Harry Woolridge
Harry Woolridge was a first-class passenger on the Valencia headed to Vancouver. There was considerable confusion over this passenger in the weeks following the Valencia disaster. The San Francisco Call on January 25th wrote:
“There will be sincere mourning in the mining caps of Alaska when the news reaches them of the fate of Harry Woolridge, famed from Dawson to the Bering Sea for his remarkable coups on the faro table. His regular vocation was that of gambling, and his daring and spectacular gaming with heaps of gold dust had won him high renown in the camps of the frozen north. The prestige he thus gained with the rugged miners, whose own lot is that of odds and chances, was added to by a warm personality, a generosity unstinted and an unquestioned reputation for being “on the square”. He was well along in the forties, his hair was tinged with gray and his appearance was that of a gentleman. Although most of his life had been spent among the rough places of the frontier and in the company of rough men, Woolridge remained always the genial, unobtrusive man of clean habits. Woolridge went to Dawson with the great rush of 1898, and it was in notable faro games during the first years of the remarkable camp that he achieved fame for big winnings and losings. His career was most spectacular, notwithstanding that his personality was modest. Woolridge has been spending the winter in San Francisco, and was on his way to Seattle for a stay of a month before starting for Fairbanks over the ice in March.”
Two days later, on January 27th, another newspaper, The Evening Statesman reported that Harry Woolridge was alive and was not on the Valencia:
"He had been in San Francisco and had bought a ticket for Seattle, intending to take the Valencia on what proved to be her last and fatal trip. The night before she sailed, however, Woolridge determined to have one more wrestle with the Frisco "tiger", and as a result of a long drawn out battle Woolridge found himself "broke". Not wishing to reach Seattle in this depleted financial condition, Woolridge disposed of his passenger ticket to a broker. The latter must have disposed of it to someone of unknown name, for it appears certain that a passenger on board the ill-fated vessel was travelling as H. Woolridge."
On February 9th, two weeks after the Valencia disaster The San Francisco Call ran a story:
“FIND WOOLRIDGE’S BODY. Remains of Thirty-Ninth Victim of Valencia Wreck Recovered. The body of a well dressed man has been picked up by an Indian on Long Beach, near Schooner Cove. Papers found in the pockets identify the corpse as that of Harry Woolridge, one of the victims of the Valencia. A Bible was found in his pocket, with the name inside.”
Harry Woolridge was discovered to be a young New Zealander who had been working in San Francisco for several months. Planning to return to New Zealand, Woolridge was first coming to Victoria to visit his uncle