In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire Along the Inside Passage

In Darkest Alaska

Travel and Empire Along the

Inside Passage

ROBERT CAMPBELL

PENN

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia

Nature and Culture in America

Marguerite S. Shaffer, Series Editor

Volumes in the series explore the intersections between the construction of cultural meaning and perception and the history of human interaction with the natural world. The series is meant to highlight the complex relationship between nature and culture and provide a distinct position for interdisciplinary scholarship that brings together environmental and cultural history.

Copyright © 2007 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104–4112

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Campbell, Robert B.

   In darkest Alaska : travels and empire along the Inside Passage / Robert B. Campbell.

p. cm. (Nature and culture in America)

   Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.

   ISBN-13: 978-0-8122-4021-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

   ISBN-10: 0-8122-4021-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)

   1. Tourism—Alaska—19th century. 2. Tourism—Inside Passage—19th century. 3. Alaska—Description and travel. 4. Inside Passage—Description and travel. 5. Alaska—History—1867–1959. 6. Alaska—in literature. I. Title.

     F908 .C36 2007

     917.9802 22

2007023274

Frontispiece: Muir Glacier from Elevation of 1800 Feet. Photograph by Frank La Roche (Photographs of Alaska, Seattle, c. 1892). Courtesy Yale Collection of Western Americana, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.

For my father

Contents

Prologue: Voyage to Brobdingnag

Introduction

1. Continental Drift

2. Alaska with Appleton's, Canada by Baedeker's

3. Scenic Bonanza

4. Frontier Commerce

5. Totem and Taboo

6. Juneau's Industrial Sublime

7. Orogenous Zones: Glaciers and the Geologies of Empire

Conclusion: Inside Passage

Epilogue: Out of Alaska

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Prologue

Voyage to Brobdingnag

To the North, the crystal of non-knowledge,

A landscape to be invented.

—Octavio Paz

Alaska was an idea in the minds of Europeans long before they had touched its shores. It was a fantasy before it had a name. (Ages of indigenous names were as yet unknown.) Previous to its becoming an American territory, the north was a space to dream over. And at this beginning there was a map.

In 1648 the Russian Cossack Semyon Dezhnev sailed east from the mouth of the Kolyma River in the Asian Arctic through a strait later named after the Danish navigator Vitus Bering, returning with vague rumors of land to the east. Thousands of years earlier other explorers had traipsed across an exposed land bridge—Beringea—leading to the settlement of the new world. The more recent Russian visitors were not aware of these ancient journeys. But Chukchi natives knew well these waters, the land mass, and the people across the strait. Native reports of a continent to the east fueled dreams of the wealth in furs that might be had there. Other ventures followed. The Russians planned to investigate the islands in the sea and the Great Land, as their native informants had called it, or bolshaya zemlya—big land, as another Russian navigator suggested. On the map it remained simply Incognita.¹

Not until 1741 did the combined naval squadron of Bering, sailing for Russia, and Aleksei Chirikov make separate landfalls and confirm the rumors. Bering's voyage ended with his death on a remote island beach off the coast of Kamchatka, but the survivors eventually surfaced with nearly a thousand valuable sea otter pelts. Chirikov returned safely, except for the loss, possibly at the hands of local Tlingit, of several crew members who disappeared after landing near present-day Sitka. This first contact between the southeast Alaskan Tlingit and the Russians suggested an inauspicious beginning to what followed.

Figure 1. Jonathan Swift's fanciful depiction of Alaska and the northwest coast from Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World (1726), now better known as Gulliver's Travels. (Courtesy The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley)

In the 1720s speculation about the northern extent of the continent had made its way onto European maps and by a more circuitous route into the imagination of a contemporary writer. Early mythmakers were writing about Alaska—and locating it on maps—before they were quite sure it existed.² Perhaps the storied strangeness of the fog-begirt lands, the pack ice, and the Arctic mirages helped spur such conjectural mapmaking.

So one should credit the satirist Jonathan Swift with the first travel account regarding this remote—to Europeans at least—northern region. Gulliver urged in his 1726 travelogue that, They ought to correct their maps and charts, by joining this vast tract of land to the northwest parts of America, wherein I shall be ready to lend them my assistance.³ To add authenticity to Gulliver's supposed discoveries, Swift enlisted the help of his London coffeehouse colleague, the cartographer Herman Moll, then known for his New and Correct Map of the Whole World (1719). Daniel Defoe had relied on Moll's map work to provide a gloss of cartographic verity for Robinson Crusoe. Together Moll and Swift conjured an image of this northern terra incognita, complete with the Straights of Annian—the fabled Northwest Passage—and a date of discovery, A.D. 1703. The pursuit of a passage became something of an obsession, as explorers from every European empire sought out the possibility of an easier sea route to the Orient. The mythic and abstract quality of this quest hid its plainly material aspect, the presumed riches that would accrue to its discoverer. It had become a commonplace to adorn those uncharted spaces on a map with imaginary geographies and fanciful creatures. As Swift observed of another region, So geographers in Afric maps / With savage pictures fill their gaps / and o'er uninhabitable downs / Place elephants instead of towns.⁴ Gulliver's ship, blown off course by a North Pacific gale, makes landfall, where he confirms his own suspicion that our geographers of Europe are in great error, by supposing that nothing but sea [lies] between Japan and California. For it was ever my opinion that there must be a balance of earth to counterpoise the great continent of Tartary [Asia]. Gulliver's story offers an appropriate, if slightly odd, beginning for the history of Alaskan travel that follows.

In Gulliver's Travels, the Anglo-Irishman Swift conjured the future-Alaska as a land of giants. He called these oversized humans Brobdingnags. Beyond the fringe of the known world, the Brobdingnags inhabited a gigantic landscape—mountains thirty miles high, monstrous plants and animals, a territory thousands of miles in breadth. The immensity of this region originated for Swift from impressions that had little connection with geographical information. The as-yet unmapped region allowed for such fantasies. In fact, the writer used the travel-writing genre to satirize the social, political, and scientific pretensions of eighteenth-century Britain. The political meanings of Swift's work have largely been lost, and what remains is a fairy tale, a daydream in miniatures and monstrosities.⁵ But it is both the political context of Swift's satire and the imaginative fantasy of Gulliver's discoveries that suggest a beginning for this book.

At the end of Swift's fictional travel narrative, Gulliver comments darkly on the method of planting Colonies. A crew of pirates are driven by a storm, they know not whither, he relates.

At length a boy discovers land from the topmast; they go on shore to rob and plunder; they see a harmless people, are entertained with kindness; they give the country a new name; they take formal possession of it for their king; they set up a rotten plank or a stone for a memorial; they murder two or three dozen of the natives, bring away a couple more by force for a sample, return home, and get their pardon. Here commences a new dominion, acquired with a title by divine right. Ships are sent with the first opposition; the natives driven out or destroyed; their princes tortured to discover their gold; a free license given to all acts of humanity and lust; the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants; and this execrable crew of butchers employed in so pious an expedition is a modern colony sent to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people.⁶

Nearly two centuries before the apex of late nineteenth-century imperialism, Swift had laid bare the heart of the colonial drama. The satirist never minced his words when confronting the moral dilemmas of his age. English colonization long predated its New World voyages whether fictive or real. And Swift used Gulliver's fiction to offer his own withering critique of colonialism in Ireland. The memory of Oliver Cromwell's Celtic horrors commingled with the brutal record of England's New World settlement in Swift's mind. His prescient condemnation of the effects of empire, and in particular his precocious sympathy for those destroyed in order to build a colony, prologue the unfolding history of imperial adventures. Born of the Irish experience, the earth reeking with the blood of its inhabitants, Swift authored the ironic fallacy that the modern idea to convert and civilize an idolatrous and barbarous people betrayed the colonizers' own barbarities. Out of eighteenth-century London, a world city and the pivot of international trade, Swift staged the dilemmas of empire and its dis-locations. With Gulliver's Travels, Swift invoked travel and the then-popular genre of the travelogue as a means to explore—and parody—the spatial reorganizations and uneven developments attendant to the spread of the boundless market. Swift located the gigantic in the grotesque abstraction of a far-flung exchange economy.⁷

Travelers to Alaska at the end of the nineteenth century had similar difficulty in avoiding the hyperbolic when describing the scenes before them. How strange that Swift's literary depiction of bigness landed in this far northern region? An accident, surely, that searching for a name for the new territory, nineteenth-century Americans decided on Alaska, an approximation of an Aleut word meaning The Great Land. Though no secret association linked Gulliver's Brobdingnag to its later formulation, Alaska, once Europeans and then Americans visited the north, the sense of limitless space suggested by Swift was hardly diminished. Immensity seemed a quality of the actual geography. Like Swift's fiction, their reality was imaginative work, full of fanciful distortion.⁸ I see miles and miles of mountain and table-land, a traveler wrote of the Alaska vistas in the late nineteenth century, covered with snow the depth of which can not be appreciated with the naked eye; there they stand like the palace abodes of some giant race.⁹ Indeed, the region reinforced the visitor's sense of scale, as the abode of some giant race, a Brobdingnag land. In the 1870s another latter-day Gulliver noted a coastal glacier that resembles a gigantic road torn up by the wheels of some Titan race.¹⁰ And another writer, traveling up the coast in the 1880s, registered what appeared as the gargantuan proportions of Alaska. I seem to have been adrift in a new creation, such as is sometimes outlined in our dreamland. I am lost in the height of the mountains, the depth of the sea, and the immensity of space. Every thing is on so enlarged a scale that there is no familiar standard of comparative measurement…. But this archipelago of mountains and landlocked seas, objects individually so magnificent in themselves as to startle the senses are multiplied and reduplicated until they paralyze one's comprehension!¹¹ As Swift had recognized, travel narratives served a vital function in the formation of imperial attitudes, but Gulliver's tale had taken on a life of its own, apart from Swift's meaning.

If, in the minds of late nineteenth-century Americans, the western frontier had closed, then an alternative was found in the North, their last frontier.¹² Following the American purchase of Alaska in 1867, the region appeared to many observers as distant and as unfathomable as Gulliver's tales. And the uncomprehending branded the acquisition with epithets—Seward's Folly, after the Secretary of State William Seward, who had negotiated the purchase from Russia for $7 million, but also Icebergia, Polaria, Seward's Icebox, and Walrussia. Boosters soon turned these misrepresentations on their head, promoting instead attractive lures to capital investments in furs, fish, gold, and lumber, but also scenic resources marketed to tourists. Following the first organized steamer excursions in early 1880s, the several-week ventures from west coast ports up the Inside Passage coastal waterway, as far north as Sitka and Glacier Bay, attracted thousands of well-to-do tourists. More than five thousand tourists steamed north along the passage in 1890 alone.¹³ Inveterate scribblers, these excursionists wrote and published hundreds of accounts of their travels. Alaska's bigness was reborn.

I use this accident, the connection of scale between Gulliver's Brobdingnag to the Great Land, to make a point. The visiting strangers never merely gazed upon a world transparently evident. If the environment produced statements, then it only did so through a myriad of cultural filters. Their observations projected a host of political, economic, and social meanings embedded in nineteenth-century bourgeois culture, itself a product of empire.¹⁴ The travelers' descriptions of Alaska were fashioned within a wider cultural context through which specific ideologies echoed.

This culture invented a past for itself, tracing a racial legacy back to the forest-dwelling Teutons and the westward-advancing Anglo-Saxons. The north was not won by weaklings…but by men with the heart of Vikings, pronounced the northern versifier Robert Service.¹⁵ Theodore Roosevelt insisted that the winners of the West had more than just heart. They had heredity on their side. The English-speaking people, according to Roosevelt, held a special destiny in their blood; they alone could win over the world's waste spaces.¹⁶ Bourgeois travelers, wielding words as acts, proved equal to these race warriors.

Other scales of meaning filled these northern spaces. The rocks and beaches, lagoons and precipices had names and stories: frog humans, land otter men, the halibut people, the trickster raven, the puffin's daughter, all animated a land and sea crowded with spirits where the human and the natural converged. Tlingit history, if we may claim it as such, filled the spaces that appeared so empty to the newcomers. These other histories were invisible to the white visitors. The Americans celebrated the bigness of the new acquisition's physical presence, but, unlike Swift, they diminished the natives into insignificance. These so-called children of nature—the indigenes—held no gargantuan qualities for the arriving strangers. Instead, they were doomed to evaporate like snow in the summer sun, as one visitor predicted.

It must be borne in mind, one guide book celebrated, how vast a country Alaska is,—as large…as the original thirteen states…from California it is as far to the western extremity of Alaska as it is to New York; so that the central city of the United States is not Omaha, or St. Paul, but San Francisco!¹⁷ Each retelling of Alaska's spatial enormity reconstituted again and again the power of the nation's imperial ambitions. Its geographical center had shifted westward. Their words served as claims to possession. Our New Alaska helped to fix the newly bought territory within the nation's Pacific ambitions. Alaska, as Secretary of State Seward had predicted, was to be the drawbridge to Asia. Soon the Philippines, Hawaii, and the markets of the Far East would be theirs.

In the shifting architecture of American cultural identity, Alaska has remained a constant, the attic of the American imagination, a place where heirlooms were stored, precious memories to some, to others nightmares, a place broader and bigger than its actual borders. If elsewhere in the Great West the epics chronicled rugged individual struggles in the progressive conquest of the natives and nature, then in Alaska this dreamscape remained alive and fresh for discovery.

Introduction

In Darkest Alaska charts the experiences of travelers and tourists along the southeastern Alaskan coast and interior from the 1867 purchase through the Klondike gold rush. Focusing on the largely ignored late nineteenth-century Alaskan travel literature, this work places several decades of tourist activity at the center of late nineteenth-century northern expansion. The narrative follows travelers along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea lane that weaves a snakelike path up the coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Protected from the fetch of the North Pacific, ships navigated through the islands and fjords, exposed to the open sea only in a few places. Native people along this temperate rain coast had long paddled tremendous cedar canoes along this passage. Under sail the passage proved more hazardous. Not until the advent of reliable steam-powered vessels in the mid-nineteenth century did Europeans, Americans, and Canadians travel regularly and reliably along the full length of the Inside Passage.

A flood of reportage—travelogues, guidebooks, articles, photographs albums, lantern-slide shows—entertained metropolitan audiences with images taken from this northern passage. In this vast literature one finds a remarkably comprehensive preview of the exploitative vision usually associated with the collective fantasies conjured by the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s. On their northern transits these touring women and men found a ledger-book of nature stocked with aesthetic treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and untold experiential thrills. Boosters may have advertised Alaska as the Last West, but this work discovers less a settlers' homestead dream than a colder Congo, part of an expanded American empire. These travelers transformed the far north into a model of modern imperial acquisition. With their dreams charted, narrated, illustrated, and published, the tourists blazed the path for later gold seekers. They made Alaska legible for those who followed.

Following these journeys northward, each chapter focuses on stopping points along the Inside Passage—Fort Wrangell, Juneau, Glacier Bay, Sitka. Each stopover highlights different forms of imperial appropriation—sex, curios, minerals, cosmologies, authentic indigenes, and the landscape itself. Here the Inside Passage refers as much to the interior mindscapes of the passengers as it does to the perceived grandeurs of the seascape. While this study highlights the specifically regional experiences of these fin-de-siecle aesthetic Argonauts, it seeks to represent the wider culture of late nineteenth-century bourgeois society.

My aim here is to analyze the forms of tourism practiced in Alaska, and to use this study of travel and tourism as a lens through which to explore the driving forces of capitalism and imperialism—in both an American and a global context. By examining the Alaskan experience, this work reveals the depth of the connections between the experience of tourism and the imperialist agenda; the extent to which the experience of tourism was informed by the racial, class, and gender ideas of the period; and how closely the business of travel fused late nineteenth-century notions of race and empire with capitalist expansion.

In the context of Alaskan history, this book asserts that travel and tourism served as a necessary prequel to the story of the Klondike gold rush, more often highlighted by historians of the region. Traditional periodizations of northern history that focus on the Klondike rush as opening the north miss the beginnings of Alaskan development. The thirty years of travel preceding the gold rush fixed Alaska's possibilities in the national imaginary. Elite travel and cultural production helped to make American Alaska into a place of colonial conquest and the natural resource extraction it entailed.

Promoters, boosters, and travelers represented Alaska within a wider world of imperial imaginings. They were a motley group, mostly unknown characters—a disenchanted London clerk, a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, a Tlingit trader, a neurasthenic minister—but others were well known, such as wilderness advocate John Muir, archetypical imperialist Rudyard Kipling, painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Edward Curtis and Eadweard Muybridge.

Spectators all, these Alaskan travelers and writers operated as the secret agents of conquest, acting without being seen to act, because they lived according to a discipline of seeing that made them unwitting functionaries of their class, race, and nation. Though these travelers exerted control upon this new world with less apparent intensity than the miners, trappers, fishers, timber cutters, and other laborers, these passersby put that world at greater risk precisely because, as the critic Elaine Scarry observes, their own immunity from risk made them inattentive to the forms of alteration they brought about.¹ Alaskan tourists worked invisibly.

Not only were their written words effective at incorporating Alaska into the nation, but the tourists' fleeting physical presence there exerted its own powerful force upon the indigenous north. Their words attracted an international audience that came to understand the north through sightseeing eyes. And their visits, filled as they were with the quest for authentic experiences and souvenirs, extended the ideal of the universal market into the domestic spaces of non-Western communities. For those who followed the tourists—the gold seekers, the miners, and settlers—trooped north certain of one thing, that Alaska was theirs for the taking. The tourists' passages transformed the north. Alaska was a scenic bonanza before it was a mining bonanza. And while the gold has run out, the scenery as yet remains.

Several questions guide this book. First, what was the American relationship to the wider world of nineteenth-century imperialism? And, how might a close examination of this far corner of North America help us to better see and understand such a relationship? Second, How do we come by the ways in which we see nature? That is, how did late nineteenth-century Alaskan travelers interpret the nature they viewed along their passages? And how have American ideas about nature, and more specifically wilderness, been shaped by this Alaskan history? Ideas about nature reflected the social and political worlds of these travelers. It almost goes without saying that the Last Frontier state continues to serve as a central fixture in the nation's wilderness imaginary. If empire and wilderness merge in this history, then how have these ideas taken shape together? That is, how did this empire of nature emerge as an historical idea that exerted great power over the native north? And how did the identification of this region as wilderness serve imperial ends? Answers to these questions require that we recognize the ideological character of our own culture's most deeply held myths. Northern nature, far from being merely natural, was, instead, constitutive of a new political order. The title refers to these questions.

Every frontier has two sides, historian William Macleod wrote unselfconsciously in the 1920s, "Too readily do we forget when we dwell of an evening over the mystery of Rene Maran's Batouala, or Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and other stories of the black mystery-continent of Africa, that North America was for long a Dark Continent. And for a longer time, the heart of this continent was dark. The far-flung agents of frontier enterprise in early Virginia felt this, as did the early explorers in the dense woodlands of the Ohio region, for a time the Potomac, and for a longer time the Ohio, were Congos."² Alaska too fit within this myth of the Dark (North American) Continent. And while the supposed American frontier had passed out of this darkness in the sweep of westering settlement, Alaska remained a frontier in the national imagination at the turn of the century. The Soul of Alaska, one observer stressed, was an integral portion of the ‘White Man's Burden’ assumed by the United States when it adopted these children of the Glacier and Fiord.³ Assuming the White Man's Burden, as the imperial versifier Rudyard Kipling trumpeted, dominion over the north required little modification to the ideologies of the frontier.

If a too easy comparison between the barbarous tropics and the frigid zone appears extravagant, then the degree to which contemporary writers drew frequent comparisons between these regions is not exaggerated. The rhetoric of the Dark Continent offered a language that might connect the era's supposed civilizing projects where ever they asserted themselves. Mary Hallock Foote betrayed this common metaphor when on joining her engineer husband's attempts to irrigate along the Boise River she exclaimed, Darkest Idaho! Thousands of acres of desert empty of history.⁴ The central position of Africa in the experience of colonialism and empire provided a common grammar. As a counterpart to Africa, Darkest Alaska fit easily in American imaginings of a wider imperial geography. In Darkest Alaska headlined a turn-of-the-century article describing the adventures of a survey team, as much isolated from civilization as was Explorer Stanley in the interior of ‘darkest Africa’…surrounded for thousands of miles of dreary stretches of uninhabited country.⁵ With the closure of the so-called western frontier in 1890, the nation found room for its expansionist imagination in Alaska. In the minds of travelers Alaska held a figurative power akin to other dark places.

America's traditional view, as historian William Appleman Williams argued, understood itself as anti-imperialist throughout its history, save for a brief and rapidly dispelled aberration at the turn of the century.⁶ The nation's history has been understood as antithetical to the historical experience of imperialism.⁷ Celebrated as a final frontier, the obscurantist ideologies of pioneering and rugged individualist struggles against wild nature, old staples of Alaskan history writing, have hidden this lebensraum of the American imagination. Indeed, as Williams insisted, one of the central themes of American historiography has been that there is no American Empire.⁸ The challenge to this perception is longstanding. But, Alaskan history has long escaped the critical attentions of historical revisionists. Even the so-called New Western history has generally ignored the role of the north in American empire.⁹ In many respects, the New Western history, having raised the question of imperialism, has largely turned away from theories of process toward more parochial considerations of place. Far from being a remote and ignored corner of American national development, Alaska's history serves as an indicator of a far flung culture of imperialism linking Americans to their European imperial counterparts.

Naval bombardment of indigenous villages, summary arrest of native resisters, and administrative reorganization of native communities exacted a powerful imperial control over the native north. But sovereignty over Alaska was seldom grounded on violence alone. Colonization was very much an intellectual and cultural enterprise alongside its more dramatic military, political, and economic conquests. In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, Karl Marx wrote, we have intercourse in every direction, universal interdependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrow-mindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature.¹⁰ Marx enunciated early on the critical role of language, image, and cultural phenomena to the production of political and economic orders.

Empire in the north was not simply the establishment of a formal American presence. Late nineteenth-century sightseers, transient visitors all, helped to extend the new political order as certainly as did any of the sailors, soldiers, missionaries, or prospectors. These travelers were all the more effective because they were not an official institution of the state apparatus. The type of power they exercised moved invisibly without the imprimatur of state activity, even as they effected critical functions of imperial expansion. Tourists, albeit unwittingly, carried on a distinctly political project. They commanded an imperial common property, a sort of power over territory and a capacity to mobilize its human and natural resources toward political, economic, and military ends. This well-connected elite acted as a true ruling class, a class which recognized the state as the tool of their shared ideals. The tourists' presences and their written passages exercised a variety of state power while appearing to have no political effect whatsoever.¹¹

Their written passages provide a wealth of historical evidence. The texts of this bourgeois cultural world reveal a host of American anxieties at the fin de siécle, that vague sense of decline and decay, but also the spirit of possibility and progress that we may glimpse perhaps most clearly at the edges of the continental empire—Alaska! The Last West, the great domain of the North, as a travel promotion announced.¹² Focusing on the enormous body of ignored travel literature, both public and private texts, this study takes seriously the reality of what was imagined, and the role such discursive forces had in northern expansion.¹³ The flood of travel writing helped to fix a particular vision of the north in the national imaginations of Americans. And these elite travelers were particularly well placed to represent the new northern acquisition to the nation. At the same time that this literature helped shape evolving images and ideas of the new North, the act of travel also proved a constitutive feature of modern American identity, a feature that extended beyond the narrow, leisured upper class. In this way, their travel activities fit within a long tradition of incorporating new land into the national body and national culture. Tourism, as John Sears observes, played a powerful force in America's invention of itself as a culture. It was inevitable when they set out to establish a national culture in the 1820s and 1830s, he argues, that they would turn to the landscape of America as the basis of that culture. At that early date America was still a country in search of an identity.¹⁴ By the end of the century, Americans had distanced themselves from Europe by establishing a common national geography whereby certain places came to characterize America itself as nature's nation distinct from Europe's claim as the historical backdrop of civilization.¹⁵

Pleasuring summer travelers in Alaska struggled with the meanings of their leisure. Not willing to simply relax, they configured their excursions as edifying ventures. Their play had to constitute some productive form. Nineteenth-century travelers merged the practices of the naturalist and nascent ethnographer with the activities of amateur tourists.¹⁶ Justifying their leisured presence, late nineteenth-century sightseers mimicked their predecessors, relying on the discourse of travel. In their own minds, they were scientific travelers, assembling observed facts—topographical, biological, ethnographical, geological, and political information. Their panoramic sightseeing, tied as it was to the scientific conventions of naturalists, collected information on landforms, flora and fauna, and institutions. No matter that such information had already been gathered. These bourgeois adventurers formed a second or third wave of incorporation, another arm of empire.

While these travelers consistently interpreted what they saw through the blinkers of a metropolitan worldview, this view was given force in their travel experiences. And this view was certainly conditioned by the expansionist geographies elsewhere in the late nineteenth century. As the following chapters will show, Alaska formed one part of a wider web of imperial fashioning that touched many aspects of a developing American culture. Raymond Williams's concept of structures of feeling or an alternative he proposed, structures of experience is useful here.¹⁷ Williams described "a social experience which is still in process, often indeed not yet recognized as social but taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating, but which in analysis…has its emergent, connecting, and dominant characteristics, indeed its specific hierarchies.¹⁸ Few of the travelers and writers considered herein would have recognized the formalized concepts or ideologies that this study attributes to them. Their written passages did, however, contain the power of a dominant worldview hidden as commonsense. Their views of the landscapes of their travels elided the actual social relations of the region. A working country, according to Raymond Williams, is hardly ever a landscape. The very idea of landscape implies separation and observation."¹⁹ The tourists' spectacular separation reproduced nature as a landscape to which they felt entitled. The more natural the scenery appeared, the more effectively it naturalized power.²⁰ Of course one would spend a considerable amount of money to travel north to see the sights. Of course American enterprise would supplant the weak Russian colonies. Of course northern natives would wither and die in their contest with the presumptively superior race. These assumptions of the traveler's everyday consciousness, that assumed possession of the north and presumed superiority over its indigenes, must be interrogated. Their ideas about nature reflected their social world and helped to assemble the new political order.

All the famous scenic points in Southern Alaska, which have made the Alaska tour famous, will be seen, a tourist brochure advertised, including Fort Wrangel, Juneau, the Douglas Island gold mines, Lynn Canal, Sitka, and the great Muir Glacier on Glacier Bay…everywhere the tourist will have unsurpassed opportunities for scanning the wonderful scenery of our northernmost possessions, and for studying the quaint and primitive native life. The entire route from Puget sound to the farthest northern point reached is lined with scenes of awe inspiring character.²¹ For the several decades that are the focus of this study, this itinerary never changed. Each passage stopped at the advertised locations with the tourists well prepared to take in what they had already been told to expect.

It is fashionable, as has been often noted, to see the imperial experience of travel as artificial and simulated, leaving authors serving the very simulations they expose. In seeking to describe the power of imperial discourse one may end up reproducing its subject positions. But, such hazards admitted, this is not a history of the native north. The Tlingit and other First Nations people are present throughout the succeeding narrative as workers, as residents, and as makers of their own history. But, this study does not seek to give voice to the indigenous people of the Inside Passage. What follows is an examination of a vanguard of bourgeois travelers who exerted a particular kind of power. It is not focused on how their past knowledge or experience was flawed, but, rather, how such knowledge and experience took shape—a kind of critical ethnohistory of bourgeois travel.

Dispensing with a traditional chronology, this book moves between a number of interrelated themes and subjects. American national identity imagined itself in a geographically conceived world. These travelers discovered on the Inside Passage an experience that pulled together all experience. Their journeys linked a loose assemblage of contemporary ideas and sensibilities. Questions concerning adventure, empire, health, aesthetics, sexuality, primitivism, industry, and geology, to name some of the central concerns of the succeeding chapters, were all weighed against how these travelers saw the natural world and their place within it. Following two introductory chapters that establish the historical context and the motivations to travel, the ensuing chapters focus on each of the successive steamer stops—the initial passage out from Puget Sound ports, Fort Wrangell, Juneau, Glacier Bay, and finally Sitka. Since the travelers themselves hardly deviated from the set stopping points along the Inside Passage, this study follows their progress northward at these ports of call. This history unfolds in space.

The first chapter, Continental Drift, links the far north with a wider field of imperial imaginings. Tracing the travels and writings of a young Englishman, the chapter ties Alaska to Africa, both through the particular experiences of this man and in a wider culture of surrogate adventurers transfixed with colonial exploits in the Congo and the far north.

Chapter 2, "Alaska with Appleton's, Canada by Baedeker's," highlights the era's obsessive interest in travel literature. Guidebooks helped scenic entrepreneurs to boost travel. Texts produced new readers and readers found new worlds of experience. Their subsequent travels, whether actual or imagined, helped conjure new cultural identities. Well-to-do Americans with increasing amounts of leisure and increasing spells of anomie sought the supposedly curative conditions of travel. Going outside into nature offered a timely antidote to the unstable environment of late nineteenth-century industrial society. Their travels were acts of differentiation, distinguishing the elite from the mass of middle-class tourists flooding more accessible sites. The salubrious sea airs and pleasing landscape vistas remedied the supposed trials of a life of urban ease.

Chapter 3, Scenic Bonanza, considers the production of nature as an aesthetic object worthy of travelers' attentions and extended travels. Viewing nature became a critical part of wealthy Americans' cultural self-definition. The chapter details the Inside Passage's course, sailing out of Puget Sound ports north through the narrow channels leading past the British Columbia coast to southeastern Alaska. On this periphery we may consider what Henri Lefebvre has called the global division of nature. The earth, underground resources, the air and light above ground, he writes, all are part of the forces of production and part of the products of those forces.²² Scenic resources had come to exist in this curious tension as both producer and product of the forces of capital. In this circular logic, nature had come to represent a utopian alternative to the very forces that had produced wild nature as an idea in the first place.

Chapters 4 and 5, titled Frontier Commerce and Totem and Taboo, respectively, trace an ex-Navy man's journey north to Fort Wrangell, Alaska. His experiences contrasted sharply with those of his wealthy counterparts, as different social constituencies reached different conclusions about the same circumstances with little consensus regarding their meanings. These chapters turn from the old sailor to a discussion of sexuality on the empire's fringes, to prostitution and Indian slavery, to the bourgeois tourists' observations on Tlingit women, to those native women's development of a thriving curio trade, selling souvenirs to the tourists who in turn take these trinkets home to their metropolitan parlors. Experience became a trinket, and the souvenir a hieroglyphic of their travels. Like the prostitutes who were both seller and sold, the tourists, likewise alienated from themselves, were both buyer and bought. Ending in the private spaces of the city, the analysis returns to the domestic interior where, as Walter Benjamin described, the fictional framework for the individual's life is constituted in the private home. His living room is a box in the theater of the world.²³ Meanwhile, the outliers of the nation, those presumed unproductive citizens, offer a point of tension with the bourgeois travelers.

Juneau's Industrial Sublime, Chapter 6, follows the meanings travelers attached to their visits to the Juneau area, site of one of the largest industrial gold-mining operations in the world for much of the late nineteenth century. The technological sophistication of the gold works seized these tourists' imaginations. They found little conflict between the extractive activities of the mine and the scenic wilderness they had come so far to see. There appeared to be enough resources of all kinds to go around. So transfixed were the visitors with the mine's industrial drama that they ignored the hundreds of native workers who helped keep the operation running.

In Chapter 7, Orogenous Zones: Glaciers and the Geologies of Empire, travelers turned their attentions to Glacier Bay, the northernmost point of their passage.²⁴ Here tourists exercised their amateur geologic knowledge, interpreting and exploring the vast ice fields at tidewater. Earlier chapters have discussed nature's aestheticization; its supposed therapeutic qualities; its relation to imperial adventuring, social Darwinian ideologies, and industrial incorporation. In short, a concatenation of cultural, political, and economic practices constituted late nineteenth-century understandings of nature. Beneath these social productions and commodifications lay the bedrock of natural science. The chapter examines their geological discourse, a natural history that legitimated their culture's possession of nature. Geological strata and glacial deposits were historical formations. That is to say, for contemporaries the language of geology was a way of seeing nature that placed its substance in a great sweep of time. But this geological grammar was, too, a historical formation, the product of the era's particular economic rationality. Their science was unthinkable without their society's simultaneous endeavors to capitalize on nature.²⁵ This was especially true of geology, a science that allowed its practitioners the ability to read the land, its strata, and ultimately its value. Darwin and his interpreters had already given sanction to interpreting biological and social phenomena in the same structure of thought. The geologizing mind positioned human nature within a physical universe of natural laws, where those races most capable of controlling nature's resources were determined to rule over the others.

A concluding chapter, titled Inside Passage, and a final epilogue, Out of Alaska, consider the wider meanings of all this activity. Sitka marked the final stopover on the tourists' junket. At Sitka travelers enjoyed a final opportunity to acquire souvenirs and snapshots of their coastal transit. After considering the particular meanings of Sitka in the travelers' experience, the chapter wrestles with the wider meanings given the landscape and the region's indigenes. The discovery of gold in the Klondike in 1896 and the rush north in 1898 marked a series of changes in the far north. Other gold discoveries would follow at Nome, Fairbanks, and elsewhere throughout the region. These stampedes were built upon the foundation established by several decades of tourist travel. But this nineteenth-century story did not end simply with the discovery of gold in the Klondike. Nature, itself, as understood and as formulated in the late nineteenth century, survived into the twentieth century, and this colonial legacy continues to lie largely unrecognized beneath the surface of the present. Alaska took its turn in the frontier myth, that much celebrated movement from east to west, then turned north. The north has a meaning that is as clear today as when the word stood for a place not yet discovered.²⁶ Darkest Alaska joined its global counterparts. The utopian narratives of American pioneering, however, have hidden Alaska's conquest.

Chapter One

Continental Drift

Less is known today of Central Alaska than of Central Africa, noted Charles Erskine Scott Wood during an 1877 reconnaissance of the Inside Passage. Wood went north to climb mountains, but also to acquire information about the unknown districts lying nearest the coast, with a view to future explorations.¹ Acting as a military escort to Chicago adventurer Charles Taylor, the pair attempted an early ascent of Mount Fairweather and had their sights set on tackling Mount St. Elias. In the imperial drama of the late nineteenth century the image of Darkest Africa prevailed over the imaginative spaces of empire. And Americans, like Wood, reached intuitively for the image of the dark continent when confronting their own dark places. The northern landscape that emerged from the traveler's pen connected this far corner of North America with a global vision of colonial encounters, even as these same travelers Americanized the colonial encounter, distinguishing the push north from its supposedly more brutal analogues elsewhere. In the heyday of European colonial adventures in Africa and elsewhere, Alaska was not remote or removed, but cut from the same cloth. It was assuredly different in degree, but not in structure. The constant revolution of expanding capital, and the global flow of materials, resources, and people, also trafficked in ideas. And so Alaska joined Africa in the widely shared cultural shorthand of the era, a metonymic structure that linked the ongoing western fantasy of exploration to the institutions of imperial power. By the