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For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu |
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For my second shipboard lecture,
I was eager to share with our company an essay of mine that
in fact originated from my very first trip to Alaska in the
mid-1980s. I first visited this land as a faculty member
accompanying a group of Yale alumni on a cruise through
Southeast that culminated with a flight to Anchorage and a
visit to Denali. My wife Nan and I wanted to do some hiking
once the Yale trip was over, so we arranged with a guide to
spend several days hiking in Wrangell - St. Elias National
Park, the largest such park in the United States -- roughly
the size of Massachusetts! We began our hike with a visit to
a ghost town called Kennecott beside an immense glacier
bearing that same name. The trip to our trailhead involved
driving more than sixty miles over an abandoned railroad bed
to reach this former mining town in the heart of one of one
of the deepest wilderness areas on the North American
continent. I came away haunted by the place, and wound up
writing an essay entitled "Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out
of Town," which appeared in a book I co-edited entitled
Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past
(W. W. Norton, 1992). Because the essay is one of the best
I've ever written not just about Alaska but about my chosen
field of environmental history, I wanted to share it with my
shipmates as an example of the work I do and of what history
can teach us about environmental change in this and other
landscapes. Although Kennecott is nearly 200
miles inland from the coast along which we've been cruising,
and so might not seem only distantly related to the Harriman
Expedition Retraced, in fact, it could hardly be more
relevant. In 1900, a pair of prospectors discovered at this
site one of the richest deposits of copper ore that the
world has ever known. The result of their find was the
construction of the great processing mill at Kennecott where
the copper was prepared for shipment. To carry the ore south
to the coast, the New York capitalists who financed the
mines also constructed a railroad, and for the next thirty
years, Cordova -- one of the towns we visited during the
first half of our trip -- became the port connecting the
largest copper mine in the world with the markets in the
lower 48 where its product was shipped, sold, and
used. In my essay about this
remarkable place, I offer a series of questions that can
help unlock the environmental and historical secrets that
give Kennecott -- and every other human place as well -- its
many meanings. What are the characteristics of this
ecosystem that enable plants and animals (including people)
to live here? How fertile are its soils? How cold and wet is
its weather? How long is its growing season? The list is
almost endless. Among the most important such questions we
can ask about how people live in any place is what parts of
its ecosystem they consume for food. As one of my colleagues
has remarked, environmental history begins in the belly. The
miners who lived at Kennecott sustained themselves with
meats and grains and other foods that reached the mine via
the same railroad that carried copper to the coast... a very
different relationship to the surrounding ecosystems from
that the Native people, the Ahtna, for whom this land was
home. I think you can learn an immense amount about people
by exploring the boundary they draw between "useful" and
"useless" things. What parts of nature do they use to
sustain their physical and spiritual beings, and what parts
of nature do they ignore? Just so do they create a unique
human place in nature, a unique way of being in the world.
The task of environmental history is to explore the choices
human beings make about the places they inhabit, so as
better to understand the effects we have on the world around
us. What is so remarkable about
Kennecott is the way two substantial towns (Kennecott and
McCarthy) sprang up here almost over night with the opening
of the copper mines. For thirty years, these communities
existed as colonial outposts of an urban-industrial world
deep in the heart of the Alaskan wilderness. They created
markets for wild game meat that resulted in the hunting out
of the surrounding countryside, but for the most part the
towns survived by exchanging the only local commodity that
mattered to them -- copper -- for everything else they
needed to survive here. Then, in the late 1930s, after the
world market for copper collapsed and the local veins of ore
began to give out, the Kennecott Copper Company simply
pulled up stakes and moved on to new sites in Utah and
Chile, leaving behind the pair of ghost towns and the
abandoned railroad bed that now brings tourists from all
over the world into the heart of this magnificent wilderness
... a wilderness that was once the world's largest
industrial site for the production of copper for a culture
suddenly dependent on a newly discovered form of energy,
electricity, capable of being transmitted over a copper
wire. The manifold ironies in that fact are among the things
that most haunt me as I wander the landscape around
Kennecott, and they were much on my mind as we docked at
Cordova, where Kennecott copper was transferred onto ships
to continue its journey to the south. This lecture felt especially
appropriate to me on August 10 when I delivered it on board
the Clipper Odyssey because just the day before we
spent an afternoon wandering around the ghost town of Unga
in the Aleutian Islands. Because Unga was still fresh in all
of our minds, I spent my final fifteen minutes showing
pictures I had taken there and contrasting them with
historic photos of that community. My "introduction to
environmental history" thus also became an exercise in "how
to read a ghost town," and we all contributed observations
of things we had observed in Unga that might be clues to
reconstructing the lives and activities of its former
inhabitants.
For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu
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