We’ve seen several White Pass & Yukon booklets about Alaska and the Yukon from the 1930s and 1940s. This one is from 1923. I found it on archive.org, but I didn’t like the way they cut the color illustration on the cover in half, so I relaid it out.

Click image to download an 11.6-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.

I learned a few things I didn’t know before. I knew that, on their way from Skagway to Whitehorse, the White Pass trains stopped in Carcross, where they met a lake steamer called the Tutshi, which took passengers down Lake Tagish. What I didn’t know is that the boat eventually got to a place called Taku Landing where it met a 2-1/2-mile portage railroad originally known as the Atlin Short Line, but colloquially called the Taku Tram. Passengers crossed a narrow neck of land on the portage railroad to Lake Atlin, where they boarded another lake steamer called the Tarahne, which took them to the town of Atlin.

I knew that the Tutshi had burned in an unfortunate accident in 1990, but I didn’t know that the Tarahne has been restored and occasionally is used as a local tea house and event venue. A couple of locomotives from the Taku Tram (which was quickly absorbed by the White Pass Route) also still survive and I’ve seen them with White Pass logos unaware that they were used on the Tuku short line.

Records show that only about 1,000 to 2,000 people a year took this trip from 1902 to 1919. But starting in 1920, numbers rapidly grew, reaching nearly 10,000 in 1928. To accommodate the demand, the White Pass company (under the name of British Yukon Navigation Company) cut the boat in half and added 41 feet to the length. They probably should have saved their money as the 1929 crash greatly reduced tourist travel in the 1930s.