagway. But he came back down to the place and he took mother and first thing she said was, “Hmph! You cut that teddy bear off!”, his old whiskers.
Our First Home in Skagway
So live in a tent we did. We pitched a tent in what was later the middle of main street. And one corner was a stove, a little cast iron stove with a drum oven in the up top. One corner was a bed put up on high posts so they could have storage under the bed. Two other springs was put up on old kerosine boxes or anything you could find to them up on to. And that was -- we had one bed for mother and dad, one for us two girls, and one for the two boys. That would give us six chances to sleep. And there was no table. So dad went out to get some lumber to build, to fix a table and he couldn’t find none. So the only thing he could find was a packing box, which he could rent but he couldn’t buy. Lumber was that scarce. So they drove posts in the ground and put the packing box upside down on the posts and that was our first table. Got the table, no chairs. So they went out in the woods and they cut off blocks of wood the height of what chairs should be. That was our chairs. That was the furnishing for our first home in Skagway.
Of course, then, he was a man who didn’t take a lot of receipts. “I trust you. I paid you and you’ll pay me. We don’t need receipts.” Paper was worth nothing. But when he was gone, his knowledge was gone too. And they just robbed mother of everything that there was. They robbed her of her horses and everything and they would have taken the cabin if they could have, that we were living in. So she just had to stay there and raise her family there. We got married and raised our family there. So Skagway to me, means more than it does to a lot of people. It’s a start of a wonderful experience and the end of a happy home.
A Rough Night in the “Hotel”
So he had us go over to the hotel to have dinner. So we went over to this here -- looked like a barn, just boards up and down and cleats on the cracks. And we went in there and it’s a long table on one side of the room and there’s an L(?) on the other side, a little lean-to thing. That was the kitchen. On the other side of this barn-place was a long bench and nails on the wall. That was your clothes hangers. And a ladder leading to the raft. So she looked around and she didn’t see nothing. We went up to see where the horses were and see if she wanted to stay up there or downtown where he had two lots. And she came back down -- we started on a wagon but the ruts were so bumpy and bad that we got off and walked. And we got back down to the hotel and she still looked around and she couldn’t see no place to sleep. It was supposed to be a hotel. So she says to dad, she says, “I don’t see any place to sleep.” “Oh, you will.”, he said. And so she kept looking around and she said, “I still don’t find any place to sleep.” “Well,” he said, “You see that ladder over there?” Now mother was born in the state of Maine where everything was just proper. Ladies didn’t show their ankles. Ladies were ladies in other words. She said, “I can’t climb up there! All these men around here!” Well, she found out she either climb up there or she didn’t sleep. So she got up. It wasn't so bad going up because the skirts would hang down. (She) got up on top and the rooms were curtained across with just canvas curtains. And the beds were mattresses laid on the floor. You furnished your own bedding. Well, on the other side -- mother had never been around drunks in her life -- on the other side of these canvas curtains there was drunks all around. We kids had a ball. It was a lot of fun. But mother didn’t sleep. So she gets up in the morning and she looks down this hole and she says, “I can’t go down there! The men are down there!” Well, when you stay up there you don’t get nothing to eat. You gotta get down there to get something to eat so she eventually came downstairs, down the ladder. When she got down on the floor she says, “That’s the last time I’ll go up there! I’ll live in a tent!”
Then he got a man to -- he gave the man the lot he had downtown to put a cabin on the lot up where he had the horses. They got the cabin built and they put in some itty bitty windows and a little bitty door. Mother was short and she couldn’t even stand up straight and walk through the door. And she couldn’t get half daylight enough. They just had two of these little peek hole windows and she says, “I won’t have those windows and I won’t have that door! That door’s got to be bigger.” “I can’t get no more lumber. (There) ain’t no more windows in town. I’ll tie-- I’ll nail a rag over them.” So they finally found more windows and they found enough lumber to make another door. And they put legs on this first door. They put legs on it and it was a table for our cabin. When they got the done they only had lumber enough to board over the top halfway so they put the boys’ beds up there and that it worked out alright until Frank fell off of the top story down into the wood box! And two bunks on the end of the cabin, when he fell off into the wood box they went out in the woods again and got some poles and made a railing. (26:39) And one corner of the cabin was the sitting room. The sewing machine and the organ was put down in this corner. The other corner up here was the kitchen. It was a wood box and a stove. On the other side of the room was this table, the door table and two hooks up on the rafters where they swung an old-fashioned net hammock. That was our couch. And we had a little bit of a rug put underneath of that. And the other corner was the two bunks. That was the size of our cabin and it was furnished. That was our furniture. You didn’t have furniture in those days, you know. But everybody else was living the same way and who cared? Everybody was happy. You know, if you didn’t have cars and you didn’t have this and you didn’t have that and everybody else didn’t have it, you wouldn’t mind. It was the same way up there. People would go out and dig holes in the riverbed or something. They were prospecting. Well, there was never any gold in Skagway but they prospected anyhow. So we moved into that cabin the day before Thanksgiving in 1897.
Packing for Ezra Meeker
That was our home until dad was on the trail...Dad packed in his outfit something I don’t want to forget. Dad packed when he was packing his outfit, dad packed Ezra Meeker’s first consignment of freight over the White Pass trail. And that was a consignment of chickens. And when they packed those animals, they packed the sides of a horse and put a crate of chickens on the top, see. And all them heads sticking out. Well, then Ezra Meeker went back and when he was in Dawson with this outfit he arranged for a cabin with a raised floor so air would go all around and he went back out and brought in a load of potatoes. He took them and dad packed that outfit over. At that time he had one of his one, I think it was his daughter and her child, and they lived in -- do you remember where Betty Summer lived when you was up there? (29:50)
(Tape problem)
Expensive Chickens
Well, we should be in business again. I got it working.
You got it working again? Then they took these chickens in Dawson. This prospector came through years later and he told me he had come out of the mines in the summer of ‘98 and he saw this dilapidated looking chicken in the crate on the outside of the store and he says, “It was marked 75” and he thought it meant 75 cents so he went in to buy the chicken. Then he found out that the chicken meant, the 75 meant dollars per pound! He didn’t buy the chicken.
And what else did we miss?
The End of a Happy Family
The part about where your dad had to go back and collect for the potatoes.
Well, he went out and got the potatoes. Dad had -- when we went and got the potatoes as far as Bennet he forgot to pay for the potatoes, the freight on them, and he went and loaded them on a scal (?) and went for Dawson. Dad had to make the trip for Dawson. He went to Dawson and came back, he didn’t get all the money he was supposed to get for the potatoes. But he came back out on the last boat leaving Dawson and he got as far as Lebarge and the boat froze in. So they came the rest of the way -- it was a Peterborough canoe. He and two other men came up the river. They got into Whitehorse -- into Lake Bennett and came home and he said he had to make one more trip over to Bennett before he would take little Nellie, his lead horse from the Winter before, out and pasture her for life. And then he would have his hernia operated on and come back to Skagway and in the spring we would all go on into Dawson, it was such a beautiful trip. But this last trip was in late November and he was coming back to Skagway. They tried to get him to keep off of the summit that night because it was a storm on the summit. He said, “My wife and family was on the other side and I’m going home.”
He got into the storm and he got sick. They stayed all night, he and a Mr. Amery, and they walked back and forth in about a ten-foot trail, back and forth to keep it open so they wouldn’t freeze to death. In the morning they could see that it cleared and they could see the smoke from the hospital tent on the railroad. And the man said, “John, don’t stop. I’ll go for help.” And he left dad and he went for help but he was so far gone himself that he made a zig-zag trail. He didn’t go straight. Well, they didn’t dare follow straight through on the trail. They had to follow his footsteps to find the man that he said was back there. When they got there dad had just passed away. He was still warm. That was on the seventh day of December of 1898 when dad passed away and left mother with four children.
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