By 1918, the world had all but forgotten the Klondike and smaller rushes had lured away Dawson City’s population, leaving small pockets of miners, merchants, tourists, and civil servants along the Yukon River. On October 23rd 1918, the Canadian Pacific Railway steamer SS Princess Sophia arrived in Skagway, Alaska, completing her regular three-day route between Vancouver-Skagway to bring a load of these Northerners ‘outside’ for winter. Her passenger list included Dawson City politicians and merchants, miners, employees of the Yukon Gold company, and their families.
SS Princess Sophia at sail, 1907, RBSC-ARC-1679-CC-PH-45-1-CC-PH-09341
As the Princess Sophia departed several hours late, perhaps Captain Leonard P. Locke and First Officer Jerry Shaw were looking to make up for lost time. Either way, despite heavy snow and reduced visibility, the Sophia showed no signs of slowing when she entered the Lynn Canal, and at 2:10 am October 24th she ran aground on the rocky Vanderbilt Reef, more than a mile off course. Rescue ships were immediately dispatched to the canal, but as the Sophia wasn’t taking on water and high waves kept rescue ships from approaching, passengers remained onboard for a tense 40 hours, hoping for relief. As a blizzard raged and rescue vessels retreated to shelter on the night of October 25th, the ship began taking on water and radioed desperately for help, but to no avail – other ships captains could hardly see the Sophia, let alone navigate to her. When the US steamer Cedar approached the reef the next morning, all it saw of the Princess Sophia was 40 feet of foremast above the surface of the water. All 343 passengers had perished – 275 men, women, and children, and 68 CPR employees, including 11 Chinese workers, making it the worst maritime disaster in the history of the West Coast.
Although residents of Seattle, Vancouver, and Victoria reacted to the Sophia’s sinking with shock and horror, the news was quickly overshadowed by the spread of the Spanish flu and by the end of the First World War. In fact, as Vancouver celebrated Armistice Day on November 11, the SS Princess Alice steamed into Vancouver harbour, returning the bodies of Sophia’s passengers to their families for identification and burial. In the North, however, the tragedy created a gaping wound. In the “Northland’s Greatest Disaster,” an already-fading Dawson City lost almost a tenth of its population with every Klondiker knowing at least one person on the Sophia. Many were leading figures in the North’s community, business, industry, and government, including William J. O’Brien, a Territorial and city councilor who was travelling with his wife Sarah and their five children, William Scouse, a wealthy miner credited with taking the first bucket of gold out of Eldorado Creek, and John Zaccarelli, a local merchant.
Souvenir Letter. Greetings from Dawson City, Y.T., 1909, RBSC-ARC-1820-01-21
Although the 1918 Princess Sophia tragedy was washed away by news of the Spanish Flu and the long-awaited end of the Great War, its passengers continue to be mourned and commemorated, most recently by a traveling SS Princess Sophia exhibit in 2018 that visited the Maritime Museum of British Columbia and other museums across Alaska and the Yukon.
For more information on the Yukon’s post-Klondike Gold Rush history and the CPR’s Princess steamers, please visit the Chung Lind Gallery.
Further reading:
“Submerged in Memory: The Sinking in Cultural Context.” Remembering the Princess Sophia: Titanic of the Pacific West Coast, WordPress, University of Victoria HIST 359. Accessed November 27, 2024. https://onlineacademiccommunity.uvic.ca/ssprincesssophia/victoria-reacts/submerged-in-memory/.
Coates, Ken and Bill Morrison. The Sinking of the Princess Sophia: Taking the North Down with Her. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1990.
Belyk, Robert C. Great Shipwrecks of the Pacific Coast. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001.
BC Historical Newspapers – For more insight into newspaper reactions, check out the BC Historical Newspapers project, which contains digitized archives from The Province (1894-1910), The Times Colonist (1884-2010), and The Vancouver Sun (1912-2010), as well as this archive of The British Colonist (1858-1980).