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The lure of elusive gold called to one German transplant whose lifelong quest led to the founding of Skagway, Alaska. For most of its history, after the United States had purchased die territory from Russia in March of 1867, Alaska (and the adjacent Yukon Territory in Canada) had been a vast wilderness of wide-open spaces, disturbed by but few natives and still fewer European settlers. All that changed once gold was discovered along the Yukon and Klondike in 1898. Almost overnight tens of thousands of fortune seekers from all over the world arrived in Alaska in search of the precious yellow metal. One man was ready to receive them: Captain William Moore, one of the first white settlers to explore the Upper Lynn Canal (at the northern tip of the inside passage leading north from Juneau) in die late 1880s. Moore had led an adventurous life by any account, a man who had participated in many a gold rush himself. If a rush was "on" somewhere in Alaska or Canada, he was there to exploit it. He had long prepared for the 1898 Gold Rush, which, he hoped, would once again make him rich.
Captain Moore was born Wilhelm Mohr in Hanover on 30 March 1822. As a little lad of but nine or ten years old he had first hired himself out on merchant ships sailing the Nordi Sea, visiting the various ports along the coast. In 1846, twenty-four-year-old Mohr joined the crew of a vessel bound for New Orleans. While in New Orleans he met his lifetime spouse Hendrika. Her family name is Fenn and she is believed to have been Dutch. They married in 1846, and eventually raised seven children. While in the United States, he fought in the Mexican-American War as a sailor and in 1848 became a naturalized United States citizen and changed his name to Moore. Having arrived too late in San Francisco to benefit from the California Gold Rush of 1851, he now tnrew his resources into the 1852 "Queen Charlotte Gold Rush" once he learned that gold had been discovered on Moresby Island, one of the Queen Charlotte Islands off die coast of British Columbia. (Since 3 June 2010, the islands are officially known as Haida Gwaii,...