Klondike Gold Rush Research Articles

American Gold Digger: Marriage, Money, and the Law from the Ziegfeld Follies to Anna Nicole Smith

This study of gold diggers is illuminating and original. Donovan defines gold digger as a woman who pursues romantic relationships primarily for economic gain. In five chapters organized chronologically and thematically, he examines the evolution of this stereotype from its emergence before World War I through Anna Nicole Smith’s marriage to an elderly billionaire in 1994. One chapter explores a moral panic about alimony in the 1920s; another investigates a 1930s crusade to end heart balm laws (prohibiting seduction, breach of promise, and alienation of affection); and a third analyzes a furor over “Allotment Annies” who married multiple servicemen apiece during World War II to pocket their military allowances. Another covers the Lee Marvin–Michelle Triola palimony case of the 1970s.According to Donovan, the trope originated in the early 1910s from the urban-amusement culture of dance halls and popular theater. In this setting, on the boundary between prostitution and dating, the custom of “treating” arose—women exchanging sex and companionship for money and gifts from men. Women who participated in these exchanges were young, good looking, sexually charged, deceptive, and manipulative; most of them appear to have been white and to have come from working-class backgrounds. Although few were actual sex workers, they nonetheless offended genteel sensibilities and, perhaps as a legacy of the recent Klondike gold rush, became known as “gold diggers.”A playwright named Avery Hopwood, who overheard dancers in the Ziegfeld Follies call each other gold diggers, borrowed the term to entitle his 1919 play about the travails of New York City chorus girls. The phenomenal success of The Gold Diggers and its remake as a silent film in 1923 and as a musical in 1929 turned what had been a slang phrase into a powerful, enduring stereotype. From the outset, the stereotype was pejorative and gendered, with class and racial overtones. Notwithstanding that the chorus girls who inspired Hopwood embraced the slang term and applied it to themselves knowingly and even affectionately, Donovan says that the stereotype has always been wielded against women, often when established systems of marriage and courtship break down. Gold diggers are vilified for being childlike, frivolous, and unsophisticated, as well as scheming and sexually adventurous. The stereotype has persisted because it allows Americans to concentrate their wrath on supposed individual misbehavior, diverting attention from larger cultural transformations and social inequities.Much of American Gold Digger comprises an analysis of popular culture, particularly the understandings spawned by movies, television shows, and celebrities. He correctly suggests that the messages promulgated by popular culture are essential to this kind of history. For example, Anita Loos’ development of her Lorelei Lee character played an outsize role in fixing the gold digger in the American imagination, first through the publication of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a book in 1925 and later as a film that starred Marilyn Monroe. Loos also wrote the screenplay for Red-Headed Woman (1932), the archetypal portrait of a femme fatale, played by Jean Harlow, who uses sex to improve her social position.As enlightening as this perspective is, however, it hides a flaw in its methodology. As his study moves beyond the 1920s, Donovan becomes so narrowly focused on popular and celebrity cultures that he cannot say how the stereotype waxed and waned on the ground or how ordinary people received it, revised it, and used it in their daily lives. It is not clear how or whether some women could mount a defense of their materialism. Nor do we learn whether women ever applied a variant of the stereotype against men, as fortune hunters. In this book, the gold-digger stereotype floats freely through popular culture, its direction unalterable by regular people.A historical study that Donovan cites in his text and that navigated similar terrain, Beth L. Bailey’s From Front Porch to Back Seat: Courtship in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore,1988), employs a better methodology. In addition to consulting sources like advice and etiquette manuals that prescribed dating rules, Bailey incorporated the voices of young women by conducting research in college newspapers and in letters to the editors of popular magazines. In Bailey’s telling, women were not just victims of popular culture; they both interacted with it and acted of their own volition. American Gold Digger is insightful, but Bailey’s approach would have strengthened it.

Comedy Gold: Humor on the Alaska-Yukon Border, 1886-1896

Abstract This article sketches a rough outline of ways humor and laughter were used in setting social boundaries along the Alaska-Yukon border in the decade before the Klondike gold rush (1896-1900). It maintains that humor possessed an extraordinary capacity to both collapse and sustain social hierarchies on the frontier—establishing in and out groups in the absence of any “official” state or national authority in the Far North, drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin's Rabelais and His World as a theoretical framework to analyze humor's capacity to establish togetherness and otherness. Frontiersmen, this article suggests, harnessed the leveling power of humor to create in-groups while deploying it against Indians and Black Americans to define otherness.

Advertising for Beer: Local Identity and the Klondike Brewery, 1900–1920

First published advance onlineOctober 1, 2019Yukon entrepreneur Thomas O’Brien opened the O’Brien Brewing and Malting Company, better known as the Klondike Brewery, in Klondike City in 1904, after the population of Dawson City had dramatically declined following the end of the Klondike Gold Rush (1896–1899). O’Brien’s decision to open a new business following the gold rush reflected his hope that Dawson would continue to develop and modernize, and O’Brien intended to be part of this growth. The Klondike Brewery operated from 1904 to 1919 and was the first brewery in northern Canada. Local newspapers—the Yukon Sun and the Dawson Daily News—frequently reported on the progress and activities of the brewery during its construction and operation, and O’Brien took advantage of the media to advertise his products. He used both his brewery and its promotion to highlight not only what was special about his products, but also what he believed Dawson’s future could be. These ads emphasized the beer’s homegrown origins, they celebrated Klondike beer using Klondike cultural imagery, and they emphasized the brewery’s modern nature. O’Brien not only sold beer, but he sold an idea to those who remained after the rush. We argue that the ways in which O’Brien branded and marketed his products, specifically his beer, tapped into a developing sense of local cultural identity among the post-gold-rush settler population in Dawson City, and that O’Brien used his brewery to shape his idea of Dawson’s potential future.

The Cremation of Sam McGee: A Brief History and Analysis

The Cremation of Sam McGee was first published in 1907 through Service's Songs of A Sourdough. The work was not intended for a large audience and its publication actually sprouted from a Christmas bonus Service received. In this brief analysis, the Klondike gold rush, the life of Robert W. Service, and perhaps his greatest work, The Cremation of Sam McGee, are analysed for their significance to Canadian literary themes.

Illustrating Racism: Challenging Canada’s Racial Amnesia with Comics

Illustrating Racism:Challenging Canada’s Racial Amnesia with Comics Sean Carleton Robertson, David Alexander, and Scott B. Henderson — Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story. Winnipeg: Highwater Press, 2011. Pp. 40. Wong, David H. T. — Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America. Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2012. Pp. 220. Worton, Zach — The Klondike. Montréal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2011. Pp. 220. It has been ten years since Chester Brown challenged Canadian historians to think more carefully about comic books with the publication of Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography.1 Over the past decade, comics with historical content have become increasingly popular resources for people to learn about the past.2 Yet many historians remain uncertain about the value and legitimacy of the emerging field of historical comics. This hesitancy is understandable; many comics practitioners make interpretive choices that disrupt disciplinary practices, often blurring distinctions between fact and fiction as well as popular and professional history. Historical comics are also rarely the products of archival research and are not subject to a peer-review process. Yet, prominent scholars such as American historian Paul Buhle and Canadian education historians Michael Cromer and Penney Clark argue that there is great pedagogical potential in engaging with comics in the history classroom.3 Cromer and Clark suggest that comics are “multilayered” and encourage students to “marry print and visual representations in order to read in ways that are deeply meaningful, because the narrative is incomplete without both dimensions.” Moreover, they contend that the process of [End Page 509] reading comics, which requires readers to piece together the story through their own interpretation of the visual and textual material provided, has the potential to increase students’ “tolerance of ambiguity and appreciation for the nature of history as interpretation.”4 The scholarship of Buhle, Cromer, and Clark has sparked a much-needed academic conversation about the merits of comics as history. To add to this discussion, I offer a review of three recent Canadian history comics that make significant contributions to Canadian social history and warrant critical attention: David H. T. Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain: A Graphic History of the Chinese in North America, Zach Worton’s The Klondike, and David Robertson’s and Scott Henderson’s Sugar Falls: A Residential School Story. Each of these works, like Brown’s Louis Riel, draws attention to Canada’s hidden histories of racism. Despite the fact that racism has deep roots in settler societies, it is commonly believed that racism did not, nor does not, exist in Canada. Sherene H. Razack calls this forgetting a racial “amnesia.”5 Although attitudes toward race are socially constructed, their material and historical consequences are not. “’Race’ is a mythical construct,” Constance Backhouse reminds us, “’Racism’ is not.” Escape to Gold Mountain, The Klondike, and Sugar Falls illustrate for readers how racial differences have been “pressed into service” to justify, rationalize, and reproduce asymmetrical social relations to the benefit of settlers.6 By examining Chinese immigration to North America, the dynamics of race relations during the Klondike gold rush, and one student’s experience in a Manitoba residential school, these historical comics demonstrate the effects of racist practices in Canada. Far from being silly or irrelevant, these historical comics contribute to Canada’s complex social history and can be used to challenge Canada’s racial amnesia. Comics, then, might be used by historians as another tool in an increasingly diverse toolkit. “A time of great and unspeakable hurt”: Escape to Gold Mountain David H.T. Wong’s Escape to Gold Mountain examines the migration of poor Chinese people to the United States and Canada in the mid-1800s and their struggles to create new lives for themselves and their families. While Wong’s story is fictional, the artist borrows from his family’s real-life experiences in “Gold Mountain”—a term many Chinese used to refer to North America during the nineteenth century gold rushes—for inspiration. The central focus of the comic book is on how different generations of Wongs (used to symbolize all Chinese immigrants) experienced racism and overcame its consequences. Though it is problematic to assume that the Wong’s family story can...

Polanski and Skolimowski in ‘Swinging London’

The terrible thing about the slag, though, is that they actually survive, down to the Yanks and French being such pushovers and thinking this must be London’s left bank, when it’s nothing but a grafter’s paradise . . . it’s the slag that’s made Chelsea a dirty word . . . Anyone’d think it was the Klondike gold rush all over again; you can’t just kindly tell them to keep off the grass, that this thing needs brains. (Robin Cook, The Crust on Its Uppers)

Alaska's place in the West: from the last frontier to the last great wilderness

From Sarah Palin's surprising rise to political stardom to recurring environmental battles over oil drilling in the arctic and public works projects like the Bridge to Nowhere, the remote state of Alaska continues to occupy center stage in the national spotlight. Yet for most Americans the history of this sparsely populated region remains a vast unknown. Roxanne Willis takes readers behind common and simplistic representations of the state to explore the rich history and extreme diversity of a land that cannot easily be pigeonholed into typical American conceptions about place. Alaska's story is usually confined to regional history books, and in many American history texts, the state simply disappears after the Klondike gold rush. Willis's book marks the first comprehensive examination of Alaskan development schemes from 1890 to the present, connecting these plans to the changing priorities of American culture and politics. She examines competing definitions of Alaska--from a Last Frontier meant to be exploited to a Last Wilderness to be protected at all costs--and explains how the contemporary Alaskan landscape is a result of this ongoing struggle to define this mythic state's place in the American West. Willis focuses on five historic battles between environmentalists and developers: the Alaska Native reindeer herding industry, the New Deal homesteader program in the Matanuska Colony, the construction of the Alaska Highway, the political dispute over the Rampart Dam, and the ongoing struggles over the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. She presents these case histories in clear language that will engage general readers while using new historical analysis that will appeal to scholars of environmental history and the American West. The result is an effective introduction to the historical origins of current political conflicts in Alaska. Transcending the typical regional histories of the state, Willis's study shows how Alaska development schemes have affected the history of American development more broadly, with conclusions that will be useful to anyone interested in environment and development issues in America or the circumpolar North--including a consideration of Alaska as the new frontier in global climate change. By showing why Alaska continues to resonate in the American imagination, Willis's book situates the forty-ninth state within the environmental movement, within the definition of the American West, and within American culture as a whole.

Stories Worth Recording: Martha McKeown and the Documentation of Pacific Northwest Life

KATRINE BARBER Stories Worth Recording Martha McKeown and the Documentation ofPacific NorthwestLife "THE TRAIL LED NORTH and toLiterary Fame,"declaredaNovember 1948 Oregonian headline, announcing a book publication by a new Oregon author. Martha Ferguson McKeown's The Trail Led North recounts the trials and triumphs of her uncle Mont (Montillious) Hawthorne as he joined the historic scramble of the Klondike gold rush. Journalist Ellen Mills Ewing promised thatwith the book's publication, "three Oregonians will be rock eted to national literary fame ? author Martha McKeown, her 82-year-old neighbor, uncle, and hero Mont Hawthorne, and Mont's 'sonofagun' dog," Pedro. The newspaper's impressive Sunday magazine spread included well illustrated descriptions ofMcKeown, Hawthorne, and thebook's production. "It's a cinch that thisbook will find a niche on thebookshelves ofOregonians along with the tomes of Oregon's ever-growing army of national-caliber authors," Ewing proclaimed. She was right, at least initially.1 Martha McKeown eventually produced three books based on her uncle's life:The Trail LedNorth (1948), Them Was the Days: AnotherMont Hawthorne Story (1950), and Alaska Silver (1951).The books recount the overland journey of theHawthorne family,Mont Hawthorne's search forwealth and adven ture during theKlondike gold rush, and his efforts in the salmon canning industry inOregon, Washington, and Alaska. Macmillian published all three, withThem Was the Days distributed toBritishaudiencesasTheLongSearch forHome: A True Account of a Pioneer Family inAmerica.2 The University of Nebraska Press reprinted the book several times with an introduction that indicated itwas meant for classroom adoption. The last edition was released in 1974, nearly twenty-five years after its initial publication. While it isunclear how many copies were sold byMacmillian, Them Was theDays sold a respectable 16,000 copies as a university press title.3 Martha McKeown OHQ vol. 110, no. 4 ? 2009 Oregon Historical Society Martha McKeown ispictured inherprofessional capacity.She developed a long careeras an English teacher,spendinga brief period as an administrator at Multnomah College inPortland. Barber, Stories Worth Recording 547 $1 ''~ TWAP?B a : ..'*.' '''IB ^^^^^. m Mont Hawthorne was photographed as a young man in about 1889. He spentseveralyears inan informal apprenticeship inAstoria, Oregon, beforehe hired out tositeand design salmon canneries in Washington and Alaska for various companies.His first tripto Alaska was as a prospector in the Klondike gold rush. would go on towrite an Oregon Trail novel, Mountains Ahead (1961), as well as Linda's Indian Home (1956) and Come to My Salmon Feast (1959), two nonfiction children's books about Indian families at Celilo Village near The Dalles, Oregon. Newspapers and magazines widely and positively reviewed McKeown's books, all of which addressed Ore gon s history, and they sold well. Yet, few Oregonians would recognize the author's name today. Published without footnotes or much explana tion of her research process (which contemporary newspaper articles and her notes suggest was extensive), itcan be difficult to assess the docu mentary value of her nonfiction. It is not unreasonable to ask whether Hawthorne's recollections about Astoria's waterfront, the characters he describes on hisway to theKlond ike gold fields, or his assessment of Alaska's canning industry are reli able. Not quite histories, McKeown's books did not endure as regional literature either. She is not listed among theOregon Cultural Heritage Commission's top one hundred books about Oregon, and none of her writing is included in theOregon State University Press's Oregon Literature Series. I am an oral historian who lives in, studies, and teaches about the Pacific Northwest, and over thepast fewyears,McKeown has wheedled herway onto my bookshelves, and intomy courses and research. Her work sparks fascinat ing,contemporary questions about the intersections ofmemory and history thatmatch her storytelling acumen and her apparent fearlessness about dig ging intoher community's problems. When asked who Iwould nominate fora shortbiography, I jumped at thenotion of bringingMartha McKeown toa new setof readers and regional historians. Oregon's 150thanniversary provides an excuse for the luxuries of reviewing old texts with new eyes and asking about their current relevance. Ihope to return readers to Martha McKeown's books with this essay,which pieces together her professional writing and private OHQ vol. no, no. 4 papers with...

The Fallen Frontier

ON THE EDGE BY ROBERT ADAMS FONDATION CARTIER PARIS NOVEMBER 16, 2007-JANUARY 27, 2008 Robert Adams's first solo show in Paris, titled the Edge, presents about 150 black-and-white gelatin silver prints that collectively introduce the Pacific Northwest landscape as a problem ground rather than an idyllic retreat. Since the late nineteenth century, the Northwest has focused its economy around the logging industry, transforming all of its resident conifer and evergreen trees into hard currency. The Klondike Goldrush, for instance, drew many settlers to the West Coast, where San Francisco was flourishing as a major metropolitan destination, while the small cities and towns of Oregon and Washington states remained sheepishly backwater. By the late 1950s, the West Coast was immortalized in Jack Kerouac's On The Road (1957) and once again became known as the final frontier, the key of freedom. However, in 1964, another Beat writer, Ken Kesey, explored the contradictory notions of independence in a much larger novel titled Sometimes a Great Notion that focused upon the lives of striking lumber workers and the land owners within a small Oregon town. On a similar note, Adams renders a visual critique of the landscape that moves past all romantic notions of the West, presenting a vision that concentrates on the physical transformation of the coastline, a result of forested clear-cutting. Located within the basement level of the Fondation Cartier, Adams's photographs appeared in a single line that stretched across six walls, bearing neither titles nor dates. Furthermore, each work hung at eye level under dim lighting and appeared to be of similar height and width. Viewers rolled past the ocean, fields of brush, a wall of rocks stacked to hold back the ocean, white caps, low fog cover, and an empty grass field. Initially, the camera's eye appears as if it was neutral, revealing nothing extraordinary. However, Adams's arrangement of these images, taken throughout the course of the 1990s, suggests that the contemporary Northwest landscape is more of a man-made rendering than a natural one. Waves crest and fall in Southwest from the South Jetty (1990-91), for example, whereas the rock wall that frames the wild moving ocean seen on the far left in Winter, Northwest Across Dunes and Tidal Marsh Inside the South Jetty (1990) contrasts sharply with the vast, empty field of grass that extends off to the right. With old, dry dock posts standing stoically, Adams conveys that deforested land and ocean floor are synonymous with each other. …

The Year That Defined American Journalism: 1897 and the Clash of Paradigms. By W. Joseph Campbell. (New York: Routledge, 2006. xxii, 317 pp. Cloth, $95.00, ISBN 978-0-415-97702-9. Paper, $27.95, ISBN 978-0-415-97703-6.)

W. Joseph Campbell's The Year That Defined American Journalism investigates the origins of the modern American press by detailing a single transformative year: 1897. In that fateful year, Campbell tells us, three rival models of journalism were founded in New York City, and one of them—the authoritative, impartial, factual discourse of the New York Times—triumphed to become the defining ideal of twentieth-century journalism. Such a single-year case study, with its sharply delimited temporal focus, can intensively examine the contending forms of journalism against a richly drawn social tapestry. At first glance, the book adheres to its proposed method; a timeline of the year's pivotal events is followed by a general introduction outlining the book's approach and the historiographic issue. In the first of four chapters, Campbell describes the social context of journalism's rupture. In sprightly manner, he reports the fads and front-page stories of 1897—from the Klondike gold rush to the New Woman—but slights any considered discussion of social history. The chapter characterizes the 1890s as an energetic, exuberant, transitional era, while ignoring more specific economic, political, and cultural developments that could have informed an account of shifts in the news industry. Indeed, Campbell later explains the journalistic innovations of 1897 simply as the accomplishments of three entrepreneurs who, in contrast to the rest of the press, reflected the era's resourceful spirit.

Connecting Alaska: The Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System

In response to the Klondike gold rush, the U.S. Army established isolated forts throughout Alaska. Between 1900 and 1905, the Signal Corps connected those posts with each other and with the contiguous United States by means of the Washington-Alaska Military Cable and Telegraph System (WAMCATS). A significant logistical and technological achievement, the system of thousands of miles of suspended landlines and underwater cable included the first successful long-distance radio operation in the world. The first physical link between the United States and Alaska, the telegraph was also the first major contribution to Alaskan infrastructure provided by the federal government, marking the beginning of the government's central role in the development of Alaska.

Skagway, Whitehorse and the White Pass and Yukon Route Railway

The White Pass and Yukon Route, a 177 km narrow gauge railway linking the Alaskan coastal port of Skagway with Whitehorse, capital of the Yukon Territory, ceased operations in October, 1982, a casualty of the economic recession of the early 1980s which brought about the collapse of the Territory's hardrock mining industry. The railway had been constructed by British interests between 1898 and 1900, that is, in the aftermath of the Klondike gold rush, and had been in continuous operation since that time. In this paper, the author traces the broad lines of the history of the railway and shows the various ways in which it influenced the development of Skagway and of Whitehorse, its ocean and inland termini respectively. The closing of the railway was a major blow to Skagway, where White Pass Transportation and its subsidiaries were the principal employers, and where over two-thirds of the railway's employees were located. The closing appears to have had a more limited impact on Whitehorse, a much larger community whose economy is now highly diversified.

Cotonou's Klondike: African traders and second-hand car markets in Bénin

This article addresses the theme of entrepreneurship in Africa by focusing on second-hand car markets in Cotonou, Bénin. At first glance this booming business seems to confirm neo-liberal and institutional models of entrepreneurship, in which entrepreneurial behaviour constitutes rational calculation in a situation of economic opportunity. The universe in which African car traders operate, however, is characterised by significant capital scarcity, dramatic losses and widespread bankruptcies. The article argues that viewing entrepreneurs as economic calculators is not the proper way to understand the Cotonou car trade. Based on case analysis of a Béninese car trader, it shows that the outcome of car trading in Cotonou is determined by the manipulation of social contacts, characterised by self-interest and distrust among business partners. Analogous to the Klondike gold rush, it appears that the car trader's engagement with the trade is to a large extent motivated by the dream of making a fortune. Thus, even though entrepreneurial failure is widespread among African car traders, most of them remain convinced that car trading can yield significant profits.

The nature of gold: an environmental history of the Klondike gold rush

Foreword by William CrononAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: On the Chilkoot1/The Culture of Gold2/The Nature of the Journey3/The Culture of the Journey4/ The Nature of Gold Mining5/The Culture of Gold Mining6/The Nature & Culture of Food7/The Nature & Culture of SeattleConclusion: Nature, Culture, and ValueNotesSelected BibliographyIndex

The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush by Kathryn Morse

The Nature ofGold: An Environmental History ofthe KlondikeGoldRush By KathrynMorse University ofWashington Press, Seattle, 2003. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 304 pages. $29.95 cloth. Reviewed byDuane Smith Fort Lewis College, Durango, Colorado >~rbE nature of gold will convince readers X. of thepowerful lure of gold for men and women. Otherwise, there isno way to explain why anyone would put up with the trials and tribulations of rushing to theKlondike in 1898 and laterand the disappointment of being too lateor finding thediggings too poor. The titanic struggle against nature and the environment during theKlondike era isunequaled in Ameri can mining history.The Klondike rushmakes those inCalifornia in 1849and Colorado in 1859 look like summer excursions. The story of Yukon and Alaska mining is about how miners "collided head on with the truenature of gold: its scarcity."The rushwas not, as theyhad hoped, a chance to escape the lifestyleand corporate-controlled, wage-labor industrial world theyhad left behind. It"became a game of chance, an endless, frustrating, and often fruitlessgamble" (p. 116).Eventually, the miners recreated the industrial society theyhad left behind, andmost ended up doing the same kind of labor theyhad done back home. As was typicalforamining rush,theearlyarrivals made theeasy money before companies dominated the scene. Industrialization triumphedhere, as it was doing elsewhere in theUnited States in the late nineteenth century. Having said that,this isnot a typical mining history,although the author has done extensive research intooriginal sources and tells much of the story through the eyes of the participants. The subtitle,"AnEnvironmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush," is thekey tounderstand ing Kathryn Morse's approach. An assistant professor of history atMiddlebury College in Vermont, Morse looks at the rush's impact on the immediatemining region and then follows the ripples as they spread farbeyond. The author examines a fascinating variety of topics; but, first and foremost, the intro duction and chapter 1,"The Culture ofGold," need to be carefully read before venturing on in the book. This discussion sets the scene of people encountering nature ? and humans versus nature? in a rush thatgave barely two years of opportunity to the "poor man" before corporations came to dominate the goldfields. The firstchaptermight have been a littleshorter and gets the storyoffto a slow start,but readers should persevere. Gold had tobe the most important thing in these people's lives,givenwhat theyhad to put up with in getting to the region and what they had to facewhen theyarrived. This iswhat the author takes up in the following chapters. In each, she examines the effectsof the gold rush on the physical world, newcomers, and native residents and explains how theyall changed or remained the same. Particularly interestingare chapters 6 and 7,which discuss thenature and culture of food and Seattle, the gateway town.Morse clearly shows the connection between theYukon and the outside world by considering, for example, the effectof the rush on sales ofVan Camp's pork and beans and, beyond that,on thefarmers who produced the ingredients.Seattle,obviously, profited in amultitude ofways, once itfended offcompetition. Reviews 341 The Nature ofGold requires careful, close reading. It is not a book for the nightstand. The experience was grim for the participants, andMorse does not trytomake it what it was not nor to fit into a romantic, adventuresome image.This volume shows thehard side ofmin ing but also ventures beyond that to examine its larger significance for people ? many of whom did not go north in 1898 ? and for the world around them. The photographs add to the story, contributing a visual component necessary for understanding what went on and why. Readers should not ignore the footnotes, which contain some gems of information.Read ersmay have towork almost as hard as some of the miners, but therewardswill bemuch greater. The authormight conclude thattheYukon rush was notworth the cost and effort, but thebook definitely isworth both. Myth and History in theCreation of YellowstoneNational Park By Paul Schullery and LeeWhittlesey University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln, 2003. Photographs, notes, index. 125 pages. $22.00 cloth. Reviewed by Richard A. Bartlett Florida State University,Tallahassee For readers who might be unaware of the storybehind this book, brief details should be mentioned. On September...

The Development of Property Rights on the Canadian and American Mining Frontiers

Introduction It has sometimes been asserted that the history of mining in North America represents a kind of pure democracy, in which mining law was created by the miners without intervention from lawyers or politicians, and particularly without the input, interference, or advice of corrupt Eastern lawmakers. The classic expression of this idea is the Turner thesis, made popular by the turn of the century historian Frederick Jackson Turner. In an address to the American Historical Association given in 1893, Turner posited that the American frontier, not Washington or England, was the source of American democracy.(1) The Turner thesis, that war-horse of American historiography, has been battered over the decades by scholars who have shown that the west was far less egalitarian and democratic than populist myth would have it. As Howard Lamar has pointed out, the rigidity of Turner's idea--that a chapter in American history had closed--made his thesis useless as a guide for the present and future.(2) American historians such as Patricia Nelson Limerick(3) have shown that the west was subject to much the same historical, economic, and political forces as the rest of the country. Yet because it contains so much that Americans would like to see in themselves, the thesis retains a seductiveness that makes it hard to ignore--if it is not true, it seems that it ought to be true. In Canada, on the other hand, a country that has had more frontier than the U.S.A., the idea that these regions have dominated Canadian political institutions (though they have at times influenced them) seems absurd. In this country the frontier populist myth is so faint that this particular historical horse has never left the starting gate. Yet if Turner was wrong, then Canada and the United States are not as different as some Canadian nationalists would prefer to believe. Despite the assaults on Turner, there are some episodes in American history that do seem to confirm his idea that the frontier was the wellspring of democracy. One of them is the early history of western mining, particularly mining law and regulations. A number of scholars working in the field of property rights have demonstrated that mining law in the western United States sprang from the experiences and the demands of the miners rather than being imposed by legislatures; its contractual nature was first established by the miners and only later codified into law. Despite what rugged individualists in northern Canada may claim, the region in this century has been heavily influenced and almost totally controlled by the central government. This is as true of mining as of any other facet of the northern experience. Except for a very brief and uncharacteristic episode, the history of mining north of sixty degrees has followed a very different pattern from the Turnerian ideal. Far from being the well-spring of democracy in this country, the northern mining districts have served as examples of a much different tradition. The Klondike gold rush in particular can best be understood not as a flowering of regional democracy, but in terms of one of the oldest and most traditional historiographical interpretations in English Canadian history--Donald Creighton's theory of metropolitanism. In 1937 Creighton published The Commercial Empire of the St. Lawrence, an attempt to understand Canadian history through a study of the influence of the St. Lawrence valley over the rest of the country.(4) Even after sixty years his view of Canada's history remains powerful, proof that some historical ideas do not lose validity with age; from the fur trade to the Canadian Pacific Railway to the National Energy Policy, it is difficult to argue with his contention that the Toronto-Montreal core has shaped Canada in the light of its own commercial interests. Though Creighton did not decry this control, others did, particularly regional historians, and what Creighton called metropolitanism, others have called internal colonialism. …

Policing the Empire: Government, Authority, and Control, 1830--1940

Introduction - consent, coercion and colonial control - policing the Empire, 1830-1940. Part 1 Policing the colonies of settlement, 1830-1900: the Irish Model and the Empire - a case for re-assessment, Richard Hawkins the varieties of policing - colonial Queensland, 1860-1900, Mark Finnane the policing of colonial New Zealand - from informal to formal control, 1840-1907, Richard S.Hill patterns of policing in the post-emancipation British Caribbean, 1835-1895, Howard Johnson imposing the British way - the Canadian Mounted Police and the Klondike gold rush, William R.Morrison. Part 2 Colonial policing in Africa and India, 1860-1940: guarding the extending frontier, - policing the Gold Coast, 1865-1913, David Killingray the ordering of rural India - the policing of 19th-century Bengal and Bihar, Peter Robb from military to tribal police - policing the Upper Nile Province of the Sudan, Douglas H.Johnson protectors and friends of the people? the South African constabulary in the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, 1900-1908, Albert Grundlingh policing prosecution and the law in colonial Kenya, 1905-1939, David M.Anderson. Part 3 Policing the colonial city: whisky detectives in town - the reinforcement of liquor laws in Hamilton, Ontario, 1870-1900, James L.Sturgis thieves, drunkards and vagrants - defining crime in colonial Mombasa, 1902-1932, Justin Willis from bobbies to Boers - police, people and social control in Cape Town, Bill Nasson.

Images of Society in Klondike Gold Rush Narratives: Skookum Jim and the Discovery of Gold

In August 1896 the discovery of gold on a tributary of the Yukon River triggered the Klondike gold rush. Focusing on the initial this article compares written accounts from official gold rush literature with oral accounts passed on by Tagish participants. Instead of assessing the veracity of the different versions, it evaluates the narrative genres shaping both written and oral accounts. The contrast sharply because they reflect conflicting ideas about social organization in late nineteenth-century northern frontier society. In northern Canada, it is frequently possible to hear contrasting accounts about an incident from the past, one found in the written record, the other in the daily conversation of elderly native men and women (see Slobodin 1963; McClellan 1963, I97oa; Arima 1976; McClellan et al. I987). The possibility of incorporating oral accounts into ethnohistorical analysis seems to give oral history rather elastic promise, particularly when so much northern scholarship appears to rest exclusively on written documents (Zaslow 1971; Wright 1976; Coates and Morrison 1988). Ethnohistorians, though, draw attention to the pitfalls of a reified definition of oral tradition. More important than the search for a body of oral texts deemed accurate within a restricted Western discourse, they say, is the question of how indigenous historical consciousness is constructed in societies where essential knowledge has always been passed on by word of mouth (see, for example, Rosaldo 1980; Cohen 1989: 9). The problem of treating oral accounts about the past as though they could be equated with Western notions of history has long been recognized in anthropology.1 As ethnohistorians look more closely at oral testimonies, they are becoming increasingly attentive to ideological, symbolic, Ethnohistory 39:1 (Winter I992). Copyright ? by the American Society for Ethnohistory. ccc ooI4-I801/9z/$I.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.192 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 06:00:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Klondike Gold Rush Narratives and metaphorical meanings in them. Combined with a sensitivity to ethnocentric bias in Western writings, awareness of the spoken word has also led to more cautious handling of written sources. Yet Steinhart (I989: 5), in a recent comparison of trends in African and American oral history, concludes that conventional archaeological, documentary, and ethnographic sources continue to be used as the standards against which oral accounts are judged to establish the 'factual' truth of cultural history. Increasingly, consideration is given to similar processes that may govern both oral and written traditions.2 My own attempts to combine oral and written accounts from the Yukon Territory suggest that both kinds of narrative may have in common problems not always addressed in ethnohistory. A critical handling of the symbolic and mythical elements in written, as well as in oral, accounts may direct us back to the social process in which both are embedded, raising questions about the privileged status of documentary evidence as a reference point for establishing truth, falsehood, or factuality. This article examines accounts about the circumstances surrounding the discovery of gold that triggered the Klondike gold rush in I896. The term discovery is somewhat problematic in this context, because it implies a discrete, bounded incident. Yet the knowledge that gold had been found in this area was far from new in I896. Robert Campbell, a trader with the Hudson's Bay Company, recognized gold in the gravel near his trading post at the junction of the Yukon and Pelly rivers in the early I85os; ten years later, Robert McDonald, a Church of England missionary, reported significant amounts of gold in Birch Creek, a tributary of the Yukon (Ogilvie 1913: 84-87). Prospectors had worked their way north from the California goldfields, following strikes on the Fraser River and in the Cariboo district, confident that the Cordilleran would yield more. In 1887, geologist George Dawson (I898: 133) named several prospectors who were making a reasonable living panning gold on the Pelly River. The idea of a major discovery, though, signals the definition of an event that dominates the written record. In this context, Fogelson's (I989: I43) notion of the epitomizing event-commemorated in narratives that condense, encapsulate, and dramatize longer term historical processes-may be instructive. While Fogelson developed this concept with reference to Native American (specifically Cherokee) traditions, in the case of Klondike gold rush traditions it more accurately characterizes Western accounts than those reported by indigenous observers and their descendants. Discovery Day, 17 August, is enshrined as a statutory holiday in the Yukon Territory. In contrast, told by native elders focus less on an event than on a process. zI This content downloaded from 157.55.39.192 on Wed, 24 Aug 2016 06:00:21 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

The Pacific Northwest: an interpretive history

Reviews of the first edition include: 'This eminently readable book provides a refreshing current perspective on the Northwest...More than 100 illustrations, maps, and figures drawn from archival repositories in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho provide a valuable visual dimension ...an excellent synthesis' - Journal of the West. 'Essential reading ...an excellent overview of the region...The well-chosen photographs are a superb counterpoint to the text...Arguably the best collection of photos and drawings anywhere in print that illustrate the whole of history' - Seattle Post-Intelligencer. 'A superb book' - Columbia. Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes has revised and expanded the entire work, which is still the most comprehensive and balanced history of the region.This edition contains significant additional material on early mining in the Pacific Northwest, sea routes to Oregon in the early discovery and contact period, the environment of the region, the impact of the Klondike gold rush, and politics since 1945. Recent environmental controversies, such as endangered salmon runs and the spotted owl dispute, have been addressed, as has the effect of the Cold War on the region's economy. The author has also expanded discussion of the roles of women and minorities and updated statistical information. Carlos Arnaldo Schwantes is a professor in the Department of History, and director of the Institute for Pacific Study, at the University of Idaho. He is the author of a number of books, including Hard Traveling: A Portrait of Work Life in the New Northwest (Nebraska 1995).

Underdevelopment in Two Norths: The Brazilian Amazon and the Canadian Arctic

The developmental scholar Andre Gunder Frank has constructed a model to explain regional underdevelopment within developed nations. Underdevelopment is defined as the inability to control the rents from local resources and limited input into political decision making. The model is based on the concepts of metropolis and satellite, the satellite being a region that is politically, socially, and economically dependent on the metropolis, Frank applies this concept to the Brazilian Amazon as a satellite of southeastern Brazil and concludes that the Amazon region has underdeveloped due to the abrupt entry and withdrawal of capitalist investment. This article applies the Frank model to the Canadian North as a satellite of southern Canada and, using the historical examples of the fur trade, the Klondike gold rush, and the whaling and petroleum booms, concludes by noting that the entry and collapse of capitalist investment in the Canadian Arctic has led to a similar form of underdevelopment or dependency in that region. Underdevelopment and dependency in both regions are seen as a result of the collapse of economic, and primarily resource extraction, booms.Key words:n orthern development, underdevelopment, dependency, André Gunder Frank, colonialism, fur trade, Klondike gold rush, natural resources, politics