The man who saw it coming was Captain William Moore. A riverboat pilot and pack-trail veteran, Moore staked a 160-acre homestead at the mouth of the Skagway River in 1887 — a full decade early — convinced that gold in the Canadian interior would one day send a flood of people past his door looking for a way over the mountains. He built a sawmill, a wharf, and a rough trail toward the White Pass summit. When the stampede finally arrived in 1897, it simply overran him: newcomers re-platted his claim into a gridded boomtown almost overnight, and the quiet homestead became the busiest place in Alaska.
In 1976 Congress made it official, establishing the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park around the preserved blocks of Broadway — wooden boardwalks, restored 1898 storefronts, and the old railroad depot — now the most-visited national park in Alaska. The cruise ships followed. Tucked at the head of a deep glacial fjord and ringed by steep peaks, Skagway is one of the busiest ports on the Inside Passage, with more than a million day-visitors a season stepping off onto the same waterfront the stampeders once crossed. It is a gold-rush boomtown that found its second fortune in being remembered.
Why People Visit Skagway
Visitors come to Skagway for the most intact Gold-Rush town in Alaska — a real boomtown you can walk through — and for the railway that climbs straight out of it into the mountains. It is compact, dramatic, and easy to explore on foot, with the harbor, the historic district, and the trailheads all close together. Equal parts living history and big northern scenery, Skagway rewards anyone who wants to stand at the starting line of the Klondike stampede.
