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For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu |
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On the morning of our cruise
from Tracy Arm to Juneau, I lectured on the history of the
Klondike Gold Rush. My goal was to prepare people for their
encounter with Skagway and their ride on the Yukon and White
Pass Railroad, along the route that so many would-be miners
followed in 1897-98. I've always regarded this as one of the
most dramatic instances of a remarkable phenomenon -- the
gold rush -- that happened repeatedly in the history of the
American West during the second half of the nineteenth
century. Think about it: word reaches the outside world that
someone has discovered gold in some remote corner of the
continent, and suddenly thousands of people decide to drop
everything they're doing, make a perilous journey to a place
they've never even heard of before, to do something for
which they don't have the least preparation or
understanding, all in the hope of striking it rich and
making a fortune. On its face, the story of the
Klondike Gold Rush has much in common with the California
rush of 1849, the Pike's Peak and Virginia City rushes of
the late 1850's, the fictitious rush on the Fraser River of
1858, the Idaho and Montana rushes of the 1860's, and the
Black Hills and Tombstone rushes of the 1870's. In 1896, a
Nova Scotian named Robert Henderson found gold on a
tributary of the Yukon River and told an American named
George Washington Carmack about his discovery. Carmack went
to the spot with a pair of friends and on August 16, 1896
found a thumb-sized piece of gold sticking out from a slab
of rock. They began panning and quickly realized that they
were working an extraordinarily rich site. Carmack soon
filed a claim and later declared, "I felt as if I had just
dealt myself a royal flush in the game of life, and the
whole world was a jackpot." Virtually every miner in the
area rushed to the site and worked through the winter. Then,
in the summer of 1897, two steamboats arrived in San
Francisco and Seattle, disembarking prospectors carrying
extraordinarily heavy luggage filled with nuggets of gold in
fruit jars and jelly tumblers. The news flashed across the
country, and tens of thousands of people, most of them young
men between the ages of 15 and 40, instantly began making
preparations to head north to the Yukon. The rush was
on. In one sense, this was a
perfectly normal event: as I've already said, it happened
repeatedly over the course of the nineteenth century. But in
the context of the Harriman Expedition Retraced, the
juxtaposition of this gold rush history with the profoundly
moving time we spent with our Tlingit hosts at Cape Fox and
Ketchikan makes the Klondike seem much odder. Tlingits and
other Alaskan Natives have been living here in southeastern
Alaska from time immemorial, and never once in their history
prior to the nineteenth century had anything remotely
resembling a gold rush taken place here. What they have
always valued in this land is the bounty it yields to
sustain them, the deep spiritual relationships they share
with all the other creatures who live here too, and the rich
cultural traditions and histories that make this place their
home. The Klondikers who came to
southeastern Alaska in 1897-98 in search of gold brought
very different traditions and cultural assumptions. For
them, this rare yellow metal called gold was all that really
mattered in the landscape through which they traveled.
Because gold had long been a token of wealth, because it
could be fashioned so easily into precious jewelry, and --
not least -- because it was the foundation of the entire
money supply of a capitalist market economy, its abstract
"value" was immense. This was, of course, a cultural choice,
and not all cultures have made the same judgment that
everything they care about can be expressed in golden
equivalents. But because gold played just this role for so
many Americans in 1898, Tlingits and other Alaskan and
Canadian Natives suddenly found their lands invaded. Indeed,
golden wealth in some form or another must surely have been
at least a little on Edward Harriman's mind, whatever
scientific and artistic purposes may also have inspired him,
as he organized his expedition to the Alaskan coast just
after the Klondikers made this same journey. Sixty thousand people departed
from Seattle alone to sail north to the frontier towns of
Dyea and Skagway on Lynn Canal, at the northern end of the
Inside Passage. Although Americans often overlook this fact,
the gold fields were actually in Canada, and the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police refused to let any Americans make
the journey down the Yukon unless they brought with them a
ton of supplies to provide food for an entire year.
Transporting such a heavy load of provisions up to the
famous Chilkoot and White Passes above Skagway was nothing
short of a nightmare. Thousands of horses died along the
trail, and prospectors without horses were forced to make
dozens of journeys carrying their heavy loads piecemeal to
the international border. Once across, they proceeded to
Lake Bennett, where they assembled crude flat-bottomed boats
and waited for the spring thaw so they could float
themselves and their supplies to Dawson City, the center of
the Klondike district. When they arrived, most discovered
that the really valuable claims were already gone. Most
never found gold at all. Although the Klondike was one of
the richest gold strikes in the history of the world, it was
also one of the most short-lived. By the time Harriman
Expedition plied these waters, the peak of the frenzy was
already passing. In my lecture, I tried to make
this strange moment in Alaskan history come alive with the
amazing photographs that were taken to show the hardships of
the trail, the labor of the miners, and the life of Skagway
and Dawson. No gold rush of the nineteenth century has more
powerful visual images associated with it, because skilled
photographers and the popular press covered virtually every
aspect of the journey north. As I projected these images, I
also read from the poetry of Robert Service, who will
forever remain the bard of the Klondike. His "Law of the
Yukon" remains to this day an astonishing description of the
dreams and dilemmas we continue to face as we contemplate
the future of this beautiful northern landscape: Wild and wide are my
borders, stern as death is my sway, Lofty I stand from each
sister land, patient and wearily wise,
For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu
Expedition
Log
I am the land that
listens, I am the land that broods;
Steeped in eternal beauty, crystalline waters and
woods.
Long have I waited lonely, shunned as a thing
accurst,
Monstrous, moody, pathetic, the last of the lands and the
first;
Visioning camp-fires at twilight, sad with a longing
forlorn,
Feeling my womb o'er pregnant with the seed of cities
unborn.
And I wait for the men who will win me--and I will not be
won in a day;
And I will not be won by weaklings, subtle, suave and
mild,
But by men with the hearts of vikings, and the simple
faith of a child;
Desperate, strong and resistless, unthrottled by fear or
defeat,
Them will I gild with my treasure, them will I glut with
my meat.
With the weight of a world of sadness in my quiet,
passionless eyes;
Dreaming alone of a people, dreaming alone of a day,
When men shall not rape my riches,-and curse me and go
away;
Making a bawd of my bounty, fouling the hand that
gave---
Till I rise in my wrath and I sweep on their path and I
stamp them into a grave.
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