Fantastic Ketchikan

Ketchikan is really a neat little town now. It’s hundreds of little Victorian houses charm the thousands of tourists who visit here. Today the Viking Orion was the third passenger ship to pull up to the dock. But what I find interesting are the photographs of Ketchikan taken in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Like a lot of small towns, this place was dirty. Like really dirty. Dirt streets. No sidewalks. The dirt came right up to the thresholds of the front doors. It was usually mud in Gold Rush days since this place gets over 150 inches of rain each year. But even though the streets and sidewalks are paved now, many of the old buildings are still here. They call it historic charm.

It was dirty in other ways too. Ketchikan celebrates the dirty side of life that was here in Klondike days. With a historic wink and a smile, tour guides tell tourist of shady characters like Soapy Smith, the con artist who ran a telegraph business here. Stampeders came from the Lower Forty-eight to make their fortunes in the gold rush. They stopped at Smith’s telegraph office to send a message back home letting their loved ones know they were safe. For a handsome fee Soapy Smith would tap out a Morse Code message on his telegraph key transmitting the news. What the Stampeders did not know was that the telegraph wire ended under the table. What a dirty trick! Tour guides tell the tale and we tourists laugh. I get it. It’s good for business.

Still, there is another side to that tale that gets glossed over. In the 1890’s the U. S. was suffering an economic depression. My great-great uncle Avery Cook could not get a job back home, so as a young man he came to Alaska to prospect for gold. Our family never heard from him again. Thousands of hopeful young men died on the Chilkoot Trail leading into the Yukon. Some froze; some worked themselves to death, and you can still see the skeletons of their overworked horses on the trail right where they dropped. Uncle Avery’s mother never gave up hope. She died still expecting her son to show up one day at her front door.

I wonder whether he ever went to Soapy Smith’s telegraph office. I guess if you wait long enough shysterism becomes charming.

So does prostitution. It’s Dirty. Our mamas taught us so. But for some young girls in the 1890’s who found themselves early widowed and a long way from home, practicing the oldest profession, sometimes only temporarily, was the only way they could stay alive. One of the houses of ill repute here in Gold Rush days still stands and has become a prostitution museum. It’s cute.

Ketchikan still celebrates the fantastic image of the rough-and-ready town it once was. Even today this town is still the jumping-off point for the thousands of young men and women who come to Alaska to go out like Henry David Thoreau to chase the fantasy of The Great Wilderness.

I have to admit that I myself get infected with the Wilderness Disease when I come to Ketchikan. I can go to a thousand shopping centers with Glenda and never be tempted in the least to buy anything. However, a store here, Tongass Trading Company, sells every conceivable type of sleeping bag, tent, camp stove and backpack you can imagine. It is hiker heaven. It is the outdoorsman’s last stop before going out into the Wild. When I go into that store I want to buy everything I see. I fancy I’m going to go out into the Alaska mountains and show a grizzly bear who is boss.

That’s pure fantasy, like the movie version of the tough guys who go out and master the elements. But then reality hits and I remember that I’m almost seventy-four years old. I won’t go camping again. The reality is that I remember that the last time we were here, we met some rescue workers attempting to find a young man who had gone up to the mountain above the town and had not come back. They never found the kid.

Ketchikan blurs the distinction between touristic fantasy and reality. We saw a stuffed grizzly in a display case. Smiling tourists photograph themselves with the bear. Contrary to the Hollywood fantasy, however, grizzlies in Alaska don’t play.

Although Ketchikan once was dirty, it has cleaned itself up. The town perpetuates its mythic identity as the last bastion of the Wild, Wild West largely because doing so brings tourists. I suppose there is little harm in romanticizing the past. People need jobs, and tourism helps people to live here and support their families. Although Ketchikan celebrates the image of a violent and sordid past, it is a pretty nice little town now. It’s not dirty anymore. It’s charming. And the fact is, Ketchikan is still the gateway to Alaska, the last frontier.Read more