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| Ferry-hopping up Alaska's panhandle |
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| Posted on: Thursday, July 29, 2010 |
Category: Cultures |
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Buckwheat, who earned his nickname in seventh grade, drove his pick-up alongside the wide, ankle-deep Skagway River then crossed railroad tracks to reach the Gold Rush Cemetery. Wooden grave markers were dotted among birch and cottonwood trees: Chadwick Biggs, Hasel Achison, Unknown - plenty of Unknowns.
The grave we were looking for belongs to Jefferson R Smith, known as Soapy (Alaska seems to attract the memorably monikered). Now back in the days of marshalls and baddies Soapy was unwise enough to boast that he was no ordinary gambler. 'When I stake money it is a sure thing that I win,' he liked to tell people.
The Skagway News remembered these words in its gleeful report of July 15, 1898: 'Soapy Smith is dead and buried. Never again will bunco steerers [card sharps] and sure-thing men flourish in Skagway.'
Picture Lee Marvin playing the psychopathic outlaw in the John Ford Western, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and you have a pretty good idea of where old Soapy was coming from. Also buried in the Gold Rush Cemetery is The Man Who Shot Soapy Smith, Frank H Harris - 'not a stellar individual himself,' according to Buckwheat.
Soapy and Frank are just two of many vivid characters I encountered on my journey along the Alaskan panhandle, the south-eastern archipelago of America's largest state. Many of these personalities are historical - including the Birdman of Alcatraz and Wyatt Earp - but most are very much alive, Buckwheat Donahue being a case in point.
Like many I met, Buckwheat is a blow-in from the 'Lower 48', the contiguous United States, but he has found a freedom on America's Last Frontier, as Alaska styles itself on its licence plates.
'I bought a grave here, I'm stayin',' he told me. 'I just wish I could go to the party. It'll be a lot of fun.'
Big as the bear that walked out in front of his pick-up, but several times more affable, he is poet, performer, recreational gold prospector, and marvellous tourism ambassador for his neck of the backwoods, the former gold mining town of Skagway.
In the late 1890s, this was the gateway to the gold fields of the Yukon. Thousands of chancers funnelled through its boardwalks and drinking parlors, many of them unwise enough to cut a deck with Soapy, but the yellow stuff glittered to deceive and the stampede was shortlived (everyone in the Gold Rush Cemetery died between 1897 and 1899). 'The death of Soapy Smith was sort of the end of the goldrush too,' said Buckwheat.
Skagway is typical of the communities dotted among the inlets and islands of the south-east. They sprang up like extreme weather events in the 1800s, flourished on fish and timber through the 20th century and have now settled into their dotage as tourist attractions - principally as stops on cruise ship itineraries.
Many places have no roads in or, like Skagway, are most easily accessed by sea. Buckwheat arrived from Colorado, via Seattle, by ferry - 'Had too much to drink between Sitka and Juneau and woke up here' - and that was my means of transportation too.
The Alaska Marine Highway, as the ferry system is known, was started in 1960 as a lifeline for the state's disparate and discrete seafront communities and today runs nine boats. The plan was to spend ten days ferry-hopping 300 miles north through the panhandle, sampling the unique history and atmosphere of the towns along the way.
Sampling, too, the things for which Alaska is best known - the immense landscapes that slid past the windows of the Observation Lounge: sounds, channels and inlets named after the 18th century British explorers who charted them, forests, mountains and glaciers with the majesty of Ansell Adams' photography; the tail flukes of breaching humpback whales, the caramel heads of speeding sealion and the white-cowled bald eagles, the birds on quarter-dollar pieces being a dime a dozen out here.
Mine was essentially the same route as that taken by the cruise ships, but there the similarity ends. Where the cruise ships are floating chain hotels, the ferries are moveable villages, used by locals and full of character. When I boarded the M/V Matanuska at Ketchikan, the start of my journey, disembarking passengers hailed friends waiting to get on.
'Sammykins!'
'Have a good one.'
On board, a young couple pitched a tent on the Solarium deck, tying the guy ropes to the guard rail, a vicar conducted an ecumenical service amid the red plush of the Cocktail Lounge, and a man who looked like Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead was running up pink and purple fishing flies in the study area.
'Have you been to Alaska before?' people asked when they heard my accent. No one said, 'Have you been to America before?' Alaska won statehood as recently as 1959 and still sees itself, and is seen, as separate, unique.
Refreshingly, it has retained a more cosmopolitan atmosphere than many states I have been through in the Lower 48. In Ketchikan, where 'Alaskeros' - Filipino-Alaskans - make up about 8 per cent of the borough population of 13,000, I ate fusion Filipino-Chinese food in the Diaz Café and stayed in a hotel opened by a Japanese couple in 1924. Round the corner in Creek Street, hookers with marvellous noms de guerre such as Deepwater Mary and Dirty Neck Maxine were once run off their feet.
The men they entertained came to can salmon, mainly - 'We eat what we can. Can what we can't' was Ketchikan's motto in the mid-20th century. Out at the George Inlet Cannery, now a museum, Chinese, Filipino and Puerto Rican workers lived on site and when they weren't working the canning line kicked back by smoking opium.
Their bunkhouses are still there, soggy and desolate in the rain. Brought back to life for my benefit, the canning line itself - the head indexer, iron chink, gang knife, clincher, vacuum closing machine and retorts - clanked with the rhythm of verse to turn out ghostly salmonless cans.
Six hours' sailing time north, the fishing town of Wrangell (pop. 2,000) has been ruled under three flags and four nations: Tlingit (the local Native nation), Russia, Britain and the US. The old boys having breakfast in the Diamond C café on a bright, breezy morning were definitely all-American.
The Diamond C is not a place in which to ask for a camomile infusion. The waitress had glitter on her face and a burly man in fishermen's boots was talking about a third party who can't pay him back. 'I ain't got no money,' he said in wheedling imitation. 'Well how about if I go down to your boat and smash a coupla windows, call it even?'
During the Gold Rush, Wrangell was too strong a brew even for the legendary lawman Wyatt Earp. He left town after serving ten days as deputy marshall, calling it 'Hell on wheels'. These days it remains gratifyingly rough around the edges. Following the closure of the sawmill in the mid-1990s, it ekes a living from fishing, from adventure tourism in the glaciated valley of the Stikine River - rafting, kayaking and wildlife watching - and from a rich Native history.
One of the revelations of this trip was the health of the indigenous culture, in contrast to parts of the Lower 48. Alaska's south-east is populated by three main 'nations'. My guide in Wrangell, Wilma Leslie, is descended from two of them, and proudly aware of the branches and subsections of her complex heritage.
'I am of Tlingit and Haida descent, of the Haida nation, Raven moiety, Yahku Laanaas clan and Double Fin Killer Whale House... now repeat that back!,' she said as we clambered around a beach dotted with ancient petroglyphs - whorls and fishes and faces carved on rocks by her ancestors.
The modern history of Native culture started in my next port of call, Sitka, where going on half of the population of 8,000 are registered tribal members. To reach Sitka the M/V Taku threaded through the Wrangell Narrows, a tight channel flanked by walls of forest and backed by distant, snow-covered mountains.
I was becoming an aficionado of water on these ferry legs - the way it changes colour and texture depending on weather and time of day. As night fell the sea took on the dreaminess of medieval glass and I pulled myself away from the guard rail only to grab an Alaskan Summer Ale in the rollicking bar - where the ice in the cocktails had been retrieved from a passing iceberg - and to refuel on a freshly grilled halibut burger in the cafeteria.
'We just got in our second stoplight,' said the bus driver in Sitka. It is safe to say that Imperial Russia would have paid no heed had the traffic light been in place in October 1804, when a Russian landing party attacked and ousted the defending Tlingit to establish Sitka as New Archangel, the centre of Russian America until 1867.
In that year, on Castle Hill in Sitka, Russia ceremonially handed over Alaska to the United States for $7 million, about 20 cents an acre. Neither the Tlingit nor any of the Native Alaskan nations were included in the deal. They had to wait more than a century, for the Native Settlement Claims Act of 1972, for redress in the form of land and compensation.
The story is told at the site of the 1804 battle, now the oldest and smallest (113 acres) National Historic Park in the US, and on Castle Hill itself. Little Sitka is a red-hot crucible of modern Alaskan history in all its ambiguities, perhaps the strangest aspect of which is the continuing presence of the Russian Orthodox Church.
At St Michael's Cathedral in Sitka - a reconstruction of the original, which burned down in 1966 - services are conducted in Slavonic, English and Tlingit and the population is principally Native. Round the corner, the old Russian Bishop's House, where long-bearded priests once peered from its banks of windows, is now a museum run by the National Historic Park.
In 1906 Sitka ceded its status as capital of Alaska to Juneau, my penultimate stop (Skagway being the end of the road). Two years later an 18-year-old called Robert Stroud washed up in Juneau with a good-time girl twice his age called Kitty O'Brien; shot dead a punk called Charlie Von Dahmer (the site of the shooting, Charlie's house, is now the parking lot on 4th St between Gold and Franklin), got banged up for the rest of his life and became the Birdman of Alcatraz.
The good-time girls and gunslingers are long gone. Juneau is still the seat of the state legislature but these days the summer months are given over to cruise ships. Down on the docks they block out the light and their inmates check their brains in at the purser's office before going ashore to have their pictures taken alongside stuffed bears.
But head uphill towards the towering, forested wall of Mount Roberts - towards, in fact, where Robert Stroud sealed his destiny - and you will shake 'em off. On the steep slope of Upper Franklin I tracked down the delightful Dee Longenbaugh in her antiquarian map and bookstore, Observatory Books.
Now Dee happens to have a walk-on part in one of my favourite travel books, Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban. After chatting about her encounter with Raban she talked about the state she has called home since she moved up here - another blow-in - from New Mexico 50 years ago.
She knew just about everyone I mentioned having met and ascribed distinct personalities to the places I had passed through on my journey north: Wrangell is noisy and happy-go-lucky, Sitka is unshockable, Petersburg is so serious, and so on. 'They say Alaska is the world's biggest small town,' she mused. 'And it is.'
Published in The Daily Telegraph on July 24, 2010
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