Big Bertha: The Housekeeping Mayor

(Above) Bertha Landes shakes hands with dentist-turned-mayor “Doc” Brown, whom she defeated in 1926.

(Editor’s note: Thanks to yesterday’s election in Seattle, the largest city in Washington state will soon have a woman—a lesbian, no less—installed in its mayor’s chair. Although there are still ballots yet to be counted, The Seattle Times reported last night that 59-year-old Democrat and former U.S. Attorney Jenny Durkan leads with 61 percent of the vote, on her way to becoming the burg’s 56th mayor. If her margin of victory holds against challenger Cary Moon, an activist with little political experience, Durkan will be the second woman ever to lead Seattle, her only predecessor being Bertha Knight Landes, who was chosen as America’s first big-city woman mayor 91 years ago, in 1926. Those are big shoes for Durkan fill, as I explain in the following excerpt from my 2003 book, Eccentric Seattle: Pillars and Pariahs Who Made the City Not Such a Boring Place After All [Washington State University Press]. Let’s hope she’s up to the task.)

When they remark at all upon the political career of Bertha Knight Landes, modern historians generally concentrate their attention around her call for strengthened law enforcement in Prohibition-era Seattle, her efforts to improve city planning and management of the municipal power company, and her demand that professional standards replace cronyism in hiring civic administrators. Those annalists observe how “peaceful” and “quiet” Landes’ two-year mayoral stint was when compared with those of her more colorful but often less ethical predecessors. And they go on at some length about her conviction that a city should be run under the same standards of efficiency, decency, and morality that would pertain in a home.

But Landes wasn’t yet recognized for most of these things in the early 1920s. Back then, she was known more widely as the woman who’d tweaked Seattle’s patriarchal establishment in a bloodless and brief coup that won her not only the powers of the mayor, but those of the police chief, as well.

The story is rather comical. It seems that in the summer of 1924, Landes was serving her first term on the city council and had recently been elected to its presidency. Edwin J. “Doc” Brown, a flamboyant former “painless” dentist and Seattle’s latest “tolerance mayor,” had decided to attend the Democratic National Convention in New York City. During his absence, council president Landes automatically became acting chief exec. (The deputy mayor’s office didn’t yet exist.) Newspapers played up Landes’ precedent-setting temporary assignment, but nobody really expected her to do much while Brown was off whooping it up at Madison Square Garden.

However, on June 23, 1924, Landes summoned Police Chief William B. Severyns into her office. She handed him a letter explaining how disturbed she was by repeated violations of local bootlegging and gambling laws and by the youthful chief’s recent intimation to the press that probably 100 men on his force were too corrupt to perform their jobs properly. If that’s true, her letter read, “then it must follow as a logical conclusion that one hundred men should be removed.” Landes wanted Severyns to act within 24 hours. When he balked, complaining that Landes was merely trying to score political points at his expense, the acting mayor dismissed him in favor of Joseph Mason, his top lieutenant. Mason also refused to carry out her order, so Landes canned him, as well. Then, exercising an obscure provision of the city charter, she declared Seattle in a state of emergency and appointed herself as its new top cop.

A palsy of shock passed briefly over the town as people realized that, for the first time in its history, the positions of mayor, police chief, and city council president all belonged to the same person—and that person was a woman! But Landes didn’t break pace. She dispatched bluecoats to close the town’s most reprehensible speakeasies and gambling joints. Other violators shut down voluntarily to avoid Her Honor’s righteous wrath. A special detail was assigned to investigate beat officers and boot out any who’d benefited from graft or bribes.

Incensed Brown supporters and threatened vice operators blizzarded the mayor in Manhattan with telegrams, begging him to immediately begin his three-day train journey home. Meanwhile, Doc’s staff supposedly plotted an early end to Landes’ reformist reign. With Brown still a day out from Puget Sound, his secretary had a pair of the mayor’s suitcases dropped off at one of his favorite breakfast haunts, and then instructed Brown’s chauffeur to retrieve them before picking Landes up for work. Bertha naturally inquired about the luggage, but the equally duped driver could say only, “It appears that the mayor is back in town.” This impression was reinforced by what Landes found in Brown’s office: another suitcase lying open with a pair of the mayor’s shoes inside; some current-edition New York newspapers; and a lighted cigar reclining beside Brown’s prized autographed photo of perennial presidential candidate William Jennings Bryan. Convinced that Doc Brown had indeed returned, Landes cooled her plans to shake up more city agencies.

Mayor Brown soon set about undoing Landes’ accomplishments. But not before the national press could applaud her audacious 10-day rule. “Men in the past have been wont to talk patronizingly of ‘women’s instinct’ as opposed to ‘man's reason,’” editorialized the Los Angeles Times. “Seattle seems to prove that an instinct for getting things done is far more useful in the world than an intellect that only talks about them.”

Not all local media were pleased, however. As the Seattle Argus groused, Landes “proved conclusively that woman’s sphere is in the home or at any rate that hers is not at the head of the city government.”

Two years more, and the Argus would be eating those words.

* * *

As the first woman mayor of a major American city, Bertha Landes helped pave the way for all women in politics. Yet she was hardly your classic feminist. “In fact,” explained one of her longtime friends, “she was decidedly opposed to the women’s suffrage movement when it was launched, believing that a woman’s place was in her home, with her children.”

Landes’ own upbringing had been very traditional. She was born Bertha Ethel Knight at Ware, Massachusetts, on October 19, 1868. Her family’s pious American roots wound all the way back to the 17th-century Massachusetts Bay Colony. The youngest among nine children, she watched at least two of her siblings find their way into circles of fame. Her brother Austin entered the navy and eventually became commander in chief of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet. Sister Jessie married David Starr Jordan, an ichthyologist and president of Indiana University, who later headed Stanford University. As a woman in the 19th century, it seemed unlikely that Bertha could attain renown except through marriage. Still, she was too filled with intelligence and dynamism to wait quietly until some ambitious gent swooned before her perennial smile, alert dark eyes, and olive skin.

In 1888 Bertha went to live with the Jordans in Bloomington, Indiana, and enrolled at her brother-in-law’s university. After only three years, she’d earned a degree in history. She had also developed an abiding interest in politics. This was during the rise of Progressivism, a movement largely among middle-class, educated, and urban Americans who believed in trust busting, public welfare reforms, and a graduated income tax—all intended to restrain the corrupting power of the nation’s wealthy minority. President Theodore Roosevelt was Progressivism’s poster child, and he incorporated the movement’s liberal precepts (at least temporarily) into the Republican agenda. David Starr Jordan was a great fan of Roosevelt’s and helped inculcate Bertha with progressive ideals. As a result, she thereafter labeled herself a Republican, though even before her mayoral election the GOP was already turning more conservative, away from egalitarian activism.

One other thing her college experience provided Bertha was an introduction to geology student Henry Landes. Despite conventional wisdom of their era, which libeled highly educated women as “unfit” for matrimony, he appreciated her strength and individuality. The pair were wed in January 1894 and the next year moved to Seattle, a town that by then had already survived fire and fiscal disaster and seemed stubbornly on its way to success. Henry joined the faculty at the University of Washington, recently moved from downtown to a single building (Denny Hall) on the north shore of Union Bay. Bertha slipped comfortably into motherhood. She bore three children, the two oldest of whom died early, and then adopted a 9-year-old girl. The family built a two-story University District home, at the corner of Northeast 45th Street and Brooklyn Avenue (a site now occupied by a hotel), where they fended away cows loping up from the Green Lake farmlands and engaged impoverished students in debate over copious helpings of Bertha’s Boston baked beans. (She later joked that her beans won her a good thousand votes from appreciative UW alumni in the city.)

(Left) Henry Landes

Careerwise, Henry rode a fast track, being named dean of the new College of Science and very nearly the UW’s president. His wife had family duties to think about, but as their children grew, Bertha indulged other interests. “[S]he had to keep busy,” her adopted daughter, Viola, told an interviewer in 1965. “She wasn’t aggressive, but if she wasn’t engaged in planning something or other, she was bored to tears.” The future mayor volunteered for work at the University Congregational Church and the Red Cross, and she seemed ubiquitous in women’s clubs.

Today, clubwork seems a quaint avocation. But for middle-class ladies of Bertha Landes’ time, it offered unique chances to discuss community and world issues, as well as a friendly forum in which they could amass the self-confidence necessary to secure more influential roles in male-dominated society. It was through her leadership of several clubs that Landes first attracted the favorable notice of local business and government archons. In 1921, after she’d organized a major three-day exhibit of the latest home-related products, Mayor Hugh Caldwell gave her his personal stamp of approval by tapping her as the only woman member of an ad hoc commission charged with suggesting remedies for the city’s intractable unemployment problems.

* * *

More important than what this commission accomplished (very little) was that it broadened Bertha Landes’ name familiarity. By 1922, women’s organizations—and even a few men who’d come to respect her management abilities—urged her to try for a city council seat, along with another woman, boardinghouse operator Kathryn Miracle.

The odds weighed heavily against Bertha. Washington women had earned the right to vote in 1910 (a full decade before enfranchisement was extended nationwide), but many of them continued to eschew the polls. Although a female school teacher had been elected to the Kirkland City Council in 1911, Seattle’s Republican plutocracy believed that women in public office would be unacceptably bad for business. Candidate Landes had to present herself in such a way as to not threaten men (who might be offended by political ambition and anti-vice zealotry in a woman) or offend more traditional women (who saw their place in the home, not on the stump). Yet she also had to prove she was decisive and knowledgeable enough to fully represent the moral and welfare concerns of Seattle’s distaff element (40 percent of the population). The contradictions involved made many of her speeches sound like apologies for running. But thanks to the passionate assistance of clubwomen in her campaign, when votes were tallied in May 1922, Bertha Landes had won a landslide victory and pulled Kathryn Miracle onto the council aboard her coattails.

At just over five feet tall, Bertha Landes was not physically intimidating. Nor was she a fiery orator. Police Chief Severyns once joked that “Compared with Mrs. Landes, ‘Silent’ Cal Coolidge is a circus spieler.” However, she possessed what the New York World described as “calm tenacity.” Marshalling this alongside her probity and felicitous demeanor, the new councilwoman was unexpectedly able to get things done. In her four years on the council, she could take principal credit for establishing a city planning commission, supporting public utilities, and stiffening regulations on allegedly salacious dance halls.


Downtown Seattle in the mid-1920s

If anything blocked more systemic change, Landes believed, it was Mayor Brown. He preferred a laissez-faire approach to governance, especially when it came to taming prostitution, drinking, and Seattle’s other vivid vices. While Landes “realizes that a seaport cannot be run like a Sunday school,” as one pro-labor newspaper phrased it, she and Brown often butted heads over matters of “civic decency.” On most occasions he prevailed; but she notched up her triumphs, too, including her legendary 1924 reform spree as acting mayor.

Landes finally pulled out her heavy guns against Doc Brown when she proposed eliminating the office of mayor altogether. As other metropolises had done, she pushed to substitute a professional city manager in Seattle, someone beholden to the council who would run the town like a big business. It was a bold proposition, too bold for many voters. But Bertha refused to abandon it—even if it meant she would have to run for mayor herself in 1926 and defeat Brown in order to blunt his opposition to the plan.

“I filed for Mayor much against my own personal inclinations,” Landes would insist repeatedly. She didn’t, though, do so without careful calculation. By her figuring, she could win Doc Brown’s seat and at the same time convince voters to sign off on the city manager plan. Although this would mean she’d never actually assume the mayor’s mantle, as president of the city council she’d still have gained the power necessary to overhaul municipal government. Furthermore, Landes told the newspapers (most of which eventually endorsed her candidacy) that if the city manager proposal lost but she unseated Brown, she would run the mayor’s office “as nearly like a city manager as the laws will permit.”

It was a hard-fought campaign. Doc’s backers spread rumors that, as mayor, “bluenose Bertha” would curtail Seattleites’ personal liberties. Bertha struck back with allegations that under Brown, “general police and criminal conditions here are intolerable.” This seemed to be confirmed by the phenomenal success of local rumrunner Roy Olmstead, whose trial for violating the Prohibition Act was concurrent with the Landes-Brown race. Bertha didn’t have to run as the women’s candidate for mayor, the way she had for the council. Instead, she cast herself as an anti-politician, someone free from the ties of finance and favor that held Mayor Brown in check.

The city manager idea earned a resounding “no” from voters. But 57-year-old Landes triumphed, if by fewer than 6,000 votes. And one of her first official acts was to fire William Severyns—the police chief Brown had reinstated after Bertha’s 10-day coup.

* * *

“Big Bertha,” as Seattle’s criminal contingent came to call her—with equal measures of derision and respect—began her days at 9 a.m., when a chauffeur picked her up at the Wilsonian Apartments on University Avenue (where she and Henry Landes had moved to enjoy their maturity), and they usually continued into a nighttime schedule of speechmaking. She proved to be a chief exec with an uncommonly strong social conscience and popular ideals. “Play the game fairly,” she once declared. “Meet life honestly—never whine and play the coward, but take life as it comes. ... Don’t be a shirker but do be a worker. Above all, so conduct yourself that you can look your own soul in the face. You cannot be true to yourself without being true to everyone else.”

Almost from the hour of her inauguration, there was speculation that she might be the woman man enough to become governor of Washington or even take control of the White House. Male observers periodically remarked how her mind worked more like a man’s than like a woman’s. “Was that a compliment, or was it not?” Landes once mused. “I never did decide one way or the other.”

Bertha pursued her goals with a diligence and effectiveness that was often referred to as “civic housekeeping.” She worked to keep down Lake Washington pollution and to put up a new public hospital. She made wide-ranging improvements in City Light, expanded the parks system, installed qualified pros at the helm of Seattle’s public works departments, saved the street railway system from immediate financial collapse, and was way ahead of the curve in advocating a merger of city and King County governments. She settled petty disputes between local law-enforcement agencies in order to win their unified support in curbing bootlegging and reducing traffic accidents. (By 1930, Seattle had one car for every four residents and more than its share of roadway mishaps.) Aside from the ruckuses she caused by trying to lower the wages of older city workers and enlist “stool pigeons” to augment police protections, her administration was remarkably without scandal.

As the late newspaper columnist Emmett Watson put it in his book Once Upon a Time in Seattle, Landes “had no agenda beyond being the best mayor Seattle ever had.”

(Right) Frank Edwards

Yet only two years after she entered city hall, Seattle voters booted her out in favor of Frank Edwards, a poseur Progressive and the shady proprietor of several second-rate movie houses. “Old boy” politics was partly to blame. Edwards had twice as much money as Bertha in his campaign war chest, much of it collected from businesses that feared Bertha’s civic-minded intrusions into their affairs. Rather than debate Landes in public, he ran a steadily negative media campaign, during which he convinced Seattleites—against all the facts—that their city had suffered under Landes. Edwards even used Bertha’s storied legislative acumen and snowdrift of newspaper endorsements against her, painting her as too mired in “the system” to recognize its failures. And he wasn’t above shaming Seattle for obeisance to “petticoat politics.” “Elect Frank Edwards,” read his pointedly sexist campaign slogan, “the Man You’ll Be Proud to Call Mayor.” (After Landes lost, the Portland Oregonian ridiculed Seattle for wanting to be a “he-man’s town” and suggested that, at Edwards’ inauguration, a pair of masculine breeches might fittingly be flown from the city hall flagpole.)

But Bertha had to bear some credit for her defeat. She’d offended civil service employees by encouraging her departments to lay off workers based on their efficiency, rather than just seniority. She had failed in six years of elected service to reach out sufficiently to the working class, and still left the impression of being a well-to-do bluenose. As Sandra Haarsager stated in a recent biography, Bertha Knight Landes of Seattle: Big City Mayor, Her Honor may also have erred by currying favor with business rather than continuing to capitalize on her identity as “the woman’s candidate.” At age 59, her career as an elected official was over. Landes relocated to the college town of Ann Arbor, Michigan, where she died in 1943—12 years after voters recalled Frank Edwards from office for refusing to enforce anti-vice laws.

Ironically, Bertha’s success as a manager may ultimately have doomed her as a lawmaker. For a city accustomed to at least half-venal mayors, men such as Hiram Gill and Doc Brown, she may simply have charted too even and sane a course. As The Nation noted after her 1928 defeat, “in American cities today good-housekeeping is not good politics, shameful as it is to admit it.”

READ MORE: “7 Facts About Bertha Knight Landes, First Female Mayor of a Major American City,” by Jocelyn Sears (Mental Floss); “Seattle’s Female Mayors Have More in Common Than You’d Think,”
by Knute Berger (Crosscut).

Bang Bang, They Shot Them Down

It was 80 years ago today that notorious Depression-era outlaws Clyde Barrow and Bonnie Parker were assassinated by members of a posse on a backcountry road in northern Louisiana. Read my notes on this anniversary in The Rap Sheet.

This Is My Idea of Heaven!

The photo below shows a man browsing through the cavernous stacks at Cincinnati, Ohio’s “Old Main” Public Library. “Completed in 1874,” explains the historical site Ohio Memory, “and designed by architect J.W. McLaughlin, the building was considered ‘the most magnificent public library in the country.’ The heads of Shakespeare, Milton and Franklin stood guard over the Main Entrance.” Unfortunately, by the 1950s this structure at 629 Vine Street was terribly overcrowded and was finally torn down in favor of a far less beautiful replacement. You’ll find many more pictures of the library here and here.



READ MORE: “Gallery: American Library” (The Morning News); “The Public Library: A Photographic Love Letter to Humanity’s Greatest Sanctuary of Knowledge, Freedom, and Democracy,” by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings).

Baby, It’s Cold Out There

As the American Northeast suffers through yet another dumping of snow today, The Bowery Boys, a Gotham history blog, has posted what it describes as “the first-ever film of a New York City blizzard.”

That black-and-white footage shows people in Madison Square Park coping with a “horrific blizzard” on February 17, 1902. It’s hard to know whether they’re any more content with their lot than modern Manhattanites might be under similar conditions. They may be much less so, for in 1900, Manhattan’s population stood at 1,850,093, while in 2012, it was estimated at just 1, 619,090. And at the turn of the last century, there were not the same artificial heating resources, underground transportation facilities, and emergency services available to residents today.

So take heart, all my friends in New York. Things could be worse.

READ MORE: “The Origin of Snow Removal for All New Yorkers, Rich and Poor,” by Greg Young (The Bowery Boys).

50 Years Ago Today

READ MORE: “A Heartbreaking Contemporary Account of America’s Grief for Kennedy,” by Murray Kempton and James Ridgeway (The New Republic); “Dallas Holds First Ever JFK Ceremony as City Confronts Its Infamous Past,” by Tom Dart (The Guardian); “The Kennedy Assassination and American Fragility,” by Charles P. Pierce (Esquire); “Sleuths of Camelot: John Kennedy’s Most Thrilling Afterlife,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Kirkus Reviews).

Living It Up on the Edge

Cliff House in the 1890s

As the San Francisco Chronicle reminds us, it was 150 years ago this week that one of Northern California’s foremost landmarks--the Cliff House, a restaurant with spectacular views over the Pacific, located just north of San Francisco’s Ocean Beach--opened to the public. The present incarnation of that wind-whipped structure, though, is far from the first; and it’s certainly not the most palatial. I devoted a couple of spreads in my 2009 book San Francisco: Yesterday and Today (Publications International) to the Cliff House. Here’s what I wrote to accompany the photos:

Point Lobos, named by Spanish explorers for the sea lions (lobos marinos, or sea wolves) that languished and barked on the surrounding rocks, is the westernmost tip of San Francisco. It’s been a leisure destination ever since the mid-1850s. In 1863, a real-estate speculator named Charles Butler constructed the first, fairly modest Cliff House just south of that point. It initially attracted the chic and well-heeled set, who ventured out by carriage over a toll road (later Geary Boulevard) to dawdle and dine, to survey the marine life on adjacent Seal Rocks or thrill to the sight of daredevils treading tightropes above the crashing waves. However, as more common folk discovered this resort, and competitors for the coastal tourist trade appeared, Butler added card rooms and saloons to the Cliff House, both of which lent it an unsavory reputation.

In the early 1880s, Adolph Sutro purchased the Cliff House. A Prussian-born entrepreneur and resolute dreamer, he’d made a fortune in Nevada’s Comstock mining country, developing a chemical technique to extract residual wealth from already processed ore and then boring a tunnel deep into the heart of the mining district, to bleed off hazardous gases. After acquiring an idyllic cottage on the promontory above the Cliff House and Seal Rocks, which he enlarged and surrounded with gardens full of scandalously underdressed statuary, Sutro began restoring the respectability of Butler’s former oceanside resort. Although a chimney fire burned the Cliff House to the ground in 1894, Sutro seemed undiscouraged. With architects Emile S. Lemme and C.J. Colley, he soon erected a considerably grander, French château-style replacement, stuffed with private dining rooms, curio shops, and parlors. He also built an electric trolley line out to the beach, so more people of lesser means could enjoy his entertainments.

(Right) Sutro Baths

Beside the Cliff House on the north, the ambitious Sutro raised the largest public bathhouse in the world. Opened officially in 1896, while its creator was serving his first and only term as mayor of San Francisco, Sutro Baths boasted seven swimming pools of varying sizes and depths (the largest being an unheated, L-shaped seawater pool 300 feet long and 175 feet wide), and 500 dressing rooms. The Victorian structure, with its Greek temple-like entrance, was roofed by two acres of crystal glass and also contained sweeping staircases, gardens of palms and ferns, restaurants, a theater, a gymnasium, and an eccentric museum that showcased Egyptian mummies, stuffed animals, medieval armor, and even a carnival made of toothpicks, crafted by a penitentiary inmate.

Adolph Sutro died in 1898, only a year and a half after relinquishing the mayor’s office to banker James D. Phelan. In 1907, his luxurious Cliff House went up in flames during a remodeling project. It was replaced two years later by a conspicuously less grandiose (but more fire-resistant) version, the essence of which still stands today. The Sutro Baths persisted as a recreation center well into the 20th century, though its largest pool was turned into an ice-skating rink in 1937. Declining attendance and rising maintenance costs finally shuttered the facility in 1966, shortly after which it too burned, leaving what some call “the finest ruins in the city,” now part of the Golden Gate Recreation Area.

I’ve been out to the Cliff House on numerous occasions--the first time, in the 1970s, with my parents; the most recent time with my brother, Matt, on a very long walk west from downtown. I know that it holds a special place in the hearts of native San Franciscans. But every time I visit the Cliff House, I feel, well, just a little disappointed. I’m too familiar with photographs of the Cliff House at its baronial, turn-of-the-last-century best, and I keep hoping that the next time I visit there, it will have been somehow magically restored to that incarnation. Unfortunately, that’s a dream only to be realized in trick photos such as this one.

If you’d to learn more about this landmark, pick up or order a copy of Mary Germain Hountalas’ 2009 book, The San Francisco Cliff House (Ten Speed Press).

Another Promise of Change

As we continues to celebrate President Barack Obama’s re-election, let’s not forget that this week also brings an important political anniversary. It was on November 8, 1932--80 years ago today--in the harrowing midst of the Great Depression, that Democratic New York Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt was first elected as the 32nd president of the United States, winning 42 states to Republican incumbent Herbert Hoover’s ... er, six.

The energetic and highly innovative Roosevelt would go on to be elected three more times, and serve in the White House until his death in 1945 (at which point Harry S. Truman assumed the presidency). He is commonly remembered now as the greatest U.S. president of the 20th century--even by Newt Gingrich--and certainly ranks among the top presidents ever.

You’ll find a collection of FDR’s greatest quotes here.

Double Billing

Has anybody else happened to mention this anomaly in American history? Barack Obama is now the third recent U.S. president in a row to be elected to two terms in the White House, following Bill Clinton (1993-2001) and George W. Bush (2001-2009).



The last and only other time three men were elected consecutively to two terms as president was back at the beginning of the 19th century: Thomas Jefferson (1801-1809), James Madison (1809-1817), and James Monroe (1817-1825).

Witness to Assassination

This is incredible. Ninety-five-year old Maryland resident Samuel J. Seymour, who witnessed John Wilkes Booth flee Ford’s Theatre after shooting President Abraham Lincoln in 1865, appears on the CBS-TV quiz show I’ve Got a Secret in 1956.

Revisiting the Watergate Nightmare

It was 40 years ago today that operatives linked to Republican President Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign broke into Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., looking for material that could be used to damage then presidential candidate Senator George McGovern (D-South Dakota) and his fellow Dems. Police arrested five men for the crime.

Three months later, those five--along with Nixon re-election committee general counsel G. Gordon Liddy and former CIA operative/spy novelist E. Howard Hunt--were indicted for conspiracy, burglary, and violation of federal wiretapping laws.

The ensuing Watergate scandal--the worst example of U.S. political malfeasance since the Teapot Dome bribery scandal of the 1920s--led to a White House cover-up, televised hearings in the U.S. Senate, mass firings in the Justice Department, threats of impeaching and removing Nixon from office, and the Republican president’s announcement, on August 8, 1974, that he would relinquish the Oval Office in favor of Vice President Gerald Ford, who had been in office for less than a full year (having been appointed to replace Nixon’s previous running mate, Spiro Agnew, who’d been forced to resign amid charges of tax-evasion). The scandal also made heroes of the two Washington Post reporters who did the most to reveal Watergate’s numerous aspects, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and encouraged myriad young journalism students to become investigative reporters.

Over the four decades since, many Watergate-era legal reforms have been instituted, only to be rolled back, and the Watergate crime scene has been all but forgotten. The increasingly corporate news media have slackened off considerably from their valuable public mission of holding politicians (such as George W. Bush, Mitt Romney, and others) accountable for their deliberate, repeated lies. And the Watergate scandal has almost entered the realm of myth, an event so big and dramatic in scale that (like the 1912 Titanic sinking) it can hardly be accepted anymore as having actually happened. Yet it did happen, and those of us who lived through the daily drips and spills and floods of scandal news in newspapers and on television won’t forget how the paranoia of a president and his enabling minions brought shame upon America’s political system. Even 40 years later, the anger and disgust engendered by that national nightmare haven’t completely dissipated.

I think that’s for the good.

READ MORE: “40 Years After Watergate, Scandal Full of What-ifs Still Captivates,” by Mark S. Smith (Associated Press); “In Need of a New Historical Touchstone,” by Steve Benen (The Maddow Blog); “3 Thrillers Inspired by Watergate,” by J. Kingston Pierce (Kirkus Reviews); “Do You Know the Other Watergate?” by Tom Cochran (Ghosts of D.C.); “The Secret Story of Richard Nixon’s First Scandal,” by Jeffrey Frank (Salon).

“Oh, the Humanity”

After writing so much last month about the 1912 sinking of the British luxury liner Titanic, I wasn’t prepared in the least to address another historical tragedy so soon. Nonetheless, I can’t forget to mention that 75 years ago today, the German passenger airship Hindenburg suddenly burst into flames and was quickly destroyed during what had seemed, up to that point, like a routine landing at New Jersey’s Lakehurst Naval Air Station.

“Seven million cubic feet of ignited hydrogen incinerated the dirigible before it hit the earth, killing 35 crew members and passengers and one person on the ground,” recalled Northeastern University history professor Ballard C. Campbell in his 2008 book, American Disaster: 201 Calamities That Shook the Nation. “News of the disaster shocked the world, dealt a blow to Nazi propaganda, and effectively ended the era of lighter-than-air travel.”

The black-and-white newsreel embedded above shows the whole sad spectacle of Thursday, May 6, 1937, with memorable landing-field narration from radio reporter Herbert Morrison.

(Hat tip to Amie-June Brumble.)

READ MORE: “10 Worst Airship Disasters in History,” by Yohani Kamarudin (Environmental Graffiti); “Over Half the People Involved in the Hindenburg Disaster Survived,” by Karl Smallwood (Today I Found Out); “1930s: Colour Photographs of the Hindenburg Interior” (Retronaut).

Praise the “Titanic”

Colorized image of the Titanic’s port side

Unless you’ve been hiding in a cave for the last few weeks, you probably know it was 100 years ago today--on August 14, 1912, at 11:40 p.m.--that the British luxury passenger liner Titanic struck an iceberg while sailing west across the North Atlantic. “She brushed the berg so gently,” wrote Walter Lord in The Light Lives On, his 1986 sequel to the classic A Night to Remember, “that many on board didn’t notice it, but so lethally that she was instantly doomed.” Within three hours, on the morning of April 15, that mammoth pride of the White Star Line disappeared beneath the frigid waters, causing the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers and crew, and settling on the seabed 2.5 miles below.

I’ve been commemorating that disaster all week on the Web:

• My wrap-up of what I think are high-quality Titanic history books was posted on the Kirkus Reviews site.

• For January Magazine, I did an interview with Hugh Brewster, the author of one of those books, Gilded Lives, Fatal Voyage: The Titanic’s First-Class Passengers and Their World.

• Also in January, you’ll find my rundown of half a dozen novels that use the Titanic tragedy as their setting or jumping-off point.

Part of my plan for concluding this commemorative week is to watch tonight’s introduction of Titanic, a four-hour miniseries written by Julian Fellowes, who is also the man behind the successful series Downton Abbey. When this new costume drama was broadcast recently in Britain, it ran in one-hour segments over four different nights. However, ABC-TV has repackaged Titanic for American audiences. The first three hours will be shown this evening, beginning at 8 p.m., with the concluding episode to start tomorrow at 9 p.m. Even though there have been a few negative reviews of the show (see here, for instance), I look forward to burying myself in the whole sad saga once more, a century after

the real disaster took place. A behind-the-scenes video about the ship set used in Fellowes’ Titanic is embedded at left.

But even beyond this weekend, I’ll undoubtedly have lots of Titanicana to catch up on. For if you’ve been browsing around the Web lately, you will have spotted abundant stories memorializing that famous shipwreck, the Titanic’s builders, and its passengers and crew. I cannot say that I’ve found all the interesting material available, but here are some links to sites and stories that I--and perhaps you, too--should investigate further:

BASIC INFORMATION

• A useful timeline of the Titanic’s short life.

• Encyclopedia Titanica

• The BBC’s Titanic history page.

• Check out these wonderful graphic presentations of the ship’s construction, its North Atlantic route, and its failure to survive the collision with an iceberg.

• The National Geographic Channel’s Titanic page, which includes artist Ken Marschall’s unique cutaways of the ship’s interiors.

• The History Channel’s Titanic page.

• Demographics of the Titanic passengers: deaths, survivals, and lifeboat occupancy.

• Dimensions and features of the ill-fated liner.

• Worst maritime disasters in history

LEARN MORE

• 10 things you might not know about the RMS Titanic.

• Five Titanic myths spread by films.

• Writer-videographer re-examines that immortal question, “Did the White Star Line really claim the ship was unsinkable?”

• Although the ship was headed for New York City when it sank, Washington, D.C., boasts not one, but two memorials to its abbreviated maiden voyage.

• The National Geographic Museum in D.C. is hosting what’s supposed to be a meritorious exhibit, “Titanic: 100 Year Obsession,” through July 8.

• And before we depart the environs of the U.S. capital, a blog called Ghosts of D.C. has put together a fine recollection of Major Archibald Butt, a military aide to presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, who “went down with the ship and [whose] body was never recovered.”

• The world’s largest RMS Titanic museum opens in Belfast.

• Did you know there was only one black family on the Titanic?

• Titanic commemorative events around the world.

• The vessel’s hull may provide clues to its quick and deadly plunge.

• Was the Titanic’s doom foretold in an 1898 novella?

• One of the first people to employ the Titanic calamity as a metaphor, writer Henry James--who’d booked passage on that vessel’s never-taken return voyage--worried that the Republican Party’s prospects in 1912 were as doomed as the liner itself.

• Remembering the dozen dogs aboard the ship.

• The New York Times reports, “two new studies argue that rare states of nature played major roles in the [Titanic] catastrophe.”

• What part might Earth’s moon have played in the ship’s sinking?

• Outstanding analysis of the ship’s design, construction, and failure to survive its encounter with an iceberg.

• Halifax, Nova Scotia, where “150 of the Titanic’s dead are buried in three cemeteries,” plays its essential role in this centennial.

• Newfoundland, too, observes its Titanic connections: “On that fateful night [of April 15, 1912], only 11 years after [Guglielmo] Marconi received the first trans-Atlantic wireless signal in Newfoundland, one of his stations there was instrumental in passing on the distress signal from the ill-fated RMS Titanic.”

• Titanic’s hidden gay history?

• The story of Jesuit priest and amateur photographer Frank Browne, who “captured some of the most enduring and iconic images of the ship, images upon which our modern-day knowledge of the interior of Titanic and the atmosphere on board are based.” Had Browne not disembarked in Ireland, those photos, like so many others, would have been lost forever.

• The Denver Post offers a collection of Titanic photographs.

• Historic images from the disaster.

• Seven famous people who missed boarding the Titanic.

• Steve Powell of The Venetian Vase blog looks back at “the remarkable life and mysterious heritage of Jacques Futrelle,” the American mystery-fictionist who perished with so many others on that “night to remember.”

• Selections from The New York Times’ original Titanic coverage.

• There were more than 100 children on board the ship.

• Janet Rudolph reviews the last dinner served on the Titanic, which included chocolate éclairs with French vanilla ice cream.

• An account of the cultural and culinary items that went down with the Titanic, including four cases of opium, one Renault 35-horsepower automobile, and three extremely rare books.

• PC Magazine looks at how the Titanic disaster changed telecommunications.

• Some second (and favorable) thoughts about filmmaker James Cameron’s romantic historical blockbuster, Titanic, 15 years after its theatrical debut: here and here.

• Old papers keep memories of the ship afloat.

• Could the Titanic disaster happen today?

PRESERVATION

• Oceanographer Dr. Robert Ballard, “who in 1985 found the luxury liner’s dismembered corpse strewn across acres of the North Atlantic’s floor,” laments the destruction committed against that wreck by scavengers. The Titanic, he says, deserves better than to “becom[e] a scrap yard picked over by scavengers. ‘You don't go to Gettysburg with a shovel,’ Ballard said. ‘You don’t come into the cemetery and dig and take the jewelry off the bodies.’”

• Ballard worries the Titanic wreck is being “loved to death.”

• Meanwhile, he has approached the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) with his plan to use submersible robots to clean and paint the Titanic’s hull, which is beset by metal-eating life-forms. That project would help preserve the wreck in its current state.

• Finally, Ballard talks with National Public Radio about why, a full 100 years later, the Titanic still captivates.

• Titanic’s “hallowed ground” may win new protections.

READ MORE: “The Wild Conspiracy Theory That the Titanic Never Sank,” by David Grossman (Popular Mechanics).

Hollywood’s Taylor-made Mystery

As history writer Larry Harnisch reminds me, in The Daily Mirror, it was 90 years ago today that “internationally known [silent] film director” William Desmond Taylor was murdered--shot in the back--at his bungalow in the then-fashionable Westlake Park neighborhood of Los Angeles.

Charges of insanity, crime-scene mismanagement, a supposed cover-up by Paramount Studios (for which Taylor worked), the allegedly lurid involvement of Hollywood starlets, odd behavior by the district attorney, and a dubious confession have all muddied the investigative waters since. Sidney D. Kirkpatrick’s captivating (though oft-denigrated) 1987 book, A Cast of Killers, provides one solution to the killing, but the case remains officially unsolved.

You can learn more here and here.

“African-American History Is All Around Us”

Dr. Quintard Taylor Jr. is a professor of American history at the University of Washington in Seattle and the creator of BlackPast.org, “an online reference center [that] makes available a wealth of materials on African-American history.” He was interviewed this morning on Weekday, a KUOW-FM radio program hosted by Steve Scher, and I found myself not only drawn to Taylor’s discussion of his Web project, but later provoked to look up the site and see what it has accomplished thus far.

You too can listen to Scher’s interview with Taylor here. (The show begins after a bit of National Public Radio news.) And Black Past--with its sections on African-American History, African-American History in the West, and Global African History--is simply a click away here. I look forward to seeing more of what Taylor and his staff of volunteers can produce in the future.

Vintage Views: Havana in the 1930s

From Hollywood, California, in the 1920s, we now move southeast into the Caribbean Sea and make landfall at Havana, Cuba--“the Paris of the Caribbean”--a decade later.

By this point, Cuba had recovered from the Spanish-American War and its subsequent occupation by U.S. troops, which ended in 1902 (although the United States maintained the right to intervene militarily in the future). It had been declared an independent nation in 1902, and for the next couple of decades enjoyed relative peace. But in the early ’30s, revolution broke out in Cuba to topple industrialist-turned-president Gerardo Machado, who critics said had become despotic in his governance, and who--in the wake of terrorist attacks reportedly committed by Communists--had declared martial law in hopes of restoring peace. With the intervention of Sumner Welles, President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s assistant secretary of state for Latin American Affairs (and later under secretary of state), Machado was deposed in 1933.

Havana’s construction industry boomed in the ’30s as the country’s middle class burgeoned in size and new apartment buildings had to be raised all over the city. Tourism was also on the rise during that decade, with hotels, casinos, and nightclubs opening to welcome visitors from the States and elsewhere. It was in the ’30s too, though, that gangsters from the States began infiltrating this “largest island of the West Indies.”

Someday, after U.S. lawmakers finally concede that the Cuban embargo--in place now for the last 51 years, and still vigorously supported by American right-wingers--is doing neither country a lick of good, perhaps I can visit Havana. The many photographs I’ve seen of it make the city look both fascinating for its history and intriguing for its street scene. In the meantime, though, I shall have to be happy with those photos and with old films like this one.

Next time, we’ll go sightseeing in Depression-era Chicago.

So Much for One Nation, Indivisible

I’ll probably address this aspect of history further, as the year rolls on. But for now, let me just note that today marks the 150th anniversary of the outbreak of America’s bloody Civil War. The Philadelphia Inquirer offers a succinct remembrance of this occasion. Meanwhile, both Steve Benen of The Washington Monthly and MyDD’s Charles Lemos wonder at a new CNN poll showing that issues related to that long-ago conflict “still divide the public.”

Vintage Views: Hollywood in the 1920s

The peaceful reaches of Barcelona, Spain, our previous stop on Limbo’s video excursion through history, seem a world away--instead of merely half a world away--from bustling, bumptious Prohibition-era Hollywood, this week’s focus.

Over blues singer Victoria Spivey’s rendition of “Hollywood Stomp,” a popular tune of the early 20th century, we’re offered a mix of black-and-white newsreel footage introducing some of the largest studios and most sumptuous movie theaters, as well as other popular sites around Los Angeles, including the Hollywood Bowl, the Brown Derby restaurant on Wilshire Boulevard, and hectic Sunset Boulevard. Although the first motion picture made in the L.A. area was not actually shot in the formerly tranquil agricultural suburb of Hollywood, it certainly didn’t take long for that now-renowned neighborhood northwest of downtown to corner the film-production market. By the 1920s, it was awash in swank cars, spotlight-enhanced movie premieres, and celebrities made to believe that they could outshine the stars in the night sky.

I am a bit surprised not to see in these clips the Hollywood Sign (which at the time read “Hollywoodland”). But maybe in those days, not long after the sign had been erected as a real-estate promotion in 1923, it wasn’t considered the landmark that it is today.

From here, we head next to the ambitious and fast-expanding Cuban capital, Havana, in the 1930s.

Vintage Views: Barcelona, 1908

Leaving behind the frenzied New York City thoroughfares of 1928, we leap back two decades and across the Atlantic Ocean to land in Barcelona. Now the largest and most beautiful city in eastern Spain, in 1908 Barcelona was enjoying a period of quiet between its 1888 world’s fair and the bloody political clashes of 1909, during which the Spanish army faced off against anticolonial and antimiltarist forces all over the Catalonia region.

I’ve visited Barcelona only once, back in 2006. But I quickly fell in love with its extensive and entertaining downtown pedestrian mall, the La Rambla; its many innovative works by architect Antonio Gaudí; and the kinetic energy and stylish inhabitants that together make this more than 2,000-year-old city feel so very modern. The video embedded above shows a place that is at once nothing like the commercially active metropolis I enjoyed, and yet every inch the same sort of grand, proud, and richly textured town.

Next time we’ll strike out west to see Prohibition-era Los Angeles.

Vintage Views: New York City, 1928

From London in 1903 and then San Francisco in 1905, we leap ahead two decades to America’s largest metropolis in the year before the Great Depression clobbered the world.

It’s interesting to see that getting around the city was no more sane or simple back then than it is today. And no, you aren’t imagining things: This clip not only features silent-film actor Harold Lloyd as the less-than-gifted, bespectacled cab driver, but also the then 33-year-old “Sultan of Swat,” George Herman “Babe” Ruth, as his second “unfortunate customer.”

Join me for our next historical adventure, when we’ll sail across the Atlantic Ocean to visit enchanting and considerably less hectic Barcelona, Spain, early in the 20th century.

The Men Who Moil for Gold

(Author’s note: On this date in 1897, the steamship Portland sailed in to dock at Seattle, Washington, bearing 68 sunburned gold prospectors grown rich from collecting gold dust and nuggets from the fields around Dawson City, in northwestern Canada’s Yukon territory. By the time that ship nosed in to Schwabacher’s Wharf [in the vicinity of Piers 57 and 58], its masts aflutter with banners and prospectors waving from its deck, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer was peddling the first of three extra editions, eagerly snapped up by 5,000 envious Seattleites who had come to watch from the waterfront. “GOLD! GOLD! GOLD! GOLD!” trumpeted the headlines. “STACKS OF YELLOW METAL!” It all seemed too good to be true. But the men who debarked from the Portland that day left little doubt that the Klondike provided what one Seattle editorialist termed “‘the open sesame’ to a dreamland of wealth.” And thus began the famous Klondike Gold Rush. Fourteen years ago, anticipating the centennial of that famous rampage for riches, I flew to southeast Alaska with plans to hike over the Chilkoot Pass, using the same historical trail that had carried most Klondikers north toward Dawson City. I wound up peddling several stories about the gold rush for different publications, but only one that recounted my trek over Chilkoot Pass. It appeared in the Wanderlust section of Salon, that Webzine’s once delightful but now forgotten travel department. If you try to find my story nowadays, you’ll see that it was stripped of its original artwork in Salon’s most recent and regrettable redesign, and thus lacks the visual appeal it once did. Because today is the 113th anniversary of the Portland’s history-making landing in Seattle, I’ve decided to repossess my piece and better illustrate it for your reading pleasure here. Enjoy!)

So there I was, dangling Harold Lloyd-like from a boulder about 2,000 feet up Chilkoot Pass, with my backpack doing everything it could to pull me off balance and my breath ragged in the depleted oxygen of that advanced altitude, when suddenly my left knee--which I injured during a schoolyard brawl many years ago--decided to lock up. This had happened before, but never while I was climbing a windy rock face separating Alaska from British Columbia and the Yukon Territory, the same geological obstruction that defied prospectors bound for Canada’s Klondike gold fields a century ago.

“You OK?” inquired a woman from Chicago, whom I had encountered at the base of this ascent and who was now several yards above me, still looking fresh, as if she’d merely been sashaying down a beach rather than scaling a mountain.

“Sure, no problemo,” I called back, trying to sound more plucky than pained, my brain meanwhile reeling with thoughts of having to complete this famous northward path on a stretcher. “You go on ahead. I’ll catch up in a moment.”

But as I watched her head, then her back, then finally the woman’s slender bare legs vanish into the dusky brume that concealed the crest of the pass, I could only wait behind, panting and feeling pretty darn pathetic. Amid the frenzied gold rush of 1897-1899, I knew, argonauts with much heftier burdens than mine had conquered this course. A piano, a portable bowling alley, and even a pot-bellied stove on a sled--well-stoked by its owner, a middle-aged woman who kept her hands toasty at the fire--all went through this rare glacier-free corridor in southeast Alaska’s Coast Mountains.

My consolation was in recalling that numerous gold seekers shared my second thoughts about this experience. As Frank Thomas of Plymouth, Indiana, remarked in an 1897 letter home: “I am undoubtedly a crazy fool for being here in this God-forsaken country.”

Hiking the Chilkoot Trail had seemed like such a fine, romantic endeavor, back when I was contemplating it from my living room sofa. It would help me to better understand those 100,000 men, women, and children who, after news broke that tons of riches from northwestern Canada had been shipped to San Francisco and Seattle in July 1897, promptly quit their mundane, sedentary lives for a shot at millions of dollars in easy money said to be awaiting anyone who could reach the Klondike River tributaries near Dawson City, then the Yukon’s boomtown capital. I would be taking a walk back into history. Never did it occur to me that I would also rediscover why this path used to be known as “the meanest 33 miles on Earth.”

* * *

The first I ever heard of Chilkoot Pass or the Klondike or “the men who moil for gold” was from my maternal grandfather. A short but scrappy Canadian named Ewart Sprinkling, he’d lied about his age when he was 15 and been shipped to the European front during World War I, only to return home terribly saddened by the death of friends and determined from then on to find his excitement in books, instead. Among his favorites were those by Robert Service, the banker turned bard who--despite the fact that he didn’t reach the Yukon until 1904, well after the excitement had waned--managed better than any other wordsmith to capture the spirit of that area’s gold rush days.

I can picture my grandfather recounting Service’s tales of Sam McGee, Dangerous Dan McGrew, and “the lady that’s known as Lou.” So dramatic were his recitations that I always assumed he’d actually seen the mountains the “Klondikers” crossed, had mucked through the silt and mire of gold-bearing streams, and had committed Service’s rhymes to memory simply as the best way to retain a vivid sense of those places. Not until his funeral more than a decade ago did I learn Ewart Sprinkling had never gone within 800 miles of Dawson.

That realization struck me again as my prop plane banked over southeast Alaska’s mountain-shaded Lynn Canal and descended toward the town of Skagway, jumping-off point to the Chilkoot Trail. I was beginning, in fact, the trek that my grandfather had so often made in his imagination.

Had I undertaken this journey 100 years ago, I’d have arrived at Skagway not by air, but probably aboard a steamship from Seattle or Vancouver, British Columbia. With me would have been barbers, tailors, reporters, policemen, and maybe even a few British lords and Maori tribesmen--all bound for one of two trails that led to the headwaters of the Yukon River and thence to Klondike country: the White Pass route, from Skagway, a 45-mile series of switchbacks and fathomless mudholes that proved perilous to overburdened pack horses; or the steeper but more frequented Chilkoot Trail, which in those days started at a raw hamlet called Dyea. Especially in the opening months of the Klondike stampede, demand for transport up Canada’s west coast to these trail heads was so high that ships were often double- and triple-booked at top dollar, pushing their ticket holders to the brink of homicide. Yet that didn’t deter many people from going north. “The man who had a family to support who could not go was looked on with a sort of pity,” wrote J.E. Fraser, a miner from San Francisco. “The man who didn’t care to leave his business or for other trivial reasons, was looked on with contempt as a man without ambition who did not know enough to take advantage of a good thing when placed in his reach.”

During its gold rush heyday, Skagway was attuned to the discordant rhythms of saws, honky-tonk music, and gunshots. Its short main street, Broadway, was bordered by campsites, blacksmiths’ shops, and restaurants so fly-by-night that one advertised its existence with a pair of pants hung from a line and “Meals” painted on the seat. There were up to 80 local saloons where a cheechako (Alaska newcomer) could gargle down strong spirits before embarking for Dawson. And among the sidewalk throngs could be counted bogus preachers, circus performers, and enough card sharps, con men, and harlots to lend the settlement a distinctly anarchical repute. As one visitor put it, Skagway was “little better than hell on earth.” No wonder most folks who passed through did so as quickly as possible.

Left: Stampeders take a breather near Sheep Camp on the Chilkoot Trail in 1897.

Even today, the town caters to more transients than residents. From late spring through early fall (the usual Alaskan tourist months), as many as five Brobdingnagian cruise ships may tie up every day at Skagway’s docks, disgorging 8,000 or so travelers to flood the gift shops along Broadway, sample brews and burgers at the raucous Red Onion Saloon (once a prominent bordello), and point their video cameras in wonder at the restored landmarks that crowd Broadway just as they did back in the Gilded Age.

Furthering the illusion that time has failed to elapse here are the hikers, like me, who on any given summer morning can be spotted tromping through town on our way over the Coast Mountains, just as the Klondikers did. The difference is, in the late 1890s, we’d have taken the White Pass Trail. That has since been substantially buried beneath the narrow-gauge tracks of the White Pass & Yukon Route scenic railway, and people are discouraged from using what remains of it. Instead, they walk or hitch a ride nine miles west to the abandoned town site of Dyea and the foot of the Chilkoot Trail.

“On your left!” The shout came from behind me, and almost before I could wheel around, a pair of skinny guys with fanny packs darted by on the path.

“How far are you headed?” I called after them.

“All the way to the end,” answered one of the marathoners. “Should get there tonight.”

“Yeah,” agreed his partner, though he sounded somewhat less sure--and more winded. “Wish us luck.”

Hey, wish me luck, I thought. I had gone about six miles--less than halfway to my earliest scheduled campsite--and already I was cursing my packful of cooking utensils and century-old gold rush journals. The Chilkoot Trail, which introduces itself in a long, steep ascent through dense timber and over slippery rocks, has scant patience with dilettante hikers. Stories are common of feckless urbanites who don’t get more than a few miles in before retreating to Skagway.

It’s amazing that approximately 22,000 people--most of them out of shape and excessively dressed--struggled over this same terrain from the fall of 1897 through the spring of ’99, lugging (in barely reasonable portions of 50 or 60 pounds) a ton of food and other provisions that Canada’s North-West Mounted Police required them to bring into the Yukon for their own safety. With that burden, it “took the average man three months or more to shuttle his ton of goods across the pass,” Canadian author Pierre Berton explains in his seminal history Klondike Fever: The Life and Death of the Last Great Gold Rush (1958). Modern hikers usually complete the crossing in three to five days. I had allowed three. That would make the 33-mile trip challenging, I figured, but still leave me time to launch a few detours and enjoy views along the way.

The majority of stampeders came through these parts during the winter months, when snow hid most of the wildlife and plant species. Traveling in summer, I could see what they didn’t--myriad butterflies weaving drunkenly overhead, Stellar’s jays yapping insistently from tree branches, blueberry bushes adroop with fruit. and fields of fiddle ferns reeling in the breeze. Not to mention relics. Sprinkled the length of this route are rotting wagon wheels, rough-hewn logs, and even shreds of boot leather--all discarded beside the trail by gold seekers who’d deemed them superfluous or just too damn heavy to carry farther. While souvenir hunters have since filched many interesting artifacts, enough remain for the Chilkoot to have been labeled “the world's longest museum.”

The most prominent ruins are at Canyon City, located across the Taiya River from the main trail and reached via a footbridge about eight miles in. This used to be a prosperous pocket-edition town with stores and saloons--and a tramway that, in the spring of 1898, started hauling carloads of goods aerially all the way to the summit of Chilkoot Pass for a price. It was a promising innovation, but it came so late in the gold rush that it never made as much money as its backers had hoped. Left behind, and looking rather like a Victorian notion of a submarine, is a giant, rusted boiler from the tram’s steam plant.

Both the American and Canadian park services have excelled in maintaining the Chilkoot pathway. Wooden steps lead up steep embankments. Footbridges leap across streams. Heritage markers stand where Klondikers once erected mini-settlements of hotels, restaurants and, of course, taverns. Those sites, now the sole spots where hikers are permitted to stay overnight, are usually identified by the presence of a crude cabin, where you can retreat from rain and the blitzkrieg campaigns of crepuscular insects.

One such site was my initial night’s stop: Sheep Camp (13 miles). An early headquarters for mountain sheep hunters, in the late 1890s it grew into a real village, surrounded by tents “so thickly set,” according to an old account, “as to prevent one passing between them.” There I found the park service cabin already occupied by some of the 30 or so other people hiking this trail. I was forced to try to set up a fancy tent I’d borrowed in Skagway, only to realize I hadn’t the faintest idea how it fit together. After I’d at least used up all the component parts, I called it done and trotted down to the Taiya for a good foot soaking. Word was that it might take 10 hours to travel from here to the next campsite, across Chilkoot Pass, so any time spent recuperating appeared worthwhile.

Eventually, I hung my pack over a tree branch, safe from voracious varmints, and curled up in my sleeping bag with my grandfather’s well-thumbed copy of Service’s verses. I was snoring before the end of “The Spell of the Yukon.”

* * *

Early the next morning, I reached the base of Chilkoot Pass. Gazing upward, I remembered black-and-white gold rush-era photos of a seemingly endless human chain trudging to the top over crude steps (the so-called Golden Stairs) hacked into the snow and ice, each encumbered miner groaning in lockstep with whomever preceded him, nobody daring to step aside and rest, for it might take hours to find another space in that chain. No images better represent the hope and hardships of the Klondike rush than those do. Now it was my turn to make the same ascent, a century later.

Almost immediately I realized why, despite threats of frostbite and avalanches, stampeders had willingly ventured this way in winter. From Sheep Camp, the trail gains almost 2,800 vertical feet in 3.6 miles. With the snow melted away, surmounting this pass promised to be less a climb than a crawl over a 45-degree slope of scree and boulders not quite as big as Kansas. I was glad to hook up with a trio of friendly strangers, two women and a man, who were also bound over this mountain, for then I might have someone to tumble into if I stumbled.

Up we went, jamming our boots into narrow rock notches and grabbing hold of rusted wires that might once have carried telegraph messages over the pass. And whenever I thought our labors were ending, fog revealed another grim, gray peak. By the time my knee went bum and a cold drizzle began, compounding my misery, I still couldn’t tell where on the mountain I stood.

Klondikers inevitably described this stage of the trail in their journals. “It is about as fatiguing a climb as could well be imagined,” observed Julius Price. “I must plead guilty to being nervous, and was afraid to look back for fear I would fall to the bottom,” wrote Lillian Oliver, who in 1898 left her ailing husband in the Midwest to brave this trail. A like fear gripped me each time my fingers slipped, or my toes seemed wedged permanently between rocks. Veteran alpiners might consider this a moderate-level climb. But I’m no veteran--and neither were most of the 19th-century prospectors who completed 30 or 40 trips over this ground with their ton of supplies. More than a few couldn’t do it, so they spun around and went home. Or shot themselves in despair.

Right: Klondikers pose for photographs at the summit of Chilkoot Pass.

It was a great relief when I caught sight of the Canadian parks service cabin marking the summit as well as the boundary between Alaska and British Columbia. There, gold seekers had paid Mounties a customs duty on their outfits--all the crates of evaporated apples, cans of coffee and condensed milk, winter clothing, mining equipment, and everything else they were packing north. It was a busy place a century ago. No longer. Catching up to my acquaintances, I discovered we were all too weary even to cheer our triumph, although the other male member of our group did find energy enough to fire up a celebratory cigarette. The rest of us just sat for a while, respecting the quietude, breathing in the damp edges of the dissipating fog.

With half the Chilkoot Trail left to cover, and my knee complaining relentlessly, I sympathized with those Klondikers who’d decided they could go no farther. I might have been tempted to screw a pistol barrel into my ear, as well.

Instead, I told my temporary companions to take off at their own pace, while I limped far behind, feeling rather cheated. The countryside north of the summit was so striking, filled with pellucid lakes, the mammoth bleak shoulders of mountains, and broad canyons licked by great tongues of snow and ice. Yet every time I started to feel joyous or just a wee bit carefree, a wave of pain threatened to slap me to the ground. I tried to think of anything except my leg. I recited as many international capitals as I could remember. I plumbed my memory for the names of the 41 U.S. presidents, followed by the names of their vice presidents. When that last task became too frustrating (who the hell was Martin Van Buren’s VP, anyway, or Rutherford B. Hayes’?), I sought to dredge up the names of the Seven Wonders of the World and as many Native American tribes as I could. Hungry from all that ruminating, I downed enough cashews from my backpack to constipate me onto my deathbed. I sang every TV theme song that came to mind, at one point belting out a glorious rendition of the Gilligan’s Island theme to some bewildered deer grazing across a nearby hillside. And when that got old, I read aloud from my grandfather’s Service collection, finding that I could now relate to the author’s words better than I ever had back home in the city:

It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.

And so, employing this desperate combination of diligence and denial, I made it past Crater Lake, where the shoreline still shows the indentations of Klondikers’ wagon wheels; past Happy Camp (20.5 miles), where a fellow wayfarer, watching me change the bandages on my blistered feet, joked, “You don’t really need shoes over all of that, do you?”; past Deep Lake (23 miles), where I was forced to assemble my tent in a downpour and go to bed hungry because I was too drained to do so much as boil water; past Lindemann City, once a bustling tent community of 4,000 people, now best known for its excellent Chilkoot Trail interpretive center; and last, through spruce forest and over chortling streams to the southern end of Lake Bennett. There once rose the log town of Bennett, where gold rushers built boats they hoped would carry them another 550 miles north over the wide Yukon River to Dawson City--and prosperity. Today, Bennett offers little more than a shuttered-up White Pass & Yukon railway station and a wooden Gothic Revival church that hasn’t hosted a service since 1902.

“Hey, you made it,” cried the Chicago woman with whom I had scaled Chilkoot Pass the day before. “We were taking bets on how long it would be before we’d have to send out a search party.”

“You really know how to boost a guy’s ego,” I said, trying not to sound (too) bitter as I collapsed onto the steps of the depot, wishing that Bennett still boasted at least one of the myriad bars it had opened to stampeders. At that moment, I might have sacrificed moderately essential body parts for an ice-cold ale, something I could sip while awaiting the infrequent train from Skagway to pick me up and take me south again to Fraser and my bus connection to Whitehorse, present-day capital of Yukon Territory. The next day, I was set to fly from Whitehorse to Dawson City.

Lying there in the sun, my ears pricked for the wail of a train whistle, my nose filled with the dense scent of unwashed flesh all around me, I tried to imagine what my grandfather would have thought of this northern escapade. He’d probably have told me I should have been better prepared. He undoubtedly would have confirmed that I was a crazy fool for taking on Chilkoot Pass. But he would have been one envious SOB all the same, because I had done what he never could. Knowing that made my knee hurt just a little less.