User talk:205.125.60.58

You have information in the article on Crystal Snow Jenne which is incorrect. I corrected the bit I noticed; you have now removed that correction, apparently for insufficient citation.

I am the grandson of Crystal Snow Jenne. I grew up in her home listening to stories of her life. I donated the majority of her papers to the Alaska State Library and have done years of independent research for a book about her. Nearly every bio in books and online has basic mistakes or misleading information, which the family keep trying to correct, but which keep being cited as incorrect information inserted into the public record. Even Sarah Palin's book has a few misleading statements in praising my grandmother, and Palin's researcher did far better in this regard than most.

The correction I made was where the family went broke after their great Klondike adventure -- Sonora and Jackson, California, not Seattle.

Here is the misleading entry I tried to correct with a shade more information.

"As her father joined the Klondike Gold Rush, they moved to Circle City where her father built an opera house.[2] After he found gold, they moved to Seattle, but they lost their money and returned to Alaska.[2]"

They crossed the Chilkoot Pass in 1894, PRIOR to the Klondike Gold Rush, and settled briefly in Fortymile, on the Yukon near the Alaska/Canada border, where a mini-rush was winding down. The next year they moved to Circle City in Alaska, where a minor new rush was slowly winding up. After two years there, working at a second log "opera house" they built (their first was at Fortymile), the Klondike strike came upriver and the family reluctantly moved there as Circle City died out in response. Crystal's father thought it was a dry hole, having prospected the Klondike himself earlier. They got a "lay" on another man's claim, #7 below the Bonanza Creek Discovery Claim. I have a footlocker full of documentation for all of this.

In late 1899, the family left the Klondike river for Seattle, in September or October, someone in the family being ill and needing a specialist, the kids wholly without schooling in their teens, and Crystal's mother worn out with the adventure (see Snow Family papers collection, MS 38, Alaska State Library). They carried @75k in gold in six sheepskin sacks (contemporary Seattle P.I. newspaper story,). After a minor mutiny aboard by disgruntled Klondike characters, and then surviving a horrendous storm, they arrived in Seattle on the old and decrepit "Progresso," last boat out that year from St. Michael, at the mouth of the Yukon River, Seward Peninsula, Bering Sea (Seattle P.I. article). From Seattle (where they made a splash with the P.I. interview) they went on to San Francisco, attempted to find acting work in professional theater there (apparently without success -- advertisements in San Francisco Music and Drama trade magazine). They formed a company of players with their Klondike gold (Snow's Company), and returned in triumph in late 1899 to Sonora, California, Tuolumne County, where Crystal and older brother, Montgomery, were born and where the extended Cornish-born family of Crystal's mother lived. Despite many grand plans, the Snow family decided to "perfect the repertoire" in Sierra foothills towns, settling in Jackson, California, seat of Amador County, just north of Sonora (Crystal says in a 1950's radio interview in Juneau -- see MS 38 papers). Crystal had almost no formal education from age 10 to age 15, having lived on the Yukon River in gold rush towns during those years (she had learned sewing, simple math and rudimentary English, and Chinook, a West Coast Indian trading language -- which she spoke "pretty good" -- at a mission school for Han Indian children on a Yukon River island at Fortymile). Her mother, Anna Edes Rablen Snow, thus insisted on a stay somewhere that had a school, and Monty and Crystal were enrolled in school in Jackson. I have paperwork documentation on this in our private family papers.

The family opened a "studio" to train local actors (in the building where vintner Ernesto Gallo was later born -- contemporary newspaper accounts and Amador County's current archivist in a conversation with me), but went broke about two years after they came out of the Yukon (they had nothing to eat but a squash at one point for three days -- Crystal Snow Jenne in a story told often to me). They returned to Juneau broke on borrowed money in early 1901, IIRC (I have the exact dates in contemporary Jackson newspaper articles detailing the return trip by a correspondent who accompanied the Snow family to Juneau in hope of going back to the Yukon with them to "get more gold" (and Crystal in her radio interview). I have a footlocker full of Jackson and Sonora newspaper accounts of this period which I collected at local archives in Sonora and Jackson some years ago.  I also have copies of all of the documents I thought critical copied from the donated Snow Family papers, MS 38, Alaska State Library, which I have studied in detail for years.  This collection (or more likely its finding aid)is the primary source for most of the authors you cite in your piece.  They don't do their homework thoroughly or they are misled by earlier work.  The family is working on a reliable "corrected" version.

After returning to Juneau in 1901 (or early 1902 -- I have exact dates at home), the family went back into the local acting business (having friends in Juneau who would reliably employ them at it), the kids finally got their schooling completed, and when Crystal's mother had a nervous collapse in 1909, Crystal's parents retired to Seattle permanently (on doctor's orders)living on a civil war pension in a small house Crystal bought for them.

I can demonstrate all of this with my own extensive collection of copied documents from MS 38 and my own research -- but you can start by consulting the Alaska State Library Snow Family papers finding aid instead of trusting the assumptions and conclusions of confused (if well-meaning) authors (and, just to keep things straight, the Snow family did NOT cross the Chilkoot Pass in 1894 with an acting company and two San Francisco "dancers" who later became prostitutes, as one famous book alleges: that group crossed separately the next year). Try this for a basic start.

library.alaska.gov/hist/hist_docs/finding_aids/MS038.doc‎

As it stands, this article is too loose and misleading as hell, like most bio's on Crystal Snow Jenne -- some are flatly inaccurate.

205.125.60.58 (talk)DCK