SAL's Menu

G. George Ostrom

It is startling! If you are unemployed, you hardly ever know what day it is. That is why Editor Joe called me the other morning wondering where my column was. That's when I discovered it was a new week and we were already on Tuesday. Inspiration for this week's epistle will have to arrive now… fast.

Ah ha! Here is a 3-year-old menu from "SAL'S" Klondike Diner in Soldatna, Alaska. Can you believe First Wife Iris thinks I should throw my entire collection of old menus from all over the world. Before I toss this one let's see if there is a column in there.

Sure there is. With current world gold prices weaving around up there over a thousand dollars an ounce, we find that precious metal was $15 in 1889, before the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. In 2005 it was at $421. The largest nugget ever found in Alaska was discovered near Nome in 1903. It weighed 155 troy ounces. On today's market, that big chunk of glitter would go for $155,000.

"The Klondike strike burst upon the world in the summer of 1897, Carmack and several dozen miners showed up in Seattle and San Francisco carrying satchels filled with about three million dollars in gold. Within days the boat fare to Skagway and Dyea, the closest access ports to the Klondike, rocketed from $20 to more than a thousand: scalpers bought tickets and sold for twice that. (George Carmack had been "halfheartedly" prospecting with two Indians up Rabbit Creek when they hit the "greatest concentrations of placer gold in the world.')

"The route to the Klondike was over the treacherous 550 mile trail which led over Chilkoot Pass, 3,600 feet above sea level. The pass only four miles in length (the way the crow flies) was steeper than a school yard slide and became the most famous strip of up and down real estate in the world in 1898."

"200,000 people started to the Klondike but only 30,000 reached it. Not more than 400 found any measurable amount of gold and of those only a few managed to keep it. If all the gold was divided among everyone whostarted out, they would each have received around $20."

Now a days, visitors to Skagway can go up over the pass by highway or railroad then drop down the other side into the mighty drainage of the Yukon. That is over a route where hundreds of people died during the gold rush and thousands of horses died trying to carry equipment the prospectors were forced by Canadian law to bring with them.

"In 1898, Dawson City became the biggest city west of Chicago and north of San Francisco with a population of 30,000. Prices went sky high with nails at $8 a pound, and eggs a dollar apiece. Miners gladly paid $1 for one whirl around the dance floor with a 'dance hall queen.' Hurdy-gurdy dancers were available and one of them was bought by a miner for her weight in gold."

On the back of SAL'S menu is a picture of a man with a huge king salmon. Yes, even bigger than the one I wrote about in this column last year. No wonder his fish is bigger than mine, it is "The World Record King." Les Anderson of Soldatna caught the salmon in May 1985 and it weighed 97 pounds 4 ounces, was 59 1/2 inches long and 37 inches in girth. Pulled it in after a half hour fight at Honeymoon Cove on the Kenai River. The catch eclipses the former recorded of 93 pounds caught in Juneau.

On a trip to Skagway a few years back with Iris' "Sewing Club," we took a private sight seeing bus around town then up over the Pass. In Skagway the driver George (no relation to me) went through the old section where many log "houses of ill repute" have been preserved and turned into shops. He told us "working girls" were there by the thousands and some of them became pregnant. He then told us the hurdy-girl's kids were called "brothel sprouts."

That last item is not from SAL'S menu.