The port of Valdez was named in 1790 by the Spanish explorer Salvador
Fidalgo after the Spanish naval officer Antonio Valdés y Fernández Bazán. A
scam to lure prospectors off the Klondike Gold Rush trail led to a town being
developed there in 1898. Some steamship companies promoted the Valdez Glacier
Trail as a better route for miners to reach the Klondike gold fields and
discover new ones in the Copper River country of interior Alaska than that from
Skagway. The prospectors who believed the promotion found that they had been
deceived. The glacier trail was twice as long and steep as reported, and many
men died
