So as I mentioned in part 1, Skagway is a very pretty gold rush down in Alaska that is a popular cruise ship port.  While most people do excursions from the ship there is actually plenty to do in town if you decide to do it on your own like we did.

There is free wi-fi at the library but it was super slow and overloaded, we could received emails on our iPads but were unable to send emails out. Don’t count on getting access here…

One of the stops we made during our walking tour was the small but interesting Corrington’s Museum.

Corrington’s Museum

Then we continued with our walking tour around town stopping in at the Moore Cabin and Homestead. This was free and run by the parks service.  This is well worth a look inside.

It was amazing to see how in the space of a few short years the family went from living in a tiny log cabin to what would have been a very classy wooden house.  Also amazingly they have original photos of the interior so they have put back the main room to almost exactly like it would have looked on the day the photo was taken – I found that particularly fascinating.

From Wikipedia “One prominent resident of early Skagway was William “Billy” Moore, a former steamboat captain. As a member of an 1887 boundary survey expedition, he had made the first recorded investigation of the pass over the Coast Mountains, which later became known as White Pass. He believed that gold lay in the Klondike because it had been found in similar mountain ranges in South America, Mexico, California, and British Columbia. In 1887, he and his son Ben claimed a 160-acre (650,000 m2) homestead at the mouth of the Skagway River in Alaska. Moore settled in this area because he believed it provided the most direct route to the potential goldfields. They built a log cabin, a sawmill, and a wharf in anticipation of future gold prospectors passing through.”

Moore Homestead

After lunch we visited the Gold Rush cemetery which I will have coming up in a future post.