The Slutty Eye: Duped Diggers  "Hopes shattered!" promises the
street sign for the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park,
and there is indeed schadenfreude involved in visiting a place
that documents the fortune Seattle made by suckering out-of-
towners. Murray Morgan in Skid Road describes the way
Seattleites outfitted Gold-Rushers with exploding stoves and
50-pound "water purifiers." In the museum you can examine
similarly useful items in the cupboard of a meticulously
recreated prospector's hovel. I can only imagine how some poor
bastard felt as he slowly froze to death while contemplating the
chocolate-flavored laxatives sold to him by some Jackson Street
merchant. As if the sad-sack fortune-hunters in the oversized
wall photos don't look miserable enough, diagrams explain
exactly how close-to-impossible gold mining actually was. (The
four layers miners had to penetrate: snow, moss, frozen muck,
and frozen gravel.) To me, the continued existence of this free,
brightly lit historical museum feels like