The Machine That Ended the Chilkoot Packer — White Pass Railroad

It is March of 1898, and you are halfway up the Golden Stairs of the Chilkoot Pass, fifteen hundred steps cut in the snow and ice, with somebody else's flour on your back. You are a packer, paid by the pound. At the summit, the North-West Mounted Police will not let a stampeder into Canada without a ton of supplies, and every pound of it has to come up these stairs on a human back. The story of the Chilkoot packers: a trade route owned for generations by the Chilkoot Tlingit and opened to prospectors in 1880, the packers who carried a hundred pounds and more for cents a pound, Healy and Wilson's trading post at Dyea, and Skookum Jim, the packer who helped find the gold on Bonanza Creek that started the Klondike gold rush. Sam Steele's one-ton rule, the stampede of 1897 and 1898, Sheep Camp and the Scales, the Palm Sunday avalanche of April 3, 1898, and the aerial tramways strung over the summit. And the machine: the White Pass and Yukon Route, built from Skagway in 1898, which reached Lake Bennett on July 6, 1899, and emptied the Chilkoot Trail without laying a single tie on it. Archival photographs and documents in this episode are listed below with their item references. Some images in this episode are AI reconstructions, used where the archive holds no photograph of what the narration describes; no real person's face is generated. They are counted and identified in the credits below. Item references: CHAPTERS 0:00 The Golden Stairs of the Chilkoot Pass, 1898 2:15 Sam Steele and the One-Ton Rule at the Summit 4:05 What Chilkoot Packers Charged by the Pound 5:42 Dyea and the Tlingit Trade Route Over the Pass 9:27 Skookum Jim, the Packer Who Helped Start the Gold Rush 11:40 The Klondike Stampede of 1897 and 1898 14:58 The Palm Sunday Avalanche of April 3, 1898 16:30 The Chilkoot Aerial Tramways 18:15 Building the White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad 21:29 How Dyea Became a Ghost Town IMAGE CREDITS DPLA — Digital Public Library of America — 7 images used, all public domain Dyea, Alaska from Dyea Mt., ca. 1899 — Pillsbury, Arthur C. (Arthur Clarence) (http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC...) http://cdm16118.contentdm.oclc.org/cd... Boundary line on ChilKoot Pass, Alaska, 1898 (copy photo?) — Larss & Duclos Photos, Dawson, Vermont (This image is in the public domain and may be used without permission. Kindly provide attribution to the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library. If you have questions about the image or collection, please contact the BHL-Reference Dept. (mailto:bentley.ref@umich.edu) If you have concerns about the inclusion of an item in this collection, pleasecontact BHL-Image Bank (mailto:gkinney@umich.edu).) http://name.umdl.umich.edu/IC-BHL-X-H... Prospectors and packhorses on White Pass Trail, ca. 1899 — Pillsbury, Arthur C. (Arthur Clarence) (http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC...) http://cdm16118.contentdm.oclc.org/cd... Prospectors' camp, ca. 1899 — Pillsbury, Arthur C. (Arthur Clarence) (http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC...) http://cdm16118.contentdm.oclc.org/cd... Seattle gold shipment — Unknown author (http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC...) http://cdm17176.contentdm.oclc.org/cd... Aerial view of Dyea and Skagway, Alaska from across Chilkoot Inlet, ca. 1899 — Pillsbury, Arthur C. (Arthur Clarence) (http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/NoC...) http://cdm16118.contentdm.oclc.org/cd... … and 1 more — full item-by-item credits, with URL and checksum, in the project's CREDITOS.md AI RECONSTRUCTIONS — 35 of the 42 images in this episode (83%) are AI-generated reconstructions, made where no public-domain photograph of the scene survives. They are period-styled illustrations, not archival records, and this video is flagged as containing altered or synthetic content. Every one is listed, with its prompt, in the project's CREDITOS.md. SOUND EFFECTS — Freesound, CC0 (public domain dedication) "picareta-cortando-degrau-no-gelo" by 16FPanskaSimonMartin — https://freesound.org/people/16FPansk... "avalanche-de-neve-ao-longe" by Vrymaa — https://freesound.org/people/Vrymaa/s... Music composed for this episode. Archival photographs are unaltered except for cropping and color grading. Before the Machine tells the stories of trades that ran the world until something new learned the job. Every episode is built on the historical record, with the archive reference for each image listed above. #ForgottenTrades #IndustrialHistory #History