Alaskan prospects: Using the mining prospector image in early twentieth-century

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ALASKAN PROSPECTS; USING THE MINING PROSPECTOR IMAGE IN EARLY

TWENTIETH-CENTURY ALASKA

by

Christina Rabe Seger

A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the

DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

In the Graduate College

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

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THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA ® GRADUATE COLLEGE

As members of the Final Examination Committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by Christina Rabe Seger entitled Alaskan Prospects: Using the Mining Prospector Image In Early Twentieth-Century Alaska

and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree.of Doctor of Philosophy (d/o} Douglas >{(. Heiner ^ 7

Kflthen'np G. Mcirri<;<;pv 7 Date

Sarah Deuts Da

Date

Date

Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copy of the dissertation to the Graduate College.

I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.

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STATEMENT BY AUTHOR

This dissertatioa has been submitted in partial fulfillment of requirements for an advanced degree at The University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library.

Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that accurate acknowledgment of source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his of her judgement the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author.

SIGNED: U 4

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Conversations witii historians Terrence Cole, John Findlay, Claus-M. Naske, Richard Francaviglia, Otis Young, Jr., Hermann Rebel, Kathryn Morse, Sally J. Southwick, as well as my committee chair Doug Weiner, helped me to narrow down my large research field. So too did my fascination with "living" prospeaors in southern Arizona, and trips out to mining areas in both Arizona and Alaska. On my research trips. Anchorage residents Robert King, of the Bureau of Land Management, and Frank Norris, of the National Park Service, were helpful and fiiendly. Bruce Parham of the National Archives, Alaska region, provided important guidance. Susan Grigg of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, was very accommodating to out-of-town researchers. David Neufeld of Parks Canada, Whitehorse, Yukon, was a wonderful host and tour guide. Kim Dormady of Yukon College was the perfect dormitory manager, providing warm conversations and needed items like tea cups, leftovers, and local advice. Thanks also to the friendly assistance of the staflF members of the Yukon Archives, Anchorage Mum'cipal Library, University of Alaska-Anchorage and Fairbanks, University of Washington, Seattle Public Library, and the Minnesota Historical Society and the James J. Hill Library in St. Paul, Minnesota.

My dissertation committee provided me with a balance of critique and support. Sarah Deutsch had a perceptible eye for what did not fit into my story. Katherine Morrissey was indispensable, practical, and wise. Douglas Weiner's enthusiasm for the "chase" and his intellectual curiosity kept me motivated. Through him, this dissertation was not a task, but rather an exciting intellectual challenge. Cathy Wideman, Sherri Goldstein Cash, Renee Obrecht-Como, and Kevin Britz all encouraged me along the way. Cathy's additional support at the very end was much appreciated. Anne Brown Tantalo knew when to begin referring to my dissertation as "the project that shall not be named." She remained ever- cheerful even when I could barely sound enthusiastic. Victor Tantalo provided additional good cheer. Without Paul Seger's cooking abilities I would be an emaciated waif, without Us formatting skills I would still be in fi-ont of the computer, attempting to get the endnote margins to behave. I appreciate all his great efiforts. Special thanks go to Sally Southwick. Her support was, in a word, phenomenal. I am eternally gratefiil to her encouragement and her unrelenting faith in my abilities. Finally, this dissertation is for my parents. My mother never cared to have college credits interfere with her own intellectual pursuits, but her enthusiasm for ideas and for learning about all subjects on the planet influenced me greatly. Up to his final days, my father provided unconditional support and love. Neither of them got to see this final product, but their spirits and love are alive and strong on every page of this work. 5

TABLE OF CONTENTS

UST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 6

ABSTRACT 7

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: THE PROSPECTOR IMAGES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY 8

CHAPTER 2 PROSPECTING THE PROSPECTOR EFFORTS OF THE MINING INDUSTRY, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND ALASKAN PROMOTERS TO USE THE MINERAL SEEKER FOR ALASKAN DEVELOPMENT 81

CHAPTERS LIMITED PROSPECTS: THE LIFE OF THE ALASKAN MINERAL SEEKER 132

CHAPTER 4 FUELED PROSPECTS: THE ECONOMIC USES OF PROSPECTOR IMAGERY IN THE ALASKAN COAL LANDS DISPUTE 176

CHAPTERS THE WANDERING PROSPECTOR: THE ARCTIC BROTHERHOOD AND THE POLITICAL USES OF THE MINERAL SEEKER IMAGE 249

CHAPTER 6 CONCLUSION: ALASKA PROSPECTS 329

WORKS CITED 365 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE I, Map of Alaska 7

ABSTRACT

In the first two decades of twentieth-century Alaska, various groups portrayed the mining prospector as a central Alaskan figure despite the fact that the actual prospector was neither the image maker nor always part of the desired end. Political and economic interests and policies were promoted aggressively by rhetorical arguments; in Alaska,

these arguments used the ideals found in the nineteenth-century prospector image as an

ideological cover and a material means for early twentieth-century economic and political

goals of industrial growth and regional development. The prospector was one of the most

complex of Western characters, a prototype that was a product of American cultural,

economic, legal and political ideals and notions about the individual and individualism.

The mining industry, federal agencies overseeing Alaskan mining, and Alaskan

promoters all used prospector images to entice mineral seekers to Alaska, but they also

worked to direct prospectors in material ways to ultimately aid their own industrial-based

goals of Alaskan growth and settlement. Actual Alaskan prospectors could not fully live

up to their images. They faced many challenges in Alaska, but were able, through hard

efifort, to achieve a limited self-sufSciency. Prospector images were also at center-stage of

ideological and rhetorical debates to determine land use policy of Alaskan coal lands,

despite the simple fact that actual mineral seekers had little to do with coal mining

development. Prospector images also carried political meanings in the struggle for Alaskan

home rule. Using this fluid iconic figure did have material consequences, although in the

end the political economy had greater influence in Alaskan development. s

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION: THE PROSPECTOR IMAGES IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Introduction

In June of 1910, Alaskan congressional delegate James Wickersham used images of the Western prospector to argue for Alaskan home rule on the floors of the U.S.

Congress. He portrayed the Alaskan citizen as an honest mineral seeker, a resolute figure who deserved self-government, "With his pack on his back," Wickersham sentimentalized, the mineral seeker "trudges into the wilderness, bravely facing the rigors of the climate, the dangers of mountain and stream, and the hardships of a lonely life, ever seeking that golden store which will enable him to bring the far-away family to the land of his labors and success, which then becomes his haven of rest-his home." In the same year, E. S.

Harrison, the editor of the Alaska-Yukon Magazine, reasoned that the federal withdrawal of Alaskan coal lands from public use in 1906 had made it "so that the industrious prospector with a pack on his back may find a fortune in coal and not be able to profit by his discovery to the extent of a potfiil of beans." Alaskan coal, Harrison concluded, should be developed "in a way that will not prevent individual initiative." Despite the persuasive arguments of these two men, mineral seekers were not the only residents of Alaska, nor did they predominate in coal mining. Why, then, were they portrayed as the central

Alaskan figure in the early twentieth century?'

Political and economic interests and policies do not prevail without powerfiil 9 arguments; and often discussions are promoted aggressively by clever rhetoric. Such was the case in early twentieth-century Alaska. Central to these Alaskan arguments and debates was the rhetorical invocation of the prospector. This dissertation concentrates on the first two decades of twentieth-century Alaska, as a case study to examine how and why prospector images were maintained in one particular Western location, and by whom.

Alaskan historian Stephen Haycox writes of a need for scholars to examine the ways in which humans have defined Alaska. He suggests that "the people of a region are defined less by the place itself than how they approached and used it." My work examines the

ways in which various groups have associated Alaskan issues with one of the most

enduring icons connected to the northern landscape.'

Alaska is an ideal setting for such a case study as it was central to political and

economic contests and visions in the early twentieth century. There were important

struggles among different political and economic actors on federal, state, and local levels.

Along with the battle for Alaskan home rule and the disputes over conservation and

Alaskan coal lands, there were contests over economic growth and development among

the federal government, the mining industry, and Alaskan promoters. Like other grand

contests, these struggles were marked by contrasting arguments as to whose vision would

bring the most benefit to Alaska and to the larger American community. In each argument

mineral seekers played a central ideological role and, to a certain extent, a material role.

The idealized individual prospector became an ideological cover and a material means for

early twentieth-century economic and political goals of industrial growth and regional 10 development. Those who promoted growth sold and deployed the prospector as an ideal did so with the expectation that the invocation of the prospector would get the desired results of Alaskan development. This study is, in part, an examination of the rules of public argument and the ways in which sometimes controlling and predatory designs are masked by appealing images.

This dissertation also examines the relationship between the physical and perceptual realms. Western scholar Patricia Nelson Limerick has written of the need for historians to connect words and images with Western places, and this study addresses such a concern.

How are images played out in real Western settings? Does imagery have material consequences? At the same time, it is important to provide a material context to the perceptual mining landscape. How did images and perceptions differ from the actual experiences of those who made up the ideal? What was early twentieth-century life like for the actual prospector?^

The prospector images did not come solely out of the twentieth century, nor solely

&om the IClondike of 1897-98. Marshall Sahlins has written that there is no such thing as an "immaculate perception." What predominates in all change is the persistence of the old substance, and any discourse "mvolves an appropriation of events in the terms of a priori concepts." Alaskan image makers made references back to nineteenth-centiuy ideals of the prospector. Alaskan images of the mineral seeker were a product of a larger and convoluted evolution.^

As nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir observed in the 1890s about the mineral 11 seekers living in a former mining town of Murphy's Camp, deep in the Sierras, it was "interesting to note the extremes possible in one and the same character; harshness and gentleness, manliness and childishness, apathy and fierce endeavor." The prospector was one of the most complex of Western characters. By the late nineteenth century, the prospector had a recognizable image and a set of unchanging, universal qualities; a bearded, SCTaggly-haired man, carrying his essential tools of a shovel, pick and gold pan.

He was a stalwart figure with a pack on his back, trudging through the wilds; or he was bent down before a stream, with gold pan in hand. He treasured, even more than gold or silver, his independence, fi-eedom, and own strengths and skills. Yet those expressions associated with the mineral seeker-such as the honest miner, the practical miner, the gold rusher, the patient and enduring prospector— embodied varying ideals. Much like allegory, this image could function on many levels simultaneously.^

The mineral seeker had become an important figure by the mid-to-late nineteenth century. This figure evolved into a composite of both actual characteristics of those searching for minerals and a variety of shifting qualities that held importance for different groups and individuals. The prospector as a prototype was a product of American cultural,

economic, legal and political ideals and notions about the individual and individualism.

Scholar Steven Lukes writes that individualism expressed the "operative ideals of nineteenth-and early twentieth-century America...the actual or imminent realization of the final stage of human progress in a spontaneously cohesive society of equal individual

rights, limited government, laissez faire, natural justice and equal opportunity, and individual freedom, moral development and dignity." In mining regions, the prospector represented these ideals of the individual. Most mineral seekers never became entirely independent, nor economically successful; these facts, however, never stopped potent ideals from continuing to prevail throughout the nineteenth century and into early twentieth century Alaska.®

Eariy Nineteenth Century

In the early nineteenth century, the prospector developed as a distinct social type.

Early American mineral rushes, for example in North Carolina, reflected the growth of mineral seekers into full time professionals, and increasingly prospecting was viewed as an independent vocation. With this development of a social type came an early example of using the mineral seeker as a rhetorical means to pursue the political and economic interests of mining concerns. Not everyone backed early nineteenth-century mining or linked the mineral seeker with citizenry. Although the yeoman farmer became a powerful and persuasive image of nineteenth century democratic citizenship, its counterpart, the honest miner, was the ideological strand that survived into early twentieth century Alaska.

One of the earliest conceptions of America, and a hopeful vision of hidden wealth that would persevere into the twentieth century, was that of El Dorado. The desire to

"get rich quickly" characterized the sentiments of the first English settlers, and English explorers, like the Spanish, hoped to find vast amounts of gold or silver. Captain John

Smith, for example, commented that there was "no talke, no hope, nor worke, but dig gold, wash gold, refine gold, load gold."^ 13

Early nineteenth-century mineral rushes confirmed the notion that mining was a

particularly quick way to gain wealth and economic success, and complemented emerging

American values of fi'eedom, opportunity, and happiness. The acting Missouri governor, referring to lead mining, said a century later; "few labors or pursuits in the United States, yield such ample, such vast returns." Other observers linked mineral rushes with American desires for social mobility and economic independence. Even the popular reaction to these

events was to recreate the glorious adventures of El Dorado. Henry Rowe Schoolcraft,

reporting in 1819 on a trip through the Missouri Territory, realized that lead prospectors

and independent miners suffered from "rage for adventures" in the vein of Pizarro, Cortez

and others. An "alluring hope" and "constant itch for discovery" made men lazy because

they spent "most time hunting for ore," and the "least in digging it." There remained "a

greater disposition to trust to luck and chance, and stumble upon ore, than by attending to

mineral character." The treasure-seeker became the mineral rusher. In 1828, the Southern

Gold Rush attracted 5,000 gold seekers to North Carolina, and by 1830, there were over

20,000 in the Southern gold fields, which included both Carolinas and . This rush

attracted people from all classes hoping to gain easy wealth and increased status, and

reinforced the egalitarian and optimistic notions of Jacksonian democracy.^

Unlike the independent miners, those early Americans working to establish settlement

and industry associated minerals with more organized economic development. Mining was

tied into immigration and regional settlement, and the prospector was germane to mineral

development. In an 1821 Philadelphia-published work on the importance of developing 14 mining skills in the United States, Considerations Upon the Art of Mining, William

Hypolitus Keating argued that metals created both progress and settlement. He wrote that the first development toward civilization came with the working of metals, and, without metals, a nation would remain a "wild and blank state." Not only did mines keep a nation independent fi-om "foreign countries," but "nothing tends more to increase the population of a country than the working of mines." For these reasons, mining was encouraged by early American governments and authorities. As just one of many colom'al laws to attract mineral discoveries, a 1651 Act of the Assembly of Connecticut promised rewards to the discoverer of mines and metals. In the 1820s, in referring to the Galena lead deposits in the Upper region of Wisconsin and Illinois, one governmental official called the common miner of the workings the "bore and sinews" of the mining region.'

Early Americans not only viewed prospecting as a particular vocation, but increasingly viewed the prospector as a distinctive social type. A 1826 North Carolina account reported that mineral seekers were divided into "full-time professionals and a larger group of seasonal farmers." In referring generally to those working mineral deposits, mining engineer Denison Olmsted wrote in 1825 that the "goldhunter" was "one of the order of people, that begin already to be accounted a distinct race."'°

These early mineral seekers, however, were not completely independent, particularly in regard to mineral property ownership. Similar to the national governments of , colonial American governments retained all mineral rights. Mining was also viewed as a way to pay oflf the war debt from the American Revolution. The Land Ordinance of 1785 15 reserved "one-third of all gold, silver, lead, and copper taken from the public lands" for the federal government. The 1803 Louisiana Purchase increased the American domain.

The national government held on to the premise that public lands belonged to the government, but new public territory as well as copper discoveries in the Lake Superior region led the national government to experiment with leasing. In 1807, Congress approved a leasing act, based on Germanic law from the Middle Ages, in which individuals could lease mining lands from the government. The first leases were not granted until

1822, but after this point leasing expanded quickly."

From a national security view, minerals like lead and iron were crucial to national defense and independence. In the early 1820s, a worry that valuable mineral lands would end up in the hands of a few individuals prompted the U. S. government to limit the size of mining leases in Missouri. Despite the law, lead was so profitable that Missouri farmers

trespassed onto the government property. On 3,300 acres the federal government had collected "almost no rent." Authorities began to enforce the law, and by 1826 had

coUected $21,653.'-

Not only farmers were looking for individual opportunities; so were those with larger

capital. In reaction to increased governmental control, two politically powerfiil Missouri

lead-mining families (named Chouteau and Gratiot) used the political influence of their

acquaintance, Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton. Upon taking office in 1821, one of

Benton's objectives was to give control of the Missouri lead deposits to private

individuals." The opportunistic, manipulative invocation of the individual mineral seeker did not begin with great struggles over the future of Alaska to promote industrial mining. Senator

Benton is an early example of a politician who used the individual miner as a rhetorical means to pursue the goals of mining companies. Benton employed the ideal as the basis of his argument to end leasing in Mssouri. He connected individual property rights with individual opportunity and national expansion. Leasing was an obstacle to settling new regions in the West. '"God placed lead...in Missouri for the use of the people who go there to live,'" he argued. Moreover, leasing was counter to American values of individual freedom. The framers of the Constitution did not intend to create a class of tenant landholders, but rather a class of citizen landowners. "'The monarchies of Europe have their serfs and vassals,'" he explained, '"but the genius of the Repubh'c disclaims the tenure and spirit of vassalage, and calls for freemen, owners of the soil, masters of their own castles.'" Benton was successful. On March 2, 1829, Congress authorized the president to sell the Missouri lead mines, while leasing elsewhere continued. Those who benefitted from the change, however, were those with capital and capabilities to develop the mines.

They were not the individuals depicted in the rhetorical arguments."

Leasing was not successful for the federal government. An insufBcient number of government agents could not contain widespread fraud and speculation. Miners re&sed to cooperate, and admim'stration costs exceeded incoming leasing revenues. Lead prices dropped in the financially turbulent 1830s, providing the federal government with even less revenue from mining. In addition, the federal government was slow to classify public 17 lands and much of the mineral land turned into private property before the government instituted leasing. In his Congressional message on December 2, 1845, President James

Polk recommended an end to leasing. He reasoned that selling off the lands would give the federal government more revenue than leasing had. In response. Congress passed acts on

July 11, 1846, and March 3,1847, opening the mineral lands of the Great Lakes region

and the Mississippi for sale. In 1846, lands containing lead in Illinois, Wisconsin,

Michigan, and Arkansas were put up for sale, followed in 1847 by copper and lead mines

in the Wisconsin and Michigan Great Lakes region. In early twentieth-century Alaska,

leasing would appear again. Rather than a source of income for the federal government,

however, leasing would fall under the guise of conservation. Opponents to Alaskan coal

lands leasing, however, would employ very similar rhetorical arguments as Benton, with

the individual mineral seeker at the forefront.'^

Not everyone in early America viewed mining in a positive light. Critics believed that

obtaining wealth in such a quick manner threatened not only orderly settlement but

American democracy. These critics saw the free will of humans in this uncontrolled

environment leading to societal disorder, especially sinful and lawless behavior like

drinking, prostitution, gambling, and violence. Proof of munoral activities existed among

adventurers and gold hunters. Typical of such a reaction to mining was an 1844 account of

the South and North Carolina gold rushes, that concluded that "for some time a more

abandoned, profligate horde could not have been collected," some "without right or law."

Humans behaved in selfish and individualistic ways when they were in possession of 18 valuable minerals. In short, miners did not make good citizens.^^

Fears also surrounded the notion of obtaining wealth through little or no work. The most honest relationship with nature was working hard with one's own physical labor.

Those who attacked mining looked down upon those who obtained wealth through very little labor or through the hard work of others as "dishonest" wealth. These critics included those who adhered to older classic republican or communitarian values. These groups were wary of the individual pursuit of material gain and wealth. Mining critics especially targeted speculative investments as proof of mining evils. Their fears did have basis in fact. Because extensive ore processing requu'ed much initial capital, and because of minerals' potential high earnings, mining regions attraaed heavy speculative activity.

Such was the case in Georgia, where speculative ventures contributed to the decline of mining activity in the area."

These critics contrasted prospecting with what was deemed a more orderly and careful approach to using nature, agriculture. In his study on early American mining perceptions, Joseph M. Thomas explains that mining activities did not fit in with the

American ideal of many early American leaders of the religious "errand" and a Utopian individualistic and agrarian economy. Small farms led to a settled citizenship while early critics described mining as having "peculiar soil" that they viewed as both "noxious and barren." As a result, Puritans and then republicans used farming as the "redemptive role" while they "demonized mining.""

By the early nineteenth century, then, the predominant American Utopian community 19 was the "Garden of the World," and the ideal citizen, the yeoman farmer. Harking back to the model of the Roman Republic, this pastoral Utopia contained self-sufl5cient farmers as virtuous citizens holding onto American values such as industry, and frugality, all the while valuing the greater public good over their own interests. This agrarian Utopia served in part as a way to withdraw from the increasingly complex urban and industrialized worid, creating, as Henry Nash Smith sums it, "group memories of an earlier, simpler, happier, state of society," representing the "real genuine America."

Citizens could live honestly and avoid social problems, including social stratification. This social ideal shaped the Republican Party and served as the ideological underpinnings of the

1862 Homestead Act."

But the mining world was creating its own ideal of an honest and legitimate relationship to nature. Similar to the way in which the yeoman made up the basis for the

"myth of the garden," a "particular set of circumstances" fostered the emergence of the prospector as a clear national "type," albeit one flexible to a variety of ideals. As the mineral seeker moved west, he became the honest miner. The , beginning in 1848, provided the opportunity to define and perpetuate notions about the mineral seeker. As historian Ralph Mann argues, this archetype was not "an authentic reaction to California," but rather "a projection of American hopes for the West."

National expansion, economic and political ideals, racial superiority, and masculinity all became components of the American prospector. Republican idealists created the honest miner in part out of a republican concern over the morality of seeking minerals strictly for 20 wealth and individual gain, and in part out of projected political desires for the ideal republican citizen in the West. The prospector as an honest miner became an embodiment of individual economic enterprise and a self-governing and virtuous citizenry. He became the mining counterpart to the yeoman farmer.^

In mining, negative aspects of wealth could be tempered by honest labor and virtuous actions in nature, and honorable behavior including strength and honesty would be divinely rewarded. Proponents of mining distinguished between the haphazard treasure seekers, with the slow accrual of wealth through hard work. William Hypolitus Keating wrote that those who condemned mining "have often mistaken the greedy speculations of the first adventurers in South America, and the visionary plans of the settlers in the country so pompously styled "El Dorado,' for the steady, persevering, and arduous labour of the true miner." In an 1844 account of the Georgia gold rush, Thomas denser wrote with great optimism that "few of those who have persevered with intelligence, industry, and economy, have failed to inaease their property, whilst some have realized largely."^'

The L840s-l8S0s

The California Gold Rush was an important event in the aeation and maintenance of prospector images and ideals. This mineral rush set up portrayals of the prospector that would later influence its usage in early twentieth-century Alaska. Evocations of the

California Gold Rush "49ers" defined the prospector as both an economic individual and a political individual. They also afiSrmed the Euro-American masculine proprietorship of the prospector identity. Such an archetype would also predominate in Alaska. 21

In the 1840s, the ideal of the yeoman pastoral paradise was akeady not living up to the material realities of a growing numbers of farmers. Agricultural work was difBcult; a farmer was responsible for maintaining an average of 80-160 acres of crops, only to earn a few hundred dollars annually. The 1848 California Gold Rush served as an alternative to declining opportunities in agriculture. As Daniel Comford suggests, this mineral rush was hardly an aberration in American society, but contained opportunities approved by the greater society and culture. For those disappointed with the reality of living the yeoman dream, the California Gold Rush offered, as Malcokn Rohrbough explains, "a modest freehold estate chance that the nation was supposed to represent." A farmer could use his draft animals and a wagon to travel to mining country. After arrival, the common agricultural tools~a pick, pan, and a shovel-could get the placer miner started in digging and sifting gold-rich gravel in the California water beds.~

Other sectors of America were also not living up to expectations of freedom, opportunity, equality, material comfort and a life of happiness and ease. Many Americans migrated to the Caliform'a Gold Rush and later mineral rushes out of dissatisfaction with the increasingly industrialized and urbanized East. Rohrbough notes that California journals and diaries did "not speak of hope and expectations in the new world as much as the bitterness toward the old." A large percentage of gold rushers were faced with dependency on wage work, inaeased debt, and little hope for job mobility. The middle class also suffered restricted economic and social mobility, with the worry of continuing old world stratification. What most Americans wanted was a fresh start to "labor on equal 22 footing without regard to family name and educational advantage, where you could make a substantial sum."^

The honest miner became the republican yeoman counterpart of the mining regions and the mythical Golden Age, the counterpart to the imagined Garden. The Golden Age harked back to a classless and propertyless Utopia of innocent freedom and happiness.

Nature's fecundity created social perfection where everyone was equally rich. Even journalist Horace Greeley, one of the most vocal supporters of the Homestead Act, approved of the California mineral rush. "We are on the brink of an Age of Gold," he wrote, and urged young men to hurry west; "the perilous stuff lies loose upon the surface of the ground." Greeley promised that "the only maclmery necessary in the new Gold mines of California is a stout pair of arms, a shovel, and a tin pan," but "even with a shingle" one could make $50-60 per day. He also estimated that the following four years would bring at "least $100,000 million to the general aggregate of gold in circulation.""*

Although the ideal looked back to a mythical time, it expressed contemporary concerns. Projected onto this republican archetype of the honest miner were political

notions about the qualities of the desired citizen for future communities in an expanding

nation. Nineteenth-century republican ideals contained the belief that western expansion

made up part of the "natural" formula for progress. For supporters of mineral

development, raw materials like eastern iron and western gold served as the "foundation"

of progress. In his annual presidential address of 1848, President James Polk spoke of

California's "vast importance and commercial advantages." A rapidly growing economy 23 and a large public domain rich in natural resources shaped a republican "philosophy of individual success." In a land of opportunity, an individual who worked hard could "tap these opportunities" and become rich. The individual became the embodiment of progress, and the individual pursued goals that benefitted the entire country.^

California Gold Rush participants held certain ideah'stic assumptions. As Donald

Pisani persuasively argues, they "carried with them strong ideas about the nature of property, the right of American citizens beyond the pale of law to govern themselves, and the power of American citizens to make their own rules concemuig the acquisition and use of public lands." Individual property rights were especially crucial. In the late seventeenth century, John Locke and others had "freed property from class and state, making it the bedrock of individual freedom and autonomy." The right to purchase property, especially federal government land, and priority rights were long-standing customs of frontier regions. Those who had trespassed on lead-leasing lands shared these assumptions. Prior to the California Gold Rush, Americans squatting on government land established "claims' associations," with their own constitutions and governing councils. These organizations believed that the purpose of the public domain was to foster individual opportunities, rather than finance the central government. Euro-Americans moved onto California soil with the same notions. Through their actions, the Caliform'a mineral rush established an important precedent: that "mining on the public domain would be open to all." Mineral seeking became fiised with individual rights as well as individual opportunities in a new place. These were important notions of economic individualism that certain individuals 24 would use later in Alaska to defend their own right to the public domain.*^

The mineral seeker, as an honest miner, represented an economic individual. In the ideal of Adam Smith, free initiative and free enterprise operated in a political economy where the individual sought his own interests, but for the ultimate welfare of all, especially if "left to unfold without governmental intervention." As scholar Stephen Lukes explains economic individualism was "both an economic theory and a normative doctrine, asserting...that a spontaneous economic system, based on private property, the market, the freedom of production, contract and exchange, and on the unfettered self-interest of individuals, tends to be more or less self-adjusting." As historian David Goodman relates, contemporaries understood gold rushes "as dramatizations and exaggerations of the social theory that the individual pursuit of wealth was the best possible basis for a social order.

The prospector also came to have a repubh'can political identity, as a political individual. Just as important as the economic individual, Alaskans who supported home rule in the early twentieth century employed the identity of the political individual established during the mid-nineteenth century. Central to nineteenth-century individuality was an individual's right to self-government. Setf-su£5ciency and self-government went hand-in-hand. The basis of the political economy was federal government non­ interference, which meant both free trade and self-government. The self-seeking individual constituted a governable society. Lukes defines political individualism as the belief that the citizens were "the best judges of their own interests," which was "based on the

[individually given] consent of its citizens...its authority or legitimacy deriving from that 25 consent.""*

California mining camps were proof of an American predilection for self-government.

But for many miners, as Donald Pisani explains, their self-instituted mining camp codes were more "concerned with the allocation of natural resources to individuals than with creating a moral society." Miners used a premise of English common law which specified that "universal custom had as much legal sanction as formal statutes." Local mining codes regulated claim sizes, as well as filing and property marking procedures. California mineral seekers in the 1850s were the "true subjects of the new liberal ideologies.^

Not only did the honest miner project republican virtues, he was an embodiment of middle-class manhood in society, a particular type of manhood that was equated with the strength and development of a vibrant new settlement. The republican honest miner combined the conflicting ideals of laissez-faire individualism and virtuous behavior by blending two kinds of nineteenth-century manhood. On one hand, he was the "masculine achiever," an aggressive, hard-working self-achiever, on the other hand, he behaved as the

"Christian gentleman," a man with a benevolent and compassionate character. A typical example of this combination seen in mining camp narratives was the story of prospectors striking it rich to support a loved one left behind. Samuel Bowles, in his 1869 account, wrote of luclqr miners returning back to the "fading eyes of fathers and mothers" and

"patient and sad waiting girls."^°

An encounter with nature also fiilfilled a masculine need for fi'eedom fi'om societal restrictions. For many male participants, prospecting became synonymous with escapist 26 adventure. This desire to escape society was a notion connected to mineral rushes that would appear again during the . Mineral-seeking substituted for other heroic, masculine outlets lost in modem society, such as soldiering and hunting. Nature contained an ability to instill or rekindle true masculinity lost in modem society. Bayard

Taylor wrote in 1850 that "a man, on coming to California, could no more expect to retain his old nature unchanged." The "most immediate and striking change" was "reckless and daring spirit...nothing is more contagious than this spirit of daring and independent action."^^

Mineral hunting alleviated the boredom, routine, and conventions found in modem life. Miners in Califonua placer beds freed themselves from dull work routines found in both mral and urban areas. Such an experience was also an escape into comradeship of an all-male world, unhampered by females. Malcohn Rohrbough explains that, for some participants of the California Gold Rush, it was "the most significant adventure of their lives, a moment of camaraderie and companionship, of adventure and independence, before they returned to family, marriage, farm, trade, or commerce." Although Hinton

Helper criticized the feverous attitudes of California mineral seekers, he had no trouble fitting himself into an exaggerated masculine paradise; men wore their revolvers and bowie knifes night and day, and Helper bragged that he mined with "the snarls of grizzly bears to lull me to sleep at night, and the howls of hungry wolves to regale my ears at the break of day."^

The language that miners and contemporary authors used revealed that, behind the "honest miner," was a continuing hope that individuals would find great amounts of wealth with less labor. During the California Gold Rush, participants and observers used the language of the Utopian El Dorado. "Argonauts" went off to "the El Dorado of the old Spaniards," chasing "the dreams of Cortez and Pizarro." Other terms became part of everyday language and the "fi-eewheeling ebullience of gold rush life and speech": prospector, lucky strike, bonanza, panning out, staking a claim, diggings, pay dirt, nuggets, following a vein, and mother lode.^^

It was not a coincidence that the predominant image of the prospector in written and visual depictions became a Euro-American male. Although diverse racial, national and gender groups like the Chinese, Native Americans, Mexicans, and Anglo women took part in mineral seeking and small-scale mining, the more economically and politically-

predominant, white mining communities did not readily accept everyone into the more

mineral-rich areas. As with the establishment and settlement of agricultural regions, the expansion into the mineral West also implied a racially-based pattern of progress. The

Califorma Gold Rush was not only proof of "an inborn American penchant for self- government," but proof that Anglo-Americans "would, by Providential degree, spread

across the entire continent and perhaps beyond it." The personal narratives left by those

who sought gold were created largely by educated middle class men. Their journals and

letters rf^veal how the authors felt that "mining life placed Anglo-Saxons in a social

environment that tested racial preconceptions." As Joseph Warren Revere wrote in his

1849 account of the gold rush era California, that "perhaps a hundred years hence...the 28 poor Indians will then have passed away; the rancheros will have passed into the possession of the more enterprising race who are about to succeed them." "Free labor" did not apply to non-white groups. Reverend Walter Colton warned other Anglos not to

"drive out the Sonorans, because when gold fails and it needs capital and machinery, you want these "hardy men" to quarry the rocks and feed your stampers" and become the

"hewers of wood and drawers of water to American capital and enterprise." In 1850, the new California state legislature instituted a restrictive foreign miner's tax to protect Anglo dominance over the placer diggings.^

The predominant collective memory of the California Gold Rush and the prevailing

Euro-American male archetype centers, as historian Susan Johnson notes, in the gold-rich

Northern Mines (along the drainage of the lower Sacramento River) which contained a larger white population. The Southern Mines (farther south, along various water courses draining out of the San Joaquin River, and with a supply center in Stockton) supported less valuable mineral deposits and a larger foreign and native population.^^

Visual images of the prospector reflect these same archetypical patterns. The pictoral image of the prospector with the California Gold Rush was only slightly altered during the

BQondike Gold Rush and later in Alaska; its essentials had begun to emerge at the time of the Caliform'a Gold Rush. Manifesting the ideals of Euro-American superiority, masculinity, and the individual, the 1850s portraits were of lean and wiry men. 49er

Charles Nahl produced illustrations that, according to Moreland Stevens, "dominated practically all the periodicals and journals." Nahl "established the image of the '49er' and 29 the new California that became an integral part of the American Pantheon [and] helped

raise the miner to the status of an allegorical hero." One of his strongest themes was, as

Harvey Jones relates, "that God's bounty in nature will reward the efforts of hard work

shared among honest men." Charles Nahl's wood engravings accompanied one of the more

famous poems of the era, "The Idle and Industrious Miner." Published in Sacramento in

1854, the allegorical poem contrasted the different outcomes of vice and virtue; hard

work and perseverance brought success and virtues to a gold hunter. One typical image of

the mineral seeker in this series was a bearded and long-haired man, sitting next to a

stream. Dressed in a work shirt, tall boots and a hat, the miner's rolled up sleeves denoted

masculinity and productive work. He held a gold pan in one hand, and a small gold

nugget in his other hand. In the background were a handful of other miners hard at work

with picks and shovels at a small gold operation. Through hard work, the illustration

suggested, one would receive wealth. The smiling face on the man implied that gold

brought happiness.^

Both artists and contemporary observers depicted the independent miner. Along with

poets, song-writers, and photographers, they recorded, promoted, perpetuated and created

specific images. But they were also important image makers. Their ubiquitous images

became, as historian Martha Sandeweiss explains, "important bearers of social meaning."

The 49ers' poetry encompassed ideas of gold covering the ground, and easy to obtain

riches. Poems also carried other familiar messages. Participant Frank Soule wrote a poem

entitled "Labor" that was recited many times in ; it spoke of the necessity of 30 the frontier, and praised the value of hard work: "There is no deed of honest labor bom that is not Godlike." Visual and written images not only served as means to express those values and ideals associated with the mineral seeker, but photographs and illustrations helped to maintain the image through time. Having a visual prototype of the prospector served as a conduit for image and ideal transference onto later settings.^^

The Growth oflndustrial Mining and the Mining Law of 1872: The Legal

Individual

Any individualistic freedoms and opportunities for wealth were short-lived during the

California Gold Rush. Many prospectors returned home, or became wage workers in an increasingly industrialized mining West. In the context of industrial development, another important manifestation of the mineral seeker emerged: The legal individual. The prospector image influenced and shaped the discussion of the important 1872 Mining Law.

Senator WiUiam Morris Stewart employed the Western prospector as a means to create a set of laws that supported the legal individual when, in fact, the laws best accommodated the larger mining concerns. The individual, then, became a legal "corporate" individual, serving to argue for the individual rights of mine companies. The rhetorical usage of the individual as the basis of mining law and property rights was one of the more potent associations of the prospector with nineteenth-century ideals, and would be employed for economic purposes in early twentieth-century Alaska.

The prospector's Utopian images of the California Gold Rush contradicted the changing realities of nineteenth-centuiy mining in the 18S0s and 1860s. bi contrast to 31 what Patricia Nelson Limerick describes as the mineral seekers' "legendary association with hardy independence," for instance, prospectors were more often than not dependent upon others. They spent their time searching for or working mineral deposits, not providing for their own food or making their own needed material goods, like tools. They became just as much consumers of the larger market as other residents. In many cases, instead of buying their own food and supplies, commercial or industrial enterprises

"grubstaked" or fimded men to do the work of searching for the ore, for a percentage of a potential discovery.^'

This era of individual placer mines was short-lived, depending upon location. In other mining regions the placer phase of individual wealth was quickly replaced by intensive capital, with hierarchical power restored. In the end, a much older "belief in social stratification" overshadowed a republican ideal of a classless society. In American society, economic success equaled social importance, and equality did not mean the Golden Age notion of equal distribution of wealth, but rather "equality of opportunity," the idea that social mobility provided the means to leave the laboring class and become a capitalist.

Furthermore, democratic ideals and orderly settlements did not mix. Restored class distinctions, economic diversification, and families were all needed to create stability and organized growth. In 1850s California, many prospectors turned into wage workers.^'

Mining in much of the interior West differed firom that in the Califonua gold fields.

Silver and gold ore mining (where the mineral was embedded or mixed in hard rock, and underground) was in place in the West after I860. Mining areas like the 32

Comstock Lode needed more elaborate mining and processing methods than picks, shovels, gold pans, and other tools to work the hard rock mines. Compared to California, as Limerick writes, "the emergence of mining as an industrial, capital- intensive, wage-labor [both skilled and unskilled] employing endeavor" was more rapid in other areas.'"'

The high mineral production coming out of the in the 1860s attracted the attention of the federal government. Congress had been seeking ways to cover the expenses of the Civil War. Options included auctioning ofif mineral lands, placing a levy on mineral production, or taxing miners. Mine developers and mining capitalists worried that the federal government would dip into their promts. In California, as Donald Pisani explains, "friends of corporate mining feared that English and Scots investors would refuse to sink more money into the mines until Congress formally approved free mining." Thus, mine operators and capitalists worked to institute a national mining law that would protect their rights to property. Free mining meant free access to minerals on public land. The

1872 Mining Law became a "clear expression" of a laissez-faire policy toward western mining. The law supported free access and mineral development on federal lands by staking a claim, with an option to purchase the land at low prices in a fee-simple system.^'

The law defined the prospector as a legal individual, with individual rights to the public domain. The rhetoric employed in Congressional debates for the earlier mining law of 1866 and the prevailing law of 1872 was similar to Missouri Senator Benton's strategy for halting leasing in the 1820s. Although the "impetus for the act" came from the mining 33 industry, backers of a national mining law argued "that the act would benefit small miners and encourage the settlement of the West." The prospector seemed to be the central figure behind the implied intent of the laws, but the laws ultimately benefitted those with more capital. And, similar to the Missouri debates, the Congressional debates over a mining law had an outspoken rhetorician. One of the mining law's strongest supporters in the 1860s was Nevada Senator . Like Senator Benton, Stewart had a personal interest in the subject. As an attorney, he had represented large companies in

Nevada. Stewart was involved in Comstock mine and mill ownership in the early 1860s, and continued to hold interests while in Congress.^"

During the 1866 mining law debates Stewart best articulated his arguments. He

portrayed prospectors in terms of familiar social and economic ideals. The Nevada senator

placed prospectors at the center of the mining West, making it appear that they were the

dominating group in mineral-rich areas. Stewart described the prospeaors as a special

type, as a "race of men" who, with their "untiring energy, patient of toil, and hope in their

sanguine temperament" provided a "valuable service to the government by converting

unknown regions into rich gold fields." Their hard labor was "the real standard of value,"

and through their "honest toil" these men were "generous and loyal" to the nation, helping

to stimulate commerce and provide wealth to the benefit of all. The mineral seeker did not

lead a life of comfort. Stewart argued that the miner was, "and ever will remain, poor."

The senator justified this poverty by focusing on the prospector's strong virtues. "They

will remain poor in their honest toil," he declared, "because three-quarters of their labor is 34 exploration. They have no reward but hope, and endure hardship and privation; they are especially deprived of home and family.

Senator Stewart portrayed the prospector as a "natural" part of the political economy of the mining world. The individual mineral seeker was the basis of mining development, where the prospector's discovery would stimulate development and feed the mining industry. The fruits and returns of a discovery would then benefit all the people. "The sand plains, alkaline deserts and dreary mountains of rocks and sage brush of the great interior," he argued, "would have been as worthless to-day as when they were marked by geographers as the great American desert but for this system of free mining fostered by our neglect and matured and perfected by our generous inaction...What he now occupies he has discovered and added to the wealth of the nation." The struggling mineral seeker, therefore, needed the help of the federal government to pursue Individual opportunities freely. "The mineral lands must remain open and free to exploration and development,"

Stewart continued. "There is room enough for every prospector who wishes to try his luck in hunting for new mines for a thousand years of exploration, and yet there will be plenty of mines undiscovered. It would be a national calamity to adopt any system that would close that region to the prospector."^

As the yeoman farmer had become the ideal for the 1862 Homestead Act, with a

Utopia for American independence of a "fee-simple empire," the prospector became the basis of a national mining law. Similar to the yeoman farmer, an individual citizen of moderate means had the rights to own his own mining claim. These mining laws supported 35 the prospector by stipulating that a mining claim patent applicant pay a basic fee, and maintain a minimum amount of improvement per year. According to Stewart's logic, the laws would also help civic responsibility. Through private ownership of the soil, miners would become settled property owners. Quoting the English Jurist Sir William Blackstone,

Stewart stated that "'there is nothing which so generally strikes the imagination and engages the affections of mankind as the right of property; or that sole and despotic dominion which one man claims and exercises over the external things of the worid in the total exclusion of the right of any other individual in the universe.'" The senator emphasized that "the feeling of security and independence produced by the right of

property in the soil is the real foundation of our stability and prosperity as a people." "It is

my opinion," Stewart concluded, "this bill will furnish homes to thousands of families, give stability to mining titles, invite capital, and greatly increase the production of the precious

metals.""*'

The 1872 Mining Law ultimately aided the mining industry. Senator William Morris

Stewart's larger motivation was to protect the western mining corporations. In discussions over the specifics of both the 1866 and 1872 mining laws. Senator Stewart focused upon

hard-rock lode locations, rather than independent placer operations. Hard-rock mining

required more advanced technology than placer mining, thus favoring those with large

capital backing.^ Sections 3 and 4of the 1872 Act also benefitted larger mining

operations, stipulating the rules for possession of large valuable veins and lodes.^^

The 1872 NCning Law, then, had conflicting dimensions. As an ideal, it supported 36 reformist and political desires for democracy and economic opportunity; but as a mechanism, the law ultimately helped large industry and commerce. The 1872 Law reflected also, in the words of policy analysts Carl Mayer and George Riley, "an early symbiosis" between the federal government and industry, where "the government offered stability, unrestricted access, technical assistance, and, occasionally, direct subsidies, in exchange for an exiguous return and the promise of economic development." The prospector was, in effect, used in part to hide ulterior motives, arguing for an individual's rights to use resources in the public domain when, in fact, the "individual" was a larger mining enterprise. It seemed that, for the federal government and the mining industry, the individual did not serve as the cornerstone for national progress, but rather industry played this role.^*

American mining law differed from that of European and Latin American countries because it was based on the notion that "the unappropriated public domain...belongs to the people of the nation individually." Any citizen could "freely at any time, and to an unlimited extent, search for and appropriate any deposit that he may be the first to discover" then "work or to sell as he saw fit." The claim owner could "extract ore therefrom and convert the same into money free of all obligations to the authorities." At the same time, as mining engineer Theodore F. Van Wagenen observed in his 1918 book.

International Mining Law, the American prospeaor was not only "entirely a product of its peculiar civilization," but was also "the child and product of the Federal mining law."

He explained that the prospecting was largely a phenomenon of the American West 37 because mineral seekers thrived where the law protected them; thus prospeaors only existed in those parts of the nation containing public land, that "were under the provisions of the Federal mining law." The Mining Law of 1872 ended up legally reinforcing the prospector as a western archetype just as the mining industry was taking center stage. In a sense, then, it was American law that made the American prospector different from his foreign counterparts. Alaskans and others in the twentieth century would continue to use the same arguments of the individual rights of the American mineral seeker that Stewart used in defending the Mining Law.^'

1870s-1890s

Certain images of mining were sustained, as well as created, by the memories of the

California Gold Rush. Authors like Bret flarte and groups like self-proclaimed pioneers reenvisioned mining regions to entertain broader audiences or to create identities of self- importance. These narratives were also strong enough to influence early twentieth-century

Alaskans. Charles Shinn reinforced the image of the prospector as a self-directed masculine figure. At the same time, in the late nineteenth century mines became part of a mining corporate landscape, but new mineral rushes perpetuated the myth of class fluidity.

Miners saw themselves as part of a class fluidity, sustaining their hopes of self-suf5ciency and great wealth.

In late nineteenth-century America, just as the agrarian myth grew stronger as it became more fictional the myth of the lucky prospector continued to motivate people as the mining landscape became more corporate. Popular depictions of a simple and colorfiil 38 world of prospectors and placer mining also increased. By the 1870s the public perspective of the gold rush era changed from, as art historian Harvey Jones explains, an

"appreciation of the vicissitudes of daily life in a rough and tumble frontier" to "a feeling of nostalgia for the colorful events of the gold rush as recounted from the selective memories of surviving Argonauts or interpreted in writers of fiction." Memory enhanced and perpetuated ideals. California writers were the first to fix a sentimental image of

California in the public mind, a nostalgic and mythical look at a timeless pastoral Utopia of simplicity, when men were essentially good, but with enough heroic drama that they still retained masculine appeal. These popularized notions of mining would serve to perpetuate mim'ng rushes and mineral regions as places of quick fortunes and ample individual opportunities, keeping overall notions about mining on a simplistic level, rather than keeping up with the changing corporate and industrial mining landscape. Such simplistic images prevailed in early twentieth-century Alaska, obscuring the realities of industrial mining.^"

No one captured this mythical Utopia better than Bret Elarte. Wallace Stegner notes that Bret Harte had a "faculty for creating types that have become the stock in trade of the whole entertainment industry." But as Stegner elaborates, Harte's popularity "was always greatest in direct proportion to the reader's distance from and ignorance of the mines."

After Harte received the editorialship of the promotional Caliform'a publication. Overland

Monthly, publisher Anton Roman convinced Harte to create a new literary style "to sing the phrases of California's idyllic life loudly," in order to attract Eastern and \Cdwestem 39 families to the area. What would become Harte's trademark romantic genre was a fusion of literary styles and audience expectations. Overlands readership was an Eastern literate and civilized middle class."

On one hand, Harte continued the popular and more exciting portrayal of the treasure seeker version of mining, emphasizing lawlessness, rather than law, and gambling and quick fortunes, rather than the slowly gained wealth. Influenced in part by Charles Dickens and others, a Greek heroic tiudition, and a "more fashionably respectable sentimental perspective," Harte also added the values and morals of the middle class and created topical parables. He wrote of picturesque and rough characters, but with solid middle class virtues in their "hearts of gold." Harte's stories, such as "Luck of the Roaring Camp" and

"The Outcasts of Poker Flat," were parables to illustrate the ultimate good found inside the roughest exteriors. "Tennessee's Partner" was a western version of a tale of brotherly love."

This imagined and charming world of mining camps influenced other authors through the nineteenth century, such as Joaquin Miller, as well as the pens of historians. Harte became an important part of a trend, as Nicholas S. Wltschi explains, based on "not a material practice but a narrative of the past." After Harte, "popular writing about the mining industry [became] a matter of addressing not physical labor but history, a production of value that [was] textual rather than material."®

In this revisionist era, the prospector spurred yet another cluster of ideals. What

Patricia Nelson Limerick so aptly terms the "extraordinary alchemy of memory" motivated 40 returning gold rush participants to reconstruct their experiences from one of "sorrow and disillusionment" to the "glorious time they had had in the West." The pioneer was the heroic western entrepreneur, and a representation of laissez-faire. Older "49er" image- makers created a pioneer mineral seeker who held the individualistic characteristics of independence, self-reliance, self-determination, sturdiness, and ruggedness. This intrepid pioneer "blazed trails" for settlement to follow. The "trailblazer" faced an antagonistic nature head on, in a test of endurance and ultimate successful conquest. Those who underwent this process emerged transformed with special qualities that entitled them to special positions in the new community. Consistent with all manifestations of the mineral seeker, trailblazing prospectors also proved themselves to be true embodiments of manhood. Later Alaskan groups, like the fraternal organization of the Arctic Brotherhood, would uphold these same ideals, albeit in the updated vision of Teddy Roosevelt. In addition, ahnost all debates over Alaska issues would, at some point, include the image and ideal of the trailblazer.'^

Endurance associated with pioneering was an important test for manhood. Early

American pioneers carried socially-desirable Christian qualities like selflessness and integrity, but by the mid-nineteenth century as scholars J. A. Mangan and James Walvin explain, trailblazers manifested "Neo-Spartan virility, with emphasis on stoicism, hardiness, and endurance." Historian John Mack Faragher writes that pioneering helped to offset "a sense of decaying masculine potency" in the modem world, but also weeded out those undesirable attributes. Granville Stewart wrote of the process of elimination of 41 the weak from the strong in the California Gold Rush: "No finer specimens of mankind existed anywhere," but "only ambitious, courageous, determined men reached the land of gold"; the "faint hearted turned back," and the "puny and sickly ones" perished."

In a metaphorical sense, the pioneer prospectors also "tamed" the ideological landscape, from a wild and sublime landscape of endurance into a pastoral one of peaceful settlement. One can see this ideological transformation in the language of pioneering. In his 1891 tribute to the prospector, C. C. Goodwin wrote that this "brave, strong, generous race" of "Argonauts" "laid the wand of their power on the barbarism which met them; it melted away at their touch." They "blazed trails, smoothed paths, rifled the hills and ravines of their stores of gold, and poured it into nations lap." What had been rugged mountain terrain changed to smooth paths and blazed trails.^

Charles Howard Shinn's 1885 work. Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier

Government, "replaced" Bret Harte's archetypal figures with a heroic and masculine

Anglo-Saxon figure. Western scholar Rodman Paul writes that this book "fixed the mining camp in the thinking of everyone who had a serious interest in the history of the American

West." Shinn reinforced familiar notions of mineral seekers and wrote that, as a type of man, the mineral seeker held the same characteristics no matter where he ventured. In

Shinn's revisionist view, mining camps were self-governing societies of fiercely independent men, rather than peaceful communities of honest miners. The "Argonaut" was a heroic figure, "as real and strong a type in the story of America as the Viking or

Crusader in that of Europe." The Caliform'a mineral rush attracted 50,000 "of the 42 healthiest and energetic young men" who mined "abundant" gold under an "equality of ownership." All a miner needed was "a pan and pick" and then went "to work for himself."

They endured "great hardships, exposure, and often disease," and "miners as a class obtained only a moderate remuneration." Independence from wages was paramount to masculinity: "The weak men sank into laborers for the new companies, or became searchers for precarious finds in the gravel heaps of the past...the one resource of the strong was to find a new camp." "The terribly exacting mining-camp society," Shinn explained, "tested the pitiless and unerring tests each man's individual manhood," and the

"ablest and best men became become leaders.""

The most important trait of the Argonaut was his place "as an organizer of society."

Men who had "toiled, struggled, suffered, and 'stood by each other* in the mining-camps were leading spirits" of the California state constitution. Groups of "comparatively poor

men" in the mining camps stood by one another "in the same manly way." These men had

"sturdy self-reUance," with "power to stand alone," but "the power to organize, if need

be." For Shinn, these attributes were not only centered on masculinity, but race. He argued

that the mining era 'proved' that the "Germanic race" had a "hereditary fitness for self- government under exceptionally trying conditions." These men were also loyal American citizens. The laws miners made were "thoroughly consonant with the spirit of republican

institutions." The physical spread of the mining-camp influence" came "through wandering

prospectors and miners from deserted camps." Alaskans who supported home rule in the

early twenti^ century would repeat Shinn's ideals." 43

Even in the face of changing circumstances~the growth of technically-complex mining, and the realities of limited independent mining-the power of individual initiative and the hope of individual opportunity remained strong motivators for mineral seeking.

Despite the general evolution toward industrial mining, the possibility of attaining some economic success remained. And, miners viewed themselves as part of a myth of a broad class fluidity in the mining world. Before the last several decades of the nineteenth century, Euro-American class identities in mining regions remained relatively Ouid. One contemporary observer noted that mine owners were "not generally of this usual capitalistic type," but rather "were as much frontiersmen as the miners themselves, men who gained their wealth by successful prospecting, or by buying in the early days of the camp." But opportunities were limited, and outside of the industrialized mining towns, the language of mining obscured class distinctions. "Miner" remained a general term to describe everyone from prospectors, wage workers, and small claim's partners, small capitalists, to bonanza kings. In mining camps, a prevailing optimism along with a relatively high mobility rate also tended to make class lines dif5cult to define. Up until late nineteenth-century, mineral deposits were still relatively easy to locate from signs above the ground. Prospectors could also sell their claims to mine companies or mine capitalists.^'

The ideal of self-suf5ciency remained strong, and would motivate mineral seekers to

Alaska in the early twentieth century. The American notion of being able to start over was closely connected to continued western expansion. Individuals succeeded through their 44 own eflforts. Self-reliance was paramount. In Alaska in 1895, author Miner Wait Bruce explained that "those who have not had personal experience in placer mining cannot realize the fascination which is always with one engaged in this occupation. It is a healthful, hopeful, rugged and independent life." The "practical miner" retained components of an artisan republicanism, with independent craftsman who valued both economic independence and one's own labor. Prospecting contained all the components of an artisan craft, albeit a "portable" craft. Finding and working mineral ores was not merely labor, it involved skills acquu-ed through the practical means of observation and participation. Western historian Otis Young, Jr. writes that prospecting was an art

"learned by apprenticeship, discussion, and experience, but seldom from documents."^

Early California miners taught themselves in the fields of geology, mineralogy, engineering, and mechanics, then traveled to other mining regions, carrying their learned skills with them. Mineral seekers had to have an intimate understanding of the natural terrain. In the ISSOs, Alonzo Delano commented that "there are general principles which may be observed with advantage, such as the shape of hills, color of the soil, natural character of the rocks, depth and shape of the ravines." Over time expansionist Horace

Greeley toned down his enthusiasm for mining as a ready opportunity for all men; he realized that mineral seeking and mining were not easy, and required experience and knowledge, not just simple tools. Observing Colorado mining camps in 1859, he wrote that "gold is in these mountains, and the right men will gradually unearth it." And, similar to apprenticeship in other crafts, experienced prospeaors shared their skills with 45 greenhorns. Rodman Paul observes that in the nineteenth century it was the older and more experienced miners who found new mineral bearing regions and who carried the knowledge of prospecting with them and helped the mexperienced majority of rush participants to get started. In his 1868 account, James Chishokn wrote that the older prospector was "self-taught by experience and by reading" about "geology, mining, science," and is "glad to teach" the younger man.^'

To some extent, the more experienced mineral seekers learned to exist by their own abilities. Far more common were those adventurers who sought the ideal to the best extent that they could. From California, for example, James Heren sent instructions for his

Missouri friends that illustrate the self-reUant attitude of prospecting; he instructed them to "tie your blankets on your back," and attach other necessary items like a cradle, pick, shovel, pan, coffee pot, bread, pork, and a rifle. A typical day would consist of digging holes, testing for gold, then relaxing around a fire. After a good sleep, you "shake yourself and you are dressed." What Heren did not instruct his fiiends was where to find the next supplies of coffee, pork, and ammunition. This desire for self-sufl5ciency was also reflected in the proliferation of self-help mining manuals designed to teach the basic skills necessary to recognize minerals. James Orton compiled his 1872 work, Underground Treasures:

Haw and Where to Find Them, to "enable any one with average common sense to distinguish those (minerals) which are of value in the arts," including the "the landholder, the farmer, the mecham'c, the miner, the laborer, even the most unscientific." The desire for the ideal, like other American self-help movements, likely resulted in more publication 46 sales than it helped create, in this case, true self-su£5ciency.^

Throughout the nineteenth century images of easy wealth also prevailed, and prospecting continued to be associated by many hopeful men with mineral rushes. Some participants of the California Gold Rush sought out new strikes throughout the West, hoping to, as Malcolm Rohrbough puts it, "recapture the euphoria of 1849." Mineral seekers went to Pike's Peak area in Colorado in 1859. Around the same time was the discovery of valuable minerals of the Comstock Lode in Nevada. Other Colorado discoveries occurred in the 1860s and 1870s. Other rushes were in British Columbia

(1858), Idaho in the early 1860s, (1863), and the Black Hills (1875). Mineral seekers came into Alaska by way of mineral discoveries in British Columbia. The first placer was worked in 1869 at Windham Bay (around 70 miles south of Juneau). A few years before, quartz gold was found at Sitka.^

Early mining areas like those in Colorado attracted dispossessed eastern laborers and cast-ofifs fi'om other mining camps. One historian has called these areas a "poor man's paradise," places where the majority of these miners failed to reach their dreams of wealth. Those groups trying to attract prospectors to Alaska in the early twentieth century employed this image of a place of opportunities for poor men. After the Civil War, war veterans looked for new opportunities in new places, and one option in the West was prospecting and small-scale mining. They carried with them to the West an attitude about economic independence. As historian Michael Neuscatz writes about Colorado miners, "a gold miner never wanted to admit that he works for wages. For when he does, it is simply 47 to get the wherewithal for another grubstake so he can go on looking for the end of the rainbow." Independent miners rarely viewed themselves as entirely outside the economic system, however. They frequently equated their own work with wage-labor. In 1869, for mstance, Samuel Bowles mentioned that Colorado "gulch-mining or dirt washing" employed 300 men, who were averaging $12 per day in gold."

Risk-taking was a masculine characteristic renewed in the wilds, and defenders of the mining camp activities of gambling and drinking, such as G. Thomas Ingham, rationalized that the "wild life" and uncertainty of mining disposed miners toward gambling. Luck and chance were the domain of brave men. Even if a prospector did not succeed, he could take reftige in his own individual worth. For these men, the focus on endurance and patience was less a continuation of the middle class republican producer version of success than a way to explain societal failure to obtain wealth and happiness. Rohrbough notes that, "as opportunities in the gold fields gradually constricted, 49ers took refuge in their honesty and integrity, rather than their ores of gold." Effort, persistence, and hardship all counted as personal achievements in themselves. To persevere and endure also counted as manly behavior."

There was plenty of evidence of limited mineral supplies and the difficulties in gathering valuable minerals from surrounding ore, but the naive expectations of easily gathered gold refused to die. Part of these persistent notions came from regional and local promoters who were trying to attract population and business through golden visions, as historian Elliott West explains; "To pump traffic westward through their stores, hotels. 48 and liveries, Missouri Valley promoters also puffed up the land awaiting travelers at the far end of the trails. The Rockies were littered with fifty-dollar nuggets and dusted with

'the purest gold that has ever been discovered.'" The predominating belief was of nature's abundant treasures. Typical was Frank Fossett's view of 1880s Colorado, that "mountain

locked treasure vaults of gold and silver" contained "endless deposits of coal and many

valuable minerals." For many, the promise of riches for the easy taking was an irresistible

dream.®®

The treasure seeker looked to the future. In his I88S Colorado travel account, Ernest

IngersoU wrote that in "the hidden, or only partially exposed, treasures of the

veins...everybody looks forward [with] delicious uncertainty." The "immense moral

power" of such beliefs, as David Potter observes more generally about economic

abundance and the American character, shaped the nineteenth-century gold rushes

experience. The hope of stumbling upon riches and treasures, missed pockets of gold,

persisting tales of lost mines, the hope of individual opportunity in a new place, and new

mineral discoveries continued to propel prospectors through the nineteenth century.

Promises of a better world motivated miners to work in conditions they would have

refused before, such as panning gold for long hours in a cold stream.*"

Klondike Gold Rush

The way that individual participants reacted to the Klondike Gold Rush at the end of

the nineteenth century, as well as the printed materials associated with this event, reveal

the presence of preexisting and pervasive images and notions about prospectors and mineral seeking. Image makers and participants gave the prospector an active ideological role at center stage of this event, as a national figure. The existing strands of the prospector archetype represented the experiences people wanted to gain, or the image makers wanted to project, fi-om the Klondike mineral rush. This event was, in short, individualism writ large.

At the same time, the Klondike Gold Rush offered another chance to be an individual in an increasingly complex society that ran counter to the individual. In late nineteenth century, an acceleration of "productive" time associated with industry and a decreasing sense of space through urbanization made it more difficult, as historian Robert Wiebe relates, "to isolate the individual." A "previously distant world intruded upon community' life," and "it grew more difficult to untangle what an individual did and what was done to him." Scholar Kathryn Morse writes that in the Klondike the working class sought an

"escape fi'om industrial society" and "honest, independent, varied, self-reliant work-the kind of work unavailable at home." Middle-class participants viewed the North "more as an escape." These late nineteenth-century Argonauts, however, could not entirely escape their previous conditions. The Klondike Gold Rush importantly revealed the increasing complexity of the individual as part of an industrial-based society.^'

There was no single movement of gold rushers to the Klondike, but rather a series of rushes. The first one was in the fall and winter of 1896-97, and was spread by word of mouth to others akeady in the region. The second wave was in the late spring and summer of 1897. Out-bound ship passengers carried the news to the Pacific Coast. Travelers 50 announced "astounding results of as high as $80,000 per single claim" in Seattle and San

Francisco in July, 1897. By August, national magazines were reporting on the event.

100,000 gold rushers traveled to the Yukon between 1897 and 1898. Those who ventured into the Klondike region came &om around the world, but the majority were U.S. citizens,

followed by Canadians.®

The most expensive way to the Klondike was by water. One could take a steamship

from Seattle or San Francisco to Saint Michael, on the far western side of Alaska, then

take another steamer more than 1,000 miles up the long Yukon River, into Canada and

Dawson City, the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush. Another option was to take a steamer

to Skagway, Alaska, then walk over the White Pass to the headwaters of the Yukon River.

Pack horses could cany supplies up this trail. What became the most famous route,

however, was the Chilkoot Pass. Steamship passengers disembarked at Dyea (to the west

of Skagway), then traveled by foot or horse to Sheep Camp, at the base of the pass.

Travelers over the White or Chilkoot passes then had to build a boat, travel across lakes,

and down the Yukon River. The Canadian government made a requirement that each

traveler have a year's supply of food.™

Some Americans journeyed into the Yukon to flee conventional restraints from

society. In March, 1898, Lynn Smith commented on the cold mornings but warm days. "I

never felt better in my life," he reported. "I have come down to Skagway for a last look at

civilization, at least the last for some time." John Muir viewed the gold rush as an

invigorating outdoor journey that would provide masculine qualities, and transform a city 51 dweller into a man. In a "letter" published in the San Francisco Examiner in October

1897, Muir reported on his impressions. "Though perhaps not so very big a bag of gold as he hopes for may be gained," Muir wrote of the mineral seeker, but "a big trip must be gained and knowledge better than gold," for "out of many a shiftless dawdler the rough mines and rough trails will make a man." Joaquin Miller could not pass up a chance to visit the Klondike. He called the Klondike "the most democratic place today in the world"

(although he admitted that the "rich mine owners" lived in the best cabins). He found in the Yukon a transcendent and invigorating nature. Compared with the earlier Califorma mining camps, the Yukon was a healthful place to be. Miller perpetuated notions of the

North as a "remote world of almost eternal winter." But he wrote his account for entertainment, and he spent most of his article discussing the complexities of living in a small cabin, where it was "about as serious a thing to select a cabin mate" as it was "to get married outside [of the Yukon].""

Geographer John Jakle explains that certain "elements in a landscape stand out" to help "define distinctive places." These elements become "place cues" and subsequent visitors look for these features. Together these cues make up "what gets remembered about a place," and travelers attach meaning to these features. The journey from the ocean, up a pass (especially the Chilcoot), and over to the Yukon became a symbol of a man-in-motion, a wandering prospector seeking gold in a exciting journey of search and discovery. Narratives described the place cues: Sheep Camp; the snow stairs up to the summit of Chilcoot Pass, with the long line of climbers; the summit where travelers 52 reorganized their supplies; Lakes Bennett, Lindeman, and Labarge, and various rough waters along the Yukon River. Participants also used these place cues as a way to embellish personal adventures and, as George Lipsitz has observed in his studies of memory, as a means to "embrace 'true' h'es, credible falsehoods." Individuals could then locate their "'own private stories with a larger collective narrative,"' to authenticate their journeys as one just as adventurous and perilous as others had experienced.^

Minnesota resident Frederick George Hunt went to the Klondike with such an adventure in mind, and related his experience by tracing his travel by these place cues. His letters to his aunt and uncle remained uncharacteristically positive and suggested a man who wanted to prove his masculinity and skills of self-suf5ciency by the experience, as a test in nature. In 1898, he wrote about his "long journey full of adventure from start to finish," from Texas, into Mexico, Arizona, and up the Pacific Coast, and to Dyea, Alaska, via a steamship. He explained that "each man was thrown on his own resources." Sheep

Camp, he related, was a "wild chasm between two mountains." He encountered no problems climbing up Chilcoot Pass, and built his own boat with lumber he had carried with him from San Francisco. He took on a partner to help him navigate his boat and "we outsailed everything that we came across." Caught in a violent storm on Lake Labarge, "I ran up the sail and kept her square with the wild and you should have seen the sharp bow plow through those waves. I felt considerable scared but kept cool for it was not a time to get rattled." He boasted that he had the characteristics to stay in such a country. "Many, thousands are going home discounted but they are not the kind of men for this 53 country.""

The Klondike Gold Rush left the majority of its participants, however, without the promised wealth and self-su£Bciency, and with ample evidence that, once again, prospectors could not be independent. Historian Morse explains that miners discovered the labor involved in placer mining to be just as hard as industrial labor. Chance played a greater part in success than any amount of labor. By Spring, 1898, as Dianne Newell writes, the rush "reached flood proportions." By this time, "every available claim on the creeks had been staked and every available job was filled.""

One could see the realization of the material realities in the correspondence of some individuals. In June, 1898, mineral seeker Lynn Smith passed through Dawson, and continued down the Yukon River to Rampart, Alaska. He complained that "there is no doubt the country has been blown high. Everything so far has been staked, but we have hopes of finding claims soon or working some on shares." By the following January, however. Smith was discouraged. Writing from Rampart City to "Bro Arthur," Smith wrote, "have given up on the idea of 'mining' much myself for I have sense enough to know I can't keep my health and do it. And not for all the gold up here would I exchange...For I've had my lesson.""

Another Minnesotan, Alexander Whyte, had left his job working in the shops of the

Great Northern Railway with hopes of becoming financially independent in the Klondike

Gold Fields. He corresponded faithfiilly to his wife from February, 1898, to September,

1899. Upon arrival in the Yukon in November, 1898, Whyte wrote that "I have not been 54 able to pick up any nuggets yet and have found out that they are not to be picked up as easy as anyone would believe that reads the paper." He also made other observations.

"There is lots of sickness here now and there has been a good many deaths in the last few months." He mentioned typhoid fever and scurvy. Yet he remained resolute. The following

January he told his wife that "I would like to stay out here three or four months longer and see if I could not make anything." He rationalized that "we got here too late to do anything before and if I can't see anything ahead by that time I am willing to give it up and try something else for I don't want to get back in a railroad shop if I can help it."^®

It was a long winter for Whyte. He witnessed one depressed man who "looked all broke up and when I spoke to him he was near crying. I feel sorry for him even if he did rob me of my grub." He also commented on other mineral seekers out in the cold weather, where it had "been hard on some taking cold and then pneumonia. They don't last long out here. Some only live a day after being sick and some take the scurvy but that lasts longer and some get frozen." He managed to weather the cold and establish his own placer operation. He complained about how difficult the physical labor was to work his own operation, and how his work left him unable to cook. In June he wrote that "you have to keep the shovel a going all the time and then you don't get the right kind of food for [sic] to keep up your strength." By July he confessed that "I have learned a lesson and if I do come home poorer and maybe wiser, I will be a gainer in is my health [sic]." In the end, his recently widowed mother had to pay for his passage home. "I did not expect to come home this way," he wrote in his last letter in September, 1899, "but I guess I ought to be 55 thankful that 1 have good health for there is many a poor man that has lost all he had to come out a cripple for life." After returning to St. Paul, Whyte resumed his work for the railroad. Many of the Klondike participants ended up as wage workers in an industrial

mining landscape of the North. Or, like Alexander Whyte, they returned home to their former lives."

This last great mineral rush of the nineteenth century revealed how individuals could

not live independently but, as in previous decades of the nineteenth century, this fact made

little difference to the memories and other persistent images of the event. Positive ideals

persisted, with the individual as a central component. Lynn Smith understood the

persistence of popular notions about mineral rushes. After one half a year of trying his

hand at mining in the Rampart area, and learning his lesson, he explained that "of course

the Transportation Go's will bring lots of people in here next year just the same and

Rampart City will be boomed. Stories of those $100 or $150 nuggets will be sent all over

the country and people will come of course.""

More than other mineral rushes since the California Gold Rush, this event aSected the

larger nation. One reason this mineral rush gained such notoriety was that it was much

easier to produce and send images quickly. Before communication technology reached the

far North, information often took many months to travel in or out of the region. As

Dianne Newell notes, the "most conspicuous feature" of the fQondike rush was the "rapid

transmission of news stories made possible by press wire services and the Atlantic cable."

Information, once it got outside of the Yukon, "spread very quickly and widely." In 56 addition, the invention of the dry plate in photography allowed tor postponed development of exposed plates, and thus enabled photographs to be taken in inclement weather.

Photographers traveled to the Yukon over the Chilcoot Pass and other routes. Joan

Schwartz writes that the work of photographers helped "shape public imagination in part

because of reproducibility and availability." Professional photographers sold individual

images as well as sets. Stereoscope images were also a recent invention; held to the eyes,

the double images appeared three dimensional, increasing the sense of presence in the

landscape. Speakers included these views as part of their lantern slide presentations,

shown all over the nation. Photographs reinforced a moment in time as well as emphasized

ideals assodated with place cues. Impressions of a place became fixed in the collective

consciousness. Once fixed in the imagination, images served to maintain cultural values

and reinforce associated ideals each time one encountered the image.^

There were accounts in popular periodicals warning the public about the dangers of

travel or the unlikelihood of wealth. Novelist Hamlin Garland wrote an article for

McClure'sMagazine. As positive as the title seemed, "Ho, for the Klondike!," Garland

warned readers that the North was a "grim country, a country of extremes." "The man

who goes there [to the Yukon] to spend a year is likely to earn with the ache of his bones

and the blood of his heart every dollar he finds in gold. He should go like a man enlisting

for a war."*"

But romantic accounts far outnumbered warnings. Cautionary diatribes counter to

tales of great riches or great adventures simply did not sell. In "The Romance of the 57

Klondike," published in The Cosmopolitan, author Clarence Pullen wrote that there was

"no theme of drama or romance that appeals more fascinatingly to the average human mind than that of the adventurous search for gold." In an adventure story fashion, he equated the Klondike Gold Rush with Australia, California, and South Afiican mineral seeking, where "hunger, thirst, fatigue, are willingly endured, in the quest of modem

Argonauts." The Klondike was now waiting for "the treasure-seekers-a specter white and chilling-the Arctic cold, the frozen land of the Klondike.""

Individualism became the basis of this lucrative popular culture industry. The

Klondike Gold Rush produced a great abundance of other materials religiously focused on wealth and excitement, including dime novels, songs, advertisements, and romance and adventure fiction. These producers of popular culture all created literature and other image-based materials that suspended the Klondike Gold Rush in a euphoric and timeless ideal. Out of the Klondike Gold Rush came a wide assortment of guidebooks. These works were in keeping with those earlier self-improvement manuals teaching mineral seekers how to prospect and mine. More than their predecessors, however, Klondike guidebook authors wrote in a style closer to that of promotional materials. The writers encouraged and convinced, as well as entertained. The authors emphasized democracy in action, where everyone had an equal chance of finding wealth. Anyone could become a prospector with a guidebook and a few simple tools. The purpose of a guidebook, however, more than to instruct, was to sell the guidebook."

The A.C. Harris guide went through more than one printing, and was sold by 58 subscription through "authorized canvassing Agents." In a scaled-down version of the work for these agents, the publisher gave instructions on how to sell the work. The canvasser should "work eight to twelve hours every day," and "visit every house, and try to sell a book to every voter in the territory." The publisher instructed the agent to "show the engravings, one after another, holding your canvassing-book so your customer can get a good view of them." The sales agent was expected to open the book to a particular page, and use the memorized sales dialogue. The sales approach focused on popular notions about wealth from gold. The dialogue began by showing chapter one, and saying:

The title of the first chapter is Land of the Argonauts. There was a story in ancient Greece about a certain golden fleece in another part of the worid that was very valuable. A company sailed away in search of it, and they went in a ship called the Argo; hence they were called Argonauts. The same name can be given to the crowd of gold-seekers who have gone to IGondike in Alaska. This chapter tells you all about that remarkable region, which is said to contain unlimited deposits of gold.

The canvasser also emphasized a rags-to-riches fairy tale, with dialogue like, "on page 46 you will see how Placer Mining is carried on. They're a rough-looking company, but they'll brush up and look better after they have got rich.""

One of the more exaggerated guides was The Official Guide to the Klorufyke Country and the Gold Fields of Alaska, published in Chicago in 1898. The publication included a series of short vignettes about successful mineral seekers: "Men have taken a tub of water into their cabin and with a pan 'panned out' $2,000 in less than a day. This is said to be equal to about $40,000 a day in the summer with sluice boxes. They get from $10 to $100 a pan average and a choice or picked pan as high as $250, and it takes about 30 minutes to 59 wash a pan of dirt." With these uplifting words in print, it was no wonder that certain ideals refijsed to die. The guide's cover illustration suggested self-sufiBciency: A contented appearing man resting on a tree stump, holding a frying pan (that could double as a gold

pan); lying against the stump were a pick, a pole pick (used to dislodge objects &om

rocks), and a rifle. A coffee pot sat in front of the stump. Like the California Gold Rush,

the publisher assured, the Klondike contained "poor man's mines." Placer mining did not

need machinery and a miner could "get along very well with a pick, shovel and gold pan."

This illustration reflected the long-standing predominant image of the American mineral

seeker as an Euro-American male."

Some of these persisting images came from ever-resolute and positive mineral

seekers. Not all travelers sent back negative reports from the Klondike. One year after his

initial passage into the Yukon, Dawson resident Frederick George Hunt again wrote to his

aunt and uncle. "I have been doing quite nicely up here and have really enjoyed myself a

great deal in spite of what the 'outsiders' call hardships," he bragged. "My health has been

splendid. I have been living well, much better than lots of people in the states." Gold was

everywhere, he explained. "It is not uncommon to see two or three quarts of gold taken

out at a simple clean up. If you should happen to be there you could pick up the pan~if

you could M it~and pan over the gold to your heart's content and no one would seem to

pay any attention although there might be between five and fifteen thousand dollars

there." It is telling that Hunt never specifically mentioned how much gold he had found; he

much preferred to fit his life into the larger narrative of wealth and success.^^ 60

Hunt was part of the larger U.S. populace who believed in the "Gospel of Wealth."

But as intellectual historian Yehoshua Arieli writes, in the late nineteenth century, the ideology of individualism became fused with industrial and corporate capitalism. The corporate "Gospel of Wealth" altered an earlier world of self-reliance and equality of rights and a "faith in the identity of private and public interest" into an industrial-centered world in which "democracy meant the equality of chances for success, the mobility of social classes, the beneficial efifects of private accumulation of wealth on the well-being of the whole nation, and the correspondence between success and merit." Despite the fact that what many Americans experienced in their daily lives contradicted these notions, the ideals of this corporate individual became associated with the "American Way of Life.

The landscape of the Yukon changed rapidly toward industrial mining. A prospectus for a -based company during the era of the Klondike Gold

Rush revealed the confidence that the corporate worid felt over the ability to control

prospectors, and the subordinate place that they would play in mining. William F. Lay was

the patent holder of the "Lay System of Hydraulic-Placer Mining." This prospectus

informed investors that, because the company owned the "sole rights to the Lay System for Alaska," it "does not depend upon establishing and maintaining prospecting parties to

secure mines of its own, but is prepared to wash out the mines of all successfiil gold

hunters, thus utilizing the prospecting done by all others. EVERY PROSPECTOR IN

ALASKA IS OUR PROSPECTOR, for he must come to us at last to have his claim

successfully worked." The prospectus was worded in a way to make one believe that the 61 company had all placer mining rights by declaring that "we have the exclusive territorial rights for Canada and Alaska.

Those companies wishing to gain financially fi'om individual investors appealed to the larger culture. These mining ventures employed notions of individual wealth and success in their own corporate strategy of obtaining wealth off of others. One financial venture, the

"Klondyke Mutual Benefit Development Association" of New York City, employed notions about individual opportunity. Anyone could also be a vicarious prospector, or come along as a group expedition to prospect. The object of the organized venture was to

"enable persons of moderate means, for a small weekly or monthly dues of twenty-five weeks, to participate in the immense gold finds of Alaska,-an Association that gives the poor man an equal chance with the rich man to be owners of these valuable gold mines."

Each subscribing member could come if they wished; the Association would provide them with "a full outfit and all necessary provisions" for a mere $50, "payable in weekly dues."

"Mining experts" would accompany the group. But, their brochure assured, "if you are not one of those who go, you still participate [sic] in the earnings or gains of those who are sent. So that your fifty dollar membership may become worth to you Thousands of

Dollars." The "individual" in this context, then, was part of corporate-based mining, in a

portrayal where great wealth was possible to those who achieved success.'^

Another company deploying images of wealth and individual opportunity to finance their own industrial ventures made parallels to previous mineral rushes. Suggesting that a 62

"single $5.00 bond might expect to get $2,000 to $5,000 or more profit in a single year" of their operations, the Alaskan Bonanza Mining, Trading and Transportation Company reasoned that "greater profits were made fi-om as small investments in the days of old

California, and again in the 60's, in Nevada, in the days of Consolidated Virginia. What has been done may be done again. The chance comes once in a lifetime-don't let it pass." A third enterprise, the Klondike Chief and Mining and Developing Co. of New York City, centered their appeal around the "advantages of united over individual efforts." They used the logic that, the more people involved, the greater the profit. The prospectus stated that

"a properly organized company, conducted on honest and conservative business principles, can better attain objects similar to that for which this company is organized than can

individuals working on their own responsibilities; for while individual effort may succeed,

united effort must." Again, such an approach suggested that individual opportunity was

best when the individual was part of a industrial corporate enterprise.^^

Conclusion

By the end of the nineteenth-century, the prospector was an easily-recognizable figure

and archetype, representing a variety of ideals of the individual. It was the fluidity of the

image, as well as the potent messages in the associated ideals, that made the prospector

image so enduring. Memories of the Klondike Gold Rush were strong at the turn of the

twentieth century, but earlier nineteenth-century strands of mineral seeker ideals also

remained as resolute as ever.

The material and ideal landscapes spilled over into Alaska after the Klondike Gold 63

Rush, in part because many Americans equated the Klondike with Alaska. As Terrence

Cole notes, "in the public eye the "Klondike" and "Alaska" or the "Yukon" were the same place." Merging the two locations together in written works was common, particularly by

American authors. The A.C. Harris guidebook sold door-to-door, for example, intermingled images of timeless "old Spanish dreams of a wonderful realm somewhere in the Western Continent," with Alaska and the Klondike; this mixture of imagery made the

Golden cache, the Canadian Yukon and the American Alaska seem like the same place.^

The Klondike Gold Rush brought people to Alaska. Mineral strikes in Alaska, like that in Nome in 1899, created a new euphoria and an excitement of new possibilities. One of the first serious historians to look at Alaska, Jeannette Paddock Nichols, wrote in 1924 that "the gold craze effectually annihilated the comparative peace of the [Alaskan] territory, while contributing to its prosperity." The event "lifted Alaska out of her famiUar position as a decried dependency into the embarrassing company of the national storehouses of natural resources."®'

Increased population and attention toward Alaska brought an increased presence of the federal government and mining industry, as well as a heightened attempt by local promoters to advertise their respective communities. Persisting popular imagery had some surprising help firom these three components. At the center of it all was the ubiquitous image of the prospector. Chapter two examines how the mining industry, federal agencies overseeing Alaskan mining, and Alaskan promoters all used prospector images to entice mineral seekers to Alaska. These groups worked to direct prospectors in material ways to 64 aid their own industrial-base goals of Alaskan growth and settlement.

But along with these corporate and government bodies were individual mineral seekers who came to Alaska in the first decades of the twentieth century. Chapter three looks at the ideals fi'om the angle of the Alaskan prospectors. Did the actual experiences of prospectors live up to the ideals? Was it possible to achieve individualistic ends, such as economic independence?

The next two chapters are case studies of specific instances in image deployment onto different material settings fi'om those of the nineteenth century. Central to chapter four is the importance of the images of the mineral seeker in a rhetorical struggle to determine land use policy of Alaskan coal lands in the first decade and a half of the twentieth century. Prospector images were at center-stage of these ideological and rhetorical debates, despite the simple fact that actual mineral seekers had little to do with coal mining development. More important were the individualistic ideals of laissez faire and private ownership associated with the mineral seeker. Chapter five explores the political uses of the prospector image in the struggle for Alaskan home rule, in the first twelve years of the twentieth century. An Alaskan fi'atemal organization, the Arctic Brotherhood, centered their identity around the masculine figure of the mineral seeker in order to appeal to the masculine individuality of political figures. This chapter illustrates that multiple notions surrounding the same iconic figure, however, can create problems in image maintenance.

Masculine Argonauts could inversely be wandering prospectors too independent and restless to settle down and establish a permanent government. 65

Finally, the concluding chapter addresses the overall effectiveness and impact of using images. This last chapter also includes an epilogue that examines the long and wandering trail of the prospector image through twentieth-century Alaska. The figure declined in use as a rhetorical tool for political purposes, but Alaskans and others continued to employ this fluid icon for varying purposes. 66

1. Congressional Record, 61" Cong., 2d sess. (16 June 1910), p. 8341; "Conservation and Conservation," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 10 (October 1910), 286-287.

2. Stephen Haycox, "Rediscovering Alaska; Ways of Thinking About Alaska History," Pacifica 1 (September 1989), 104,127-28.

3. Patricia Nelson Limerick, "Making the Most of Words: Verbal Activity and Western America," chap, in Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William Cronon, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992):167-184. In a more recent essay, Limerick lists those patterns associated with Western mining communities, and touches upon the pervasive qualities of the romanticized figure of the prospector. This dissertation will focus on this topic to a greater degree. Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," California History 77 (Spring 1998). A. Yvette Huginnie has written one case study of the material uses of ideals in her examination of how the ideologies behind the categories of race, class, and gender were used in a southwestern mine labor setting to "shape and disguise social relations." A. Yvette Huginnie, "A New Hero Comes to Town: The Anglo Mining Engineer and "Mexican Labor" as Contested terrain in Southeastern Arizona, 1880-1920," Mew Mexico Historical Review 69 (October 1994), 325. In his work, Hard Places, historical geographer Richard Francaviglia looks at the meanings behind Western mining landscapes, but does not address mineral seekers. Richard FrancavigUa, Hard Places, Reading the Landscape of America's Historic Mining Districts (Jiovfi City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. Historian Otis Young has produced several works on prospecting, but his focus is on mining methods and technology. See, for example, Otis E. Young, Jr., Western Mining: An Informal Account of Precious-Metals Prospecting, Placering, Lode Mining, and Milling on the American Frontier from Spanish Times to 1893 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1970). Sally Zanjani examines female prospectors, and looks at their motivations for mineral seeking, providing a useilil work for the lives and motivations of a small sector of Western mineral seekers. Sally Zanjani, A Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West, 1850-1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). My work hopes to add to her notions of what drew mineral seekers to remote regions, but fi'om the angle of the enticing imagery and notions of mineral seeking.

4. Marshall Sahiins, Islands of History (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 6, 145, 147. Sahiins credited these ideas to Saussure, as well as anthropologists Kant, Boas, and Levi-Strauss.

5. John Muir, The Mountains of California (New York: The Century Co., 1894), 328; Charles L. Sanford, The Quest For Paradise: Europe and the American Moral Imagination (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1961), vi. The prospector having such a consistent yet diverse identity fits into what historian Louise Young described as a "shared 67 universe of symbolic meaning; a place where the evanescent and mutable qualities of popular culture permitted a sense of both unity in principle and diversity in interpretation." Louise Young, Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 425.

6. Steven Lukes, Individualism (New York: Harper & Row, 1973), 26.

7. Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1984), 146; Louis B. Wright, The Dream of Prosperity in Colonial America (New York: New York University Press, 1965), 21; John Smith, Travels and Works of Captain John Smith, ed. A. G. Bradley (New York: B. Franklin, 1967), 104. Mineral seekers in other countries also gained some economic and social freedom and independence. Prior to the Late Middle Ages, mining was considered mem'al and degrading work and in most of Europe was delegated to slaves or prisoners. In a growing European commercial world of the Late Middle Ages, however, minerals became long- term investments. This inaeasing commercial climate toward free enterprise opened up the role of a miner as a freehold and independent prospector. Prospecting provided independence from wages, the freedom of mobility, and a means to better one's economic standing. People who searched for minerals and worked them independently became a distinctive economic type. Associations of free miners, for example, worked ores in Germany. Robert Shepherd, Ancient Mining England: Institution of Mining and Metallurgy, 1993), 63; John Temple, Mining: An International History (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1972), 32. In the 1770s, groups of Gypsies in Transylvania, Banat, and Romania maintained their autonomy by washing gold from riverbeds during the summer months. Angus Eraser, Ihe Gypsies, 2"* ed. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishers, 1995), 191. This trend was not limited to Europe. The prospector became known as the gambusino in Mexico and the faiscador in Brazil. Throughout the Latin American colonial period, the mineral seeker was, according to Carlos Prieto, the "chief protagonist in mining." Carlos Prieto, Mining in the New World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1973), 19. Furthermore, opportunities were not restricted to those with existing capital. English author Gabriel Plattes wrote in his 1639, A Discovery of Subterraneal Treasure, that his "directions and rules" were for "every ordinary man," and were meant to aid "Indigent people"of "difiScultie [sic] of obtaining their livings." Mineral ores "in the belly of the Earth...doth no good at all" if not found; it would be a "great benefit" to "divers Kingdomes and Countries by setting people on worke [sic]." Gabriel Plattes, A Discovery of Subterraneall Treasure (London: L Oakes, 1639), unnumbered pages.

8. Donald Abramoske, "The Federal Lead Leasing System in Missouri," Missouri Historical Review 54 (October 1959), 28; Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, A View of the Lead Mines of Missouri (New York: Charles Wiley and Co., 1819), 9,65, 91; Otis Young, 68

"The Southern Gold Rush, 1828-1836," Journal of Southern History 48 (August 1982), 384-385, 392. A contemporary North Carolina account mentioned that not only were "common laborers engaged in digging," but also that "most prudent and wealthy citizens are entering the business." "Gold Mines of North Carolina," The American Journal of Science and Arts (July 1829), 361-362. See also, Fletcher Green, "Georgia's Forgotten Industry: ," Georgia Historical Quarterly 19 (June 1935), 210.

9. William Hypolitus Keating, Considerations Upon the Art of Mining (Philadelphia: M. Carey and Sons, 1821), 4-5, 76; J. Leander Bishop, A History of American Manufacturers From 1608 to I860 (Philadelphia: Edward Young and Co., 1868), 505; James E. Wright, The Galena Lead District: Federal Policy and Practice, 1824-1847 (Madison: University of Wisconsin, 1966), 99-100. Bishop's work details other examples of colom'al laws.

10. Otis Young, "The Southern Gold Rush," 377; Demson Olmsted, "On the Gold Mines ofNorth Carolina," The American Journal of Science and Arts (June 1825), 6. In one of the first American novels based on mining, Guy Rivers, published in 1834, novelist William Simms described mineral seekers as "guided by varying and contradictory Impulses, in the formation of a common caste, and in the pursuit of a like object." William Simms, Guy Rivers, vol. 1 (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1834), 57.

11. Following English common law, the Crown retained rights to the valuable minerals on the "original grants," and "most colonies continued the reservation of mineral land when they became states." Russell R. Elliott, Servant of Power: A Political Biography of Senator William M. Stewart (Reno: University ofNevada Press, 1983), 47. A lease is a "contract between landowner and another granting the latter right to search for and produce oil or mineral substances upon payment of an agreed rental, bonus, and/or royalty." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, ami Related Terms (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing OflSce, 1968), 634. Lead mines in Indiana Territory, as one example, were leased up to five years, administered under the War Department. They collected a royalty of ten percent. Donald J. Pisani, "1 am Resolved Not to Interfere, But Permit all to Work Freely*: The Gold Rush and American Resource Law," California History 11 (Winter 1998/99), 126.

12. Abramoske, "The Federal Lead Leasing System in Missouri," 29-30; Carl J. Mayer and George A. Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion: A History of Public Mineral Policy in America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985), 26-27,29.

13. Ibid- 69

14. Thomas Hart Benton, quoted in Abramoske, "The Federal Lead Leasing System in Missouri," 33, 34; Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 29-30.

15. Elliott, Servant q/"Power, 49. Donald Pisani wrote that "the actual production of lead was four times that reported to the War Department." Pisani, "'I am Resolved Not to Interfere,"' 126-27.

16. Thomas C. denser, "Gold and the Gold Region," The Orion (1844), 64.

17. David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford, California: Stanford Um'versity Press, 1994), 46-49; Green, "Georgia's Forgotten Industry," 214. Speculation, and related bribery and corruption in politics also existed in the lead regions of the Upper Mississippi Valley. Michael Conzen, "The European Setting and Transformation of the Upper Mississippi Valley Lead Region," chap, in Wisconsin Land and Life, ed. Robert C. Ostergren and Thomas R. Vale (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997), 172-173.

18. Joseph M. Thomas, "PecuUar Soil: Mining in the Early American Imagination," Early American Literature 27 (Fall 1992): 151-169; quotations from pp.152 andl64.

19. Henry Nash Smith, Virgm Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1950), 124, 165; Leo Marx, Jhe Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 9; David E. Shi, The Simple Life: Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 52-53,91.

20. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 5; Smith, Virgin Land; Ralph Mann, "The Americanization of Arcadia: Images of Hispanic and Gold Rush California" American Studies 19 (Spring 1978), 8. A way to counter criticism was the position that certain ethical behavior was deemed necessary for success in finding and developing minerals. Balancing individual wealth with virtuous behavior was, indeed, part of a larger paradox of conflicting American ideals. One of the ideological dilemmas of both expansionists and the JeSersom'an Republic, as David E. Shi explains, was how to promote both a "dynamic free enterprise system," emphasizing laissez-faire individualism, and a "self-limiting republican morality," carrying "an appeal for classical simplicity and civic virtue," with strong moral duties held within the population. The solution was to combine the two seemingly-conflicting goals, making the ultimate ideal one of individual success gained while acting virtuous. Individual success would only be problematic if achieved in an unchristian manner. Shi, The Simple Life, 101; E. Anthony Rotundo, "Learning About Manhood," chap, 'm Manliness and 70

Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940, ed. J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, eds. (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1987), 37- 38.

21. Keating, Considerations Upon the Art of Mining, 3; denser, "Gold and the Gold Region," 61.

22. Daniel Comford, "'We All Live More Like Brutes Than Humans: Labor and Capital in the Gold Rush," California History 11 (Winter 1998/99), 82, 83; Malcohn Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 2; Malcolm Rohrbough, "The Califorma Gold Rush as a National Experience," California History 11 (Spring 1998), 19. Placer mining is mining the placers or "alluvial or glacial deposit[s], as of sand or gravel, containing particles of gold or other valuable mineral." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary, 829.

23. Rohrbough, "The California Gold Rush as a National Experience," 27-29. Dissatisfactions with limited economic and social opportunities continued to motivate Americans to take up prospecting and work on small claims through the rest of the nineteenth century. As one example, in an account of Colorado mineral rushes, G. Thomas Ingham wrote that the national economic crisis of 18S7 prompted "dissatisfied adventurers" firom the East to try their hand at mineral discovery in Colorado. G. Thomas Ingham, Digging Gold Among the Rockies, or. Exciting Adventures of Wild Camp Life in Leadville, Black Hills and the Gunnison County (Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1880), 308.

24. Denis Crosgrove, Social Formation and Symbolic Landscaping (London: Croom Helm, 1984), 166-167; Horace Greeley, New York Daily Tribune, December 11, 1848, quoted in, William Goetzmann, The West of the Imagination (New York: Norton, 1986), 126-127; Horace Greeley, New York Daily Tribune, December 9,1848, quoted in, Goetzmann, Ihe West of the Imagination, 126-127.

25. Congressional Globe 30* Congress, 1" sess. (5 December 1848), 5; John G. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 42,43-44, 47; Robert Rydell, All The World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 21. It is no coincidence that the first transcontinental railroad completion in 1869 was symbolized by the driving of a golden spike.

26. Pisani, "T am Resolved Not to Interfere,'" 123,125, 126-27.

27. Lukes, Individualism, 89; David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994), xxvi, 25. 71

28. Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1964), 286; Lukes, Individualism, 79.

29. Mann, "The Americanization of Arcadia," 5; Pisani, "'I am Resolved Not to Interfere,'" 127-28; Goodman, Gold Seeking, 25.

30. Rotundo, "Learning About Manhood," 37-38; Samuel Bowles, The Switzerland of America: A Summer Vacation In the Parks and Mountains of Colorado (Springfield, Mass: S. Bowles and Co., 1896), 156.

31. Bayard Taylor, El Dorado, or Adventures in the Path of Empire (New York: G. P. Putnam and Sons, 1850), 64.

32. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream: 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 60; Rohrbough, Dcys of Gold, 6; Hinton Helper, The Land of Gold, Reality Versus Fiction (Baltimore, Maryland: H. Taylor, 1855), 157, 159.

33. Rohrbough, "The California Gold Rush as a National Experience," 19; Michael Kowalewski, introduction. Gold Rush: A Literary Exploration (Berkeley, California: Heyday Books/California Council for the Humanities, 1997), xxvii.

34. Mann, "The Americanization of Arcadia," 5-6,12-13; Joseph Warren Revere, A Tour of Duty in California (New York: C. S. Francis and Co., 1849), 156-157; Rohrbough, "The California Gold Rush as a National Experience," 22; Colton, Three Years in California, 368. On the foreign miner's tax, see Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2000), 210. On Chinese placer miners in the West, see Liping Zhu, "No Need to Rush: The Chinese, Placer Mining, and the Western Environment," Montana 49 (Autumn 1999): 42-57; Liping Zhu, A Chinaman's Chance: The Chinese on the Rocl^ Mountain Mining Frontier (Niwot, Colorado: University Press of Colorado, 1997); and Randall Rohe, "Chinese River \fiiung in the West," Montana 46 (Autumn 1996): 14-29. Malcolm J. Rohrbough discusses Native American, Hispanic, and women miners in Dc^s of Gold: The California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of Caliform'a Press, 1997). Sally Zanjani focuses on independent female prospectors and small-mine operators in^ Mine of Her Own: Women Prospectors in the American West, I850-I950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997). See also Jo Ann Levy, They Saw the Elephant: Women in the California Gold Rush (Hamden, Connecticut: Archon Books, 1990).

35. Johnson, Roaring Camp, 25-28, 51-52.

36. Moreland L. Stevens, Charles Christian Nahl: Artist of the Gold Rush, I8I8-I878 (Sacramento, Caliform'a: E.B. Crocker Art Gallery, 1976), 48; Harvey L. Jones, "The 72

Hessian Party: Charles Christian Nahl, Arthur Nahl, and August Wenderoth," in i4rt of the Gold Rush, ed. Janice T. Driesbach, et ai. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 51. The poem, "The Idle and Industrious Miner" has been attributed to William Bausman. Daniel Cornford, ""More Like Brutes Than Humans,'" 79. Gail Bederman writes that the ideal middle-class male was wiry. Gail Bederman, Manliness and Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender and Race in the United States, 1880-1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 199S), IS. One of the earlier California gold rush paintings depicting the mineral seeker was artist A. D. O. Browere's "The Lone Prospector," painted in 18S3 and based on Nahl's created prototype. As Janice T. Driesbach explains, Browere "used figures that appear to be types rather than individuals." In this case, the "type" was very much an "individual," alone and self-suf5cient in the wilderness. This painting depicted a man riding a horse through a wooded and rocky land, with hills in the background. The bearded and long-haired prospector wore a red work shirt, long boots, chaps, and a hat. On his horse were the necessities of the self-suflBcient prospector a bed roll, pan, pick, and shovel. The self-suflBcienQT is underlined by the miner^s pistol and rifle. E. Hall Martin's painting, "The Prospector," also depicts a bearded man with long hair wearing similar clothing and footwear. This prospector was on a rocky mountain top, looking out at view of a forest below shrouded in clouds. He leaned on his rifle, with one foot on a large rock. Slung over his shoulder and on his back he also carried the objects of Independence and self- sufficiency: cooking utensils, a canteen, a pistol, and a partly visible pick and shovel sticking out of a portable placer gold rocker serving as a backpack of sorts. Janice T. Driesbach, "Mining The Picturesque: A. D. O. Browere," m Art of the Gold Rush, 79, 89; the "Lone Prospector" is on p. 76 (Fig. 61); E. Hall Martin, "The Prospector," in Thomas A. Ayres, "First in the Field: Thomas A. Ayres and E. Hall Martin," m Art of the Gold Rush, p. 12 (Fig. 8). A rocker was as an easily-constructed small wooden box that served as a sluice. The operator directed water through the rocker, with any gold dropping to the bottom. U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary, 934.

37. Martha Sandeweiss, "Views and Reviews: Western Art and Western History," chap, in Under An Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past, ed. William Cronon, et al. (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 187, 202 (quote); Duncan Emrich, American Fold Poetry: An Anthology (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 560-562; Franklin Walker, San Francisco's Literary Frontier York: A.A. Knop^ 1939), 219-220. Malcolm Rohrbough writes that an 1854 letter sheet printed for miners to send home to loved ones demonstrates "how quickly the Gold Rush became steeped in nostalgia and mythology." The sheet included John Sutter's account of the gold discovery that set off the mineral rush, and a drawing of Sutter's mill, the site of the famous discovery. Participants also had their photograph taken. Photographs stressed the value of labor and self-sufficiency. It was common to be photographed while wearing a work shirt and holding a pick. Another common photograph was an individual holding a pick, pan, and shovel. Rohrbough, "The Caliform'a Gold Rush as a National Experience," 18, 20; Janice T. Driesbach, "Scenes of 73

Mining Life," in The Art of the Gold Rush, 25 (Fig. 20).

38. Limerick, "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," 32; Duane Smith, Roc!^ Mountain Mining Camps: The Urban Frontier (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), 6; Earl Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevacb (JLincohi: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 53.

39. Cornford, "More Like Brutes Than Humans," 93-94; Limerick, "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," 34-35; Smith, Virgin Land, 215; Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Ijibor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 13, 20; Ralph Mann, After The Gold Rush: Society in Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849-1870 (Stanford, Caliform'a: Stanford University Press, 1982), 39.

40. Limerick, "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," 34; Logan Hovis and Jeremy Mouat, "Miners, Engineers, and the Transformation of Work in the Western Mining Industry, 1880-1930," Technology and Culture 37 (July 1996), 437; William T. Doherty, Jr., Conservation in the United States: A Documentary History (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1971), 499-500. As distinguished from placer mining, lode mining involved those minerals found in "veins or lodes of quartz or other rock in place." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary, 654, 829.

41. Pisani, "1 am Resolved Not to Interfere,'" 130-31 (italics are those of Pisani); Elliott, Servant of Power, 51; Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 7-8.

42. Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 8, 55. In the 1870s Stewart resumed active involvement in various California and Nevada operations. Elliott, Servant of Power, 16-17, 83-86.

43. Congressional Globe 39"' Congress, 1" sess. (18 June 1866), 3226.

44. Ibid, 3226-27.

45. Ibid, 3227, 3228. Regarding the homestead system, see Smith, Virgin Land, 170.

46. Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 52, 56. Donald Pisani explains that the 1866 law "confirmed the status quo and extended the rules established in California's gold camps to the rest of the West" and "ensured that mineral lands within the public domain would remain open to 'all.' The 1866 law applied only to shaft mining, but in 1870 Congress extended the opportunity to purchase claims to placer miners, at $2.50 per acre. A third mining law, adopted in 1872, completed the formal process of turning control over precious metals to the miners, countries, and states." Pisani, "1 am Resolved 74

Not to Interfere,'" 131. Lode claims cost $5 per acre, and placer claims, $2.50 per acre. Lode claims could not be more than 1,500 feet long or 600 feet wide. Placer claims could not exceed 160 acres. Even though the limitation was 160 acres, there was no limit to the number of claims an individual could hold at one time. "An Act Promoting Mineral Developing," in Doherty, Jr., Conservation in the United States, 548.

47. Section 3 specified that locators had the "exclusive right of possession and enjoyment of all the surface included within the lines of their locations, and of all the veins, lodes, and ledges throughout their entire depth, the top or apex of which lies inside of such surface lines extended downward vertically, although such veins, lodes, or ledges may so far depart from a perpendicular in their course downward as to extend outside the vertical side-lines of said surface locations." Section 4 specified that "where a tunnel is run for the development of a vein or lode, or for the discovery of mines, the owners of such tuimel shall have the right of possession of all veins or lodes within three thousand feet from the face of such tunnel on the line thereof, not previously known to exist, discovered in such tunnel, to the same extent as if discovered from the surface..." "An Aa Promoting Mineral Developing," 549.

48. Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 78.

49. Another unique feature (that differed from old Spam'sh law and German law) was that an individual could follow, in addition to the first discovered mineral vein, other veins that "lie within the boundaries of the claim, either at its surface or vertically below any part of it." Theodore F. Van Wagenen, International Mining Law (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1918), 98,99, 286-88, 313. In contrast, other countries like Spain, Britain, Mexico and Australia "reserved some part of mineral production for public use." Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 78.

50. Harvey L Jones, "Sentiment and Nostalgia," m Art of the Gold Rush, 102. Leonard Lutwack argues that the abstracted arcadia "always lives on in the imagination after it ceases to exist as a reality." Leonard Lutwack, The Role of Place in Literature, 153.

51. Wallace Stegner, quoted in, Michael Kowalewski, "Imaging the Califonua Gold Rush; The Visual and Verbal Legacy," California History 71 (Spring 1992), 70; Patrick D. Morrow, "Bret Harte, Mark Twain, and the San Francisco Circle," A Literary History of the American West, ed. Western Literature Association (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), 346-347.

52. Kowalewski, "Imaging the California Gold Rush," 62; Morrow, "Bret Harte," 347- 348; Walker, San Francisco's Literary Frontier, 264. Lawrence Clark Powell notes Harte's creations were "at once recognizable as plausible, cohesive, self-contained." 75

Lawrence Clark Powell, California Classics, quoted in >Miam Everson, Archetype West: The Pacific Coast as a Literary Region (Berkeley, California: Oyez, 1976), 26. In her work on the California Gold Rush, Susan Johnson suggests that historians "help turn backgrounds into foregrounds." Behind some of Harte's most popular stories were other narratives that need more examination. "Tennessee's Partner" may have well been based on two men who lived together for fifty years; contemporary observations suggested that these men shared an intimate relationship. Harte's "The Luck of Roaring Camp" contained a "shadow story" about a "multiracial, multiethnic social world," a world that existed during the mineral rush but did not become part of the mainstream memory. Johnson, Roaring Camp, 334-340, 343.

53. Nicholas S. Witschi, "Landscape Matters: Natural Resources and the Claim to Realism in Western American Literature," PhJ). dissertation. Department of English, University of Oregon, 1998,41,43.

54. Limerick, "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," 33; Goodman, Gold Seeking, 4. The trailblazer's struggle with nature was part of nineteenth-century transcendentalism. In writing about transcendental encounters with nature, William Everson explained that man comes out victorious, but only after enduring a process where nature tortures "his living, integral body, and made him pay something for his triumph in consciousness." Everson, Archetype West, 19.

55. Mangan and Walvin, "Introduction," m Manliness and Morality, 1; John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992), 324; Granville Stewart, Prospecting For Gold, From Dogtown to Virginia City, 1852-1864, ed. Paul C. Phillips (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 61.

56. C. C. Goodwin, The Comstock Club (Salt Lake City, Utah: Tribune Printing Co., 1891), 51.

57. Rodman Wilson Paul, introduction, Charles Howard Shinii, Mining Camps: A Study in American Frontier Government, ed. Rodman Wilson Paul, (1884; reprint. New York: Harper & Row, 1965), xvii; Shinn, Mining Camps, 109, 110, 134,148-49, 157,290. Similar to Paul, Caliform'an historian Kevin Starr writes that this book "formulated what tum-of-the-[twentieth] century Califomians believed about the mining era." Starr, Americans and the California Dream, 121.

58. Shinn, Mining Camps, 3,130,134,286,289.

59. George Suggs, quoted in Nfichael Neuschatz, The Golden Sword: The Coming of Capitalism to the Colorado Mining Frontier (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986), 14; 76

James Edward Wright, The Politics of Populism: Dissent in Colorado (New Haven, Conn.: Press, 1974), 18.

60. Miner Wait Bruce, Alaska: Its History, And Resources, Gold Fields, Routes and Scenery (Seattle; Lowman and Hanford, 1895), 61; Otis Young, Jr., "The Prospectors: Some Considerations on Their Craft," Reflections of Western Historians, ed. John Alexander Carroll (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1969), 121. Eric Foner writes that the republican objective was not vast wealth, but a middle-class goal of independence from wage labor, either though self-employment or by owning one's own capital, like a business or a shop. Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men, 16, 17, 31. Ann Fabian defines artisan republicanism as a community of self-governing and independent craftsmen, each pursuing their own self-interests but ultimately laboring for the public good, and a progressive future for all. Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, Bucket Shops: Gambling in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), 165-167. In the mid-nineteenth century, Abraham Lincohi came to epitomize this self-educated, vigorous, and self-reh'ant man. Cawelti, Apostles of the Self-Made Man, 42, 44, 57,87, 95.

61. Rodman Paul, California Gold: The Beginnings of Mining in the Far West (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1947), 132; Duane Smith, "Mother Lode For the West: California Mining Men and Methods," California History 77 (Winter 1998/99), 169; Alonzo Delano, Across the Plains and Amongst the Diggings (1854 reprint. New York: Wilson-Erickson, 1936), 163; Horace Greeley, An Overland Journey From New York to San Francisco in the Summer of1859 (New York: C.M. Saxton, Barker and Co., 1860), 115; Rodman Wilson Paul, Mining Frontiers of the Far West: 1848-1880 (NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 113-114,169; James Chishohn, South Pass 1868, ed. Lola M. Homsher (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1960), 111-112.

62. James Heren, quoted in John Caughey, Gold is the Cornerstone (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975), 168-169; James Orton, Uruierground Treasures: How and Where to Find Them (Hartford, Conn.: Worthing, Dustin, and Co., 1872), 10; unnumbered page entitled, "Note."

63. Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 205; Robert W. Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation," chap, in Paul W. Gates, History ofPublic Land Law Development (Washington, D.C.: Public Land Law Review Commission, 1968), 710-11; Claus-M Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, Alaska: A History of the 49* State, 2"^ ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 69.

64. Marvin Lewis, quoted in, Neuschatz, The Golden Sword, 11; Neuschatz, The Golden Sword, 15; Samuel Bowles, The Switzerland of ^erica, 152. Italics are mine. 77

65. Ingham, Digging Gold Among the Rockies, 359-60; Rohrbough, Days of Gold, 196.

66. Elliott West, "Golden Dreams: Colorado, California, and the Reimagining of America," Montana, The Magazine of Western History 49 (Autumn 1999), 9; Frank Fossett, Colorado (New York: C.G. Crawford, 1880), 1; Mann, "The Americanization of Arcadia," 13.

67. Ernest Ingersoll, The Crest of the Continent, A Record of a Summer's Ramble in the Rocl^ Mountains and Beyond (Chicago: R.R. Donnelley and Sons, 1885), 154; David M. Potter, People of Plenty: Economic Abundance and the American Character (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1954), 98; Pomeroy, The Pacific Slope, 45.

68. Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877-1920 (NY: Hill and Wang, 1967), 133; Kathryn Taylor Morse, "The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the AlaskaHfukon Gold Rush, (PhJJ. dissertation. University of Washington, 1997), 56-57.

69. Charlene Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers: Women, Men, and Community in the Klondike (Vancouver, B.C.: University of British Columbia Press, 1998), 203; Dianne Newell, "The Importance of Information and Misinformation in the Making of the Klondike Gold ^sh," Journal of Canadian Studies 21 (Winter 1986-87), 95, 101-103. An 1898 census of Dawson, Yukon, for example, counted 15,203 people, with 9,534 from the United States; British subjects came in second, with 4,911, followed by continental Europe and "other/unknown." Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers, 360, 398.

70. Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 77.

71. Lynn Smith, Transcript, "Bound for Klondike-Letter From Lynn Smith Who is Headed that Way," March 27,1898, Folder 1, Lynn Smith Correspondence, Box 1, Herbert Heller Papers, University of Alaska, Fairbanks; John Muir, "Story of the Trail," San Francisco Examiner, October 1,1897, reprinted in Bruce Merrell, "'A Wild, Discouraging Mess': John Muir Reports on the Klondike Gold Rush," Alaska History 7 (Fall 1992), 34; Joaquin Miller, "Daily Life in a Klondike Cabin," Latid of Sunshine 9 (June 1898X 16-17,21-22.

72. John A. Jakle, Human Spatial Behavior: A Social Geography (North Scituate, Mass: Duxbury Press, 1976), 300-301; George Lipsitz, Time Passages: Collective Memory and American Popular Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1990), 163, quoted in David Lowenthal, "Fabricating Heritage," History &Memory 10 (Spring 1998), 18.

73. Fred G. L. Hunt to Aunt Josephine and Uncle James, September 12, 1898, Frederick George Lincohi Hunt Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota, pp 1-3. 78

74. Morse, "The Nature of Gold," 52-103; Newell, "The Importance of Information," 106.

75. Lynn Smith, Transcript, "Getting Into Gold Fields-White Horse Rapids," June I, 1898, Folder 1, Lynn Smith Correspondence, Box 1; Herbert Heller Papers. The emphasized words are those of Smith.

76. Biographical sketch; Alexander Whyte to his wife, November 18, 1898, and Alexander Whyte to his wife, January 14, 1899, Alexander Whyte and Family Papers, Minnesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota.

77. Alexander Whyte to his wife, letters dated January 30,1899; June 23, 1899; July 7, 1899; and September 12, 1899; and Biographical sketch, Alexander Whyte and Faniily Papers; Michael Ostrogorsky, "The Influence of Technology on Social Typology and Change in the Western American Mining Frontier," (Ph.D. dissertation. University of Idaho, 1993), 229.

78. Lynn Smith to "Bro Arthur," January 29, 1899, Folder 2, Lynn Smith Correspondence, Box 1, Herbert Heller Papers, p. 5. Italicized words were underlined in Smith's letter.

79. Newell, "The Importance of Information," 98,99; Joan M. Schwartz, "The Geogr^hy Lesson: Photographs and the Construction of Imaginative Geographies," Journal of Historical Geography 22 (January 1996), 20, 31. An example of a published collection of photographs would be F. La Roche, En Route to the Klondike, A Series of Photographic Views of the Picturesque Gold and Glaciers (Chicago: W.B. Conkey Co., 1898). Stereoscope images were also widely used. For instance, John P. Clum, U.S. Postal Inspector in Alaska and later Postmaster of Fairbanks, put together a show of these images that followed the route of his own first trip to the Yukon and Alaska. John P. Clum, A Trip to the Klondike Through the Stereoscope, From Chicago, III., to St. Michaels, Alaska, During that Marvelous Crusade in 1897-8 to the Gold Fields of Alaska (Meadville, Pennsylvama: Keystone View Co., 1899).

80. Hamlin Garland, "Ho, For the Klondike'.," McClure's Magazine 10 (March, 1898), 443,454.

81. Clarence Pullen, "The Romance of the Klondike," The Cosmopolitan 5 (August 1898), 30.

82. Examples of dime novels include, W3. Lawson, "Diamond Dick, Jr.'s Klondike Claim; or. Striking it Rich in the Frozen North," The Boy's Best Weekly No. 56 (November 6, 1897): 1-32; "An Old Miner," "Young Klondike; or. Off for the Land of Gold," Young Klondike, Stories of a Gold Seeker, No. 1 ^larch 16, 1898). American 19 published adventures include Hamlin Garland, The Trail of the Gold Seekers: A Record of Travel in Prose and Verse (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1899), and an Alaskan-based story from the popular children's series of Edward Stratemeyer, To Alaska for Gold, or. The Fortune Hunters of the Yukon (Boston; Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1902). Rex Beach based his novels in Alaska. For example, The Spoilers is based on early Nome, Alaska, incidents (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906). And, of course, the popular northern adventures by Jack London, such as The Call of the Wild and Burning Daylight. An example of a popular song is "He is Sleeping in the Klondike Vale Tonight." MJ. Fitzpatrick, Song sheet, "He is Sleeping in the Klondike Vale Tonight," Pamphlet 1897- 39, Yukon Archives, Whitehorse, Yukon. See also, Jean A. Munay, Music of the Alaska- Klondike Gold Rush (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1999). Historian Terrence Cole listed the various products with Klondike labels, including "Klondike Boots, Klondike Boats, Klondike Bicycles, Klondike Underwear [and] BClondike Medicine Chests." There were also popular Klondike dice games, and a board game, "Going to Klondike," in which a player was blindfolded, spun around, and placed a pin on a map; the map was divided into sections of gold amounts, ranging from .90 to $2,500,000. Terrence Cole, "Klondike Visions: Dreams of a Promised Land," chap, in The Alaska Journal 1986, ed. Terrence Cole (Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Northwest ^blishing Company, 1986), 88-89, 90.

83. A.C. Harris, Canvassing Sales Book, The Klondike Gold Fields, n. d. This book went through more than one printing. Two are, A. C. Harris, The Klotidike Gold Fields (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: People's Publishing Co., n.d.), and A.C. Harris. Alaska and the Klondike Gold Fields (Washington, D.C.: J.R. Jones, 1897), n. p.

84. W3. Conkey Co., The Official Guide to the Kloncfyke Country and the Gold Fields of Alaska (Chicago: W3. Conkey Co., 1898), cover, 24,30. The predominant image was male, although Euro-American females did become prospectors and small-scale miners. Charlene Porsild has found, however, that only one per cent of Yukon miners were women. Porsild, Gamblers and Dreamers, 84.

85. Fred G. L. Hunt to Aunt Josephine and Uncle James, November 14, 1899, Frederick George Lincoln Hunt Papers, pp. 1-2.

86. Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, 334-37.

87. Alaska GoId-PIacer Machine-Mining Co., Prospectus (New York, 1897), unnumbered pages. Upper-case letters those of the company. Some of those operators who would come to dominate large-scale mining in the Klondike region came during the mineral rush. A. N. C. Treadgold, for example, spent each summer in the Yukon, beginning in 1898, "to make bis move once the present claim owners bad finished mining and were ready to sell 80 out and abandon their ground." Another future large operator, Joe Boyle, arrived in the Klondike in 1897, and slowly accumulated properties. The Guggenheims also came to the area, but not until the first decade of the twentieth century, around 1906. Lewis Green, The Go/(c///w5//(ew (Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Northwest Publishing Co., 1977), 15, 97, 137.

88. One-half of the discovered gold "shall be turned over to the Association, to be divided among their associates." Membership cost $50, with an additional $2.00 weekly dues. It was not declared where they would find the riches, whether "at the Klondyke, or other Alaska gold mines." Klondyke Mutual Benefit Association, Prospectus (New York: Klondyke Mutual Benefit Association, 1897), 3-5. The bold words are those of the company.

89. The Alaskan Bonanza Mining, Trading and Transportation Company, Prospectus, A Fortune in the Alaskan ami Klondike Mines (Chicago, Illinois: Klondike Promotion Co., 1898), n. p.; The Klondike Chief Mining and Developing Co., Prospectus (New York: Klondike Chief Mining and Developing Co., 1897), 3. Italicized words those of the company.

90. Cole, "Klondike Visions," 87; A.C. Harris, Alaska and the Klondike Gold Fields, iii.

91. Jeannette Paddock Nichols, Alaska: A History of its Administration, Exploitation, and Industrial Development During Its First Half Century Under the Rule of the United (Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1924), 142. 81

CHAPTER 2

PROSPECTING THE PROSPECTOR: EFFORTS OF THE MINING INDUSTRY, FEDERAL GOVERNMENT AND ALASiCAN PROMOTERS TO USE THE MINERAL SEEKER FOR ALASKAN DEVELOPMENT

Introduction and Summary

Jack London became one of the most recognized writers from the Klondike Gold

Rush, London mythologized himself as a "self-made American Adam," and as an adventurer and "hard-living individualist," qualities he also placed upon his northern characters. In the first decade of the twentieth century he perpetuated in his works the

"dominant individualism" of a wild and free North. In his short stories he depicted enduring and poor prospectors who found great quantities of gold, and he contrasted the

Alaskan gold seekers with explorers, the "men who will ultimately win the Pole."'

But in 1900, three years before London wrote The Call of the Wild, he was already viewing the Klondike Gold Rush as a "thing of the past." Lamenting the fact that many of the "individuals" of the Gold Rush put far more money and labor into their endeavors than they received in return, he enthusiastically stated that there were "immense quantities" of cheaper gravels in the greater Yukon Valley and that it was "inevitable that they yield to the enterprise of brains and capital." "The new Klondike, the Klondike of the future," he continued, "will present remarkable contrasts with the Klondike of the past." Part of this natural evolution was that "the frontiersman will yield to the laborer, the prospector to the mining engineer, the dog-driver to the engine-driver, the trader and speculator to the 82 steady-going modern man of business.""

In early twentieth-century Alaska, those who looked toward mining as an important

component of regional growth shared London's evolutionary view that simplicity would

yield to complexity. The mining industry needed new mines and new raining regions to

keep up with increasing demands for minerals, and looked northward. The federal

government envisioned Alaska as a mineral "storehouse" of abundant minerals that would

serve the nation through added gold to the treasury, and help to fill the rising needs for

other minerals deemed strategic to the country's economic and political strength. Alaskan

promoters spoke of the need for settlement and growth, and hoped to attract mining

capital and industrial mining concerns.

The solution to the type of growth in Alaska best fitted to serve all these needs was

not the popular (Clondike image of Alaska as a land of independent small placer gold

mines. Rather, the fixture would center around large placer gold mining operations using

mechanical dredges or hydraulic operations with extensive sluicing, and around hard-rock

lode mining of quartz gold, copper and other metals. It was medium to large mining

enterprises-those companies with capabilities to handle, extract and mine larger quantities

of ore~that would produce amounts of minerals needed for increasing national demands

and that would provide a vibrant regional economy for Alaska.^

Those in the overall Western mining industry, those federal governmental agencies

overseeing mining activities in Alaska (namely the United States Geological Survey and

the Bureau of Nfines), and regional Alaskan promoters assumed that prospectors and 83 independent small miners would be replaced by larger mine operations. Yet, at the same time, they all encouraged the prospector's activities, and described this figure using nineteenth-century ideals of the individual. These portrayals of the mineral seeker were closer in line to those found in Jack London's popular stories than in expected depictions of disappearing and outdated prospectors in the face of industrial mining. Those in the mining industry and federal government ofiBcials lauded prospectors as heroic trailblazers; promoters spoke of mineral regions as Utopian destinations for poor men and as opportunities for self-reliance and economic independence. How do we explain this incongruity, then, between the simultaneous expectation of the disappearance of the prospector in a land of industry, and an encouragement of a mineral seeker in a land of opportunity?*

The irony was that, as much as those groups wanted to replace prospectors and small mining operations with larger operations, mining development in early twentieth-century

Alaska could not be done without the help of real prospectors working in real settings. It was the prospector who continued to find mines in the early twentieth century, and benefit the mining industry. His searchings also provided valuable information for the federal government about the worth and extent of mineral producing areas. For regional promoters, having prospectors scouring the land to find new mines was a positive sign of growth and the mineral seekers' activities had the potential to attract capital to their respective areas.^

At the same time, those who wanted prospecting activity had to convince a 84 population who labored without wages or any certain monetary gain that it was worth their while, that prospecting would pay off. In the nineteenth century, the prospector had been an important symbol of the individual, and the Klondike Gold Rush had only reinforced the ideological importance of this character. And, despite the material limitations of the Klondike Gold Rush, authors like London knew the mass appeal of individualism, confirmed by the popularity of his stories in a time when the nation was becoming increasingly populated and industrialized. But so did those who wanted Alaska to become a settled area with vibrant industry.

In the early twentieth century, the overall Western mining industry, the federal government, and Alaskan promoters made a concerted efifort to encourage and to direct prospectors on both an ideological and a material level. They worked to manage ideological images though the written word, and through their rhetoric when commenting about prospectors or mining in Alaska, with the expectation that the deployment of images would work to their ends. They played up those nineteenth-century mdividualistic notions of mining; heroic figures opening up new regions; self-sufi5ciency through owning one's own mine, and 6*66 enterprise in an unrestricted place of individual opportunities. Alaska was portrayed as a place to attain wealth, a mecca for poor men to work under equal circumstances, a place where the American ideal of succeeding through one's own efibrts as a self-made man could be attained. This individualistic vision, however, was a thinly disguised veil for achieving the goal of a settled region of vibrant industry, and not the vision of what their rhetoric implied, small mining operations and individual prospectors 85 dotting the land, each making a living from their own gold placer operation. Individualism became an ideological cover and a material means for a goal of a very industrial-based story.

These groups also needed to direct the prospectors in material ways better to serve the needs of industry. Supporters of mining growth sought a more efScient prospector, rather than a mineral seeker who bad complete free initiative. As in historian Alfred

Chandler's revelation that it was the "visible hand" of business management that directed

Adam Smith's "invisible hand" toward modem business needs at the turn of the twentieth century, it was the "visible hand" of the mining industry, Alaskan federal government agencies, and promoters that helped to direct the prospectors' activities toward the interests of capital and industry. These groups provided mineral seekers with information to make them better able to find and develop minerals; they directed prospectors to areas of high potential, and to look for particular minerals; and they worked to teach them the terminology of mining and the language of the industry, and the terms of selling their claims, in order to work effectively with interested capital and mining companies.^

Behind the veiled narratives of freedom and self-sufficiency were certain assumptions about the ultimate role of mineral seekers. Mine companies, promoters, and the federal government all needed prospectors, but they also needed laborers. A steady supply of labor was important for attracting mining industry and other enterprises to Alaska, and it was implied that the prospectors would make up the work force when the region became dominated by industry. 86

The Mining Industry

Like other expanding industries at the turn of the twentieth century, the mining industry operated under progressive notions of eflBciency. These optimistic ideals of progress and efBciency contained an assumption that technology and science could control and improve the material world, managing natural resources in a way that would bring in higher levels of material abundance and economic wealth for industry. Up until the late nineteenth century, for example, most mineral production came predominantly from new mines. As high-grade ore deposits (those with high concentrations of the desired mineral) declined from these mines, the mining industry developed new techniques to exploit the lower-grade ore, allowing tor production of ore bodies that had been considered too costly to process.^

The industrial mining world ultimately believed that the independent prospector would be replaced by more efiBcient technology and large-scale exploration in a 'natural' evolution from a simple and primitive past to a more complex and productive modem mining world. The president of the Colorado School of Mines declared that "in place of the single miner panning out his gold is the placer mining company with its huge dredge or its great water power, leveling hills and directing whole rivers to secure the free gold."

Any force in the corporate world counter to efficiency was seen as unnatural and

"retrograde and primitive." Those who described the great accomplishments in mining technology referred to those methods used by prospectors as "primitive" and wrote about new techniques as new "phases" which would replace previous methods. Speaking to an 87 audience of industrial mining professionals, Alaskan geologist Alfred Brooks, for example, explained that "up to a decade ago placer mining was limited almost entirely to the most primitive methods." The individual miner "worked with pick and shovel and rocker or sluice box, the latter usually made of whip-sawed lumber. This phase of mining, however, is passing away in the larger mining districts."*

There remained a sizable gap in the mining industry, however, between the ideology of an evolutionary progression and the material ability to find new ores. In the first decades of the twentieth century, editorials and letters to the editor in professional mining journals discussed a common concern that mines were not being discovered in proportion to the increasing demand for mineral production. A growing industrialized nation needed

ores like copper and iron. World War I required metals like zinc, lead and tungsten. In addition, the federal government used gold to finance the war. Although lower-grade ore

could be mined with new methods, the mining industry continued to rely on new mine

discoveries for high-grade ores and for a variety of mineral ores to meet the increased

needs for production. Early twentieth-century mining technology and geological

knowledge, though, was not sufficient to find ore bodies readily. Behind their optimism,

mining engineers and mining exploration companies could not figure out how to find

mineral deposits in an efficient manner. Those in the mining industry placed great hope

that in time mining engineers and mining geologists would learn foolproof scientific

principles for discovering mineral deposits, but even these "experts" admitted that they

could not find ores without extensive work. Mining remained a difficult field for attaining ss economic and scientific efi5ciency because much of the mineral resources lay underground.

It was not only a challenge to find a mineral deposit, but then the discoverer had to figure out the extent and richness of an ore body that he could not see. These quandaries were recognized by a mining engineer in IS94 who confessed that mining involved "more unknown and indeterminate quantities than in any other branch of engineering." An 1908 editorial in The Engineering and Mining Journal explained that, although it was "possible to make a rough approximation" of the location and extent of some minerals like coal and iron, it was still "beyond the ability of all of the mining engineers and all of the mining geologists together" to determine the reserves of other ores; there existed no "man who can see into the ground."'

Searching for mineral ore was labor-intensive. Historian Morris Zaslow explains the

laborious process of prospecting for ore;

The task of finding a workable deposit, even in a known favourable area, entails hunting for hundreds of "showings" spread over a wide area; stripping away the overburden, digging and trenching to get an idea of their extent and trends; searching for an "occurrence" that might warrant further efforts to assess its size, content, grade, and shape by additional work...and sinking shafts and tunneling that could raise the "occurence" to the status of a "prospect." Hundreds of occurrences subjected to such efforts might yield only a single prospect; and even then, dozens of prospects are abandoned as too small, or too low grade to justify the capital outlays needed to develop them."

Rock and mineral outcroppings exposed above the surface or leaving telltale signs such as

mineral staining and paucity of plant growth had made for easier discoveries in some of

the newly-found mining regions. Without ready surface indicators, or without

"grassroots" deposits (mineral deposits lying close to the surface), nature became even 89 more enigmatic and prospecting became even more difBcult and time-consuming. And, even after drilling or uncovering a preliminary area (called the "sampled face") to determine the ore value and quantity in more detail, it was still uncertain what lay beyond this area. A mineral deposit could end suddenly, or taper off in quality or quantity. In order to determine whether prospects contained a larger body of valuable ore, the prospector had to do enough exploratory development work to determine the extent and the commercial value or quality of the ore. This work involved intensive digging and conducting mineral tests on the uncovered ore to determine its richness."

Alaskan prospecting had additional challenges that made for tedious work. One of the most distinct obstacles to mining in many parts of Alaska was having to work in frozen ground. Permafrost dominated most regions outside of those areas along the coastline. For placer mining, the ground needed thawing before one could begin to dig down beneath the surface. Typically, a miner started a wood fire over the spot to be thawed. It was a slow process, but needed little equipment. Fires were used in winter to sink a vertical mine shaft down into the gravel bed (wide enough to acconmiodate human travel) in order to determine the presence and extent of gold-bearing gravel. This method took some skill, as too hot a fire or heat directed against the walls of the shaft would result in a potentially dangerous collapse of the heavy gravel walls.

Another aspect of placer prospecting and development work was drift minings or drifting. This method involved digging out a horizontal passage underground, following the path of the mineral. These passageways were created at the bottom of a shaft, at the 90 level of the discovered gold, usually at bedrock. This gravel also needed thawing, and wood fires could be utilized (work was conducted in these smoke-filled tunnels).

Compared with other kinds of prospecting, drifting needed only inexpensive equipment.

Shallow shafts of less than ten feet did not need reinforcement, but deeper shafts needed wood timbers for safety. And placer mines near sea level or in summer when thawing occurred needed expensive pumps to manage water seepage.

Small boilers and steam fittings to thaw the ground by steam were developed in the first decade of the twentieth century, but were costly. One also needed, as a minimum, a hand-powered windlass, a cable, and wooden buckets to transport gravel out of a hole.

The windlass could only function down to 200 feet; deeper ground needed a small hoisting engine. In addition, prospectors needed to construct a sluice and find a running source of water, to separate the gold fi'om the gravel and mud. They also needed wheel barrows, shovels, picks, and pans. All these activities involved back-breaking and slow labor. Using power drills or hand drills to sink pipe down to bedrock and then extracting and analyzing the pipe's contents was another way to prospect in placer or lode mining. But this machinery was expensive, and power drills needed either steam or gasoline power to operate. Hand drills needed human labor to operate the mecham'sm, and was effective only down to 75 feet."

It was expensive for a mining company to prospect, in Alaska and elsewhere. Large mining and mining exploration corporations conducted their own exploration for minerals, using engineers and geologists, and hiring experienced prospectors upon occasion Up 91 through WWI, large-scale exploration consisted of finding likely sites through mineralogical observations and regional geological studies, then drilling sample bore holes into rock to determine mineral content. These methods were time-consuming and costly.

An important part of an exploration company's activities, however, included examining the findings of local prospectors or mine claim owners, for purchase. In one sense, then, they were "prospecting" for prospectors.'®

Neither the mining engineer working for an exploration or mining company, nor the prospector working for himself, could easily figure out nature. As an editorial related in

1916, "the ideal prospector is as rare, and no rarer, than the ideal engineer. The prospector to whom Nature is an open book is as uncommon as the engineer to whom the earth's crust is transparent." Because the labor involved in finding prospects and undertaking the initial developmental work was so time-consuming and expensive, mine companies did not want to accept these risks. Prospecting could not fit into the efficient industrial economy because of inadequate technology in mineral exploration, but it was also not efiScient because the amount of labor needed to find a mine was unknown and could not be calculated into a daily wage. The cost would be an uncontrolled element and an unmeasurable risk.'^

In the economic theory of risk and reward, another way to reduce risks was to shift the risks into the hands of those willing to take on risks or, as economics professor Frank

Knight put it in 1921, one of the "fundamental methods of dealing with uncertainty" was to reduce risk "upon selection of men to "bear* it." Because nature remained a largely 92 unpredictable factor in mining, uncertainty and ctiance prevailed. The prospector could

"assume" the risk of ore discovery, and the mining industry could offset their own material shortcomings by leaving "luck" and "chance" to the mineral seeker."

Not much different from the work required by nineteenth-century prospectors, the early twentieth-century prospector's physical labor located the mineral deposits needed by the mining industry to maintain its operations. Various observers in the early twentieth century commented on the fact that it was the prospector who found the mines. One writer noted in 1905 that most of the prospecting in the West was "generally carried on by the typical prospector himself, and it is the exception to find the technically-trained engineer engaged in this work.""

Despite the fact that mineral seekers provided a usefiil service to the mining industry, many of those involved in early twentieth-century industrial mining (and especially formally-trained professionals like mining en^eers) held strong patronizing and at times condescending views toward prospectors. Engineers worked to validate their position of authority and importance by distinguishing themselves from those groups like prospectors who, in contrast to engineers, had technical knowledge and expertise acquired through practical experience.'®

One mining engineer revealed this patronizing attitude when he summed up the

"natural" roles of the primitive prospector and the modem engineer The "natural person to discover new mineral deposits is the man who can subsist simply and who has the physical endurance and patience to wander for long periods of time in remote places. Such 93 a man is usually a miner and not a mining engineer." After this man found a suitable mineral deposit, the "man of higher training and more fastidious physical requirements" arrived upon the scene. Any strong condescending views, however, had to be held in check because the mining industry still needed the prospector to find new mines. This ambivalent view could be seen in the remarks of a mining engineer in 1916, who wrote that the prospector had crude ideas of finance, "wild...propositions," that he was

"unlearned in technical expression" and ignorant of geology and ore formation, "yet this is the man who leads the way."^

The mining industry used both ideological images and material means to encourage and motivate mineral seekers to find new mines. Mining professionals explained the prospector's role as an unpaid laborer in glowing terms, using ideological images. Some authors made tributes to prospectors as heroic figures. Working off the nineteenth-century prototype of the individual as a masculine hero, mining professionals portrayed the prospector as a trailblazer and a pioneer. This manifestation of individualism was an independent, self-reliant, and self-determined figure seeking to open up a new region, as a forerunner of settlement and civilization. The trailblazer aheady had powerfiil meanmgs associated with it, an embodiment of unrestricted opportunity and free initiative, natural liberty and 6*66 enterprise. Behind this representation were the ideals of Adam Smith's political economy: an individual seeking his own interests, but ultimately helping others

(what is good for the individual is good for everyone).

The Pacific Coast Miner in 1904 called the prospector the figure who was "blazing 94 the trails and opening the way for a new civilization," a man who was "finding the key to

Nature's store houses so that the avenues of trade and commerce naay be kept M to overflowing with the many metals of the world—with imperishable wealth." In a "Tribute to the Prospector," prominent mining engineer John Hays Hammond wrote in 1910 that the mineral seeker was "above all others the real pioneer of civilization, antedating the missionary and the railroad surveyor." He was a "man of exceptional probity...the

courageous, indefatigable prospector." Engineer T. A. Rickard described "The Miner as a

Pioneer of Civilization," in a 1914 issue ofMining and Scientific Press, where he

portrayed mineral seekers as invindble men with "human muscle" in place of machinery

and "common sense" in place of science. These figures arrived at mineral rushes, and "they

came, they worked, they conquered; and for their labors has arisen a great and glorious

commonwealth.""^

Whereas the prospectors of the nineteenth century had used the moral qualities of

endurance, hard work and courage to describe their own physical risks taken to pursue a

reward, the corporate world used these same attributes to justify using prospectors to

lessen their own financial risk, as labor for which they could not pay. The language of the

enduring, patient, hopeful, courageous, and persistent prospector came to mean the

endurance and hardships that went beyond the normal measure of sacrifice, that is beyond

the regular wage labor that could be calculated for the firagmented and specialized tasks of

industry.

This idealized character seeking his own rewards also had to be materially directed to 95 serve the needs of the mining industry. The general consensus of an ongoing

"symposium" on the increase need for new mines in the pages of the Mining and Scientific

Press was that "it would be well to combine the unscientific instinct of the old type with the scientific knowledge of the new school" of mineral seekers. There were similar pleas firom the North that the prospector needed both encouragement and direction. In short, prospectors needed to become more scientific and efficient to meet the needs of an increasingly efficient industry. Those in mining industry needed to make "prospecting for prospectors" pay off-

Mining engineers and mining geologists produced prospecting manuals to help direct prospectors and have their activities better fit industrial needs. Arthur Lakes, a former professor of geology and the assistant editor of The Colliery Engineer mid Metal Miner, noted that the mineral seeker needed to acquire knowledge "to save a vast amount of time and labor." Similarly, mining engineer 0. H. Packer explained that "the well informed man is not dependent upon luck alone. Knowledge is the key which he expects to unlock earth's greatest storehouse...do not underestimate the value of knowledge."^

These handbooks instructed the reader how to prospect more effectively. Mining engineer R. H. Stretch spent much of his manual working on correcting what he felt was misinformation and misconceptions held by prospectors. Most importantly, he felt that mineral seekers had little knowledge of geology and mineralogy. "Every mining man," he wrote, could "undoubtedly recall numerous cases where labor has been expended on worthless minerals which a very slight knowledge of mineralogy would have saved." 96

Misconceptions included a notion that mines became richer in mineral ore the further one dug. Packer directed his readers to use maps of mineral locations because they "suggest to the prospector where he should search for new discoveries."*^

These handbook authors also attempted to instruct their readership on how to use the formalized language of the mining industry to describe minerals and mine workings.

Stretch, for example, was concerned that prospectors were not adept at "accurate observation and description," but rather used formal mining terms "in a loose way," making it difficult to describe his mineral findings accurately. He laid out his book's goals as enabling the mineral seeker "to make his locations to better advantage than is now the case in a very large proportion of those on record, and [to] funiish him with the language in which he can intelligently describe to others what he has found, so that they shall see it

Just as he does.""

At the same time the authors attempted to train prospectors to fit the needs of industry, these writers also led the reader to believe that prospecting would pay off for the prospector. Stretch wrote that, with "a donkey, a little water, a few pounds of quicksilver, and a fair share of patience and physical strength the owner of... [a gold] prospect can create his ovm capital." Packer suggested that the "intelligence, industry and luck" of the prospector may make a difference between no profit or a profit in the "thousands."^

Alaska mine companies also encouraged and directed prospecting in their own regions of activity. One way to guide the activities of prospectors was to grubstake them

(furnishing them with supplies so they can search for minerals). Mine owners grubstaked 97 mineral seekers, and told them where to search. One prominent mine owner in Nome, for example, grubstaked individuals along particular promising creeks. Some mining companies and mine owners did hire prospectors on a limited basis but, again, in a managed fashion. Using wage workers to prospect made the most sense in regions with proven ore-bodies and close to the existing mine company holdings. At the turn of the twentieth century one mine company in Nome saved money by using wage laborers as

"'grubstakeless' prospectors" to hunt for more deposits in the nearby region.-^

The Copper River and Northwest Railroad also encouraged prospecting along its transportation corridor near the Copper River northwest of Cordova, Alaska. The railroad offered prospectors the opportunity to send their mineral ore to Tacoma, Washington, in ten-ton lots without any advance payment. This offer was meant to encourage small operators and prospectors to obtain money firom their high grade ore in order to do &rther development work on their claims. The raih-oad was owned by the Morgan-Guggenheim group, who stood to benefit not only by potential mineral discoveries, but also by increased business at their smelter in Tacoma.^

The Federal Government

Like the mining industry, federal governmental agency officials who oversaw Alaskan mining (namely those associated with the United States Geological Service and the

Bureau of Mines) were aware that prospectors found the majority of mineral deposits.

Geologists and mining experts working for the federal government could determine where valuable minerals would likely lie beneath the surface. But, like mining companies, they did not have the science nor the time and effort needed to determine the extent of valuable mineral ore in a region. It was the prospectors' labor that provided valuable information for the federal government and, in turn, the mining industry.

These same governmental services in Alaska guiding the prospector, were more importantly also helping to attract capital and industry. The federal government saw large placer mining operations and lode mining as the best means to develop Alaska, not small independent claims. In 1908, one government ofiBcial writing about gold placer mining in

Alaska called the transformation from "the crude methods of a pioneer" to "modem well- equipped plants," a process of "industrial evolutions." Another federal geologist wrote in

1909 that, "though the small operators still predominate" along with their "crude equipment," it was "the advent of the trained engineer and the capitalist" that will rob the

"northern mining field of much of its romance" but give the region "greater commercial stabiHty."^

These comments reflected the long-standing support of the federal government for industrial mining development in the West. As discussed in the previous chapter, the 1872

Mining Law was an early "symbiosis" between the federal government and industry, offering access to resources in return for economic development. The most prominent federal government agency overseeing Western mining regions was the United States

Geological Survey (USGS). The USGS began in 1879, for the purpose of "classification of the public lands and examination of the geological structure, mineral resources, and products of the national domain." As historian William Robbins has explained, scientists. 99 the USGS, and Western capital enterprise "established precedents and advanced a set of relationships that would become evermore complex (and intimate) in the twentieth century." The work of the Geological Survey provided details of the resources and topography of the Western lands needed for the "modem industrial state." The first director of the USGS, , worked with mim'ng investors. Those defending the continuing work of the Survey stated before Congressional proceedings in 1886 that "all the work" of the Geological Survey was "directly or indirectly of economic value, because it always relate[d] to the mineral resources of the United States."^

It was the Klondike Gold Rush that increased U.S. governmental presence in the

North. Prior to 1897 the U.S. Army had explored regions of Alaska, but the Rush marked the beginning of continuous army Involvement (building roads, policing, opening up the interior), followed by other government agencies. The federal government viewed Alaska as another western region available for settlement and economic expansion. The U.S.

Department of Labor, for example, described the Klondike Gold Rush as possible

"opportunities for renumerative employment of American labor and capital" in nearby

Alaska. Federal government explorations revealed evidence that Alaska contained an abundance of minerals that would add not only gold to the treasury, but also contribute important industrial-based minerals like copper and tin. Heightening this interest in gold.

Congress declared in 1900 that gold was the "sole legal tender monetary metal," with silver as a "subsidiary currency." Those in federal government who supported Alaskan mineral development viewed the prospector as playing an important part in this growth. 100

Just as important, however, was the role that governmental agencies like the USGS would play to direct mineral seekers toward a overall goal of industrial expansion. In 1900 a

Congressional Senate Committee on Military Affairs stated that "the development of the mineral products of the have been materially retarded owing to the absence of a guiding hand to assist the prospector in his research."^'

Like the mining industry, federal government agencies overseeing mining utilized imagery for their own purposes. In an ideologically-constructed Alaska, agency officials used the prospector ideal of individual initiative and opportunity but, again, as a material means toward achieving the needs of industry. A rhetoric of equal economic opportunity and success for all also helped to justify and explain their own intrusion and involvement in the Alaskan economy.

Although the Department of Commerce and Labor warned potential goldseekers of the great distances, high costs, and climatic conditions, their reports also suggested that Alaska was a place for someone of limited economic means to earn an independent livelihood. A

1903 governmental publication on the commercial possibilities of Alaska, for example, printed the report of the Alaskan governor for 1901 which cheerfully stated that "placer mining attracts the greatest number because the returns are immediate and it can be conducted by the great majority with very small capital. A grubstake, rocker, pick, pan and shovel, strength and skill are the main requisites."^^

Similar to the mining industry, the federal government idealized this needed search for ore by portraying the prospector as an independent trailblazer in a land of individual lOl opportunity, a self-reliant and self-determined figure who would open up a region for the benefit of others. Geological Survey head George Otis Smith called the miner the "pioneer of civilization." The "historyofthe winning of our own West" he wrote, was the story of "the rancher that followed the miner," followed by the "railroad builder." This imagery was also used to explain the involvement of the federal government in the North. The Bureau ofMines argued that their planned mining experiment station in Alaska "should prove of ahnost

incalculable value," because the miner had been "the pioneer of the fi'ontier, and the markets developed by the communities founded on his discoveries have led to permanent settlements

and the development of other resources."^^

Federal governmental mining specialists used a rhetoric in their reports and speeches that

expanded upon Adam Smith's ideals. They portrayed the prospector as not merely a self-

serving figure, but an individual who worked for the welfare of all. Every man's work helped

others. The head of geology for the USGS in 1905, C. W. Hayes, explained that each year

the percentage of the survey's economic work had been steadily increasing. The history of

U.S. economic development, argued Hayes, had proved that it was "safe to trust to individual

initiative," and that the distribution of knowledge would provide the "largest probability of

general benefit.

Democracy was to serve the many and not the few, and therefore everyone needed equal

access to scientific knowledge of mining. As Yehoshua Arieli explains, the state creates a

general fi-amework of "equity and equality" of the individual in the United States. It was the

federal government that could act as a disinterested clearinghouse to provide the guidance 102 needed to help in fostering individual opportunity for citizens, rich or poor. The purposes of the Geological Survey were to determine the "mineral wealth" of a region, to investigate the

"general geology," and to disseminate "authentic geological information." The Survey "should be the consulting geologist to the public, the mining engineer of the poor and the rich alike."

This agency worked to make geological reports and geology "more understandable to the layman.""

By supplying services such as survey maps, geological descriptions of mineral-centered areas, mineral assays, and general mining advice, the federal government provided an ideal of equality of opportunity. At the same time, the governmental agencies guided the efforts of the mineral seeker with a "visible hand" to complement those efforts and goals of the industry for a more efficient mineral seeker. These goals also fit nicely within the government's ideals of conservation at the turn of the twentieth century. Progressivism centered on efficiency, expertise, and order, and toward centralization of federal government efforts to oversee the nation's natural resources. In 1908, James Garfield, the Secretary of the Interior, explained that the USGS classified land in such a way that "the practical mining man may know how best to use those resources, how best to conserve them, using what we actually need without unnecessary waste." This long-standing idea was succinctly articulated in a professional mining publication in 1928 that commented on the long-standing efforts of the USGS to help prospectors. Mineral seekers "will be directed to the regions which, from a geological standpoint, offer the greatest probabilities of success, and away from those that offer little chance of returns. This is conservation of both capital and labor." Conservation meant 103 working to minimize waste of natural resources; but conservation also meant streamlining economic activities to maximize production while minimizing the expense of labor and development capital. An efficient prospector could better conserve time and labor to more effectively find new sources of minerals for an expanding industry.^

Congress granted $5,000 to undertake Geological Survey investigations of Alaska in

189S; by 1898, appropriations had reached $25,000. The Klondike Gold Rush resulted in a

preliminary governmental focus on ascertaining general conditions, until more detailed work could be done. By 1900, appropriations had increased to $60,000 (out of a total USGS budget appropriations of $844,740). This money fiinded USGS geologists and other

Geological Survey employees to travel across Alaska and gather information about mineral

resources. Topographical maps were one of the agency's highest priorities, for maps guided

the prospector in the area he was exploring. The USGS worked to direct prospectors to

Alaska by producing an Alaskan map in 1898 that included information on the locations of

known gold-bearing regions and mim'ng activities. This document also listed other minerals,

including silver, copper, and platinum. It was hoped that this document "prove of immediate

use to the prospectors and miners who may visit Alaska.

In addition, the Geological Survey put out bulletins and reports to help direct the

prospector in a more efficient and systematic fashion. In response to "numerous requests" to

the USGS for information on the costs and methods of working gold placer claims in Alaska,

for instance, the USGS researched and in 1905 produced a Bulletin, "Methods and Costs of

Gravel and Placer Mining in Alaska." The chief geologist who was to oversee Alaskan surv^ 104 work for the next several decades, Alfred H. Brooks, wrote that there was a great need to provide information on Alaska because mining ventures had gone into Alaska not anticipating its particular conditions and had failed. He expected that this report would "stimulate the mining industry" by providing accurate information on how to prospect and undertake placer mining in Alaska.^'

In 1901, Geological Survey director Charles D. Walcott knew the timeliness of making information available to prospectors traveling to Alaska. In a letter to the Secretary of the

Interior, he recommended the prompt publication of recent geological investigations in

Alaska "in order that they may be available to the public by the time the usual spring exodus to Alaska begins." The USGS was careful to separate its work from any involvement in the irrational world of mineral rushes. In 1908 Secretary of the Interior, James Garfield, clarified that one of the responsibilities of the USGS was to classify the public domain, but he was carefiil to specify that the Geological Survey had "never attempted to pick out special localities where great strikes might be made," but rather gave "some definite ideas about the minerals that may be expected to be found.

Like mining engineers, USGS geologists debunked popular theories of prospectors. One geologist covering the Seward Peninsula criticized prospectors for not heeding those facts contained in previous Geological Survey reports which, if followed, "would cause them to conduct their search with more promise of success than the hit-or-miss style so often adopted." He then disproved three "populartheories" ofgeology held by prospectors. These misconceptions were "the theory that a second bed rock may be found below the first, the 105 theory that the ledges are not wholly in place, and the theory that there is a uniformity of elevation of possible ancient beach lines in areas outside of the now partly explored Nome tundra."^

The USGS also directed mineral seekers toward those Alaskan locations with the highest potential of containing valuable ore deposits. USGS geologists acted as preliminary

"prospectors" by examining rock outcrops and ledges and determining the general

"character and distribution of the mdividual rock masses and their relations to one another"

Included in USGS maps were general topographic information like water sources, drainage corridors, forests, trails, and other information of use in getting to and setting up a mining camp. The USGS geologist was also, in a sense, a mediator between the prospector's labor and the mining industry. He not only surveyed regions for mineral potential, but he also collected information about mining aaivities. Just as it was the prospector's labor that found mines for mining and exploration companies, it was the prospector's labor that provided the valuable information to determine the richness and extent of minerals in a particular place for the federal government and, by extension, the mining industry. As historian Morgan

Sherwood writes, during the Klondike Gold Rush the United States Army and Geological

Survey explorers "mined the miners" for information about Alaska.^^

The geologists had to wait to obtain more information, because in the "early months of the development of a camp there are rarely sufScient exposures, either natural or artificial, to furnish data for a complete account of the ore bodies," and the geologist could only

"formulate general statements as to genesis and structure." In early twentieth-century Alaska, 106 the prospectors in a new area typically worked their claims to figure out the extent of a mineral deposit in the area. In 1907, for instance, a veteran prospector reported that stampeders to the Innoko area in the central western interior of Alaska had been tracing placer gold back to a quartz ledge, which they believed was twenty feet wide and seven miles long. Once prospectors uncovered ore, their findings were of interest to the mining industry as a whole. The Geological Survey played the role of serving the industry by passing along this information. It was clear that the agency prioritized those newlyactive mining areas. One surveyor explained that the USGS gave precedence to those "groups of prospectors in undeveloped districts" to send a geologist to examine their operations and report his findings based on these operations.^^

Another government agency, the Bureau of Mines, also operated under the ideals of conservation, striving for greater eflBciency, economy, and safety. Like the USGS, the Bureau worked "in behalf of the public welfare," but ultimately to aid industry. Estabh'shed in 1910, one purpose of the Bureau ofMines was to increase safety ofthe industrial mining workplace, with the goal of increased efficiency and production. Another purpose was to ensure "a more efficient, or less wasteful, development and use of our mineral resources." As the first appointed director, J.A. Holmes, stated, "all unscientific or inefficient use of resources...[was] a waste."'*^

The annual Bureau ofMines report for 1914 first mentioned the "great need" to create a mining and metallurgical laboratory in Alaska, in part to assist prospectors. la 1915

Congress authorized ten new mining experiment stations in the United States, including one 107 at Fairbanks. Material delays postponed M operations until the summer of 1917. Their

investigations centered around large-scale mining, and included "the development of more

efiBcient methods of working frozen placer ground; the milling and metallurgical treatment of

gold and copper ores, the mining and concentration of tin ores; and the application of

hydroelectrical [sic] power in the mineral industries of Alaska.'""

The Fairbanks Experimental Station ofBcials focused their other activities on assisting

the mineral seeker, but it was clear that these activities also centered around industrial mining.

One of the services offered to prospectors at the Fairbanks station was to conduct a

"qualitative analysis and identification" of "economic mmerals" sent in by prospectors or

those involved in mining development in Alaska. The mineral samples could be sent to

Fairbanks, and an answer would be sent back to the prospector via a letter Officials singled

out those minerals deemed to be "economic," or most needed by industry. A priority was to

encourage prospectors to look for minerals other than gold, since most prospectors could

recognize gold, but not other valuable minerals. They supplied "information as to the

economic minerals known or likely to be found in Alaska, the station maintaining on exhibit

a collection of such minerals." Having these samples on display helped instruct mineral

seekers how to recognize these desired minerals out in the field. The Fairbanks station

promoted tin and platinum, two minerals needed for industry.^^

Their public role not to meddle in private industry was, at times, blurred. The Bureau of

Mines claimed that they were careM not to conflict with the roles of commerce. They

explained that their purpose was not to provide firee mineral assays, for this was the job of 108 local assayers. What the agency could do, however, was to "make mineralogical or qualitative determinations" for prospectors and small-scale miners. The Bureau was aware of the high costs for a mining corporation to send an examining engineer to remote Alaskan areas, so another purpose was "to some extent take the place of a preliminary examination and furnish data" that would then "justify the trip of an engineer" to Alaska. This agency clearly helped to speed the process of mining development, where needed.^

The Bureau of Mines also worked to bring together prospectors and capital. The station was dubbed a "clearing-house" for Alaska mining news, but focus centered upon informing prospectors of the current market value of various needed ores, as well as bringing together

"the names of men or firms interested in their purchase." The station kept a file of prospects and small mines for persons and companies interested in "exploratory work" on a site to determine its potential use for a larger operation. Officials also informed prospectors and small operators of the market activities in Seattle, so a miner would not ship an ore sample to this market after the going price decreased. Although the man who oversaw the station,

John Davis, called it an "informal stopping place" for prospectors, the Bureau could not meet its industrial-based goals without the prospector's mine claims. "Our work," wrote Davis,

"cannot be done without their cooperation."^^

Alaskan Promoters

A third group, Alaskan promoters, also worked to attract prospectors to their respective

areas by promising great rewards and self-employment. New discoveries meant new mines,

and interested development capital or mining companies looking in the direction of their 109 region. Alaska was a vast territory of varying climate and accessibility. Closest from Seattle by ship was the more temperate southeastern Alaska, which included Juneau, Ketchikan,

Sitka, and Skagway; farther away but still accessible by boat was the Prince William Sound and Kenai Peninsula. Still farther on by sea was the remote Seward Peninsula, on the Bering

Sea, with the mining settlement of Nome, difBcult to access in winter. A third area was the vast interior, including points along the Yukon River, and more-known mining districts like

Fairbanks, Rampart, Eagle, and Fortymile (see Figure l).^'

Most small conununities as well as larger urban places like Juneau, Nome, and Fairbanks came into being on account of gold discoveries. It was not surprising, then, that promoters focused on mining. An editorial in 1908 declared that "it was not anticipated now" that Alaska would produce any agriculture for export, and that mineral resources would remain "the most important factor in the settlement and development of the country." For regional promoters, having prospectors scouring the land to find new mines was a positive sign of growth.

Alaska's governor Wilford Hoggatt proclaimed a positive future on Alaska Day in 1906 because "thousands of brave and hardy men are scouring every inch of our country in search of the hidden wealth." An editorial in the July 1907 issue of the Alaska-Yukon Magazine celebrated new gold finds and discoveries of copper and coal as indications of a prosperous future.^'

Promoters were competitive, arguing that their respective communities offered the best opportunities for the mineral seeker. They also aeated an idealized world. Alaska was a mecca for poor men, a place where the American ideal of succeeding through one's own 110

ir»VSp!

FIGURE I: Map of Alaska

From: Alfred H. Brooks, et al., "Report oa Progress of lavestigations of \fineral Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska," United States Geological Survey Bulletin 259 (Washington, D. C.: Government Printing OflBce, 1905), Plate 1, p. 14. Ill eSbrts was possible. Prospectors could find a pay streak (a valuable pocket of ore) and obtain

a comfortable income. Whereas supporters of the 1872 mining law used the image of the

"poor man" to argue that civic responsibility would lead to a nation of settled property owners

(in this case, owning their own mining claims), the early twentieth-century idea of the poor

man was that, through his own efforts, he could rise out of the working class and into a higher

economic class in industrial mining. Promoters created an aura of equality of opportunity,

using the "guiding hand" of wage labor as a means to an end of economic success where mine

laborers could become mine owners. Just as in the nineteenth-century, this ideal was centered

around Euro-Americans. There was no invitation to prospect for the 29,536 Alaskan Native

Americans counted in the 1900 U.S. Census. Although native groups lived near mining areas

like Fairbanks, they did not make up part of the promoter's vision of a vibrant industrial

region.'"

The Nome Chamber of Commerce graced the cover of their 1905 promotional brochure

with a photograph of a large gold nugget, weighing 182 ounces (more than eleven pounds).

The publication emphasized the possibilities of the individual in gaining successful self-

employment in placer gold mining, as well as tin placer mining. The Chamber of Commerce

reassured that "hundreds of men were given employment" working placer operations, and

singled out one location as allowing individual operators to average not less than ten dollars

per day. The "present aim of the prospector," one paragraph declared, was to "find a creek

rich in placer gold that he may take out a small fortune and do it quickly."^^

SimQar to the Klondike Gold Rush, most of the hopefiil mineral seekers who traveled 112 to Alaska after the turn of the twentieth century did not attain great wealth. Nonetheless, promotional publications focused on those prospectors and small operators who were productive and financially successful, and told stories of the successful individual or self- supporting entrepreneur. The Nome promotional work, for instance, mentioned that J.C.

Brown, a man of "endurance, courage and resource," had sluiced "several thousand dollars fi-om a very small dump which he had extracted.""

Fairbanks also stressed a rags-to-riches story, and emphasized the individual. A promotional brochure of the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce placed on its cover an illustration of a man checking his gold pan, with a pick nearby. The Chamber of Commerce declared that their region offered "the possibilities of wealth to men of every walk in life," but stressed that "nearly all the rich men of the district, as well as many who have retired with a comfortable competence, are men who, less than ten years ago, were either penniless prospectors" or "working for wages for others." Wage labor served as the base for eventual success. The brochure explained that a waged employee could save enough money fi'om wages to purchase supplies for prospecting trips "bringing in fortunes in discoveries of rich claims." This promotional piece stressed the new qualities of the region. "Hundreds of streams" had never been named, nor "seen by white men." "Not one-tenth" of the area had been prospected, and many "yet undiscovered" rich ore localities "only await the coming of the prospector." It was the "vast fields of placer gravels" that held the greatest potential, "with the positive assurance of its return manifold." In another laudatory promotional overview of mining opportimities in the Fairbanks area, promoter Percy Meaker wrote that the area 113 presented "a spectacle ofindividual independence where many men are creating small fortunes for themselves and some are making large ones, the best field in the world for individual enterprise and small capital."^^

Va& Mining Journal in Ketchikan was especially aggressive in trying to lure prospectors into their more southern region. The paper declared that the "gr®at bulk" of Alaska's mineral wealth was not found in gold placers, but rather in quartz, and "thousands" of prospectors had

passed by Ketchikan's vast deposits of quartz on their way to the much more expensive interior regions. Contrasting their community from "sensational" reports of Klondike and

Alaskan gold camps, the Ketchikan promoters proclaimed that the "permanent, durable wealth of Alaska" was to be found in lode mining for gold, silver and copper. One article offered an example of a prospecting trip of three local prospectors to illustrate how much easier it was

to prospect m the greater Ketchikan area. The Ketchikan District offered easy transportation,

easy access, and low-cost living. All that was needed was a rowboat or sailboat ($20.00-

$50.00), a "few hundred dollars" worth of supplies for three or four men, a rifle, and some

fishing tackle. All one needed to do was "haul their boat upon the beach, strike their tent, and

they are at home." With so much "virgin ground," it was "ahnost absolutely certain to reward

the labors of the prospector, hidden treasures."^

A larger regional publication in the first decade of the twentieth century, the Alaska-

Yukon Magazine, emphasized Alaska as a Utopia for the poor. Alaska was "a good place for

people who are poor and proud," declared one 1907 editorial, a place where one "does not

have to live beyond one's means." An editorial in the magazine presented a "rags-to-riches" 114 portrayal of Alaska, a place where many past wageworkers had become mine operators.

Wage labor was a "means to an end," a way to accrue money for development of individual prospects. Another editorial assured that there was "plenty of room in Alaska for the poor man," and that there were "hundreds of men today living in comparative wealth and comfort who only a few years ago were poor people in Alaska." Working off the image that labor is equal to one's own capital, another 1907 issue stated that "the Alaskan mines are the kind of property that a poor man acquires, and becomes rich through the gold they produce," without the help of "outside capital.""

Like those in the mining industry and the federal government, Alaskan promoters also worked to direct mineral searchers in material ways. Promoters applauded federal governmental aid to prospectors. An editorial in the April 1907 issue of Alaska-Yukon

Magazine stated that the Geological Survey was doing an important job in Alaska, especially in providing accurate and valuable reports for the prospector. Local enterprises also directed

prospecting toward their community by grubstaking. In 1903, the Alaska Commercial

Company was giving credit to customers for supplies, "with the object of increasing the gold output by keeping the men at work.""

Promoters also guided mineral seekers toward the needs of industry by instructing them on efficient mining methods and how to approach purchasers in order to sell their mine claims. The Mining Journal in Ketchikan advised prospectors on how to prepare their

prospects for investors, stressing that they may have to wait until fiirther developmental work

was done before reaching any payment agreement, and to allow for "hlieral propositions" for 115 payment, ratherthandemandingunreasonableprices. Similarly, aDouglas newspaper warned prospectors not to misrepresent the value of their ore, and that it was most important to be able to show the value of the ore remaining, not the value of any ore already sold. Other articles in issues of the same paper explained how to locate lode ore, how to determine its worth in light of factors like accessibility, and how to develop an ore body to determine remaining ore."

By 1914, Fairbanks was directing prospectors toward quartz gold, not placer gold.

Promoters were hoping to expand beyond the prevailing placer operations to what they perceived to be the more permanent and industrialized hard rock mining of quartz gold. A promotional pamphlet written under the direction of the Fairbanks Commercial Club stated that one discoverer of a quartz prospect had "little capital to start with except his energy" but the prospect "practically paid for its own development" and has "produced $350,000 in gold."

Overall, "without capital...quartz prospectors have taken out probably $700,000 in gold";

Fairbanks was a place in which prospects "developed themselves." The brochure quoted

Secretary of Interior Franklin K. Lane as stating that "individual fortunes have been made" around Fairbanks "larger than the price paid Russia for the whole territory."®*

Like the mining industry and the federal government, Alaskan promoters envisioned a

"natural" sequence of growth and development different firomautopia of independent mineral seekers. They believed that prospectors and independent small miners would have to be

replaced by large-scale industrial mining if any economic growth were to occur. Promoters

believed that the individual miner would give way to large operator and corporations, what 116 a Skagway, Alaska, newspaper called the "whispered voice," or the "sound of industry." An editorial in the April 1907 issue oiAlaska-Yukon Magazine explained that new discoveries of gold were enough to attract population, and that the subsequent gold industry "will necessitate the building of towns and cities," as well as railroads and other forms of transportation, and those other industries "that will follow the development of the gold mines." The president of the Alaska Banking and Safe Deposit Company in Nome, overseeing the largest hydraulic plant in the area, stated in 1907 that "the work of the individual miner and small operator must give way to the work of the large operator and corporations," for larger capital was needed for more productive operations."

Conclusion

In the end, as much as those who promoted prospecting activities declared the importance of the prospector, they were selective in who they really wanted coming to Alaska and what these new immigrants should be doing. They did not want those who were unwilling to work hard physically, or those who complained about their circumstances. It is clear that the federal government did not want truly poor men in the region, unless they were willing to take on physical labor. In 1900 an army captain, P. R Ray, commented on the U.S. Army efforts to feed around 300 persons at Fort Yukon, Alaska, deep in the interior to the west of the Canadian border and the area of the fQondike Gold Rush. Many were without available means to buy food and supplies, or to leave Alaska. Ray put those willing to work on jobs cutting wood, with hopes that some of them would buy prospecting supplies with their wages, for "much benefit to the country may be derived from their prospecting." He gave promissory 117 notes to those with financial resources back home, but, in his words, he "forced the malcontents" to leave the region. In his view, only those willing to work toward the economic development of the region were welcome®

It was an ambivalent attitude toward prospectors, because supporters of an industrial and settled region needed the help of the prospector, but they did not, in the long run, want them to loiter. A1907 editorial on Alaskan labor made it clear that those going to Alaska were to seek gainful employment, announcing that there were ample opportunities for wage labor in

Alaska and that "a poor man who goes into this country must find work," for "idleness in

Northern Alaska means burdensome expense." Another editorial specified that Alaska wanted a population of "desirable persons," specifying "strong men who are not afi'aid to work" rather than stampeders that left poor.^'

When discussion focused upon wage labor disputes among Alaskan mining companies, those against these labor strikes employed similar rhetoric. A1908 editorial used the argument of individual advancement as a critidsm of labor union activity. Why have unions in the first place if the work was a transitory means to a better future for the individual laborer? "The object of labor unions," stated the editorial, was "to promote the welfare of the laborer," but unions had no place in new mining camps. The "class of men" who labored in mining camps did "not e.\pect to be laborers all their lives" and that "the wage-earner of today may be the mine owner of tomorrow." Anyone with such goals could not "justify himself' as a member in a labor organization.^^

At other times the rhetoric of individual advancement used to encours^e prospectors 118 magically disappeared when writers spoke of labor strikes. A1908 editorial responding to a recent strike of wageworkers in the Fairbanks area stated that most wageworkers were bom into the "proletarian rank" and it was only "sometimes" that "a giant breaks through ranks."

Another editorial took a more benevolent view toward labor tension, hoping "that in less than another 700 years there will be a more general distribution of wealth."^

Many viewed prospectors as the ultimate in labor, working for larger enterprises as wageworkers in the warmer summer months, and using their wages to foot their own prospecting expeditions during the ofif season. As one USGS ofiBcial encouraged, "men who are willing to work for wages during the summer, and actively and intelligently prospect during the winter with the money so earned, have always the chance of finding and locating a pay streak for themselves." In these managed prospector ideals, however, it is just as significant where the prospector c//

It was clear that, even as promoters were working to attract prospectors through promises of poor men's conditions, they did not want this population ultimately working in their own small placer mmes. One writer contrasted the earlier wasteful placer miners whose

"strength was their capital" but who depended on blind luck and "only developed such ground as afforded them immediate returns." Large dredging operations, on the other hand, were a more important component in Alaska, a "game for capital and men with big capabilities" and for those "whose brains are their greatest asset." They put larger amounts of gold into 119 circulation, "stimulating the wheels of industry." The solitary figure of the mineral seeker became part of a different ideal after his mineral discovery. In the goal of the eflSciently-run mining industry, he showed up as a wage laborer. Darnel Guggenheim's response to a rush of "hundreds" of prospectors to one area in 1914 in the central interior Alaska (along the

Susitna River) revealed the intentions of those in the mining industry. As the head of the

Guggenheim interests in the nearby Wrangell Mountains, he stated that "the discovery will afford employment to hundreds of men, for the recovery will not be made by placer mining, as in the Klondike, but by smelting and cyam'ding."^^

Popular writers like Jack London placed certain values and ideals onto a northern landscape. Examining the words of the mining industry, federal government agencies, and promoters in early twentieth-century Alaska shows how these groups actively deployed and perpetuated similar ideological images for their own purposes, and to get desired material results. Words and images were used to persuade, sell, reassure, direct, and justif>'. They also disguised ulterior motives, making it appear that certain values and ideals were natural to the mining landscape, and operated freely in the actions of autonomous individuals striving to seek their own fortunes.

The trailblazing prospector was a false reality. It was not the prospector who blazed the trail, but rather the federal government, the mining industry, and the promoters. The government surveyed and classified the appropriate uses of the land, and then directed appropriate activities with maps and information. These were, in a sense, promotional materials. Any "blazing the trail" the prospector did was to show engineers and mining companies where to work to their financial advantage.®® 121

1. Earl Labor, "Jack London," in A Literary History of the American West, ed. Western Literature Association (Fort Worth: Texas Christian University Press, 1987), 381-382; Jack London, "The Gold Hunters of the North," Atlantic (July 1903), reprinted in The Unabridged Jack London, ed. Lawrence Teacher and Richard E. Nicholls (Philadelphia; Running Press, 1981), 674. For rags-to-riches stories, see London's short pieces such as, "The Faith of Men" and "Too Much Gold," in Jack London, The Faith of Men and Other Men, and Other Stories (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904).

2. Jack London, "The Economics of the Klondike," The American Monthly Review of Reviews 21 (January 1900), 70, 74. Historian Susan Kollin argues that London's fictional depictions of the North were really depictions of American expansionist desires in Canadian territory. Susan Kollin, "North to the West: Jack London and the Literature of U.S. Expansion in Canada," Canadian Review of American Studies 26 (Spring 1996), 63- 81. But David Wrobel writes that in London's 1900 essay he was lamenting the passing of the firontier and the inevitability of industrial transformation. By the time he published The Call of the Wild in 1903, London had become a socialist, and felt, in Wrobel's words, that the fi'ontier "had served as a safety valve for the discontents of the working classes, ensuring social fluidity and consequently stunting the growth of class consciousness." David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 82-85; 89-90, quotation fi'om p. 82. London's portrayal of the "natural" progression of industry, however, echoed the positive outlook of other less known authors writing about the future of Alaska and the Yukon. Alice Henson Christoe declared the "day of the sluice- box, the gold-pan,~die poor man's implements...is over. The day of the dredge, the symbol of the capitalist, is upon the land" and the stamp "with its steady rising and falling, and rising again, is Progress, Prosperity and the peace that goes with them." Alice Henson Christoe, "A Sympathetic Journey to the Klondike," Alaslat-Yukon Magazine 1 (May 1909), 97.

3. Hydraulic mining is defined as "mining by washing sand and dirt away with water which leaves the desired mineral," generally washing away a "bank of gold-bearing earth" by a "jet of water, discharged through the converging nozzle of a pipe under a great pressure, the earth or debris being carried away by the same water." Placer mining debris was directed through sluices, long wooden "trough-like" boxes in which "the sand and gravel are carried away, while most of the gold and other heavy minerals are caught in riffles." A dredge is a "large raft or barge on which are mounted either a chain of buckets or suction pumps and other appliances, to elevate and wash" gold-bearing sand and gravel from river channels. U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, aid Related Terms (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office [GPO], 1968), 348-349,560, 1031. For a history of Alaskan dredges, see Clark C. Spence, The Northern Gold Fleet: Twentieth-Century Gold Dredging m Alaska (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1996. 122

4. By "the mining industry" and "those in the mining industry," I mean those professionally-trained individuals (mining engineers, mining geologists, mine superintendents) who worked for mine companies, ofiScials of those companies, and the various mine companies, whether it was a mine company producing minerals, an exploration company, a mining syndicate, or other financial enterprises backing mining ventures. What is important is that these individuals and groups all had a vested interest in large-scale mining and the overall growth and development of mining.

5. As in the nineteenth century, a handful of female prospectors searched for minerals in the early twentieth-century American West. Those who perpetuated prospector images and ideals, however, referred to mineral seekers as male. I will continue to use the male pronoun, therefore, to refer to prospectors in general. For a look at female mineral seekers, see Sally Zanjani, Women Prospectors in the American West, 1850-1950 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997).

6. Alfired D. Chandler, Jr., The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American (Cambridge, Massachusetts; Belknap Press, 1977), 1.

7. Harold U. Faulkner, The Decline of Laissez Faire, 1897-1917 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1961), 151-152; Lorenzo C. Simpson, Technology, Time and the Conversations of Modemi^ QTf : Routledge, 1995), 18; Ceceh'a Tichi, Shifting Gears: Technology, Literature, Culture in Modernist America (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 75. Friedrich Juenger explains that there were periods in history that supported, and thus served to strengthen, the notion of technology producing riches. Friediich Georg Juenger, The Failure of Technology (Los Angeles: Henry Regnery Co., 1956), 9. For a larger look at efficiency from the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century, see Samuel P. Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement 1890-1920 (New York: Atheneum, 1980). Cecilia Tichi explains that proponents of technological progress believed that the material world was a mechanical construction of "dynamic, integrated assemblies of component parts," each operating under "varying degrees of efficiency." Nature was also a mecham'sm and, like human-designed machines, humans could study the natural world and come up with ways to redesign the relationship between component parts to make a stronger and more efficiently operating whole. Tichi, Shifting Gears, xii, 34,41. One method to counterbalance a decreased grade of ore was through increased volume of ore; other methods included chemical and electrical concentrations of crushed ore to extract a higher percentage of the mineral. Harold Barger and Sam H. Schurr, The Mming Industries, 1899-1939: A Stu

8. Victor C. Alderson, "Mining Engineering Education in the United States, in Report of the Proceedings of the American Mining Congress, Tenth Annual Session, Joplin, Mo., November 11-16, 1907 (: American Mining Congress [AMC], 1908), 165; Tichi, Shifting Gears, 54, 64; Alfred H. Brooks, "Alaska and Its Mineral Resources," m Report of the Proceedings of the American Mining Congress, Tenth Animal Session, 265.

9. Samuel Christy, "The Growth of American Mining Schools and Their Relation to the Mining Industry," Transactions of the American Institute of Mining Engineers 23 (1894), 458; "The Conservation of Resources," Engineering and Mining Journal 86 (October 19, 1908), 583; "Prospecting and Prospectors," Mining and Scientific Press 113 (October 28, 1916), 618; (jeorge Otis Smith, "The Public Interest in Mineral Resources," in Proceedings of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress, vol. 8 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1917), 538; Carl Abbott, "The Federal Presence," in The Oxford History of The American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner, Carol A. O'Connor, and Martha A. Sandweiss (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 474; "The Position of the Gold Mines," Engineering and Mining Journal 104 (December 22, 1917), 1097. Although the editorial in Mining and Scientific Press was printed in 1916, it was part of an ongoing discussion of the decline in prospecting that had been concerning the mining industry since the turn of the century. "Prospecting and Prospectors," 618.

10. Morris Zaslow, Reading the Rocks: The Story of the Geological Survey of Canada, 1842-1972 (Toronto: Macmillan, 1975), 36; quoted in Dianne Newell, Technology on the Frontier: Mining in Old Ontario (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1986), 15.

11. Clark C. Spence, Mining Engineers and the American West: The Lace-Boot Brigade, 1849-1933 (Moscow, Idaho: University of Idaho Press, 1993), 94. A.B. Parsons explains that development work in vein or lode deposits "serves a dual purpose; it discloses ±e existence of ore and, at the same time, it provides the workings through which the ore may be attacked, and, when broken, transported either to the bottom of a shaft or to a main exit adit." Development means (literally) "the uncovering or unfolding of something that has been uncertain; the working out in detail." A.B. Parsons, The Porphyry Coppers, (NY: The American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1933), 356.

12. John Power Hutchins, "Prospecting and Mining Gold Placers in Alaska," in Alfred R Brooks, et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska: Report on Progress of Investigations in 1907," United States Geological Survey (USGS) Bulletin 345 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), 55; Genevieve Alice Parker, "The Evolution of Placer Mining Methods in Alaska," (Undergraduate Thesis, Alaska Agricultural College and School of \fines, 1929), 20-23.

13. Parker, "The Evolution of Placer Mining Methods in Alaska," 23-25; Hutchins, "Prospecting and Mining," 55,65-66, 76. See also T. A. Rickard, Through the Yukon and 124

Alaska (San Francisco; Mining and Scientific Press, 1909), 209-215.

14. F. J. Katz, "Methods of Placer Mining in Fairbanks District," in L. M. Prindle, "A Geologic Reconnaissance of the Fairbanks Quadrangle, Alaska," USGS Bulletin 525 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), 116-117; Hutchins, "Prospecting and Mining," 58-63.

15. Chester Wells Purington, "Methods and Costs of Gravel and Placer Mining in Alaska," USGS Bulletin 263 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1905), 39-43. Purington wrote that drilling equipment in Alaska was expensive to transport and to use; the machines cost between $3,500 and $4,000, and around $3.50 per foot to operate in interior Alaska, compared with $2.50 in Caliform'a. Other forms of drilling cost up to $8.00 per foot. Purington, "Methods and Costs," 39.

16. "Prospecting and Prospectors, 113 (October 28,1916), 618.

17. Frank H. Knight, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1921), 239; Irving Fisher, The Nature of Capital and Income (London; The Macmillan Co., 1919), 295. These and other works mentioned financial speculators and insurance brokers as two major risk-bearers. I am assuming that this theory can incorporate any individual or group that takes on the financial risk of another, in this case prospectors.

18. D.D. Cairns, "Prospecting in Western Canada," The Journal of the Canadian Mining Institute 8 (1905), 304. Cairns included the larger United States and Canadian West in many of his remarks in this essay.

19. Since the responsibility of the engineer revolved around control and use of scientific and technological knowledge, he distinguished himself through the mastery of knowledge, and through controlling and licensing that knowledge. Similar to mechanical engineers m the 1890s and 1900s, mining engineers formed professional societies, published professional journals and estabUshed courses in major universities and colleges. Earlier in the nineteenth century mining engineers had to travel to Europe to receive formal training, but by the end of the century there were over a dozen mining schools in the United States. By 1921, six out of seven of the more prominent American mining engineers had been college-trained. See David F. Noble, America by Design: Science, Technology, and the Rise of Corporate Capitalism (NY; Alfired A. KnopC 1977), xxiv; Edwin T. Layton, Jr., The Revolt of the Engineers: Social Responsibility and the American Engineering Profession (Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971), 3, 5; Chandler, The Visible Hand, 464; Mining Engineers and the American West, 18, 25-46. 125

20. John Wellington Finch, Symposium, "What is the Matter With Prospecting?-!!," Mining and Scientific Press 108 (January 17,1914), 133; John T. Reid to The Editor, Engineering and Mining Journal 102 (September 23, 1916), 556. Reid was a mining engineer and a member of the American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME) since 1903. AIME, American Institute of Mining Engineers Year Book (NY: AIME, 1913), 90. Examples of similar imagery continued into the early 1920s. In 1920 one man stated in the Mining and Scientific Press that the prospector was "absolutely necessary to successful mining, for it must be the prospector who originally finds the property for the engineer who scouts for the capitalist. No corporation can require fi-om its employees the endurance of such hard-ships." E. Hedburg to The Editor, Mining

21. "The Prospector and His Work: Interesting Story of a Life Continually in Touch with Nature," Pacific Coast Miner 9 (April 23, 1904), 197; John Hays Hammond, "Suggestions Regarding Mining Investments," Engineering and Mining Journal 89 (January 1,1910), II; T. A. EUckard, "The Miner as a Pioneer of Civilization," Mining and Scientific Press 108 (June 20, 1914), 1005. Hammond began working for the Guggenheim Exploration Company in 1903, and continued for many years as a mining engineer for the company. John Hays Hammond, The Autobiography of John Hays Hammond, vol. 2 (NY: Farrar and Rinehart, 1935), 502.

22. "Prospecting and Prospectors," M/w/zigant/5c/ew//^c Press 113 (October 28, 1916), 618. Although the results of the symposium were printed in 1914, these remarks reflect many earlier dialogues in the professional journals on the need for a more trained mineral seeker. For a northern articulation of the need for a better trained prospector, see R.A.F. Penrose, Jr., "Gold Mining in Arctic America," Part 2, Engineering emi Mining Journal 76 (December 5,1903), 852.

23. Arthur Lakes, Prospecting for Gold atui Silver in North America, 2nd ed. (Scranton, Pennsylvania: The Colliery Engineer Co., 1896), 7; 0. H. Packer, Prospector's and Mner'sMa/raa/(San Francisco: Brown and Power Stationary Co., 1913), 15.

24. RJL Stretch, Prospecting, Locating aiul Valuing Mines (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1908), 10-11,150; Packer, Prospector's and Miner's Manual, preface.

25. Stretch, Prospecting, Locating and ValuingMines, 1,150-151. 126

26. Ibid, \l,^dxkex. Prospector's and Miner's Mmual, 15. Some of these guides went through multiple printings, indicating that they sold well. Arthur Lakes' 1896 guide, for example, was on its second edition, while Stretch's manual was in its tenth impression in 1908.

27. "Mining in the Nome Country," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (December 1907), 397; Harold French The Editor, Mining and Scientific Press 113 (September 30, 1916), 485. "Grubstake" refers to the "supplies or funds furnished to the mining prospector on promise of a share in his discoveries." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms, 516.

28. Alaska Sourdough (Douglas), September I, 1911.

29. Hutchins, "Prospecting and Mining," 54; Alfred H. Brooks, "History of Mining in Maskdi," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (May 1909), 149.

30. Carl J. Mayer and George A. Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion: A History of Public Mineral Policy in America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985), 78; Department of the Interior, "The USGS, Its Origin, Development, Organization, and Operations," USGS Bulletin 227 (Washington, D.C.; GPO, 1904), 9-10; William G. Robbins, Colony and Empire: The Capitalist Tran^ormation of the American West (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1994), 67-68; U.S. Congress, Report of the Joint Commission to Consider the Present Organizations of the Signal Service, Geological Survey, Coast and Geodetic Survey, and the Hydrographic Office of the Navy Department, 49th Cong., 1st sess., S. Rep. 1285 (June 8,1886), 115.

31. Sam C. Dunham, "The Alaskan Gold Fields and the Opportunities They Offer for Capital and Labor," Bulletin of the Department of Labor No. 16 (May 1898), 297,395; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee of Military Affairs, "General Introduction," Compilationof Narratives of Explorations in Alaska (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1900), 8, 14; ^chard H. Timberlake, Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 167. The Compilation of Narratives of Explorations in Alaska contains the major federal government-supported Alaskan explorations from 1869 to 1899. Mineral observations are numerous throughout these reports.

32. United States Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Statistics, Commercial Alaska 1867-1903 (Washington, D.C.; Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of Statistics, 1903), 57.

33. Smith, "The Public Interest," 540; Sumner S. Smith, "The Mining Industry in the During the Calendar Year 1915," Bureau of Mines Bulletin 142 127

(Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1917), 10.

34. C. W. Hayes, "The Relation of the Federal Government to the Mining Industry," in American Mining Congress, Papers and Addresses of the Eight Annual Session of the American Mining Congress, 1905, El Paso, Texas (Denver; AMC, 1906), 47, 59.

35. David White, "Organization and Cost of Geological Surveys," in Proceedings of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress, 605, 607,609. Yehoshua Arieli describes the state-based construction as JeSersonian. Arieli writes that the "natural justice and the free, spontaneous activities of the natural society could express themselves only if the state created a general framework of equity and equality as well as the conditions of social well- being." Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), 160.

36. James Rudolph Garfield, "The Federal Government in its Relation to the Mining Industry," Report of Proceedings of the American Mining Congress, Eleventh Antmal Session, 1908, Pittsburgh, Pemisylvam'a (Dtrntt: AMC, 1909), 90; Engineering and Mining Journal 126 (December 1,1928), 868; Hays, Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency, unnumbered page in the preface to the Atheneum edition.

37. S. F. Emmons, Map of Alaska, Showing Known Gold-Bearing Rocks with Descriptive Text Containing Sketches of the Geography, Geology, and Gold Deposits and Routes to the Gold Fields (Washington, D.C.: USGS, 1898), unnumbered page in front, 38-39; Department of the Interior, "The USGS," 11, 31-32; Morgan B. Sherwood, Exploration of Alaska, 1865-1900 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1992), 181; C. W. Hayes, "The Relation of the Federal Government to the Mining Industry," in American Mining Congress, Papers and Addresses of the Eight Annual Session of the American Mining Congress, 1905, El Paso, Texas (Denver: AMC, 1906), 48.

38. Purington, "Methods and Costs," 11, 13. Many of the USGS reports were free, but their topographical maps cost five cents per sheet. Pacific Coast Miner 9 (March 19, 1904), 143.

39. Charles D. Walcott to The Secretary of the Interior, January 11,1901, Roll 8, M430, Interior Department Territorial Papers: Alaska, 1869-1911, Record Group 48, Records of the OfiBce of the Secretary of the biterior. National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska; Garfield, "The Federal Government in its Relation," 89.

40. Philip S. Smith, "Investigations of the Mineral Deposits of Seward Peninsula," in Alfred H. Brooks, et al., "Report on Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1907," USGS Bulletin 345,209-213. 128

41. Department of the Interior, "The USGS," 28; Sherwood, Exploration of Alaska, 151. Some prospectors even joined expeditions as paid guides. "Innoko Diggings," Alaska- Yukon Magazine 4 (November 1907), 257. Thanks to Sally Southwick for the notion of the USGS geologist as a mediator.

42. Department of the Interior, "The USGS," 31; F. L. Ransome to The Editor, Mining and Scientific Press 108 (May 2, 1914), 736. Geological surveyors, however, took precautions not to publish the output of an individual operator, as this was considered guarded information by many miners. Alfred Brooks, "Administrative Report," in Alfred Brooks et al., "Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1907," 15.

43. J. A Hohnes, "The Bureau of Mines and Its Work," in American Mining Congress, Report of the Proceedings of The American Mining Congress, Thirteenth Annual Session, 1910, Los Angeles, California (Denver: AMC, 1910), 224; Joseph A Holmes, Third Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau of Mines to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1913 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1914), 5.

44. Joseph A. Holmes, Fourth Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau ofMines to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30,1914 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1914), 42; Van H. Manning, Seventh Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau ofMines to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1917 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1917), 22-23.

45. Van H. Manning, Eighth Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau of Mines to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30,1918 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1918), 92,94; Engineering and Mining Journal 103 (January 13, 1917), 117; Engineering and Mining Journal 102 (December 23, 1916), 1116.

46. Smith, "The Nfining Industry," 10; John A. Davis, "Government Aid to Alaska Mining," Engineering and Mining Journal 103 (January 20,1917), 89. In 1922, Interior Secretary H. Foster Bain continued to use the rhetoric of the trailblazer to justify governmental intrusion into the economy. He wrote that it was the Alaskan mineral seeker who was "in the work of conquering the wilderness, of winning for civilization the great silent stretches of the North" and "assisting him the Bureau of Mines has a fitting field for its enterprise." Prospectors were "too poor to employ a consulting engineer" for their lode prospects and thus the agency needed to continue providing assay services. H. Foster Bain, Twelfth Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau of Mines to the Secretary of the Interiorfor the Fiscal Year Ended June 30,1922 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1922), 14-15.

Atl. Engineering and Mining Journal 103 (January 13, 1917), 119; Davis, "Government Aid to Alaska Mining," 89. 129

48. For more specific information on Alaskan regions, see Purington, "Methods and Costs," 42. See also the Alaska map with noted mineral deposits, between pp 14-15, in Alfred H. Brooks et al., "Report on Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1904," USGSBulletin 259 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1905). Promoters worked to attract those inside and outside of Alaska. Some local newspapers, for example, hoped to draw settlers who were akeady in Alaska to their communities. The Ketchikan paper, VxQ Mining Journal, stated that copies went to "every town, mining and fishing camp in Alaska." Mining Journal, January 28, 1905. The monthly periodical, the Alaska-Yukon Magazine, was the "organ of the Northland." This monthly periodical provided news of the region as well as advertised the region's attributes to a larger audience. The publisher sent copies to subscribers in the continental United States. "Publisher's Announcement," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (March 1907), 94-96. In addition, the Alaska Club in Seattle was one location where visitors could find promotional materials. This Club was a stopping place for Alaskans and others traveling to and from Alaska. The Club contained a reading room "of all the Alaska newspapers, government documents relating to Alaska, photos and mineral exhibits." Terrence Cole, "Home of the Arctic Club: The Alaska and Arctic Buildings in Seattle," The Alaska Journal 15 (Winter 1985), 11. It was also likely that steamships carrymg tourists contained Alaskan literature. The Alaska Steamship Company, for example, refiised to buy copies of Jeanette Paddock Nichol's 1924 to carry on their ships. In her work, Nichols criticized the financial conglomerate, the Alaska Syndicate; one of the Syndicate's holdings was the Alaska Steamship Company. Terrence Cole, "The History of a History; The Making of Jeannette Paddock Nichol's Alaska," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 77 (October 1986), 136-37.

49. "Alaska Looks Better Than Ever," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 1 (November 1908), 161; Mining Journal, October 27,1906; "Future of Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magcaine 3 (July 1907), 444-45; William R. Hunt, Alaska: A Bicentennial History (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1976), 61.

50. Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 44, 50; Evangeline Atwood, Frontier Politics: Alaska's James Wickersfum (Portland, Oregon: Binford and Mort, 1979), 297-298. According to the 1900 Census, Alaska's total population was 63, 592. Ernest Gruening, The State of Alaska (New York; Random House, 1954), 121.

51. Nome Chamber of Commerce, Nome: A WonderlaruJ of Wealth (Nome, Alaska; Nome Chamber of Commerce, 1905), cover, 3-7, 19-20.

52. Ibid, 3. A dump is a "place where the ore taken from a mine is dumped." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms, 361.

53. Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce, Tanana Valley, (Fairbanks, Alaska: Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce, c. 1908), unnumbered pages; Percy Meaker, "The 130

Tanana Valley of Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (February 1908), 439-440.

5^. Mining Journal, January 5, 1901; January 26, 1901; April 20, 1901.

55. Untitled editorial, Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (March 1907), 83; "Opportunities for Poor Men in Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (February 1908), 501-502; untitled editorial, Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (Jan 1908), 430-431; "Alaska and Nevada Mines," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (May 1907), 264.

56. "Encourage Good Work," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (April 1907) 172-73; Engineering and Mining Joumall6 1903), 767.

57. "The Era of Development at Hand," Mining Jounml, February 2, 1901; "Locating a Lode," Alaska Sourdough, December 5, 1911; "Advice to Prospectors," Alaska ^ai/rc/oi/gA, December 26, 1911.

58. WJ. Thompson, Interior Alaska, The Home of Opportunity (Fairbanks, Alaska: First National Bank, 1914), 8, 15,21.

59. Daily Alaskan (Skagway), August 17, 1912; "Alaska Will Be Settled," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (April 1907), 170-71; "Mining in Nome Country," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (December 1907), 294.

60. Captain P JI. Ray, "Relief of the Destitute in Gold Fields," in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee of Military Aflfairs, Compilation of Narratives, 546.

61. "Labor in Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (May 1907), 265; "Go North Young Men," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (March 1908), 57-58.

62. "Labor in Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (Jan 1908), 287-289.

63. "Tanana Wage Question" and "The Wage Earner and the Employer," both vsi Alaska- Yukon Magazine 4 (February 1908), 502-504.

64. Purington, "Methods and Costs," 15.

65. David Gove, "The Gold Sifters of Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 13 (July 1912), 159-60; Sun (New York), September 14,1914, Engineering and Mining Journal 98 (September 19, 1914), 544. Smelting and cyaniding are methods used to concentrate and refine crushed ore to extract the desired mineral; they are used in large- scale industrial mining. 131

66. When looking back at his long career as the head of USGS work in Alaska, Alfred Brooks portrayed the USGS as the true traUblazer. He credited Alaskan prospectors in helping to open up new areas, but he also explained that prospectors' "conception of where they have been is often as vague as their ideas as to where they are going." For Brooks, it was the USGS who supplied such information to aid mineral seekers. Alfred Hulse Brooks, Blazing Alaska's Trails (College, Alaska: University of Alaska and the Arctic Institute of America, 1953), 282-283. 132

CHAPTERS

LIMITED PROSPECTS: THE LIFE OF THE ALASKAN MINERAL SEEKER

Introduction and Summary

Prospectors did come to Alaska, undiscouraged by the realities of the fClondike.

Certainly the ideology of the federal government, the mining industry, and promoters told these mineral seekers that they were important individu^s, and that Alaska held great possibilities. Did these promises live up to the actual experiences of working prospectors in Alaska? Was the American dream of self-suflBciency and the self-made man possible?

This is a difficult population to examine. From existing records, it is hard to calculate the total numbers of prospectors or their overall movements. Governmental ofScials and observers of the various mineral rushes in early twentieth-century Alaska gave only general estimates of mineral seekers in a particular area at a particular time. In the summer of 1905, for example, around 2,000 people rushed to the Eureka mining community along

Moose Creek, near Kantishna Hills in the central interior. Another rush in 1914 to the interior placer region along Livengood Creek motivated "hundreds of people" to travel to the area. From these numbers, it is difBcult to trace a population of those hunting for minerals or working independent operations in the larger region of Alaska at any given time. It is also a challenge to track numbers of prospectors entering and leaving Alaska.'

Many descriptions of prospecting were also very general. Typical was United States

Geological Survey (USGS) geologist Alfred Brooks' imprecise estimations in 1911 that 133 there was "much prospecting and considerable mining" in one region. The USGS was less interested in counting mineral seekers than in focusing on production numbers, output tonnage, and mineral values to support an ideology of economic development. U.S.

Census records were also very general. Although census workers counted a total Alaskan population in 1900 of 63,592 (of which forty-six per cent were Native American), they only took detailed occupational information from a small segment of this group. Out of

5,309 Euro-American men counted with occupational details, 2,889 declared their livelihood as "mining." This imprecise category could imply positions ranging from mine owner to mine laborer. Furthermore, mineral seekers did not always want their activities

noticed, for fear of attracting competitors to their area. Alaskan Hardy Trefeger wrote

that, in 1911, he looked for promising copper deposits near Yakutat Glacier and brought along anunal traps "as a blind for our prospecting." Anyone recording Tre&ger's activities,

therefore, would have categorized him as a trapper.-

In addition, most of these early twentieth-century argonauts did not reveal their

innermost desires or motivations on paper. Some who participated in the Klondike Gold

Rush and then returned to their own communities kept journals and provide us with their

impressions. But those who stayed on in the area or moved to Alaska after the turn of the

twentieth century and who made prospecting one of their most constant activities did not,

as a general rule, record their experiences. And, if they did, these writers only listed their

activities in a chronologicai narrative. Nevertheless, by examining general mining activities

in Alaska, mining periodicals, USGS and Bureau of Mine reports, biographies of Alaskan 134 residents, mine union activities, and existing narratives of prospectors, one can sketch out generalities about prospectors' lives in Alaska.

When the prospector arrived in the territory in the early twentieth century, Alaskan conditions were ultimately working against individuah'sm and self-su£5ciency. Alaska was not a paradise for poor men. It was an expensive place to reach, and an expensive place to live. Mining in Alaska was not democratic, nor was the playing field level. Certain unequal economic relationships were in place. The "natural" role for the prospector was looking for the mines, not generating capital or adding great wealth through mining operations.

Prospectors were challenged by increasingly industrial landscapes or by decreased opportunities as other miners and mining interests took up the richest mineral claims.

Ongoing legal disputes, abuses of power of attorney, and speculation further restricted their freedoms. Mining companies and developmental capital also maintained control over the payment arrangements for prospects and mines, and many wanted full control of the property.

Yet prospectors continued to come to Alaska and to prospect, year after year. If the realities did not meet the ideals, why then did the prospector continue to carry the burden of unpaid labor? The desire for wealth and success and the ideal of rugged individualism and the seif-made man prevailed in American society. There was also some evidence that an individual could still discover a valuable ore body. Mineral seekers were also influenced by the possibility of luck, as seen in population fluctuations toward areas of important mineral discoveries. 135

But immediate success of vast wealth did not happen to the majority of mineral seekers. Still, prospectors were willing to take a risk, and take up the work of searching for mineral ore because it did offer a chance for some financial independence. Labor union activity showed that many wageworkers did not see themselves as permanent laborers, but rather that they desired a chance to work for themselves. There were limited opportunities in earning a living fi-om prospecting and small independent mining operations.

Examining the lives of those prospectors who lived in the area more than a few years suggests that they achieved a limited self-sufSciency, especially if they varied activities as needed. But any success through one's efforts did not come without hard work. It was a testament to individual entrepreneurship and adaptability. In the end, however, they could never become entirely independent. Prospectors were dependent on the larger market place and the federal government for their "independence." Additionally, World War I revealed that the idea that the prospector could provide the basis for facilitating development was itself a flawed perception, and that the real nature of the political economy in Alaska was more complex.

Alaskan Realities

Contrary to the promotional images, Alaska was not a haven for poor men. One had to have some means to get to Alaska in the first place, and the fare from Seattle,

Washington, to any location in Alaska was high and difiScult to finance by prevailing wages (not including the expenses to reach Seattle). In I90S, second-class passenger fare firom Seattle to Juneau was $16.00, but to Nome it ranged between $50.00 to $100.00, 136 and $110.00 to Fairbanks. At the turn of the twentieth century, wages for Western miners ranged from $3.00 to $5.00 per day, with a 300-day income amounting to between

$900.00 and $1,500.00. The aimual cost of living for Western miners, however, was between $660.00 and $1,500.00, not leaving much room for savings. In other industries until 1918, an average yearly wage was $900.00. Looking at the lives of those who prospected and stayed on in Alaska, many came from a different previous enterprise or means of living. Harry Badger, for instance, had been a farmer in Washington and other western states before venturing to Dawson in 1900, and Fairbanks in 1903. Erford Elle

Chamberlain operated a Tacoma, Washington, real estate firm until 1897, then worked as a freighter over the White Pass trail, before turning to prospecting for the next ten years in the Klondike and then in Alaska.^

Even with some means to reach Alaska, the challenges of such great distances inside the territory and overall high costs made it difiBcult to live in Alaska without some additional economic means. It was certainly evident in the late nineteenth century that one required a fair amount of food for one year in the general northern region. In 1898 a U.S.

Department of Labor ofScial warned that one person needed "at least 1,500 pounds of provisions and sufBcient means to take him back to civilization at the end of the year in case of failure." Such expenses were hardly in the realm of possibilities for the "poor" man, given the additional costs of travel to Alaska from the lower states. USGS official

John Power Hutchins estimated in 1908 that Alaskan supply costs were "at least 100 per cent more than in the States." As mentioned in the previous chapter, to work one's own 137 placer gold claim in the interior Alaskan regions one had to thaw the ground tediously.

Wood fires was one method, but required large amounts of wood. Costs did not decrease as time passed. In the interior, wood cost $12 to $16 per cord in 1915, and was hard to obtain. A more elaborate prospecting outfit, including a four horsepower boiler, a hoisting engine, steam thawing equipment, and supplies for hauling and dumping the ore cost $600 in 1913. Some locations were particularly expensive in which to live. In 1912, it was estimated to cost between $1,500 and $2,000 per year to live in the White River area of the interior.*

In addition to permafirost subsoil conditions in some regions, there were other physical features that made it hard to prospect in Alaska. In 1929 Alaska historian

Genevieve Alice Parker listed the many challenges facing the early miner. A long cold season limited the "favorable mining period," and glacial ice restricted early summer work; summer precipitation was never sufficient for sluicing operations through the summer; and deep ground made it difficult to dig without elaborate equipment. A correspondent to the

Mining Magazine in 1911 stated that a short summer season and land covered with either

snow or a "damp layer of moss" all hindered mineral exploration, making it more costly.^

In the interior, vast expanses, limited trails and rough roads made for transportation

difficulties. The distance firom Valdez to Fairbanks along the Valdez Trail, for example,

was 372 miles. First accessible only by dogsled in winter, the road was improved into a

horse-drawn sled trail by 1905, then fiirther improved by the federal government, but it

remained an unpaved road. As a result, fi'eight facilities to bring in supplies and carry out 138 ore were also inadequate and expensive.^

Alaskan prospectors were also challenged by increasingly industrial landscapes, in particular Alaskan areas. As Michael Ostrogorsky argues in his examination of Alaskan mining, Alaska's "industrial mining frontier" was well in place in parts of Alaska by the

1890s. Mining mdustry grew into a strong presence in the Klondike. Capital-backed medium to large mining enterprises tended to concentrate in those areas of high-grade ore or areas of extensive low-grade ore with nearby sources of water or rail transportation.

Some areas were dominated by large mining companies. The Treadwell mine near Juneau was an early industrial center. John Treadwell erected a five-stamp mill in 1882, to crush ore containing low-grade quartz gold, and 880 stamps were in operation by 1899 (the largest stamp mill in the world). The company grew to a conglomerate of four separate mining operations in the Juneau area. By 189S the annual gold production of the

Treadwell mine was one-half million dollars; in 1908 the mine was processing 1,360,000 tons of ore, producing $3,250,000 in gold. 1200 men worked for the company.^

Another single large corporation was located in the Wrangell Mountains northeast of

Valdez. Here the Kennecott Copper Corporation oversaw a large copper operation. In

1906, the Alaska Syndicate, backed by the Guggenheim family and JJ>. Morgan interests, purchased 40% interest in the Bonanza mines, and the remaining 60% in 1909, with total control of around 3,000 acres. The Syndicate built a 400-tott mill, constructed the Copper

River and Northwestern Railway to Cordova, and produced its first trainload of copper-

rich ore in 191L During the next twenty-seven years of operation Kennecott mines 139 produced between two and three hundred million dollars worth of copper ore.'

Mine companies used more expensive and elaborate equipment than small operators.

The first dredge in Alaska was in operation in the Nome area in 1899, but more active dredging began in 1903 with two small dredges on the Seward Peninsula. Gold dredging began in the interior Fortymile District in 1907, and in the Iditarod, Circle and Fairbanks areas in 1912. By 1914, forty-two dredges were operating in Alaska. Some of these operations also utilized hydraulic mining.^

Fairbanks was one area with a large number of placer gold claims but, contrary to the promises of the town's promoters, mining conditions and developments in Fairbanks quickly narrowed down the playing field to larger operations, or those leasing out their properties. Genevieve Alice Parker placed the "peak" of placer production at 1909. The period between the beginning of high productivity in 1904 and 1909 marked the

"transition fi'om the easily worked shallow ground to the rich, but deeper drift mining ground" necessitating larger machinery and capital. One man who accompanied a Senate

Committee in 1903 gathering information about Alaskan conditions reported that the 40- mile square gold-rich area around Fairbanks had aheady been "pretty thoroughly prospected" and only advantageous to those with money to buy claims or machinery to work part interest in a claim.'"

An overburden covered the gold-rich gravel in Fairbanks by up to 200 feet, making the job of even reaching the paying ore expensive. Most of the prospectors, Alfi'ed Brooks reported in 1907, had "little money or experience in mining," and Fairbanks became 140

"crowded with men who could find nothing to do." In his 1908 report. Brooks commented that it would take a minimum of $12,000 in equipment and supplies to uncover the 200- feet of overburden; for those who could not aflford this expense, wage labor was the alternative. That year, there were 250 drift-mining companies in Fairbanks. Most of these operations were run by steam-power plants, each hoisting gold-laden gravel up from a deep shaft and onto a trolley cable. The cable carried the gravel to long sluice boxes, operating near a ditch. One gang of laborers picked and shoveled the gravel into buckets down in the shaft, and another gang worked at the sluice boxes. A typical operation hoisted 250 buckets (around 80 cubic yards of gravel) per day. Fairbanks was not a Utopia for those with limited economic means, but rather a place of wage labor.

Another major area of gold mining was Nome, but those with capital soon established large mine operations there as well, leaving only the beach for those with limited resources. Alfred Brooks complained that "considering the cost of equipment, the loss of time, and the number of men engaged in beach mining, every dollar taken out cost at least two dollars worth of work and equipment." Mining engineer T. A. Rickard observed in

1908 that an individual with little means could still prospect for gold on the beaches near

Nome. He did admit, however, that the distribution of beach gold was "erratic," and that

the average "pay" from this work was $3.00 per day, lower than the average daily wage.^"

Mining companies and developmental capital purchased mining claims and partly

developed mines from prospectors. Because nature remained a largely unpredictable factor

in mining, uncertainty and chance prevailed. Not only did using an unpaid prospector to 141 find mines considerably reduce the risk for a company, but the mining industry could also selectively choose prospects and control the payment arrangements to keep their own financial risks low. They avoided purchasing prospects where the purchase costs were too high and the chances of payable ore too low. Thus they continued to leave "luck" and

"chance" to the mineral seeker. As Rickard related," the purpose of mining is to make money. That can only be done by not paying too much for the mine and by not wasting money in the exploitation.""

The payment arrangements made with prospectors varied, but ultimately worked to the benefit of the purchaser. The engineering community acknowledged that a low price was paramount to acquiring prospects. A Canadian mining engineering student, D. D.

Cairns, explained the process in a 1905 essay about prospecting, emphasizing that his findings applied to the general American West. When large companies employed engineers to search for minerals. Cairns noted, part of the engineers'job was to "watch for opportunities to buy likely looking prospects from the prospector at a low figure." Such a figure could be agreed upon "if the prospector does not know the engineer is representing a company. In that event, the price of the prospect will always be in proportion to the supposed importance of the purchases."'^

Another mining engineer, in an essay on selling mining property, explained that mines were rarely sold for cash. More common were payments extending over several years with a royalty on extracted ore that would apply to the purchase price. Mining engineer

Herbert Hoover (who worked in mining before he turned to politics and then to the 142 presidency) wrote that there were various "devices of financial procedure" to "assist in the limitation of the sum risked." The best option was to "offer a middle course to the investor between purchase of a wholly prospective value and the loss of a possible opportunity to profit by it." He explained that the "usual form" was "an option to buy the property after a period which permits a certain amount of development work by the purchaser before final decision as to purchase." Another common variation was for the seller to exchange his property for part of the mine company's stock, with no general rule for how many shares to use as exchange.

After the financial arrangement or purchase was made, some corporations also wanted full control over promising mine claims, a necessity in their view for efficient development and production of the property. They no longer needed the prospector, as he

had done his part to reduce risk. As a 1908 essay on how to sell one's mine property

noted, both large and smaller mining syndicates were always on the lookout for mine

purchases but warned that syndicates of all sizes demanded full control of the property.'^

Prospectors and others complained of the unfair payment arrangements for prospects.

One long-time engineer commented in 19IS that, in general, when mining companies and

syndicates sent mining engineers to assess prospects and negotiate prices, the engineer typically treated the mineral holder with "lordly destain," informing the prospector that he had to develop his claim fiirther before the syndicate would "pay any money for the really

intelligent selection that the prospector has made of ground still open in Uncle Sam's

domain of mineral land, to say nothing of the hard licks he has put in for three, five, or ten 143 years-in doing the necessary assessment work." The mining company or syndicate profited "at the rate of 100% to 1000%" on the investment of a prospect. The "reward to the prospector," he concluded, was not "commensurate with the effort put forth."

Similarly, a Ketchikan prospertor, William W. Rush, complained in 1914 about long­ standing problems for prospectors in southern Alaska. He explained that, after incapable and opportunistic wildcatters had failed to help the prospector secure a buyer, "large mining interests" appeared when the prospector had been "starved to the verge of subsistence." These interests then secured options "on ridiculously easy terms." Rush concluded that, "with all due respect for the wonderfiil industrial eflBciency of companies like Treadwell and Granby Consolidated, their contributions to the support of the prospector is less than insufficient-it is almost negUgible. Their very efficiency forbids any consideration of the question of a fair compensation for prospecting."'^

There were other ongoing problems that restricted the prospector all across Alaska.

As in other western mining regions, disputes arose over claim ownership, over legal claim boundaries, and over water rights. A letter sent directly to the Secretary of the Interior in

1904, for example, described how a group of Fairbanks businessmen and miners were planning to divert the nearby Tanana River to their advantage for mining activities, and would therefore cut off necessary water to the community of Chena, downstream &om

Fairbanks. Nome also had its share of disputes over land and water ownership. For instance, in 1906 the Nome Mine Workers Union complained that the Miocene Ditch Co. monopolized the water in the area, affecting those who relied on goldbearing gravel 144 deposits. Prospectors in Nome also had to contend with the illegal practice of claim- jumping, whereby claims were taken over by others claiming the ground as their own.

Dishonest lawyers and judges were part of the widespread scheming in Nome until outside ofiBcials finally contained the problem."

The widespread practice of using power of attorney to accrue a number of claims in a given area was another major impediment toward prospecting. One individual could obtain permission in a legal document to act as a power of attorney for other individuals; that individual, as T. A. Rickard noted, could then travel up a particular creek and "stake for himself and his friends as many claims as he likes, provided he makes a discovery on each

20 acre claim." At the same time, he added, it was rare for the discoverer to carry out immediate work. One individual could also stake an "association claim of 160 acres, using the names of eight men and making only one supposititious discovery." As a result,

Rickard complained, "Alaska has been blanketed with claims now belonging to men who sit back, letting others do the work and incur the risks of mining while they gather a rich tribute." Those miners with fewer means and no access to finding their own claims, worked these grounds as lessees, paying the claim owners "a royalty of 25 to SO per cent on the gross output." In Fairbanks in 1908, "fiilly three quarters" of the gold extracted was taken out by these lessees. The Ketchikan prospeaor, WiUiam W. Rush, also complained in 1914 about another continuing problem, speculators who took out claims for the sole business of buying and selling the claims." 145

Limited Possibilities

All these impediments indicated that Alaska was hardly a haven for mineral seekers. If the ideals were contrary to evidence, then why were they seemingly accepted? Why did people continue to come to Alaska to prospect?

Mineral seekers were living under the same general assumptions of wealth and opportunity as other Americans. At the turn of the twentieth century, "the love of money and success permeated all ranks of society, not just the top," and rugged individualism

"reached down through all ranks of American society." The self-made man was the prevailing hero, only this time in an industrial-centered economy. Optimistic notions of social mobility and equality of opportunity connected with the "Gospel of Wealth" and

"Cult of Success" continued into the early twentieth century.*"

Such a notion of equality fit in nicely with the idea of luck, that every mineral seeker had an equal chance of finding a valuable mineral deposit. Historian Ann Fabian notes that in the California Gold Rush and in those nineteenth-century "fi'ontier economies in extractive industries" not yet revolving entirely around the industrial workplace, money came firom gambling and risk, not fi'om the "slow and steady toil" of wage labor. Similarly,

Kathryn Morse found in her study of Klondike Gold Rush participants that, after miners realized that no amount of labor guaranteed a reward of wealth fi-om gold, these miners began to perceive that "success was governed by chance and luck."^

Early twentieth-century mineral seekers were also living under a prevailing assumption of American political economy, that risk and sacrifice would ultimately result 146 in a return. They risked their own unpaid physical labor, but expected some sort of eventual reward. As a political economist wrote in 1895, "no man cares to labor for that from which he can get no benefit." Another economist, Frank Knight, agreed that one expected a reward when undergoing a sacrifice, and wrote of the long-standing human tendency first mentioned by Adam Smith "that men will readily risk a small amount in the hope of winning a large when the adverse probability (known or estimated) against winning is much in excess of the ratio of the two amounts." Km'ght explained the influential belief in luck here, "an inveterate belief on the part of the typical individual in his own "luck," especially strong when the basis of the uncertainty is the quah'ty of his own judgment." Thus, in an inverse logic, the risk-taker expected a larger reward when the sacrifice was "viewed as contingent than if it [was] considered certain, and that it will have to be larger in at least some general proportion to the degree of felt uncertainty in the anticipation."^

That Alaskan mineral seekers were influenced by the possibilities of luck could be seen in population fluctuations toward areas of recent important mineral discoveries. Small mineral "rushes" in Alaska continued into the 1920s. As early twentieth-century Alaskan prospector George Hick noted in his memoirs, "it is ahnost necessary to follow up all new strikes or you might just miss the right one. And in the gold bearing country you never know where you are going to find it." There was evidence, as the promoters so liked to point out, that an individual could discover a valuable ore body and sell it for a sizable amount. Furthermore, Alaska was still relatively unexplored compared with other areas of 147 the West. Industry was concentrated in certain areas, making it difBcult to prospect, but other areas were relatively unpopulated (albeit in many cases, remotely located).

Promoters and United States Geological Survey officials pointed out this faa. For example, in the USGS report on the distribution of mineral deposits in Alaska, Alfred

Brooks called the knowledge of the distribution and "genetic relations" of potential ore bodies in the Prince WiUiam Sound area "still obscure." With remaining areas not yet fully prospected, a possibility of wealth remained. The prospector was willing to take a risk, and take up the work of searching for mineral ore because it did offer a chance (however slim) for financial independence.^

At the same time, high costs and unsuccessful prospecting could force a person even with some previous means into becoming a wage earner. But unlike the progressive view of mineral seekers ending up as a valuable labor pool in a land of large industrial operations, for many prospectors wage labor was an opportunity and a means toward an end of obtaining wealth and self-sufficiency from their own independent placer operations.

Prospectors could sell their labor as needed. One of the best ways for a new resident to an area to learn about local prospecting methods and mining was to labor first for a mining operation. In the 1896 edition of his popular prospecting manual, Arthur Lakes suggested that "the best education" for learning about mining methods and minerals peculiar to an area was to "spend as much time as possible in practical work, in, and around the various mines" before commencing to prospect. One Alaskan who followed this approach was

William Bunge. After arriving in Alaska from Minnesota in 1898, he obtained work in a 148 construction gang on Douglas Island. His plan, however, was to find employment in the nearby Treadwell mines, where he "would learn the business maybe in two month [sic]."^*

Wage labor was also the primary means of earning or collecting one's own grubstake.

As promoters suggested, one could save enough money through wages to prospect part of the year, or to buy equipment to develop existing mining claims. Wage rates were high compared with other states. A USGS study on placer mining published in 190S found that wages for laborers in placer mining varied by location, ranging fi^om $3.50 to $10 per day,

with $5 with board being a typical rate. Nome paid an average of $5.00 per day in the summer, with board included. The lowest wage was in Juneau, with $3.50 to $4.00 per

day, without board; but Juneau in southeastern Alaska also had easier and therefore less

expensive access fi-om Seattle, as well as a more temperate climate. The length of time

needed to save enough for food and supplies varied, depending upon wage rates, personal

living expenses, the amount of supplies needed, and their costs. In 1911 a Douglas

newspaper published the advice of a local prospector who assured that it took only around

three months of wage labor to furnish an outfit for prospecting, but other sources

suggested that it took an entire season (five to six months).^

The labor season in many places, however, was limited by time of year, by current

market demand or price for a particular mineral, or by geographical area. In Fairbanks, for

example, mining operations typically worked fi-om late April to late September, depending

upon the weather conditions. Years of decreased overall mineral production in Alaska

affected wage work avaUability. In 1907, for instance, a nationwide financial panic 149 decreased Alaskan copper mining company activities. In addition, water availability was crucial to placer gold mining productivity; lower precipitation levels in 1907 resulted in decreased work of processing gravel through water-generated sluice boxes.^

It is clear that many laborers did not see themselves as permanent wageworkers. One prospector, C. K. Snow, complained that he had to work for wages during the summer months to procure a "winter grubstake" for prospecting. When he was a wageworker, he related that he felt "like a prisoner. I chafe under the conditions which compel this interference with my quest." Much of placer mining work involved hard physical labor.

T. A. Rickard related that, in 1908, in a typical day of working in a placer drift in

Fairbanks, a man averaged 80 to 100 wheelbarrows. This was not easy work for someone who might have come to Alaska expecting successful prospecting rather than labor. When they had to work for wages, mine laborers had many of the same concerns as wageworkers elsewhere; long hours, low wages, substandard working conditions. Most

Alaskan mine laborers joined unions, a similar pattern to other Western mining regions.

Socialist organizations played an active role in communities like Fairbanks, helping to organize labor unions. The Western Federation of \Cners (WFM) recruited in Alaska, with around 6,000 Alaskan members in eight WFM locals.^

Labor movements used notions of individualism not that far removed ftom other

Americans. The "producers philosophy" was merely a radical interpretation of natural rights philosophy. Individual labor was the only measure of value and title to property, and

&ee competition was the best regulator of wealth. For example, the Fairbanks pubh'cation. 150

The Miners Union Bulletin, argued in 1909 that unionization was necessary for the welfare of all, and responsible for maintaining the liberty that the individual possesses. The goal was to render laborers independent of a master, since they were personal chattel and feudal slaves. Alaskan mine workers, like American workers in general, had no intention of overthrowing the capitalist system. Instead, they wished to rise out of the working class and to aspire to the dream of economic success and independence. Alaskan prospectors and independent placer mine owners supported Socialist Party candidates (evidenced by the popularity of socialist candidates in distant mining precincts) because the Socialist

Party lauded independent ownership while speaking against the evils of monopolies.

Mineral seekers wanted nothing more than to own their own productive mine.'^

In Alaska, the popularity of mining labor groups had to do with their practical platform of issues that would improve the workplace but also give laborers a chance to work for themselves by having the opportunity to accrue a grubstake. The Nome Mine

Workers formed in 1905, with a total of 1500 members in the 300 square-mile Nome

Mining District; the WFM later joined in their efforts. Going on strike in 1907, they demanded a $5.00 work day (an increase of $1.00) and a eight-hour work day (down from ten hours) where laborers worked underground surrounded by damp and cold permafrost.

The mine operators agreed to their demands. The WFM local 193 in Fairbanks had similar complaints about long hours, low pay, and dangerous underground conditions. Also at issue was the "mechanics' lien," a common practice in Fairbanks where the mine operators waited to pay the laborers after the "clean-up" (in which the year's gold was washed 151 through the sluices). If the clean-up was lower than expected, the operators prorated the wage payments, or ofifered a claim to next year's gold output. Another issue was the high transportation costs in the region. The Fairbanks workers were not as successful as those in Nome in gaining all their demands.^

Laborers also complained about the high costs of their grubstakes. Besides higher wages, their solution was to bring in more business competition to lower the prices of goods and supplies. Lower overall costs would also bring more mining operations to

Alaska, and thus provide more employment opportunities. The Alaskan Socialist Party

was particularly vocal on the issue of high prices. The group identified their frustrations as

those of the Alaskan prospector. Their 1914 platform argued that Alaska was the "last great frontier," but that the "dreams of the lonely prospector" had declined. One article in

the Fairbanks sodalist paper by "Old Prospector" complained of the miners' "hardships"

from the high prices of "grub." They spoke up against price gouging of the Northern

Commercial Company in the mining camps in the Tanana area around Fairbanks. Other

issues of the Alaskan Socialist Party were to eliminate absentee claim-staking, to demand a

mechanic's lien law and an eight-hour day, and to ask the federal government to build

more roads and railroads in Alaska.^

When laborers had a clear choice, however, they preferred to work independently.

The option between becoming a wageworker or going off and pursuing potential riches

was obvious. During the summer of 1907 in Fairbanks, for example, around 1,200 laborers

abruptly left to join a stampede to a mineral rush in the Innoko area. In 1913, a Seattle 152 newspaper reported that "nearly every mine" in the copper country around the greater

Cordova region had lost employees to a rush of argonauts to the Sushanna River area.^'

There were limited opportunities to earn a living from prospecting and small independent mining operations, but for most it was hardly the rags-to-riches story (or the wageworker-to-mine owner story). Again, it offered possibilities outside of wage labor.

Prospectors did seek knowledge to help them learn how to prospect more efifectively

(beyond working for mine companies). In 1918 a correspondent to tins Mining and

Scientific Press reported that Alaskan prospectors had been taking courses in the art of mining from the College of Mnes at the University of Washington, Seattle, for many years. They did utilize the help and direction given to them from the federal government.

Even United States Geological Survey topographical maps with only general information included were "in great demand" by prospectors. As mentioned in the previous chapter,

"numerous requests" to the USGS for information on the costs and methods of working gold placer claims in Alaska resulted in guides like the 1905 bulletin, "Methods and Costs of Gravel and Placer Mining in Alaska." Likewise, USGS ofiScials proclaimed that prospectors heeded their findings to look for the source of Nome placer gold found on the beaches "in the hills," and not offshore, as "many supposed at the time." Mineral seekers also used the services of the Bureau of Mines to identify minerals. During the 1918-1919 fiscal year, for example, the station identified 333 mineral specimens brought in by prospectors. In the same year, there were 1,600 visitors to the Fairbanks station."

Prospectors did search for minerals other than gold. One man on Chichagof Island in 153

Southeastern Alaska, for instance, recorded six claims in 1900 with promising deposits of gypsum. He interested a group of businessmen from Tacoma in his claims. Mineral seekers

were aware of the current market for minerals and some prospectors adjusted their

searches to meet current market demands. In 1913, the rising price of copper resulted in

increased prospecting for copper lodes in the Iimoko-Iditarod and lUamna regions. At the

same time, prospectors knew that mine companies had less interest in those areas further

from easy transportation, so these areas had fewer searchers.^^

Examining the practices of grubstaking and leasing from a different angle reveals that

there could be limited benefits for the mineral seeker. There were opportunities in early

twentieth-century Alaska to obtain grubstakes from those with capital. These

arrangements cut the prospectors' potential earnings, as the grubstakers expected part of

the mineral income. These arrangements, however, could be optimistically viewed as

opportunities outside of wage labor. Alaskan prospector George Elick had such a positive

defim'tion of the grubstaking arrangement as "outfitting a man with food, and half of

everything he makes, as long as the grub lasts, is yours." As mentioned earlier, in areas of

already prospected ground, many mineral seekers leased from the claim owner. Leasing

could be severely one-sided, providing an easy income to the owner without having to

touch a pick or shovel. At the same time, it provided a prospector a chance to earn

"wages" through his own labors, rather than being obliged to an employee. Leasers could

make money off of a leased claim if they could procure a good arrangement with the

owner, and if the claim contained high-grade ore. During the first decade of the twentieth 154 century George Hick balanced prospecting trips in the greater Seward Peninsula area with leasing and working placer claims near Nome. His income from these leases was enough to pay for his prospecting trips, although it was not greater than if he had taken on wage labor."

The majority of mineral seekers did concentrate on working placer gold from their own small claims. Again, working one's own claim oSered a sense of independence outside of wage labor, and provided another means to procure a grubstake. An editorial in a 1909 issue of the Alaska-Yukon Magazine explained that the reason that prospectors were not interested in searching for and developing quartz deposits and preferred placer mines was because "enough gold has been taken out by prospecting and the crudest method of mining to pay for the installation of machinery." These Alaskans lived within their means, utilizing technology that was labor-intensive but did not require great expense. In smaller streams in the interior, prospectors could travel by simple-constructed flat-bottomed boats, using long wooden poles to negotiate. One could also stick to the so- called "primitive" methods for mining. In 1906 prospector C.A. Bryant joined two other men in a hard rock quartz gold operation in the Eagle area of central interior. They built an arrastra, operated by water power, to crush the quartz ore. They ground five tons of ore, retrieving only $40.00 of gold, before quitting for the season."

It was not easy work. In some streams with shallow gold deposits, one could get by with just shoveling gravel into sluices, hard labor by itself In deeper gold-bearing gravel

(more than a few feet), it was just as much physical labor as working for wages, since the 155 basic operations of a placer gold mine-thawing gravel, digging tunnels, and shoveling and sluicing the heavy gravel-were the same whether the mine was large or small. Drift mining was a relatively inexpensive way to take out shallow placer gold in gravel beds.

Most of the placer gold prospecting was done in the winter. The frozen ground provided a safer environment for digging vertical shafts and horizontal drifts and tunnels (in the summer, the softer earth could collapse and miners would have to spend extra labor constructing timbered supports or, as mentioned before, they would have to drain the mine). Also, transportation over the snow with dog sleds was more expedient than having to carry supplies on one's back during the warmer months.^®

The value and extent of gold or other minerals in a claim, however, dictated one's level of independence from wage work. Despite the mining company or investment firm having a great advantage with purchase negotiations, prospectors did sell their claims.

Property containing outstanding mineral ore value received high sums, but more typical were modest purchase prices. In his biography, for instance, Alaskan resident Hardy

Tre&ger described various claim offers and sales in the first decade of the twenty century ranging from $200 to $400. Similar to other minerals, unless you hit a rich source of gold you would not attain great wealth this way. In many placer mines, miners only took out

"wages" from their claims. Certain locations gained reputations as reliable places for an individual to pan and sluice enough gold for a year's grubstake. In 1902, for example, the

Fortymile region in the central interior of Alaska was one such place. Other locations did favor low-cost mining and a steady income from placer gold mining. As one United States 156

Geological Survey geologist related, those placer gold deposits that were easiest to work were shallow and contained high-grade mineral ores. A writer who had visited the mineral strike activities in the Squinel River region in 1910 reported that the conditions were ideal for a "poor man's camp"; gravel containmg gold was near the surface, the gold contained high values, the sun could thaw the frozen ground after removal of surface moss, and there was an abundance of water for sluicing, 6sh for eating, and timber for fuel, and easy transportation. If the gold was particularly high quality, prospectors could make enough money from gold sales to finance equipment for more extensive work. One prospector reported in 1907, for example, that those working in the Innoko area were taking in a very lucrative average of $2,000-$3,000 per season."

Some prospectors hoped to earn extra profits by leasing their own claim to others.

Such an arrangement was advantageous if there was the potential for valuable ore, but the claim owner did not have the fluids to buy the equipment needed to work the claim

Instead, he could lease it to those with the equipment. As mentioned before, large mining

corporations wanted ownership of the property, but smaller mine companies sometimes worked out leasing arrangements with the owner. C.A. Bryant had searched for minerals

in the Eagle region since the turn of the twentieth century, and he finally had some luck

when he and his partners discovered a valuable hard-rock quartz mine in 1906. They

woilced the mine off and on themselves with limited equipment, finally leasing it out in

1914 to two men with the capital necessary for hydraulic mining in the surrounding

gravels." 157

A small percentage of prospectors were able to earn enough profits fi'om small placer operations to buy more substantial equipment and hire laborers for their own mine operations (generally with a handflil of employees). Two brothers in the interior area of

Hot Springs, for example, developed a gold ledge, revealing enough of the ore to interest capital. They then used the money to build a small stamp mill (two stamps), and took out

$10,000 in gold in 1908. Owning a reliable source of mineral still did not guarantee economic success. Prospector George Hick spent six years in the Seward Peninsula looking for a paying claim, supplementing his prospecting trips with earning enough money fi'om working on the Nome placer leases. Finally, in 1906, Hick and an English partner found ore rich enough in the Candle region that they hired a couple of men. They also leased some of their other claims. One of the laymen found a pay streak, and fi-om this success they were able to bond the property for $100,000 and hire a larger crew of laborers. The bonders, however, could not raise the promised amount of money and declared bankruptcy. All these men continued to prospect every chance they got, despite changed circumstances. After Bryant leased his quartz mine property, he continued to take on governmental contracts and other work so that he could keep searching for another valuable claim.^'

Examining the lives of those prospectors who stayed on in Alaska suggests that one could achieve a limited self-sufficiency in the northland, especially if one varied activities as needed. It was a testament to individual entrepreneurship, with one foot in a world of

informal partnerships and subsistence living, and the other foot utilizing the greater 158 economic market. But this life did not come without hard work, and an adaptability to circumstance. Many hoped to find a mineral deposit that would yield a good payment for sale, or a steady income through small-scale gold placer mining. But if the reward was less than expected, they could rely on other activities to tide them over until they found a suitable venture, if at all. Their actions suggest that they preferred a varied life rather than steady wage labor. As long-time prospector C.A. "Bert" Bryant quipped, "there is always a way when there is a will.""""

These Alaskans were seldom independent loners, but sought out company and had a reciprocal relationship with others. Informal partnerships were fairly common, with men

(and sometimes spouses) joining together at times to search for prospects, or to develop promising claims. They could pool their money and supplies, share labor, and have companionship on journeys. They also shared in the variety of activities. What Thomas

Bundtzen calls a "subsistence-hunting ethic" formed the basis of the lives and activities of

many prospectors and small operators of the Kantishna area in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Joe Quigley, for example, had been in Alaska since 1891, and ended up in the Kantishna area. He and his wife, Fannie, gardened and hunted to feed not only themselves, but other residents in the area. Over time they formed partnerships with

various prospectors, finding a variety of minerals, such as gold, silver, lead, zinc, copper,

antimony, and arsenic. Having other partners allowed them to do more substantial work,

such as developing an antimony deposit, in which they shipped I2S tons of high-grade ore

in 1916. Although they could subsist on local foodstuffs, they were also much in tune with 159 the going market for ores to provide some cash for other needed items like provisions.

The high price of antimony in the first decade (related to the Russo-Japanese War of

1904-1905), for instance, prompted the Quigleys to develop an antimony mine. Sometimes entire families would work together in Alaska. One Texas man, his wife, and four sons traveled up to Hope, Alaska, and worked claims for several years, each year saving earnings fi-om their gold sales for food and more elaborate equipment. In 1912 they succeeded in taking out $12,000.^'

Many long-time residents of Alaska who did prospecting over the years took on some sort of government-appointed position or government contracts to supplement their incomes. Charles L. Kemp arrived in Alaska in 1898 and prospected in various parts of

Alaska while working as a mining recorder and later as a court bailiS! Prospector Tom

Odale moved fi'om place to place, taking on wage labor and prospecting partnerships when needed, supplementing his purchased food with game animals, sahnon, berries, and game birds. He eventually had enough money to purchase a boat, and ended up receiving a steady contract for hauling the U.S. mail. During the first two decades of the twentieth century, C. A. Bryant funded regular prospecting trips in the Eagle area by providing firewood for a nearby U.S. Army outpost, logging trees for U.S. government telegraph poles, and taking out federal government contracts for road building.^^

They were entrepreneurs and created their own businesses where they saw the need.

As well as government contracts, Bryant and a partner started a hauling business for mine operators. In addition, they hunted for some extra income. Prospector John M. Brooks 160 joined the mineral rush to the Tanana area (near Fairbanks), and established a wood and ice business there. Some "disappointed prospectors" could make an income by growing a truck garden for nearby mining camps. T. A. Rickard mentioned that, in 1908, most farming in Alaskan conununities was done in this manner.^^

In the end, however, mining was not democratic-only a small percentage of mineral rush participants found payable ore; the majority did not. One needed to be early on the scene, and lucky. Out of the 2,000 people in 1905 who rushed to the Eureka mining community in the central interior, only thirty-five to fifty men remained to work the pay streak the following year. Such a low level of success was a common outcome in many areas. Similarly in 1914, "hundreds of people" traveled to the interior area of Livengood

Creek, but only ten mines became "commercially productive." Scudder McLain, who accompanied a Senate Committee in 1903 gathering information about Alaskan conditions, suggested that the natural progression of mining was not democratic.

Commenting on the "ten or twelve thousand people" who sacrificed money and time to come to the Nome gold fields, he wrote that it was a "great game, in which few men win and many lose. It will always be so. Some men win enormous fortunes, and their good luck will always attract many more, a few of whom will be successful." Nor was the playing field level. Those with previous capital or outside financial backing had a distinct advantage. Interviews with the "three most prominent miners of Northwestern Alaska" in

1907 typified the industrial mining world; Two of the mine owners had an ample amount of money before arriving in Alaska, one as a banker and the other as a industrious 161 freighter; the third was the individual who located the pay streak on a particular gold-rich area near Nome, and had mining experience as well as financial backing.^

The Alaskan activities of mineral seeker William Bunge revealed both the limited possibilities and the undemocratic realities of early twentieth-century prospecting. In 1898, at age twenty-five, Bunge traveled fi'om Minnesota to Alaska "to take just a little of adventure." He stayed on for the next twelve years, living mostly in the towns of Douglas and Treadwell on Douglas Island in southeastern Alaska. His letters to his brother, sister and father show a hopeful mineral seeker who spent year after year coming up with various schemes to find a valuable ore deposit. Like other mineral seekers, he took on wage work to learn the business of mining and to earn money for his own grubstake.

After an initial job on a construction crew, Bunge managed to get a job as a mine laborer to learn the art of mining. For a decade he worked off and on for the same employer, the

Treadwell Mim'ng Company, to supplement his own mining ventures. Bunge worked in the mill of the Treadwell Mine, helping to process and extract gold firom quartz ore. Working for a successfiil industrial enterprise made Bunge very aware of the possibilities of wealth fi'om mining. In one monthly clean up of gold, he was helping the foreman to carry "every night some $6,000.00. That would be an income of over $40,000.00 a month firom one mill alone."*^

Like other hopeful mineral seekers, Bunge assumed that, with enough labor and investment in searching for mineral ore, his efforts would eventually pay off. During the years he lived in Alaska he held onto various mine claims and made a variety of financial 162 arrangements with others. In 1899, he gave the legal right of power of attorney to another man. The man and his partners promised to stake a claim for Bunge; in return, Bunge paid no money but he promised "to give them an interest in what they stake for me." This venture did not bring Bunge the financial independence he wanted. In the same year, he obtained a power of attorney for the "Treadwell Master Mechanic" and, promising his coworker that he'd stake a claim for him, Bunge took some time ofif to look tor gold in the Yukon. He came back dejected, complaining to his father that the trip "was so hard and expensive and so utterly futile that I am sick of prospecting." Yet he continued to work on mining schemes with others. From 1900 to 1901 he made various agreements with partners to invest partial interest in placer mining claims in the Nome region.

Traveling to Nome in 1900 to check up on his investments, he wrote that "this Nome trip is the greatest dissapointment [sic] of any." Nonetheless, he continued to invest in Nome claims, and returned to Treadwell to earn more income to support these ventures. In 1901 he wrote, after another trip to Nome, that "this year certainly caps the climax in my reverses and it must change after a while.

His fortunes never improved, but his hope of financial independence remained until the end of his life. He spent the following years working for Treadwell Mine, while dreaming up schemes to invest in real estate ventures in nearby Juneau. He believed that

Juneau would eventually become an important town. He also acquired a mine claim that showed great promise but, unfortunately, was located close to valuable claims held by his powerful industrial employer. The Treadwell Mine Company had tunneled into Bunge's 163 claim, and in 1909 Bunge took the company to court (while still working for them).

Shortly before his untimely death at age thirty-seven, he wrote to his brother that he felt sure about a legal outcome in his favor but, just in case, he continued to work on his

Juneau real estate investments. He wrote that these investments would "put me out of the woods considerable in case the Treadwell suit should go wrong." According to a biographer, some days later Bunge "mysteriously fell down the shaft of the mining I company and was killed." No one "could or would testify" about the incident. His family had Bunge's body returned to his birthplace of Eitzen, Minnesota, and he was buried on

February 17, 1910. Bunge's life was a testament of the strong drive of an individual to seek self-sufSciency in Alaska; his death, however, was a testament to the pervasive power of industrial mining development.^^

Conclusion

The actions of early twentieth-century prospectors reveal that, to an certain extent, imagery can have material consequences. Prospectors came to Alaska to attain the

American dream, thinking that the ideals were going to deliver on a material level. Their goals, then, were closely aligned with those ideals generated by the mining industry, federal government, and promoters. The prospectors, however, envisioned an Alaska of individual mine operations, the idealized Utopia that the promoters and other interested parties projected, but did not expect, nor want, to last.

In a place working against individuaUsm, there was room enough, with effort, that the prospector could attain a degree of independence, at least from wage labor. At the same 164 time, though, to become a "self-made man" he needed the help of the federal government, mineral markets, and industry and population centers nearby, for availability of supplies, creating supplemental income through entrepreneurship, and to take on wage labor if needed.

Did the deployment of images and efforts to direct the prospector get the desired results of a vibrant industrial north? Mineral seekers were not the only group operating on misguided notions. The idea that the prospector was the basis for facilitating development was, in itself an ideal. The prospector alone could not attract development, nor settlement. True, mineral seekers found mines. They also helped to generate interest in new areas by discovering minerals, setting off a mineral rush, resulting in a handfiU of producing mines. But adherents of such an ideal expected that the "natural" outcome of progression was that the prospector and his claim would be replaced by large mining ventures.

The political economy was a much stronger force in determining economic growth than new mineral discoveries and the existence of valuable ore. Space and distance were not annihilated in the material realm-costs remained too high, and distances very real.

Supply and food costs remained high without more competition, but enterprises were reluctant to enter Alaska because of the high costs of transportation. Improved transportation would encourage enterprise, lower costs, and help increase the population, but congressional debates over Alaskan transportation appropriations hinged on an existing population or industry to justify building new costly roads, and the population did 165 not greatly increase in the first two decades of the twentieth century. The Alaska Road

Commission did build roads but funding was limited, and the Alaska Railroad (fi-om

Seward to Fairbanks) was not completed until 1923. If mineral prices decreased, then mining operations decreased, and wage work availability decreased, and the pool of prospectors and thus mineral discoveries decreased. If wages fell below living costs and the ability to procure a grubstake, both prospecting and the pool of wageworkers decreased.^'

World War I revealed the real nature of the political economy in Alaska. In the early years of the war prospects seemed bright for Alaskan mining. Gold was badly needed to control inflation and to maintain credit reserves. As other metal prices rose during World

War I, one professional mining journal reported that the Industry expected a "marked revival" in prospecting. Investors increased their interest in Alaskan mining properties during the early war years. At the same time, however, supply and food costs in Alaska doubled. This factor, along with ongoing limited and expensive transportation and higher war-time wages elsewhere (making for comparatively lower wages in Alaska when one factored in the high cost of living and shorter season) made it difBcult for mining companies to continue. The labor shortage increased further when young men left to serve in the military. Many of the large low-grade gold operations were forced to close, because

they could not be worked at a profit with rising supply and labor costs. la 1918 one

observer wrote that the activities of the prospector and small operators had "constantly

become scarcer." With a post-war mining recession and little gain in population, the 166 mineral industry in Alaska never fully recovered until the 1930s, when the federal government raised gold prices/'

The most compelling evidence that many prospectors could not become completely self-sufBcient was that many of them could not live outside the wage system if wages fell below the high costs of living, as was the case during World War 1. Many left the region.

Those most resistant to economic fluctuations did stay and found ways to weather the changes. Some of their activities and choices made by this latter group, however, were closer to a Jack London northern outdoor adventure tale found in The Call of the Wild than a story of striving for economic success and great wealth. 167

1. Thomas K. Bundtzen, "A History of Mining in the tCantishna Hills," Alaska Journal 8 (Spring 1978), 152; Alfred H. Brooks, "Preliminary Report of the Tolovana District," in, Alfred H. Brooks, et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report oa Progress of Investigations in 1915," United States Geological Survey (USGS) Bulletin 642 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing OflSce [GPO], 1916), 201.

2. Alfred H. Brooks, "The Mining Industry in 1911," in Alfred H. Brooks et al.. Mineral Resources of Alaska: Report on Progress of Investigations in 1911 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1912), 40; Hardy My Fiffy Years of Hunting, Fishing, Prospecting, Guiding, Trading and Trapping in Alaska (New York: Exposition Press, 1963), 21; James Drucker, "Gold Rushers North; A Census Study of ^e Yukon and Alaskan Gold Rushes, 1896-1900," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 85 (July 1994), 82, 83,90. Alfred Brooks, head of the Alaska Survey for the USGS, focused on those regions that, in the words of progress and development, had the most "increased" activity, "production," and areas with the most "prosperity." Brooks explained in 1907 that it was "only on the basis of past production, considered with estimates of the mineral reserves, that the future progress of the mining industry can be forecast." Alfred H. Brooks, "Placer Mining Operations in Alaska in 1909," Engineering and Mining Journal 90 (August 27, 1910), 412-14; Alfred H. Brooks, "Investigations of Nfineral Resources of Alaska in 1907," in Alfred H. Brooks et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska: Report on Progress of Investigations in 1907," USGS Bulletin 345 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1908), 14.

3. Chester Wells Purington, "Methods and Costs of Gravel and Placer Mining in Alaska," USGS Bulletin 263 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1905), 230-231,234; Ronald C. Brown, Hard-Rock Miners: The Intermountain West, 1860-1920 (College Station, Texas: Texas A and M University Press, 1979), 102. Evangeline Atwood and Robert N. DeArmond, compilers, Alaska Historical Commission, Who's Who in Alaskan Politics (Portland, Oregon: Binford and Mort, 1977). 4, 15.

4. Sam C. Dunham, "The Alaskan Gold Fields and the Opportunities They Offer for Capital and Labor," Bulletin of the Department of Labor No. 16 (May, 1898), 297,395; Jolm Power Hutchins, "Prospecting and Mining Gold Placers in Alaska," in Brooks, et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska: Report on Progress of Investigations in 1907," 58; F.J. Katz, "Methods of Placer Mining in Fairbanks District," in L. M. Prindle, "A Geologic Reconnaissance of the Franks Quadrangle, Alaska, USGS Bulletin 525 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1913), 116-117; Sumner S. Smith, "The Mining Industry in the Territory of Alaska During the Calendar Year 1915," Bureau of Mines Bulletin 142 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1917), 10." Mining and Scientific Press 105 (September?, 1912), 317. Some writers referred to the continental Um'ted States as the "states." 168

5. Genevieve Alice Parker, "The Evolution of Placer Mining Methods in Alaska," (Undergraduate Thesis, Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, 1929), 19; "Speciid Correspondence, Cordova, Alaska," Mining Magazine 5 (September, 1911), 184.

6. Parker, "The Evolution of Placer Mining," 18-19; "Special Correspondence, Cordova, Alaska," 184.

7. Michael Ostrogorsky, "The Influence of Technology on Social Typology and Change in the Western American Mining Frontier," (PhD. diss.. University of Idaho, 1993), 189, 229; T. A. Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska (San Francisco: Mining and Scientific Press, 1909), 15,26-28; James C. Foster, "The Treadwell Strikes, 1907 and 1908," Alaska Journal 6 (Winter 1976), 2; G. F. Becker, "Distribution of Gold Deposits in Alaska," Journal of Geography 3 (1895), 960, cited in, Morgan B. Sherwood, Exploration of Alaska, 1865-1900 (Fairbanks, Alaska: University of Alaska Press, 1992), 146. A stamp mill is "an apparatus...in which rock is crushed by descending pestles (stamps), operated by waterpoweror steam power." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1968), 1066.

8. Robert A. Steams, "Alaska's Kennecott Copper and the Kennecott Copper Corporation," Alaska Journal 5 (Summer 1975), 130,135-136; William Cronon, "Kennecott Journey: The Paths Out of Town," in William Cronin, George Miles, and Jay Gitlin, eds.. Under an Open Sky: Rethinking America's Western Past (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1992), 31. Steams writes of the tenacious and probable underhanded actions of mining engineer Stephen Birch and others to acquire claims fi:om various prospectors. Steams, "Alaska's Kennecott Copper."

9. Norman L. Wimmler, 'Tlacer-Mining Methods and Costs in Alaska," Bureau of Mines Bulletin 259 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1927), 76. For information on Alaskan gold dredges, see Clark C. Spence, The Northern Gold Fleet: Twentieth-Century Gold Dredging in Alaska (Urbana: University of Illinois Press), 1996.

10. Parker, "The Evolution of Placer Mining," 5; John Scudder McLain, Alaska and the Klondike (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1907), 313.

11. Katz, "Methods of Placer Mining," 121-125; Alfred H. Brooks, "The Mining Industry in 1906," in Alfi'ed H. Brooks, et al., "Report of Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1906," USGSBulletin 314 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1907), 35- 36; Alfi'ed H. Brooks, et al., "Report of Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1908," USGS Bulletin 379 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1909), 195-97. 169

12. Alfred H. Brooks, et al.. Reconnaissances in the Cape Nome and Norton Bay Regions, Alaska, in 1900 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1901), 152; Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska, 340, 344.

13. T. A. Rickard, Retrospect: An Autobiography (NY: Whittlesey House, 1937), 51.

14. D. D. Caims, "Prospecting in Western Canada," The Journal of the Canadian Mining Institute 8 (1905), 303.

15. C. Lorimer Colbum, "Selling Mining Property," Engineering and Mining Journal 98 (August 22, 1914), 342; Principles of Mining: Valuation, Organization and Administration, Copper, Gold, Lead, Silver, 77« aw*/Z//;c (NY: McGraw-tBll, 1909), 51; Kirby Thomas, "Investing in Mining Prospects," Engineering and Mining Journal 110 (July 3, 1920), 14-15. Colbum also mentioned that most properties on the market were "raw prospects" and listed the typical buyers of such property: "Typically the purchasers are either a large exploration and ore-purchasing company; a successful mining company 'whose ore bodies are fully determined"'; manufacturers who need the raw material; mining men who want to make money off a mining proposition; promoters with a following of customers; individuals and associations who have special ore processes. Colbum, "Selling Mining Property," 341. Colbum was a mining engineer in Denver and a member of American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME) since 1908. AIME, AIME Year Book (NY: AIME, 1913), 24.

16. "How to Sell a Mine," The Engineering and Mining Journal 86 (August 29, 1908), 429-430. This 1908 editorial was reprinted in its entirety in 1916, stating that in the intervening eight years there was "nothing new to be said on the subject." Engineering and Mining Journal 102 (July 29, 1916), 219. In 1913 a representative of the Guggeheim Exploration Co. firmly stated that it was "absolutely necessary that we control the whole business." Engineering and Mining Journal 96 (August 9, 1913), 268.

17. F. L. Sizer to The Editor, Mitung and Scientific Press 111 (October 16,1915), 580- 581; William W. Rush to The Editor, The Alaska and Northwest Mining Journal (August 1914), in Roll 45, Alaska Mining Records, 1867-1900, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska. The page number is illegible from the microfihned copy. Sizer was listed in the 1913 AIME directory as a mining engineer and a member of AIME since 1900. AIME Yearbook, 100.

18. B. D. Crumpacker to E. A. Hitchcock, Secretary of Interior, July 25, 1904, Roll 10, M430, Interior Department Territorial Papers: Alaska, 1869-1911, Records of the Office of the Secretary of the Interior (Record Group 48), National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska; Nome \Cne Workers Union to The President and the Congress of the United States, November 25,1905, Roll 14, M430, Interior Department Territorial 170

Papers: Alaska, 1869-1911; National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska; Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska, 346-62. Examining the career of James Wickersham, U.S. District Judge in Alaska, 1900-1908, shows the great number of court cases involving mining disputes. See his own account, James Wickersham, Old Yukon: Tales, Trails, and Trials (Washington, D.C.: Washington Law Book Co., 1938), or his biography, Evangeline Atwood, Frontier Politics: Alaska's James Wickersham (Portland, Oregon: Binford and Mort, 1979).

19. Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska, 274; WiUiam W. Rush to The Editor. USGS employee Chester Wells Purington noted in 1905 that, in many cases, the "power-of- attomey man" was better equipped than "the prospector of limited means," and went to a new mining region with the backing of other men and the sole purpose to take up claims. Purington, "Methods and Costs," 255. A lease is a "contract between landowner and another granting the latter right to search for and produce oil or mineral substances upon payment of an agreed rental, bonus, and/or royalty." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms, 634. As historian Ronald Brown explains, those who leased "assumed all the costs and obligations of the mining and paid the owners anywhere from 10 to 60 percent of the gross receipts from the ore removed. When accompanied by a guarantee bond, leasing was the closest thing to an assured return for the owners." Brown, Hard-Rock Miners, 101-102.

20. Robert L. Heilbroner and Aaron Singer, The Economic Tran^ormation of America (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1977), 75; Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), 334-335. Heilbroner and Singer were using the ideas of historians Henry Steele Commager and Charles and Mary Beard.

21. Ann Fabian, Card Sharps, Dream Books, and Bucket Shops: Gambling in 19^- Century America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 6; Kathryn Taylor Morse, "The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Alask^ukon Gold Rush, (PhJD. diss.. University of Washington, 1997), 81. See also pp. 80-85. Another historian, Gunther Peck, has distinguished between the financial risks valued by nineteenth-century middle- class capitalists with the risks of luck and chance found in gambling and physical labor valued by working-class mine labor. Gunther Peck, "Manly Gambles: The Politics of Risk on the Comstock Lode, 1860-1880," Journal of Social History 26 (Summer 1993), 704, 708, 714.

22. John Haynes, "Risk as an Economic Factor," The Quarterly Journal of Economics 9 (1895), 414; Frank H. Km'ght, Risk, Uncertainty and Profit (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1921), 235-236. At the time of publication. Knight was an Associate Professor of Economics in the State University of Iowa. 171

23. George Hick, Pioneer Prospector: The Account of a Pioneer Prospector's Search for Riches During and After the Klondike Gold Rush, ed. by Charles E. Bunnell (College, Alaska: University of Alaska, 1954), 20; Brooks, et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska: Report on Progress of Investigations in 1907," 27.

24. Arthur Lakes, Prospecting for Gold and Silver in North America, second ed. (Scranton, Pennsylvania: The Colliery Engineer Co., 1896), 8; William Bunge to his brother, September, 1898, William C. Bunge Papers, Minnesota Elistorical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota. Prospectors tended to supplement their prospecting ventures with wages, but not all wageworkers became prospectors. One correspondent suggested that ethnicity played a role here; he wrote that in Alaska "every English-speaking miner that can get away is off on a stampede," but that there were mine workers who wanted a steady job to send their wages "to a home in the old country." "Traveler" to the Editor, Mining and Scientific Press 108 (March 14, 1914), 463. Doug Weiner needs to be acknowledged here for suggesting the idea that prospectors sold themselves as wage labor.

25. Purington, "Methods and Costs," 211. Bill Baranofi^ "Prospecting with a Gas Boat in Southeastern Alaska," The Alaska Sourdough (September 1, 1911). Although "grubstake" meant supplies and funds given to the prospector by a grubstaker, when prospectors began to earn wages to accrue the necessary supplies, they used the same term to mean the purchased prospecting food and supplies.

26. Brooks, et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska: Report on Progress of Investigations in 1907," 30, 34,40; James C. Foster, "Syndicalism Northern Style: The Life and Death of WFM No. 193," Alaska Journal 4 (Summer 1974), 134. Seasonal wage labor possibilities also came from private compam'es engaged in short railroad lines or constructing ditches for mining companies. For example, the Tanana Valley Railroad needed 300 workers during the summer of 1907 to extend their line. Foster, "Syndicalism Northern Style," 134.

27. C. K. Snow, quoted in "Type of Alaskan Prospector," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 5 (March 1908), 58. Rickard, Through the Yukon Alaska, 276; Joseph Sullivan, "Sourdough Radicalism: Labor and Socialism in Alaska, 1905-1920," m Stephen W. Haycox and Mary Childers Mangusso, eds.. An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past (Seattle: University of Washington, 1996), 222-23; James C. Foster, "The Western Federation Comes to Alaska," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 66 (October 1975), 171, 172.

28. Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism, 342-343; "Territorial Government," The Miners' Union Bulletin (Fairbanks), September 13,1909; Sullivan, "Sourdou^ RadicaUsm," 222,224,228. 172

29. Foster, "The Western Federation Conies to Alaska," 162, 164,167. With a membership of over 2,000 the Fairbanks WFM went on strike in 1907. The local Mine Owner and Operators Association agreed to an eight-hour, $5.00 work day between the busiest time from April 1 to October I. The local 193 rejected this oflFer, countering that it was still a ten-hour day between October and April. The operators after 1908 managed to weaken the WFM by tactics like arresting the leadership. Consequently the WFM could not continue its strong presence in Fairbanks. Foster, "Syndicalism Northern Style," 130- 140.

30. Sullivan, "Sourdough Radicalism," 224,227,229; Old Prospector, "Greedy Price- Raisers and Camp Killers," The Alaskan Socialist (Fairbanks), July 17, 1914. Overall, Alaska mining labor unions had limited success. The first Alaskan Territorial legislature in 1912 gave them the eight-hour-day, plus other provisions. Labor groups were not very strong after World War I, however, in part because of the decline in socialist labor groups in the United States, but also because of the decline in mining and overall population in Alaska during and after World War I.

31. Part of the impetus to leave the Fairbanks area in 1907 were ongoing labor fiustrations and disputes over wages. Having these potential strikebreakers leave town helped the local group of the Western Federation of Miners survive a difiBcult mining season of water shortage and national economic problems. Brooks, et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska: Report on Progress of Investigations in 1907," 40; Foster, "Syndicalism Northern Style," 134; "Stampeders Rush to Sushanna River," Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 14, 1913.

32. Maurice D. Leehey to the Editor, Mining and Scientific Press 116 (March 23,1918), 401; Charles D. Walcott to The Secretary of the Interior, March 29,1905, Roll 12, M430, Interior Department Territorial Papers: Alaska, 1869-1911, p. 3; Purington, "Methods and Costs," 11,13; Department of the Interior, USGS, "The USGS, Its Origin, Development, Organization, and Operations," USGS Bulletin 227 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1904), 45; Van H. Manning, Ninth Annual Report of the Director of the Bureau of Mines to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30,1919 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1919), 84-85.

33. "The New Alaskan Tin Deposits," Pacific Coast Miner, March 28, 1903, 235; Fred H. Moffit, "The Gold Placers of Tumagain Arm," in, Alfi'ed H. Brooks, et al., "Report on Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1904," USGS Bulletin 259 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1905), 99; Charles W. Wright, "Lode Mining in Southwestern Alaska, 1907," in, Alfred H. Brooks, et al., "Report on Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1907," 96-97; "Mining in Alaska in 1912," Engineering and Mining Journal 95 (January 11,1913), 131; Patricia Ropel, "Gypsum," Alaska Journal 3 (Summer 1973), 149. In 1884, United States mining laws were extended to 173

Alaska. The basic provisions of the 1872 Mining Law still applied. After making a mineral discovery, a mine claimant filed a location notice for a desired claim up to 160 acres with (in the case of Alaska) the nearest division of the Alaska District Court. To keep the claim, the claimant had to perform at least one hundred doUars worth of labor per year on development. After expending five hundred dollars in labor, the claimant could then file for a patent with the nearest branch of the General Land Office. After placing a patent notice in a local newspaper for sixty days, the claimant could purchase the land for five dollars per acre. There were separate provisions for placer claims (in twenty-acre increments) and placer gold found on Alaskan beaches, but the general process of locating and recording was the same. Wilson L Snyder, Mines and Mining: A Commentary on the Law of Mines and Mining Rights, vol. I (Chicago: T. H. Flood, 1902), 1267; M. D. Leehey, Leehey's Mining Code For the Use of Miners and Prospectors in Washington and Alaska (Seattle: Lowman and Hanford Stationary and Printing Co., 1900), 21-22,24- 31,49-50, 58-59.

Pioneer Prospector, 5,11-15, Hard-Rock Miners, 101.

35. "Alaska Gold Quartz," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (November 1909), 64; "Alaska Needs Population," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 (February 1910), 186-87; Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska, 259; C.A. "Bert" Bryant, "Another Man's Life," typed unpublished manuscript (1937), Alaska State Library, Juneau, Alaska, 158-160. An arrastra is a "circular rock-lined pit in which broken ore is pulverized by stones attached to horizontal poles fastened in a central pillar and dragged around the pit." U.S. Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related Terms, 53. Prospectors sold their gold dust locally. In 1914 there was competition between banks in Fairbanks to attract customers wishing to sell their gold dust, with the lowest competitive rate of a 2 1/2% processing fee. Hubert L Ellis, "Handling Gold Dust at Fairbanks," Engineering and Mining Journal 98 (November 7,1914), 817-820.

36. Hutchins, "Prospecting and Mining," 76; "Winter Prospecting in Alaska," Alaska- Yukon Magazine 4 (January 1908), 428.

37. Trefeger, My Fifty Years, 14,20; Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska, 340, 344; Dawson Daily News, September 22, 1902; Hutchins, 'Trospecting and Mining," 57; DiL Robinson, "The Facts About the Squirrel River Strike," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 11 (January 1911), 10-11; "imoko Diggings," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (November 1907), 257. Although author D. H. Robinson lauded the Squirrel River area as a place for the "poor," the ultimate desired fate of the area was, again, "an immediate future of rapid development," with more elaborate and large-scale gold operations. Robinson, "The Facts About the Squirrel River Strike," 10-11. 174

38. Bryant, "Another Man's Life," 159-173,180-188. Bryant's operation became problematic during a shortage of labor in World War I; Bryant bought a share in the hydraulic operation, but by the 1920s the operation was operating in the red. Ibid.

39. Hots Springs Post, May 1,1909; Hick, Pioneer Prospector, 11-15; 18-27; Bryant, "Another Man's Life," 159-173.

40. Bryant, "AnotherMan's Life," 170.

41. Bundtzen, "A History of Mining in the Kantishna tfills," 152-154; quote from p. 154; "Family Succeeds on a Gold Ranch," Seattle Post Intelligencer, July 17,1913.

42. The Pathfinder 1 (November, 1919), 8; Tom Odale, "Some Alaskan Adventures," Alaska Journal 4 (Winter 1974), 41-48; Bryant, "Another Man's Life," 144-181.

43. Bryant, "Another Man's Life," 145-A, 150, 152, 155, 155-B, 161, Atwoodand DeArmond, Who's Who in Alaskan Politics, 11; Rickard, Through the Yukon and Alaska, 286.

44. Bundtzen, "A History of Mining in the Kantishna Hills," 152; Brooks, "Preliminary Report of the Tolovana District," 201; McLain, Alaska and the Klondike, 173; "Mining in the Nome Country," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (December 1907), 294-300.

45. William Bunge to his father, March 18, 1898 and January 29, 1899; Bunge to his brother, September 17,1898 and September, 1898, William C. Bunge Papers, Miimesota Historical Society, St. Paul, Minnesota.

46. William Bunge to his father, January 29,1899; June 8,1899; June 15,1899; April 5, 1900; August 20,1900; Bunge to his sister, June 17,1901, William C. Bunge Papers.

47. Bunge to his sister, January 9, 1905; Bunge to his brother, December 7,1910; Typed biographical information on William Bunge, William C. Bunge Papers.

48. For the debates and problems involved creating Alaskan roads, see Claus-M. Naske, Paving Alaska's Trails: The Work of the Alaskan Road Commission (Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1986).

49. Engineering and Mining Journal 101 (April 1,1916), 612; "Juneau Report," Engineering and Mining Journal 101 (January 15,1916), 136; Sumner S. Smith, "The Mining Industry in the Territory of Alaska During the Calendar Year 1916," Bureau of Mines Bulletin 153 (Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1917), 11-12; P.C. Stoess, "Mining in Alaska Under War Conditions," Engineering and Mining Journal 106 (October 5,1918), 611-614, quote from p. 614; "General Review of Mining in the United States in 1918," 175

Engineering and Mining Journal 107 (January 11,1919), 107. Both Great Britain and the United States needed gold reserves to keep their respective nations economically strong. At the same time, however, the war-time economy caused high commodity prices and, as a consequence, depreciated gold values (the same amount of previous gold reserves purchased fewer commodities). The resulting dilemma became how to motivate gold miners to produce more gold, while the price of gold fell. As the Secretary of the Treasury declared, gold was "one of the most needed war essentials" because government bonds financed war expenditures, and additional gold reserves were needed to provide and maintain such a large "credit structure." "The Position of the Gold Mines," Engineering and Mining Journal 104 (December 22, 1917), 1097; "The Plight of Gold Miners," Engineering and Mining Journal XQSQmt 22, 1918), 1143-44. 176

CHAPTER 4

FUELED PROSPECTS: THE ECONOMIC USES OF PROSPECTOR IMAGERY IN THE ALASKAN COAL LANDS DISPUTE

Introduction

The rhetoric of prospectors as the embodiment of the mdividual was not just used to entice mineral seekers to Alaska. Those debating over the status of Alaskan coal lands used prospectors as part of a perceptual and ideological landscape that extracted and refined images, in a rhetorical struggle to determine land use policy.

Coal mining in Alaska during the first two decades of the twentieth century followed an unusual pattern. Mine operators, coal developers, and syndicates came to the North and obtained coal claims with the intention of working profitable coal enterprises.

Between 1900 and 1906 some 900 claims were filed with the General Land OflBce. Local residents and entrepreneurs expected coal mines to result in a burgeoning regional economy. Then, in 1906, President Theodore Roosevelt withdrew all Alaskan coal lands fi'om public use. Between coal withdrawal in 1906 and a leasing act in 1914, ahnost no coal was mined on a commercial basis. Yet the issue of Alaskan coal remained at center stage to the increasingly impatient coal claimants, to those Alaskan residents Living in coal areas, to federal government oflScials, to conservationists, and to incoming administrations. And coal remained most active on a rhetorical level of images and ideals.

Compared with their involvement in metallic mining, prospectors had little to do with the business of finding, developing, and mining coal. Yet prospectors were central to the 177 rhetoric of coal debates. Those who supported the opening of coal mines to private ownership placed the prospector at the center point of the debate over the use of natural resources, as if the mineral seekers were the sole players in coal mining. Coal had played no part of the nineteenth-centuiy mining images and ideals. Coal was not included in the popular conceptions of Western mining regions, nor was coal part of the Klondike Gold

Rush. There were no working images of prospectors swinging their picks into coal, or trudging up a steep mountain trail with a bag of coal slung on their back. As an Alaskan writer observed in 1909, "we are prone to think only of gold when we consider Alaska."'

Yet image makers transferred those attributes of the prospector associated with the metallic minerals onto a landscape of coal. Alaskan coal mining is a useful case study of image deployment and how images can be transferred onto physical landscapes other than those in which they were created. The rhetoric that was utilized also reveals which images and ideals people believed were most persuasive in early twentieth-century United States.

All phrases, references, images, and ideals associated with nineteenth-century metal

mining were employed in discussions over coal. The prospector represented the individual

and all that the individual as an ideal implied. In order to eliminate struggles on the floor of

the legislature, legislators employed ideals and rhetoric of the prospector as an important

individual. Those who supported the conservation plan leasing of coal lands to large

enterprises legitimized their own activities and plans by addressing the individual

conversely as no longer important in coal mining, and the prospector as an outdated

figure. 178

Federal government-backed conservation subordinated individual rights to the public interest. As the federal government and large industrial operations accepted a modified laissez faire, those who supported the coal claimants argued for a return to individual- based laissez faire. To them, American values revolved around private ownership and the rights of the individual citizen of moderate means to own his own property. This idea served as the basis for arguing against federal government intrusion into Alaskan coal lands. Those supporters of individual initiative argued that prospecting would be hampered by withdrawal of coal lands and later, by federal government leasing. But these writers were not as concerned with the future discoveries as they were with those coal claims already taken and their own circumstances. As with Alaskan metal mining, the rhetoric of the prospector as individual was a cover (or ploy) for ends that ultimately served those other than the mineral seekers, in an industrial mining landscape.

Alaska Coal

Alaskans needed fuel for the long and cold winters. According to local laws, each resident, or individual working a mine, could use SlOO worth of timber fi'om public lands for domestic use, for buildings and fences, or for mining and prospecting. In some areas of Alaska, however, coal was a more desirable fuel source than wood. To the west and north, a paucity of forests forced residents to turn to alternate fuels. And even Ketchikan and Juneau residents favored coal over wood. Despite being surrounded by forests, these southeastern Alaskan communities faced expensive fuel costs. The region's limited wagon roads and wet climate raised wood prices up to $15 per cord. Native American residents 179 also used local sources of coal.'

More important, Alaskan coal had commercial possibilities. Coal mine operators and investors from both inside and outside of the territory considered Alaska a valuable source for coal. Steam power, generated by coal, underpinned Alaska's industrial growth.

Some prospectors used coal instead of wood to thaw their placer prospects and placer operations since the coal burned more slowly and thus lasted longer. River steamboats were an important means of transportation in parts of Alaska (for example, along the lengthy Yukon River). These vessals could use wood or coal, but coal was desired where wood was scarce. Railroads also utilized coal-powered steam. In early twentieth-century

Alaska, there were a handful of short raikoad lines. Developers also viewed Alaskan coal as having export possibilities, providing a western source of coal to compete with Eastern markets.^

Alaska contained all coal types, but the lowest grade, h'gnitic coals, were the most conmion, with a wide distribution throughout the region. More valuable coal types were found in limited quantities. In 1907 United States Geological Survey (USGS) geologist

Alfred Brooks estimated that there were roughly 12,644 square miles of known coal fields. Coal sources included the coal fields of Cook Inlet, Chignik Bay, Kachemak Bay, and Cape Lisbume. It was the Bering and Matanuska fields, accordng to Brooks, that were the most valuable for commercial use. The high-grade coals of the Bering River field were located near Controller Bay, about 110 miles from the town of Cordova. The USGS descnbed the Matanuska coal fields as roughly "2S miles from tide water at Knik Arm" 180

(near Cook Inlet). Since Cook Inlet froze during winter, the distance to tide water was also "measured to the east side of Kenai Peninsula, about 184 miles." The area covered around 900 square miles of known coal, with 46.5 square miles of proven "commercial seams" in 1909.^

Coal was less the domain of small-scale prospectors and miners and more suited to financially-backed enterprises seeking profitable returns on their investments. Coal laws reflected the large-scale nature of coal mining. Nineteenth-century U.S. coal mining law treated coal differently from other minerals. Coal was "more readily discoverable" and was

"thought to have a greater potential for raising revenue" than precious metals. The 1873

Coal Lands Act discouraged monopolies, however, by limiting clauns to 160 acres.

Associations of individuals were limited to 320 acres, and an association of not more than four individuals could obtain up to 640 acres if they had spent a minimum of $S,000 on improvements to this property. The 1873 Act also stipulated that a coal claimant could not

"authorize sale of lands valuable for mines of gold, silver or copper," a restriction intended to prevent individual profit-seekers from accruing 640 acres of precious metal mine properties. Coal land claim holders had to describe their entry "according to the government survey." Legislation enacted in 1900 and 1904 extended these coal laws to

Alaska.^

Compared with their efforts to locate other minerals, prospectors had little to do with the business of discovering and developing coal. Although finding coal was often much easier than locating precious metals, coal prospecting involved special knowledge as well 181 as tools to do the job. As with any mineral, after the initial discovery the other important component of prospecting was to determine the extent and value of the mineral deposit.

Central to placing a value on an individual coal bed was estimating the quantity and quality

of the coal. The cost of mining was crucial in determining the value of a coal bed. Coal

developers estimated the coal bed's value "at so much a ton in the ground." The physical

character of the coal bed was an important factor of cost. The method of determining "the

existence, depth from the surface, nature, thickness, dip, and strike of a deposit" was to

create bore-holes deep into the ground. Coal miners in the United States commonly

employed the keystone drill, using steam power. Such an outfit cost $200, and took two

men to operate. Coal beds less than two feet in depth or more than 2,000 feet were less

economical to mine, and thus less desirable. In 1909 geologists determined that the

workable coal beds of the Bering River coal field were three to twenty-five feet thick, with

areas of larger thickness. The Matanuska commercial beds varied between five to thirty

feet in thickness.®

Spedal abilities were also needed to analyze the sample ore firom a location. The

grade of the coal was important in determining its value. Coal quality included the levels

of moisture, carbon, ash, and calories, and the fuel ratio of samples. An author of a 1908

work on coal mining explained that, although one can make approximations of the heat

value of coal samples without extended training of chemistry, "the determination of the

ultimate analysis of coal is an important and somewhat lengthy process, necessitating great

accuracy and a considerable knowledge of practical chemistry."^ 182

Thus prospecting for coal was expensive, and certainly not in the domain of anyone without sufficient capital and knowledge. One USGS report in 1904 estimated that "many thousands of dollars" had been spent in the Kootznahoo Inlet for coal development

"without minable deposits." Even obtaining the land from the government was not for a person of limited means. At the rate of $10 per acre, costs for 160 acres would amount to

$1600.00, no small expense. Coal could be mined on a limited basis by digging a pit down to the deposit and then carrying the ore to the surface in buckets or carts. Such mines were usually producing limited amounts of coal for local use.^

Those interested in making profits from coal, however, knew that one needed an operation large enough to be capable of mining substantial quantities of coal ore to make their investment worth the efibrt. The primary activities of a coal mine were to extract the ore, clean the ore of impurities, separate or cut the ore by size, and then ship the coal to where it could be sold. By the 1880s, Western coal mines used air-driven machines to break, drill, and cut the ore. On the surface, there were steam-driven hoisting machines and pump houses, as well as mecham'sms to help clean and sort the ore, and to load the ore onto railroad cars. Together, these necessary components required a sizable investment. Raihroads were also needed to ship the coal out of the region. A 1904 governmental report stated that "the proper opening" of Alaskan coal mines "will require large investments of capital, not only in development work, but also in transportation facilities." A problem in early twentieth-century Alaska was the lack of established railroad lines. Anyone expecting to establish a coal company would have to provide the means to 183 transport the coal out to the buyer. As United States Geological Survey geologist Alfred

Brooks related, "geographical isolation" increased cost.^

Brooks summed up the nonessential role of the coal prospector by stating that "the man who has the means necessary to provide for a survey, payments to the Government, and the development work on a claim required before patent is issued usually does not follow the vocation of a prospector." He explained that "the difference between the mining of coal and the mining of placer gold has not always been recognized. A placer claim may yield a profit to the prospector who has but a supply of provisions and a few simple tools, but as a necessary preliminary to coal mining at least several thousand dollars must be expended on each claim." And, "even after the money necessary to patent has been spent, no profit from mining can accrue until sufficient capital has been invested to provide eqm'pment and transportation facilities." An Alaskan coal operator, H.R. Harriman, provided an even higher amount. In 1909, he estimated that a coal mine in a "virgin district" would involve an investment between $150,000 to $500,000.'°

Coal was not entirely ignored by mineral seekers, for they could certainly make the initial discoveries in a region. Yet few Alaskan prospectors looked solely for coal. Those mineral seekers who found coal were usually in search of a variety of other minerals. In

1896, for example, two gold prospectors found the important Matanuska coal deposits.

Later, in 1911, Frederick Zom and his son had coal claims in the Yentna River in central

Alaska. Zom was seeking financial backing from capitalists to develop their claims, for he could not progress any further on his own. Ultimately, claims needed to be sold to larger 184 operations with capital for the proper development work and for handling the extensive volumes of material. It was much more common, then, for established companies or syndicates to search for usable quantities of coal, and to obtain coal claims. Those enterprises needing coal for their operations (such as steamship companies), for example, often did their own preliminary developmental work. So it was medium to large mining enterprises-those companies with capabilities to handle, extract and mine larger quantities of ore-that would effectively mine enough coal to make the investment worthwhile."

Even the earliest Alaskan coal discoveries and development had been executed by companies. The Russian-American Company mined coal in Coal Bay (20 miles southwest of Chugachik Bay) beginning in 1854. By the last two decades of the nineteenth century, coal enterprises operated on Admiralty Island, in Kachemak Bay (in Cook Inlet), at

Chignik River, in the Homer area, on the Alaska Peninsula, at Herendeen Bay, and along the Yukon River. Whalers in steamships used deposits sporadically at Cape Lisbume.

Visitors around 189S noticed the high-grade coals of the Bering River field, but it took another decade for systematic prospecting. These "prospectors" were not small operators of one to several individuals, like those placer gold miners. In 1901, English capitalists and their Pacific Oil and Coal Company purchased coal lands in the Bering River area. In the same area two years later, fort)- to fifty men were developing for the Alaska Development

Co. (backed by English capital), and four to five men worked for the Alaska Petroleum and Coal Company.^

Coal operations needed large tracts of coal lands. The coal acquisition had to be large 185 enough to justify a paying operation. As H. R. Harriman quipped, by the early twentieth century the American coal mining industry had "outgrown short trousers and has come to man's estate." A coal operator working with twenty feet of coal, for example, would soon use up the deposit on a smaller acreage. As Falcon Joslin, a railroad operator in the

Fairbanks region, succinctly stated, a 160-acre tract "does not contain coal enough to pay

the cost of opening a mine."'^

Coal claim holders devised ways to get around the law to amass larger holdings. One

common method was for one person to use power of attorney for other individuals not

present to acquire enough adjoining claims to obtain a sufficient area for a coal operation.

Power of attorney was not illegal, although this practice had been rampant in early

twentieth-century Alaska with placer gold and the focus of much frustration for those

miners who wanted to stake claims and found that a specific area had been claimed by just

a few individuals present at the time. Another techm'que was to use dummy entrymen who

could then secretly turn over their titles to the individuals or corporations wanting the land

(but who were ineligible to claim such a large amount of land). For example, Duncan

Stewart, a resident of Seward, and six others, were charged with conspiring to acquire

10,000 acres of coal lands, by using dummy entrymen. Still another method was to

combine claims after they had been separately obtained and patented. These arrangements

were often handled by an agent, who represented the various owners.'^

By 1906 there were around 900 claimants of Alaskan coal mines, with claims pending

in the General Land Office. Many of these clsums had been obtained under such less than 186 scrupulous methods, with a notable percentage of them acquired by using dummy entrymen. Alaskan coal operators made up a portion of the claim holders, such as T. P.

McDonald, a former successful coal miner from Montana, who was developing a tide­ water coal claim on Controller Bay. There were also claimants from various locations in the United States. One large group was the Michigan-Alaska Development Company from the Detroit area."

Coal Withdrawal

Although one observer remarked that a particular group of thirty-three claims only made up about eight percent of the total of around 400 claims in the Bering River coal field, this group became the focus of widespread attention and the center of a conservation debate. The "Cunningham claims" (with a total of around 5,000 acres) were named for prospector Clarence Curmingham. Cunningham was hardly a "lone prospector" of small means. A 1904 government report stated that a Clarence Cunningham was prospecting and developing with twenty to twenty-five men, "representing an unincorporated syndicate." Cunningham had staked a total of thirty-three claims under his own name and, through power of attorney, the names of a number of businessmen from

Seattle, Spokane, and cities in Idaho and Ohio.'^

Not surprisingly, there was evidence that Cunningham had plans to consolidate these claims. It was the involvement of certain large corporate interests, however, that made this group the center of attention. By 1906 there were rumors that the banking conglomerate

J.P. Morgan and the equally-powerful Guggenheim family planned to consolidate coal 187 claims from the Cumiingham group. That same year in July, Morgan and the Guggenheims combined to form the Alaska Syndicate to oversee business activity in Alaska. They acquired sahnon fisheries, a steamship line, and a commercial company, as well as a copper mine operation in the Wrangell Mountains northeast of Cordova."

There is no question that the Alaska Syndicate had intentions of expending great capital in the North. The Guggenheims oversaw large gold dredging operations in the

Yukon and boasted a "production record" of $100,000,000. The Kermecott Copper

Corporation was to become another large Syndicate enterprise, and in 1906 the Syndicate was making plans to build the Copper River and Northwestern Railway from the copper properties to reach the ocean terminus at Cordova. These enterprises were close to the

Bering coal fields. There is no evidence, however, that the Alaska Syndicate wanted to start a large commerdal coal operation. When the Guggenheims began the raikoad, they did not own coal claims. It was logical, though, that the Syndicate would be looking for a nearby source of coal for the railroad. They had also planned to build a smelter on Prince

William Sound, where the ores from their copper mines would be smelted. Coal was needed as coke for smelting. They could have also utilized local coal for their steamship line and for general steam purposes. Additionally, the Guggenheim railroad would be a principle means of transporting minerals out of the greater Cordova region. Anyone who would have mined coal in the Bering fields, unless they built their own costly railroad, would end up using the Copper River Railroad. The Guggenheims stated that they were willing to invest in an extension railroad from their line and into the coal lands, indicating that they wanted to work as a carrier, rather than a prindpal coal mine owner. At the time, 188 the Syndicate denied any connections to the Cunningham claims, but later an engineer for the Guggenheims stated that, in 1907, the Syndicate agreed to an option to acquire one- half interest in the thirty-three claims (it was illegal to consolidate before patent, thus the denial).'*

What made the Cunningham claims reach national attention was that those who criticized large corporate conglomerates quickly identified Alaska Syndicate with other large monopolies. The Alaska Syndicate was part of a larger movement in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth century toward corporate consolidation in industry and finance. J. P. Morgan typified this effort to reorganize financial ventures into larger entities when his banking syndicate combined with Andrew Carnegie, creating the United States

Steel Corporation. An increasingly concerned public worried that large companies and corporations would destroy competition and upset the market system. As scholar

Yehoshua Arieli puts it, those affected in negative ways by large corporate bodies realized that "between the ideal of individualism, unrestrained by society, and the ideal of democracy, was an innate conflict" that "unrestrained competition and combination meant the triumph of the strongest." Those critical of monopolies associated conglomerates with excessive economic power. Critics also viewed large corporate bodies as threats to individual initiative in a competitive market. Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act in

1890 to help control the power of these large combinations, but the law was too vague and was either broadly interpreted or ignored.'^

At the same time, the strengthening conservation movement worked to put a limit on resource use. Evidence of resource depletion and the announcement of the closing of the 189 frontier in light of the 1890 census made a growing number of Americans aware, as historian David Wrobel explains, that "unbounded expansion had reached its limits." Those concerned with resource scarcity began to believe that resources needed to be conserved

"in order to maintain that tradition" of progress. President Theodore Roosevelt best symbolized this movement. Roosevelt had stated that individualism was "'the fibre of our whole citizenship.'" While commending individualistic pioneer virtues, however, he suggested that individualism should be "curbed whenever it becomes inconsistent with the public welfare." This limitation was what Yehoshua Arieli calls a "wise and regulated individualism."*"

Yet as historian Charles Edward Mem'am among others note, conservation meant not only avoiding waste of natural resources, but also preventing "control by special as opposed to general interests." Roosevelt was not against business, but differentiated between efiBcient corporations that lowered costs to the consumer with those enterprises that employed corrupt methods or unfair competition. He felt that governmental regulation would insure that business did not operate against the public interest. In 1902, for instance, Roosevelt worked with the Justice Department to dissolve a railroad holding company run by J.P Morgan, Edward H. Harriman, and James J. Hill, along with John D.

Rockefeller.^^

Roosevelt supported the goals of utilitarian conservationists. These conservationists wanted federal regulation of limited resources like forests, water, and mineral lands, including oil and coal. Chief Forester for the United States, Gifford Pinchot, was one of the strongest proponents of utilitarian conservation and federal regulation. Pinchot was 190 not against development of public resources, but he detested monopolies. He viewed

Alaska as a place ripe for monopoly dominance, and firmly believed that the Cunningham claims were being held for use by the Alaska Syndicate. Gifibrd Pinchot urged the

President to withdraw Alaskan coal lands fi-om public entry. Americans critical of corporate monopolies were also disturbed by the Cunningham claims. Although in 1907 the Syndicate was to agree secretly to acquire some of the claims, at this point the

Cunningham claimants had followed the law. USGS geologist Alfred Brooks explained that the public confused the legal (but unscrupulous) acquiring of coal lands through power of attorney with the illegal use of dummy entrymen. The Alaska Syndicate and, by extension, the Cunningham claims, became associated with what many perceived to be illegal activity and the claims became a convenient target and symbol of monopoly.'

In response, in 1906 Rooseveh withdrew around 66 million acres of land from nine western states and territories, where '"workable coal (was) known to occur.'" In Alaska,

Roosevelt blocked all pending coal entries from obtaining patents, but added that he would consider those claims already filed. Roosevelt did not mean for withdrawal to be permanent, but rather a necessary measure while a better way of using coal resources was enacted. The federal government also used newly enacted forest reserve legislation to safeguard the coal lands. Some of the lands had already been established as part of the

Tongass Forest Reserve. In 1907, the Secretary of Agriculture recommended creating the

Chugach Forest Reserve, whose boundaries took in twenty-one of the thirty-three

Cunningham claims. The Tongass and Chugach reserves included much of the populated southeast Alaska, as well as the coastal area near Prince William Sound.^ 191

The Image of the Prospector in 1908 Congressional Debates

Not surprisingly, the claim holders, coal investors, and those who were hoping for economic development near Alaskan coal fields were upset by the coal withdrawal and the new forest reserves. As policy analysts Carl Mayer and George Riley explain, these groups argued that "at a critical moment in Alaska's development, its abundant and valuable coal­ fields were suddenly ofif-limits." At this time, though, the claimants still had political power. Although they did not have enough influence to convince Roosevelt to rescind his withdrawal, their influence could be seen in the successful passage of another Alaska coal mining law in 1908, allowing the consolidation of individual claims into tracts up to 5,280 acres.-^

Those who supported consolidation of coal lands knew, however, that they could not argue in favor of larger development to gain the desired increase in coal acreage. This argument would sound too close to upholding the rights of conglomerates, currently out of favor by the public. Instead, they employed the seemingly innocuous figure of the

nineteenth-century prospector. Utilizing the familiar archetypes of this mineral seeker as a

representation of the individual was, again, an ideological cover for industrial-based goals.

Debates over this new Alaskan coal bill reveal that Congressional proponents of coal consolidation effectively used the ideals and rhetoric of the prospector to eliminate

struggles over the issue and to pass their legislation.

Two observant muckrakers writing forMcClure's magazine, John E. Lathrop and

George Kibbe Turner, accused those legislators who argued in favor of increasing coal

land amounts of using the prospector as a ploy to get the bill passed. These authors listed 192 various Congressmen who either had personal interests in the Alaskan coal claims, or those whose names "did not appear as original claim holders, but took assignments from them." They wrote that "this permission to abrogate the coal law in part was secured simply by the continued representation that the 'hardy prospector of Alaska' was interested in the bill, when, as a matter of fact, not five per cent of those interested in the coal claims had ever seen the mines." The journalists recognized that the use of prospector imagery was connected to upholding the rights of an individual. They saw "individualism" as excessively abused by large conglomerates. "The day of rampant individualism on the political platform and of monopoly control in the committee room is coming to an end," trumpeted xYit McClure's article, and the federal government and politicians needed to

"manage our affairs in our own interests.""^

Using the prospector as a ploy could be seen in the reports of the Committee on

Public Lands. The committee was headed by Frank W. Mondell, from Wyoming. Mondell stated that in his "early youth" he had "prospected and developed and opened some coal properties," giving him the authority to oversee this topic. The Committee on the Public

Lands prepared similar reports on the Alaskan coal lands bill to both the House and

Senate. They played down the fact that it was mine companies needing more than 160 acres to make a profit who wanted the bill passed. Instead, the committee reported that, because of the high expense of surveys and the "broken character of the deposits," and the

"doubt of the continuity of the deposits," 160 acres was inadequate.^

More importantly, the committee made it seem as if the sole player in Alaska coal mining was the prospector. "Many of the men who made the original coal locations in 193

Alaska were hardy prospectors," the committee reported. They played up this character as a poor miner. Many of these men, they continued, "who were willing to undergo the hardships and difficulties surrounding prospecting in that region...fbund it difficult to raise the funds for the expense of surveys required of each 160-acre tract and the cost of the payment of $10 an acre on the land." To undergo surveys and pay for the land, the prospectors needed to find a source of funds, "and there has been some question as to whether under the present construction of the coal-land law this could be done." The committee concluded that if the proposed legislation of increasing holdings to 2,S60 acres were passed, that this would then "enable the pioneers who discovered and prospected these fields to realize upon their claims and will make possible a much-needed development in the Alaskan field.""

On the fioor of the House Mondeli continued his method of focusing the argument on the prospector. He stated that it was "highly important that the hardy prospectors who located the coal fields of that far distant country should have an opportunity by combining their original locations to make an entry of sufficient area to make a coal operation

profitable." He explained that it was "entirely impossible to carry on a coal operation

(including establishing "a working plant") in that country on 160 acres of land." Again,

Mondeli made it seem as if coal operator and the prospector were one and the same.^

What had really bothered the two muckraker journalists, however, was the debate

between Representatives Robinson and Wilson. The joumah'sts explained that

Congressman Wilson fi'om Pennsylvam'a mentioned in the House of Representatives the

great potential profit of coal lands but, "with the appearance of the phantom form of the 194

'hardy prospector of Alaska,' Mr. Wilson of Pennsylvania persisted no fiirther, and his question remained unanswered." Indeed, the Congressional Record shows that Wilson had observed that 2,560 acres "with several veins of coal on it from 4 feet in thickness upward would produce an enormous amount of coal." When Wilson asked whether it would be better to first determine the value of the coal lands before establishing a limit on acreage, Robinson replied that Alaska was "a new country. Men who go there and take their picks on their shoulders and go into that wild country take their chances that all explorers take, and you can not get that Information until somebody has gone there and started to develop." He continued that, "if the Alaskan coal fields are to be developed, and

I think they ought to be developed, we ought to permit explorers to go there and take the chances that explorers have taken always since the beginning."^

Congressman Craig from Alabama who added to the rhetorical debate also placed the prospector front and center. He explained that the bill did not ask for additional land, but rather that it "asks that these prospectors, who have been hardy enough to go up into this frozen country and make these claims to find out what was there, may get together and combine their entries, so that they can make money out of what they have there; and they

have paid their $10 an acre under the flat rate in Alaska, as I understand it." It was evident that this rhetoric appealed to the general body of Representatives. After this last statement, Craig received a round of applause. A vote was taken soon after this, with 147 for the bill, 38 against, 14 answering present, and 188 not voting. WQson voted against the

measure.^

The Congressional Act that passed on May 28, 1908, permitted those who had 195 located coal lands before the withdrawal date of November 12,1906, to consolidate their coal locations up to 2,560 contiguous acres, or 16 claims. Compared with 160 acres,

2,560 acres was generous. The two muckraking journalists estimated that "a tract of 2,560 acres of the Cunningham property would produce at least 45,000,000 tons, worth

$22,500,000," and that the coal "will yield a profit, when developed, approximately one thousand times what the Government sells it for."^'

The Move Toward Coal Leasing

Nonetheless, this law remained worthless, for no patents were issued under this act.

Alfred Brooks explained that "a popular clamor...against all the Alaskan coal claimants" continued. The popularity of conservation and the unpopularity of monopoly as symbolized by the Alaska Syndicate made it difficult for any administration to allow

Alaskan coal lands to be opened or to issue patents. Exacerbating this situation were the actions of Richard Ballinger. What was termed the "Glavis-Ballinger Controversy" followed by the "Ballinger-Pinchot Affair" were important struggles in the debate over who should control natural resources. These disputes, however, kept the claim holders in limbo.^^

In March, 1907, Roosevelt appointed James Garfield Secretary of the Interior.

Garfield named Richard A. Ballinger the new Commissioner of the General Land Office.

Ballinger had once been the mayor of Seattle, as well as a lawyer for "many years."

Ballinger had a clear bias in overseeing the Alaskan coal claimants, as he specifically favored the development of the Cunningham claims. There was evidence that he was meeting with Cunningham interests during his stint as Commissioner, and he even 196 admitted at one point that he was a &iend to many of the Cunningham claimants.

Nonetheless, Louis R. Glavis, a special agent for the General Land Office and an admirer of Roosevelt, was put to work by a department manager in the summer of 1907 to investigate accusations that the Morgan-Guggenheim Syndicate was "engaged in a criminal conspiracy" with the Cunningham claim holders. In January, 1908, however,

Ballinger told Glavis that he had "directed that the claims be clear-listed and accepted for patent," a move that would deem the Cunningham claims "legal and valid." Clear-listing was the final step before giving the claimant title to the land. The normal period between clear-listing and patenting ranged from three months to three years; the Cunningham claims took only a few weeks. Glavis complained, which halted the claim patents. And on

March 4, 1908, Ballinger avoided a scandal by resigning and resuming private practice as an attorney. His loyalties were made clear when, during the summer of 1908, he worked as legal council for the Cunningham coal claimants to help them obtain patents on their claims.^^

Glavis continued with his investigation of the Cunningham claims, and he found evidence that the claim holders had planned to consolidate and offer all the property to a large company (which, again, would be illegal if they had intentions to consolidate before patent). This conflict, however, had not seen the last of Richard Ballinger. Even out of his official capacity Ballinger was able to influence Glavis' supervisor, Fred Dennett, to limit

Glavis' investigation. Glavis had to corroborate his evidence in the field, and it was winter, so he had to wait until better weather, delaying the investigation further.'*

Ballinger was not only able to influence activities while out in office, but he managed 197 to return to power. His return and his continuing actions kept the issue of the Cunningham claims in the forefront and-ironic for Ballinger-fiirther prevented any claimant from receiving patents. William Howard Taft became president in 1909. Against former

President Roosevelt's counsel, Taft appointed Richard Ballinger the new Secretary of

Interior. As historian Winifred McCulloch explains, in contrast to Roosevelt's "more aggressive approach of halting activities on pubUc lands," as former attorneys both Taft and Ballinger had a more "conservative legalistic view" on the limitations of governmental intrusion in conservation. Richard Ballinger backed private enterprise and corporate control over resources. Ballinger believed that conservation hindered development, and that large corporations best utilized the resources. In turn, the public benefitted by the

increased circulation of money into the economy. In 1909, for example, in response to his allowing railroads into a region in Oregon, he replied that "the proper course to take with

regard to this domain is to divide it up among the big corporations and the people who

know how to make money out of it and let people at large get benefits of the circulation of

the money." Ballinger immediately went to work as Secretary to try and reverse the land

policies of Roosevelt. He wished to issue patents to the Alaskan coal claim holders who

had been waiting for three years for some action.^^

But not everyone in the federal government thought like Ballinger. By 1909 Chief

Forester Gifibrd Pinchot had a clear set of ideals in mind for resource use that ran counter

to the new Secretary. Pinchot agreed that conservation meant resource development, but

believed that one of the most important principles of conservation was that natural

resources "must be developed and preserved for the benefit of the many and not merely 198 for the profit of a few." The nation's coal was limited, but "if it can be preserved, if its life can be extended, if by preventing waste there can be more coal in this country when this generation is gone" then conservation was worth pursuing. In direct contrast to Ballinger,

Pinchot believed that the federal government should oversee coal development through a leasing program, and not through private enterprise.^

Ballinger and Pinchot came into conflict over the continuing problems involving the

Cunningham claims. Ballinger assigned the matter of the Cunningham claims to his First

Assistant Secretary, Frank Pierce, but "remained involved in the sidelines." Ballinger continued to impede Glavis' work. For example, he informed Glavis in April, 1909, that he had 60 days to "substantiate in the field if the Cunningham claims were being developed together." One could not feasibly visit that region until summer, and thus once again

Glavis could not reasonably complete this order.^^

In August, 1909, an increasingly fiiistrated Glavis brought the matter to the attention of none other than Gifford Pinchot. In his offidal capacity, Pinchot oversaw the Chugach

National Forest, where the Cunningham claims were located. Pinchot had ah'eady been voicing his own discontent toward Ballinger, accusing him of allowing public lands to fall into the hands of "'unscrupulous monopolies,'" and asking if "Taft's legalism" was also

"not fiirthering the monopoly purchase of lands rich in mineral and power resources at the expense of the public interest." Pinchot helped Glavis appeal to Taft. The President, however, sided with Ballinger, and authorized Ballinger to dismiss Glavis for "filing a disingenuous statement, unjustly impeaching the official integrity of his superior officers."

By this time, the accusations between Pinchot and Ballinger had elevated to the national 199 level. In early 1910, Congress undertook a joint investigation of the Cunningham claims and the actions of the Department of Interior. GifTord Pinchot overstepped his authority by writing a letter that was read on the Senate floor. In response. President Taft removed him from oflSce. On March 6, 1911, Ballinger again resigned, this time for '"health and financial interests.'"^*

The Ballinger-Pinchot controversy marked a major victory and turning point for those who supported federal leasing of coal. The Congressional investigations all but halted any plans to allow the sale of Alaska coal fields, and to issue patents to the coal claim holders.

At the same time, many federal government officials began to argue that leasing might be best implemented through large enterprises. In the early twentieth century, despite industrial criticisms toward federal governmental interference, government was in partnership with the mming industry. Their mutual objective was, as historian WiUiam

Robbins writes, to "improve the effectiveness, efficiency, and stability of the existing social order, or, in the rhetoric of industry spokesmen, to work in the national and public interest.""

Similar to their policy toward metal mining, the federal government saw industrial coal mining as a means to best develop Alaska. Larger operations would be more efficient, and consumers would benefit from resulting lower coal prices. In contrast to Richard

Ballinger, these proponents believed that the federal government should regulate larger operations under a leasing program, rather than through private enterprise. If the government were to oversee coal mining, officials did not want to work with hundreds of leases of varying sizes. President Roosevelt had supported the idea of large coal 200 operations as the best way to mine coal. In his seventh State of the Union message on

December 3, 1907, he favored leasing but explained that if Congress would not approve of a leasing program, then coal deposits "should be sold under limitations as public utilities.

The regulations should permit coal lands to be worked in sufficient quantity by the several corporations."^

Large mining corporations agreed. As policy analysts Carl Mayer and George Riley point out, mine companies recognized that an unsupervised market in the natural resource industries such as lumber, coal, and oil had resulted in "chaotic and unregulated competition, overproduction, and chronic instability." The oil industry became dominated by powerful combinations, so competition was not a problem. Western coal mines, on the other hand, had not been taken over by larger interests, and a number of independent operators could mine coal and withstand pressure of being forced out by combinations. As historian William Robbins notes, many large capitalists supported the conservation movement not for "preserving social resources for future generations," but rather to bring stability and order to industry

Industry was not concerned at all about deviating from laissez faire if the result was profit maximization of larger, more efficiently run enterprises. Those who supported large industrial concerns came to realize that a leasing system could benefit large coal enterprises by controlling production, especially if leases were only granted by current market demand. In addition, as Mayer and RH^ explain, if a lease had liberal specifications of "low royalties, large acreage allowances, and lengthy lease periods, leaseholders could obtain benefits equal to or greater than those possible under private 201 ownership.

Using the Prospector to Argue for Conservation

Larger coal companies and governmental agencies that oversaw mining viewed leasing as the best means to utilize coal lands. These supporters of large-scale leasing

played down the individual to justify their own activities and policies. They argued that

individual initiative would no longer work as a force in the political economy of utilizing

natural resources like coal. Once again, the prospector was the figure that best symbolized

the individual in Western mining. These writers used the prospector to show that-despite

the fact that most coal claimants were not prospectors-the mineral seeker was an

outdated figure of inefficiency, who needed to be replaced. It was large conglomerates

that would best run an industry for the benefit of all.

Even while working for Roosevelt, who tried to balance leasing between the

consumer and industry, George Otis Smith, as the head of the USGS, viewed leasing as

"the best way for industry to increase profits." After studying Australia's leasing system, he

saw its favorable application in the United States. Smith clearly advantaged large

developers for a leasing plan, but spoke of public welfare to justify these plans. The

Western coal industry, be felt, needed to develop "as fast as the market justifies

expansion." The operator should have "the right to occupy an acreage sufficiently large for

economic operation during an average mine-life period, and second, fi'eedom firom too

great investment risks." Leasing was a perfect arrangement, for it provided "relief fi'om

the large capital outlay now required in the acquisition of the large acreage absolutely

necessary for a modem mine." Less financial risk and lower up-&ont costs, in turn, would 202 result in "a correspondingly lower price of coal to the consumer, [which] concerns general welfare." There was clearly no place for the individual in coal mining. The USGS diredor was critical of applying the ideals of the homestead law to coal (as had been one of the arguments for establishing the nineteenth-century general mining law). The homestead law, he wrote, "expresses the spirit of American institutions in that it has encouraged every citizen to own a home but there is neither sentiment nor sense in a proposition to sell at a low price one hundred and sixty acres of coal land to an individual-every citizen does not need to own a coal mine.""'^

Another strong and vocal supporter of leasing to help industry was H. Foster Bain, the state geologist for Illinois. In 1908, Bain explained that in the past, the fee-simple system supported the individual, "even if he wasted his ore through selective mining methods, or if he let his property remain idle." But Americans had, "in a way, been living on an inherited surplus, [where] each took what he would and did as he pleased. The result was the development of the magnificent individual im'tiative which has contributed so much to American success." But, with "changing conditions, and particularly the exhaustion of our surplus, [there] must be a change in attitude." He argued that monopolies would exist in either a fee-simple system or in leasing. He asked, "are there any reasons to suppose that under a lease-hold system individual initiative will be more repressed than under a system of large private monopolies?"'*^

Bain used an argument based on the ineffective skills of prospectors to bolster Bain's

position on a coal leasing policy. He believed that prospectors played no role in modem coal mining, for they had found few coal mines. Instead, large tracts of coal lands needed 203

"organized scientific prospecting" and a large-scale leasing system. "To my mind," he concluded," it is not a question of whether such a system would prove as stimulating to the individual as that under which our grandfathers did live, but whether it would not be more stimulating than any other which our grandchildren would otherwise live."^'

A few years later as the editor of The Mining and Scientific Press, Bain wrote on leasing regularly. He again employed prospectors as a contrast to argue that Congress had not recognized that circumstances had changed. In 1873, he explained, "the individual and the small colliery were then the rule, and the laws followed the general model of those under which farms were given to citizens." These laws were never adopted to changing conditions. "Ostrich-like," he wrote, "Congress has kept its head in the sand and refused to see that conditions have changed. The lonely pioneer is no longer the only one for whom provision must be made. The individual 160-acre claim and the maximum 320- association claim are jokes and have been for years.

Using Darwim'an logic. Bain explained that large industrial combinations were a product of evolution. "In the evolution of society we have come to a stage where the transaction of business in large units is an economic necessity...We have now reached a much higher stage of development; one in which court orders commanding large corporations to disintegrate are as futile as the orders of King Canute to the sea. Ultra- conservatism cannot hold back progress." He believed that trusts would be particularly advantageous in Alaska where, under "adverse conditions," the coal fields would "be developed more quickly, economically, and efficiently by a single great syndicate than by a number of small warring concerns." Remaining cognizant of conservation. Bain explained 204 that "large business organizations" would best provide "equitable distribution of the surplus earnings of mankind."'''

Using the Prospector to Argue against Conservation

A major roadblock to leasing were the coal claim holders. Together, the claimants had acquired most of the known coal deposits. The coal claimants, in turn, realized that the federal government would favor leasing to established large-scale operations. Many of these claims were part of organized syndicates of investors hoping, at a later date, to organize coal companies or interest existing coal compam'es and coal mine operators in their collective coal lands. Other claim holders were part of established coal operations financed through stockholders, and were large enough to make a profit for their investors.

Because leasing might select coal operators through a bidding process, though, it was not clear if any of the claimants had a chance in selection. The claim holders, then, would not only lose their individual claims, but also any chance of mining coal.

Claim holders were not the only fiiistrated group. Another important contingent were those who had personal economic stakes or interests in Alaskan coal fields. This group consisted of local promoters and communities near mining regions; Alaskan businessmen with vested interests in coal mines or in those communities directly affected by coal production; and those working in professions that benefitted directly fi'om coal mining.

The greatest fear of these middling professionals and businessmen, as well as local communities, was what the continuing withdrawal of coal lands would do (and was doing) to their personal or collective economic fiitures.

Many Alaskans were blaming the lack of population growth on coal withdrawal. In 205 his annual reports from 1906 to 1909, Governor Wilford Hoggatt complained that the population was not increasing. The answer, he wrote, was development of Alaskan coal mines. The federal government continued to refuse to issue patents on any of the pending claims. Only two claims had ever reached patent, and they were producing very litde coal.^*

Coal had to be imported, and it was expensive. Prospector George Hick, for example, needed coal for a steam pump to move the water through his gold sluices. In 1907, he paid $38.00 per ton, and a ton would only operate his pump for 24 hours. Another

Alaskan pointed out the "anomaly" of the Tanana Valley Raihroad near Fairbanks. The steam engines could not run on the "abundance of good steam coal along the right of way of this road," and instead had to bum wood that cost around $12 per cord. Some residents, especially those who lived in more remote regions, ignored the laws altogether and used local coal for their placer mines and for personal heating in the cold winter months.""

The coal claimants and those who had a personal stake in the Alaskan coal lands did not sit idly by, awaiting an uncertain fate. "In every forum they could find," they worked to reverse coal withdrawal and to obtain patents. Their influence was most felt in the

American \fining Congress (AMC), where they kept up a battle to oppose "any form of leasing." First known as the International Mining Congress in 1897, this national organization was incorporated in 1903 as the American Mining Congress. The organization's express purpose was to bring together "the mining men of the United States into closer relations with one another and of promoting a friendly feeling for one another 206 through social intercourse and the discussion of mutual interests." Although early membership had included prospectors and workers, its goals favored mine operators. One of the political strategies of the AMC was to place before the legislature "the needs of the investor and mine operator." They had influence in Congress. For example, the organization was instrumental in creating the Bureau of Mines, in 1910."

Prior to 1908 most of AMC's membership came from the metal mining industry. In the wake of Theodore Roosevelt's withdrawal of western coal lands, coal operators saw the advantage of belonging to such an organization that would address their concerns as well. One prime focus of the AMC became Alaskan coal land matters. A growing concern of "those interested in the Alaskan mining operations" over the inadequate coal mining laws led the AMC at their 1907 meeting to appoint a committee to investigate Alaskan conditions. Other committees for Alaskan mining law and other Alaskan matters followed.

Although the members claimed to be "free from an element of personal bias," they were hardly disinterested members. An AMC Committee on Alaska Mining Laws in 1910, for example, included Maurice D. Leehey, an attorney for numerous Alaskan coal and other mineral claim holders, and John L. Steele, a copper operator near some coal fields.

"Prominent Alaskans" sent their suggestions for change to the Alaskan committee members. Members also visited "a considerable portion of the different mining districts in

Alaska," as well as "called upon on many different occasions to answer mquiries and fiimish information upon Alaskan subjects to eminent Government officials. Senators and members of Congress and Eastern men, who were studying Alaskan conditions." The

Alaska committees worked with both Alaskan mine operators and government and 207 political ofiBcials to come up with recommendations and compromises. In 1909 the

Committee made its first resolution, urging the granting of coal land patents, under the

1908 Congressional Act. A similar resolution in 1909 urged measures to allow granting patents to those who located claims prior to November 12, 1906, while enacting measures to prevent "monopolistic control.""

Just like those involved in Alaskan gold, the coal claim holders and their supporters had industrial-based goals in mind. Alaskan AMC committee members spelled out what they believed would be the "natural" sequence of development of the region. Member J. L.

Steele was a copper operator at Landlock Bay, and on Alaskan committees for the AMC fi-om 1909-1913. He and his partners had seven claims, and they had spent over $100,000 in less than three years. Steele explained that having access to coal would usher in "an era of great industrial activity along the entire Pacific Coast, for we have all the raw materials and only lack the necessary fiiel with which to operate blast fiimaces, rolling mills and factories to convert these great deposits of mineral wealth into use for not only this but coming generations." Henry R. Harriman, chairman of the AMC Committee on Alaska

Mining Laws, was a Seattle attorney and secretary to the Alaska Petroleum and Coal Co., in the Kayak District. He argued that railroads fueled by local inexpensive coal would develop quartz gold, which in turn would create a local market needing local sources of products firom farms and stock raising.^

The claimants and their supporters argued against monopoly. They understood that a leasing program would favor only large coal enterprises. Speaking for the Alaska

Committee of the American Mining Congress, Maurice Leehey explained that it would "be 208 much easier for the creation of a monopoly in the Alaska coal fields under a leasing system than upon a system of private ownership with the opportunities of the latter for competition and individual initiation." An anti-monopoly position, however, did not necessarily mean an anti-Guggenheim position as well. The claim holders wanted the chance to open their mines, and saw the government as the problem, not the Syndicate.

They certainly shared the same goal as the Cunningham claimants of wishing to obtain their patents. In addition, they had every hope of developing into industrial enterprises themselves, albeit not on the scale of a Morgan-Guggenheim conglomerate. Leehey was careful to point out that the committee was not implicating the Alaska Syndicate. "Your committee has only words of commendation for the enterprise of the Alaska Syndicate," he said, "and believes it should be afforded every opportunity to realize handsomely on the investment of its millions for the development of the Territory of Alaska." They saw the

Syndicate as assisting their efforts to develop by putting capital into the regional economy, and decried the "popularly expressed fear that this syndicate will control Alaska."^^

Appealing to legislators and public officials through the AMC was one way to tr>' and enact change. The persuasive rhetoric of carefully chosen words and images was another potent tool. Coal mining activities may have come to a halt, but coal mining continued on an ideological level. It was during 1910-1911 that the rhetoric was in full swing, when the movement toward leasing was the strongest. Claim holders and their supporters deployed images for specific ends. They had to convince those federal government officials overseeing mineral policy as well as members of Congress that coal mining was best done through private enterprise. They also had to counter those pro-leasing proponents who 209 argued that coal mining was the domain of large companies, and that the individual no longer played a role (even though they were hardly "individuals"). They had to be careful with their arguments for opening coal lands, especially with the portion of public sentiment that associated the coal claimants with the Alaska Syndicate.

Like the legislators of the 1908 Congressional debates, those who supported opening the coal claims recognized and employed familiar phrases and ideals from the nineteenth-

centuiy. They focused on the ideals associated with the individual, and the representation

of the individual in mining, the prospector. They used familiar notions of the innocuous

figure of the nineteenth-century mineral seeker, choosing from the wide array of meanings,

fi'om the yeoman farmer to the trailblazer. Claim holders countered images of a outdated

and fading figure with the image of a masculine robust and necessary individual. They

employed their rhetoric through the pen, in publications, and through the spoken word.

The AMC annual meetings were well-attended by local and state legislators,

representatives of large mining concerns, and a wide variety of public servants, including

directors of federal government agencies (like the USGS) and, at times, the Secretary of

the Interior and the President.

The individual was central and paramount to their rhetorical discussions. Those

against Alaskan conservation policies employed the strong nineteenth-century belief in

individual initiative to support the argument that the less government, the better. The basis

of nineteenth-century political economy had been non-interference. Most Westerners (and

especially those involved in ranching, mining, and lumbering) opposed any limitations on

using the public domain. Many believed that the prevailing system of laissez-faire would 210 foment competition and allow for a vibrant economy."

One of the most vocal defenders of individual initiative was Seattle attorney Maurice

D. Leehey. He represented claimants in more than one-half of the lode and placer applicants for patents filed in Alaska, aiding original locators and their use of power of an attorney. Leehey wrote an Alaskan mining code guide (including coal laws) for

prospectors and miners. He also had "personal interest" in Seward. He remained one of the more active Alaskan members in the AMC, serving on various Alaskan committees.

Leehey argued that great development came from the individual. "We believe that the system of private ownership which encouraged individual initiation," he explained, "and gave the great West such a magnificent growth and development as was never equaled

elsewhere in the history of the world, should not be lightly cast aside for new experiments

in Alaska, in that land of distance and difficulties, and under conditions where large

rewards must be offered both to capital and labor.""

Applying similar logic, Alaska-Yukon Magazine editor and coal claims defender E. S.

Harrison blasted the federal government for its special treatment of Alaska, and the

destruction of individual initiative: "Since Alaska has been found to be so immensely rich

everybody is taking a shine to her, and the conservationists say, Lo and behold, here is a

place for us to conserve...We will stop individual initiative...Ha, hal We will stop the

monkey-doodle business of the corporations. All the people shall have a share of

Alaska-"'®

Another potent nineteenth-century ideal revolved around private ownership and the

rights of the individual citizen of moderate means to own his own property~this ideal 211 served as the basis for arguing against federal government intrusion into Alaskan coal lands. In a document read before the 1911AMC meeting, the Publicity League of Katalla explained that Alaskan development required the "free and interrupted use of the coal."

This group of local middle-class developers equated coal lands with general land laws, and stated that individual ownership of the soil was the basis of permanent settlement and an

American tradition. Calling coal leasing an "experiment," the League referred back to the failure of leasing of lead lands in the 1830s. "American citizens could not be induced to work these lead lands under the leasing system," they explained, "and so the government sold them to citizens and from that time to the present day these mines have been worked with that intense industry which the American applies to the thing he owns, but never will apply to the thing which the other fellow owns." The "ownership of the soil," the League argued, was "the most potent civilizer known to man." The Alaskans predicted that, "until we can induce each man to labor, suffer and worry for a stranger, as he will for his own family, your leasing system will prove a dismal and tragic failure."^^

The failures of nineteenth-century leasing of Missouri lead mines were usefiil in arguing against twentieth-century leasing. Anti-conservationists drew upon the rhetoric of tenants and landlords, echoing the argumentation used by Senator Benton during the nineteenth-century leasing debates. This rhetoric harked back to European images of tenant farmers, a land poh'(^ that did not recognize individual rights. One of the strong defenders of private ownership was Falcon Joslin. He had good reason to be frustrated with the coal land withdrawals. Living in Fairbanks, Joslin had built the Tanana Valley

Railroad to serve local placer mines. He complained that his railroad was using between 212

$20,000 and $30,000 each year in wood. He and others located adjoining claims to accrue an area large enough to mine cheaper local coal, but then these lands had been withdrawn from entry in 1906. Joslin was an active member of the AMC Alaskan mine laws and

Alaskan affairs conunittees. In an essay he wrote for the promotional Alaska-Yukon

Magazine, Joslin placed conservation policies of setting aside forest reserves (with

restricted wood use, shutting off both wood and coal to the public) as tantamount to

government encroachment of individual freedoms."

In a speech before the 19 U AMC, Falcon Joslin warned that the federal government,

in proposing to move from the freehold to the leasehold system, was returning to a

European system of tribute payers, a system abolished when the United States became a

free and independent country. "A thousand years and more ago," Joslin explained, Europe

"was held under leasehold." At that time it was "called it the feudal system, and the people

who occupied the land as tenants were called vassals and were obliged to do humble

service of allegiance in one form or another in order to hold the land." Fortunately, Joslin

continued, "when the American colonies established their independence, the last vestige of

feudal tenures was abolished and all the lands in the nation were held as freeholds and this

country became a free country, not a country of vassals and tenants, but a land of

freeholders and free men." He lamented that "now they propose to return to that old

feudal system and make the people of Alaska tenants and tribute payers-to make them

come as suppliants and vassals to Washington."^'

The prospector was the perfect figure to represent individual initiative and other

individual ideals in these coal leasing arguments, regardless of whether or not the mineral 213 seeker had contributed materially to coal mining. Centering one's arguments on this popular and seemingly innocent figure was one way to divert attention away firom prevailing negative associations of the Cunningham claims. Writers and speakers used the prospector's importance as an individual to convince the federal government to keep coal lands in the hands of "individuals," versus leasing them to organizations.

Those who utilized the prospector imagery argued that real development could not continue without the aaivities of the prospector, and this important individual needed mining laws that would protect his right to obtain claims. The Publicity League of Katalla, for example, used the belief and argument that the prospector was the basis of mining progress. As a "natural" component of the economy of the mming world the mineral seeker would stimulate development; neither withdrawal nor restrictive coal laws, however, would encourage prospectors to find flirther deposits of coal. Before the mineral wealth on Alaska's 600,000 acres could be developed, the League explained, "it must be discovered by some one [sic], and the prospector is the only man who has ever done this anywhere in this country, even under the most favorable conditions." "Though Congress try ever so hard," the League explained, "it cannot reverse history nor change the laws of economic necessity." These supporters of individual initiative argued that prospecting was hampered by withdrawal of coal lands and later, would be impeded by federal government leasing. But, again, these writers and speakers were not as concerned with the fixture discoveries as they were with those coal claims already takerL They already had claims selected, awaiting development, and wanted those same legal rights as their idealistic

"prospector" would have." 214

Coal mine operators and Alaskan residents rarely spoke of the problems and restrictions of coal law as affecting their own economic circumstances, nor explained what those circumstances might be; instead, they explained the restrictions as those of the prospector, projecting their own circumstances onto the mineral seeker. Looking at these writings, it would appear as if the prospector was the sole player in Alaskan coal mining.

Lafe Spray was one such author who spoke of coal mining as if the only participant was the hardy mineral seeker. Spray wrote a number of articles on Alaskan towns and a variety of Alaskan topics, as well as poetry, for the Alaska-Yukon Magazine. He was also the editor of a Fairbanks newspaper. The Alaskan Citizen, (lis created prospector image was modeled from the nineteenth-century prospector as trailblazer. According to Spray,

'"Seward's Folly* was known only as a trackless, barren, desolate region of perpetual ice and snow" until the prospector arrived. This "hardy pioneer who has from the beginning of history blazed the trails of civilization" had prospected, "year after year along down the centuries." He "uncomplaining...toiled because he had an abiding faith in the law and equity of the government." But the prospector had found "plenty of good vigorous

English with which to denounce the government for keeping bad faith with him." The mineral seeker, above all, needed his rights protected, "so that he will continue in his work of uncovering the vast resources of this great country." The prospector, wrote Spray, "will not be convinced that it is right and proper that the fruit of his toil shall be filched from him by the burglarious hand of the public through a bureaucracy in Washington. It does not appeal to him as being reasonable or just that lands that have been made valuable by his labor shall be withheld from his use and his rights therein confiscated. He stands aghast 215 at the lack of justice, and therefore a wail is ascending to heaven. WhQe he wails the pick is idle.""

An even more blatant example of a coal operator hiding behind the prospector image was T. P. McDonald. Instead of focusing on his own situation, McDonald, one of Alaska's principal coal claim holders on Controller Bay, and a member of the AMC Alaskan Affairs

Committee, projected his concerns onto the prospector in an article for the Alaska-Yukon

Magazine. He complained of the "new school of political economists" that advocated leasing. "Under the leasing system," McDonald concluded, "we fail to see what inducement would be held out to the prospector, he could not secure title to the land, nor could he lease, for none but men of great wealth and influence would be able to lease and

operate a coal mine." With a fee simple title "there has always been great inducement for

the prospector to discover a good coal mine, but we fail to see where there would be any

reward for him under the leasing system." He never once mentioned his own involvement

in coal mining, nor how his own economic status might undermine his rhetoric.*^

Employing the prospector to cover one's own intentions included larger players as

well as local Alaskans. Richard Ballinger placed the prospector at the base of the political

economy, and employed this figure to support private rights and land ownership. While

Ballinger was still Secretary of the Interior, he began to advocate leasing, perhaps to cover

up his own increasing political entanglements. In 1910, in a letter to the ofiBcers and

members of the AMC, he outlined the recent recommendations he had made in his annual

report to the President, including preventing monopoly or extortion though a leasing

system. But as soon as he resigned, his rhetoric magically returned back to private 216 property rights and supporting the position of the claimants. At the center of his rhetoric was the prospector. He explained that "it was sound political economy that dictated the long standing policy that 'all the people' of the country permit the sale of the natural resources on purely nominal terms, giving to the industrious and courageous prospector the fruits of his discovery, because in that way and in that way only was the larger measure of return enjoyed by 'all the people.'" He compared Alaska to Colorado, and asked if during Colorado's development "we had a conservation poh'cy that insisted on the continued ownership of all her natural wealth with no reward to the prospector, the discoverer, or the miner, what would her population be today?" Ballinger also made a parallel with the yeoman farmer. He asked if it was "progress and sound reform to say we will no longer tolerate the system which gave a fee simple title to the industrious and courageous prospector and settler in the public lands, a system that has made the great mass of our people home builders and the builders of new commonwealths stored with wealth and civic progress unrivaled in all the range of human endeavor?'"^

Ballinger's linkage of the "prospector and settler" was typical of the ways those who argued against withdrawal and conservation incorporated the pioneer ideal. Since these proponents of coal mining already argued that the prospector was the basis of mineral development, and the pioneer traditionally opened up a new area in the West, it made sense to joine these figures together, just as some had done in the nineteenth century. The image of the pioneer alone carried with it strong and powerful im^es. In the nineteenth- century American West, the pioneer represented the heroic Western entrepreneur. This figure was a representation of laissez faire, connected to the ideal that the individual 217

pursuit of wealth would best order society. The prospector-as-pioneer was the entrepreneurial figure that opened up mineral regions.^

An editorial in the Alaska-Yukon Magazine employed the ideal of the prospector as a

pioneer suffering in nature. Editor E. S. Harrison complained that under leasing

"individual effort as far as the coal lands are concerned would be squelched," because

"only a nch corporation operating raih-oads and other means of transportation could

undertake to comply with the provisions of a government lease." The prospector who

"ventures into the unexplored regions of Alaska and endures the privations and hardships

of pioneering might discover a valuable coal vein, but the government would not

compensate him for his discovery." The prospector deserves such a reward because he

"risks his life in the wilderness of the Northland.""

Larger capital defending the coal claimants took on their own qualities of the

prospector as pioneer. Justifying his family's involvement in Alaska and their displeasure

over coal withdrawal, Simon Guggenheim equated the heroic pioneer prospector with the

Eastern capitalist or financial investor. For Guggenheim, "the most important man to

Alaska's fiiture is thus the prospector and his backer, the man willing to spend money in

'prospecting prospects.'" Both those "who risk all they have, including their lives, and

suffer hardships" and "the ease-loving Easterner," he continued, were "entitled to rewards

commensurate with the risk" of obtaining "riches" fi'om the public domain. Guggenheim

warned that "if Alaska is to be developed at all the interests of these pioneers must be

guarded as jealously as the interests of the man at home." He complained that "we have

come to reverence our pioneering forefathers for the work th^r did in the favored land 218 that is now ours," and argued that "because the same rare type of man has gone beyond the edge of our every-day vision to do the same splendid work in a still more difficult field we call him names, especially if it is his money that he is risking in a gamble that we ourselves would not touch." The development of Alaska, he concluded, rested upon

"equitable encouragement of pioneering enterprise, whether large or small." Guggenheim even personified his Copper River and Northwestern Railroad as a brave trailblazer, a financial project that was "recognized as a daring and risky enterprise of the utmost importance to Alaska."*®®

As much as those against coal land withdrawal and leasing disliked conservation, they recognized that conservation was a force to be reckoned with. The Publicity League of

Katalla spelled out their continumg fioistration about coal withdrawal and their concerns that the President and the Secretary of the Interior had "announced themselves in favor of leasing the coal lands of Alaska." The Katalla citizens explained that they were not against conservation per se. "True conservation" was the "prevention of unnecessary waste," but when it "produces or augments waste or prevents development it is destructive."*^^

Those who argued against withdrawal also recognized that conservation rhetoric was a persuasive language of the time. They intertwined the language of conservation with the ideal of the prospector. At the 1909 AMC meeting, Alaskan coal operator Henry R.

Harriman explained that Alaskan coal mine owners were cooperating with conservation.

"We want to develop our mines economically," he stated, "and to avoid the mistakes and waste of other districts." He wanted the coal lands opened and developed "under such wise laws and regulations as will best conserve them, not only to the 'use and benefit' of 219 the pioneer, without whose daring and ambition they would still be unknown; but for the whole Nation at large in the upbuilding of great industries upon this coast." Harrison applied the rhetoric of conservation to the prospector to argue for coal laws that allow for land ownership. "We stand for such policies as will make the investment of capital more attractive and better safeguarded," he stated, "and will enable the discoverer to become a partner with that capital and realize his maximum 'use and benefit.'" Those "laws and regulations" that "emphasize the theory that the maximum 'use and benefit' of the pioneer shall be his elimination fi-om the field...are not the true fiiend of the Alaska coal miner."

The discoverer of coal mines was "a safe partner and will be reasonable and generous; and his 'use and benefit' shall extend throughout his lifetime and be a proper legacy for his chndren."®*

Prospector rhetoric was especially prevalent surrounding separate visits of two federal government officials (both leasing advocates) to Alaska in 1911, Walter Fisher and

Giffbrd Pinchot. Earlier that year. President Tail had replaced Richard Ballinger with

Fisher. At the time. Fisher was vice president of the National Conservation Association, a conservation lobby, headed by Gifford Pinchot. The new Secretary of Interior did not support the claim holders. He accused them of obtaining their claims through fi^ud, and then referred several patent cases to the Justice Department. He hoped that "persecution of a few claimants would encourage the rest to relinquish their Interests." As a conservationist. Fisher strongly supported leasing, rather than private ownership of coal lands. But unlike Pinchot, he realized that he needed the support of industry, "for no

Congress would force a system as pervasive as leasing upon the mineral industries without 220 some support from the companies affected." Fisher began to work on a leasing proposition that would be acceptable to industry. President Taft backed the leasing plans of Secretary

Fisher.®

Alaskans appealed to Fisher to help their plight, and attempted to convince him that coal withdrawal was the best means to develop Alaska. Being in the vicinity of the Bering

coal fields, Cordova was especially bard hit by coal withdrawal. In addition, one Alaskan

resident observed that the "recent completion of the railway and the departure of the

contractor's forces" had made Cordova feel the "falling off of business." Cordova resident

J.Y. Ostrander used the pioneer prospector in an appeal to open up the nearby coal land.

He portrayed a prospector who, because he was so "intensely practical," made it appear

"unjust and impractical, and in a way, absurd, that the development of the country, the

prosperity and happiness of its inhabitants, his individual welfare, should be rendered

ahnost impossible, by the refusal or neglect of the government to take such action as will,

for example, encourage the opening and beneficial use of the native Alaska coal." The

"poor, but ambitious" prospector, he wrote, had suffered enough. This writer added how

ironic it was that, "never before, in the history of a new country, have the pioneers been

told that they must not use of the resources of the country in the process of its

development."™

Several months before Fisher's visit, on May 4,1911, Cordova residents staged an

"Alaskan Coal Party." The deputy director described the event as "two hundred or more

citizens many armed with shovels marched to dock (and) began shoveling foreign coal"

into the bay. The aa was led by the president of the Cordova Chamber of Commerce and 221 a former mayor of the town; participants included "most of the property owners" in

Cordova. They were backed by the Alaskan Committee of the AMC. The Cordova residents demonstrated against the federal government's practice of requiring duty on coal imported &om Canada, on one hand, while, on the other hand, preventing the residents from using the coal from their own region. In their formal petition to "the President and

Congress," they employed the images of the pioneer prospector, as well as references to the American Revolution. "We believe," the petition stated, "that the authorities at

Washington should hold themselves as amenable to laws of the United States as they expect these pioneers to be who are enduring hardships on the frontiers of Alaska." The petition concluded that "we emphatically commend the spirit of liberty and independence of these sturdy descendants of that other band of patriots who upon another notable occasion dumped a cargo of tea into Boston Harbor."'^

Valdez resident George Baldwin was the most vocal critic of Walter Fisher. A firm defender of individual rights and a prominent resident of Valdez (and an Alaskan resident for eleven years), Baldwin had been the superintendent of the Bonanza copper mine before its sale to the Alaska Syndicate, then had worked on other mining properties near Valdez and in the Copper River country. He had also served as a civil engineer for the Alaska

Central Railway. This railroad started at Seward and headed 70 miles toward the

Matanuska coal fields. Baldwin was also active in the AMC, serving on Alaskan committees as a representative from the Valdez section. He believed that the nation had

"been made great and prosperous by the initiative and enterprise of the individual," and not by "communistic experiments."'^ 222

When the Secretary of the Interior visited Alaska, he was presented with a "memorial by the citizens of Valdez," which Baldwin helped write. The memorial made heavy use of prospector imagery. The residents asked for "the same rights as have been accorded the pioneers of other territories in their primitive struggle for development," those rights "to create property for themselves out of the limitless resources of this vast territory

unhampered by bureaucratic dictation and interference." The backers of the memorial did not see any conflict in using nineteenth-century hard rock mining law debates to argue for the opening of twentieth-century coal lands. The memorial referred back to "the senator

who introduced the first mining law into Congress in 1866." This senator "said that the

miner had given the honest toil of his life to discover wealth, which when found was

protected by no higher law than that enacted by himself under the implied sanction of a

just and generous government." The memorial rationalized that since these mining laws

had "stood the test of nearly forty years" and "ail important points" had "been settled" by

the courts, "to enact a new set of laws at this late date...would impose on that industry a

burden it could not well bear.""

George Baldwin was especially incensed about a conversation that had taken place

between Alaskan residents and Fisher during his visit, over the role of the pioneering

prospector. Baldwin related to an audience at the 1912 AMC the dialogue of the local

residents with Fisher, while riding along the Copper River Railroad:

Some of the citizens made some reference to the hardships of the pioneers, who, fourteen years before, had toiled up that river; how they had started fi'om the present site of Cordova early in February; pulled their sleds by the neck, as we say up there, as they had neither horses nor dogs; and when the river broke and the ice went out, whipsawed lumber, built boats and pulled them up against the current; and by 223

September had reached a point perhaps 100 miles inland; of their hardships in the way of being short of various supplies and some of them necessities; of their fighting the mosquitoes and gnats; and of the almost total failure of all of them.

Baldwin was appalled by Fisher's response. "The Secretary expressed himself very fi-eely,"

Baldwin continued, and said "that the prospector did not deserve any credit and that kind of talk made him rather tired; that the Geological Survey had gone ahead and shown the prospectors where to set their stakes." Baldwin lamented, "what can we hope when the absolute decision largely as to whether we are to progress or retrograde is in the hands of a man so hopelessly ignorant and prejudiced as that?"^^

Another Alaskan visitor was GiflFord Pinchot. Like Fisher, Pinchot was critical of the use of the pioneer prospector image as a means to argue against conservation. After he lost his job as forester, he continued to advocate leasing and "public ownership" of coal.

Although Pinchot already had a counsel (George W. Pepper) during the Congressional hearings in early 1910 over the handling of Alaskan coal claims and the Ballinger-Pinchot disputes, Amos Pinchot helped his brother with legal matters. Amos and Gififord Pinchot wrote to President Taft, concerned that Secretary of Interior Ballinger would reconmiend that the Cunningham claimants be granted patents. They also presented a brief to Taft the following January, asking that the President cancel the Cunningham claims.^^

In this brie^ Gififord and Amos Pinchot attacked the use of pioneer images, but then employed them themselves. The authors questioned the legitimacy of the Cunningham claims and the tactic of portraying Cunningham claimants as pioneers. "Contrary to the popular impression," the brief explained, "the Cunningham claimants are not pioneers at 224 all. They are a group of wealthy, hard-headed men of affairs, representing chiefly the great corporate interests of the Northwestern States, most of whom have never set foot in

Alaska." But these same authors made use of the image of the prospector as pioneer to argue that the original claim holders were pioneers. They reasoned that "in cancelling the claims in the Cunningham group the Government would work an injustice to the pioneers who have braved the hardships and dangers of Alaska." These hardy pioneers who discovered and located the Cunningham claims were bought out by Clarence Cunningham in 1903 for a low sum of about $300 a claim or $1.88 an acre.^®

Many Alaskans supported Ballinger and denounced conservatiomst Pinchot. Anti- conservationist Falcon Joslin, for example, chided how Gifford Pinchot had obtained his personal wealth, "a fortune which he had not earned, but had inherited." Such a statement was quite harsh, since the "self-made man" was still a potent ideal in the early twentieth- century West. Because Pinchot had "no need for more money he sought power" explained

Joslin. Pinchot helped create the "religion of conservation" and, since all reUgions "had to have demons," he "created the Guggenheim dragon, which was about to gobble Alaska, and he was the heroic defender of the rights of the whole people," with help from

Roosevelt. When Pinchot traveled to Alaska in the summer of 1911 "to get information at first hand, and to insist upon my own opinions," he did not have a warm reception everywhere he went. When he visited KataUa, residents utilized references to the trailblazer to protest his visit. They posted a poem entitled "Hail to the Chief." in various locations of the town. The poem began with the lines, "The conquering hero comes too 225 late/To view the corpse in its last estateAVith the sword of power in the hand of greed...They have blocked that trail that the brave had trod/And fenced the land from men and God.""

After Pinchot departed, local resident George Baldwin blasted Pinchot and, with references to the heroic pioneer, characterized him as a weak man. Pinchot traveled on a trail leading to the Mantanuska coal fields, Baldwin explained, "on a trail that has been traveled for years by men, women, children, and cripples-still it was too tough for him.

He turned around and came back and spent a large part of his time in Alaska around hotel lobbies trying to justify his actions before a hostile and outraged people. If the pioneers of

Alaska had been made of no sterner stuff than he the Mantanuska coal fields would never have been discovered." Baldwin would not let go of his animosity for Pinchot and continued to refer back to the conservation leader's visit. A year later he called Pinchot

"the high priest of conservation" and "the prince of shadow dancers." He recalled that, when Pinchot "recently visited Alaska to gloat over his handiwork of empty houses, deserted villages, dying towns, arrested development, bankrupt pioneers, and the blasted hopes of sturdy, self-reliant American citizens, it is a striking comment on the law-abiding character of our people that he came back at all."^^

Coal Leasing

In the end, the claimants did not get what they wanted. Their rhetoric did not work.

Federal support of leasing (and corporate willingness) was too powerful. At the 1911

American Nfining Congress Fisher related that he had gone to Alaska to look at the coal land problems firsthand. He criticized the fee-simple process as an outdated system and 226 favored a leasing system in which one of the "prime requisites" was that "only sufBcient coal lands should be leased to meet the existing market and encourage its development."

This stipulation was exactly what the coal industry wanted to restrict competition. Pinchot remained steadfast in his opposition to monopoly, continuing to associate monopoly with the coal claim holders. By 1912, the federal government had successfully cancelled almost one-half the pending claims. The Cunningham claims were cancelled in 1912.^

Frustrated by the lack of development, Alaskans began to acquiesce to the inevitability of leasing. They still held onto the principle of individualism. Secretary of

Interior Walter Fisher had met with the protestors of the Alaska Coal Party in Cordova, and had convinced them that leasing would reduce the more expensive imported coai. In a

1912 letter to the Alaskan governor, Walter E. Clark, the secretary of the Cordova

Chamber of Commerce lamented that it was "unfortunate" that Alaska happened "to be the dog upon which an experiment is to be tried." He stated that, "as a matter of principle" the Chamber of Commerce had opposed a leasing system for Alaskan coal. "We have believed," he continued, "that the laws that have in the past so well conduced to the settlement, development and prosperity of the western states and territories of the Union will, if administered with the same liberality, result in an equal measure of prosperity and happiness for the people of Alaska." At the same time, he described the "present condition of the territory" as resulting in the people as "somewhat discouraged and desperate," and ready to support any policy that promises a measure of relief however inadequate. WE

WANT OUR COAL MINES OPENED AND RESOURCES OF ALASKA

DEVELOPED." Likewise, Governor Walter Clark stated in his 1912 report to the 227

Secretary of the Interior that Alaskans were "generally...willing to accept any measure which will cause the fuel resources to be opened to development—so much so that the comparative advantages of a fee system, a leasing plan, or government operation have almost ceased to be a matter of discussion."^"

In 1911 the Alaskan Committee of the American Mining Congress accepted the inevitability of leasing, as "it was the only way to get action." Even after changing its position on leasing, however, the organization still urged that the remaining claims receive patent. Members of the Alaskan committee continued to use prospector rhetoric.

Accusing the United States of becoming an "empire" and Alaska "one of its colonies,"

Falcon Joslin pointed out that Alaskans were against "federally-run coal leasing"; "we who are the colonists up there feel the pressure of unjust and unlawful actions at the Central

Government." He pleaded with legislators to "think what condition that country is in" with prohibited coal mining and ceasing of railroad construction, and "all other industries retarded or strangled entirely." After seven years, "any plan whatever that promised relief to us was worth working for."*'

Likewise, there was a growing support for the federal government to build a railroad into the interior. The federal government had an interest in building a railroad to access the

Matanuska coal fields. The United States Navy wanted to use Alaskan coal for its Pacific fleet. Although Taft was conservative, he agreed that a government railroad was probably the answer to helping Alaskan development. In addition, the Alaskan Committee of the

American Nfining Congress worried that capital had all but lost any inducement to "go into

Alaska," and realized that if Alaska were going to have any railroads, the government 228 would have to build them. In this matter, the AMC had no quahns about receiving federal government aid, revealing the contradictory nature of their attitude toward the government. The committee therefore introduced a railroad bill in 1911 and secured hearings with the House and Senate."

In 1913 Woodrow Wilson took ofBce (elected in part due to a split in the Republican

Party between Taft and Roosevelt over the Ballinger-Pinchot Affair). He appointed

Franklin Lane Secretary of the Interior. Lane and Wilson favored a government raihoad to access the coal mines for Navy fuel. Wilsou'an progressivism also favored opening up

Alaskan resources, but the new president warned that the resources "should not be

'destroyed or wasted,' for the 'abiding interests of communities' must be placed above any

'narrow idea of individual rights' that could bring about monopoly." Their idea of individual rights, however, meant canceling claims and advocating coal leasing. Lane continued the process of cancelling claims. Almost three-fourths of the claims had been canceled by the end of 1913."

President Wilson signed the Alaska Coal Leasing Act into law in October, 1914.

Congress also passed an act authorizing the President to construct "approximately one thousand miles of railroad at a cost not to exceed $35,000,000." The Alaska Committee of the AMC and Gifford Pinchot had both negotiated with legislators, but aspects of the coal leasing law revealed that the larger mining interests had wielded the strongest influence.

This law repealed all the previous statutes and authorized leasing in Alaska. Claims pending before the Department of the Interior "would have to be disposed of within one year," and no longer would any coal-bearing lands be sold to a private developer or 229 operator. Lessees could combine multiples of 40-acre tracts up to 2560 acres. 2560 was certainly better than 160 acres of the original law. The Mining and Metallurgical Society urged (and was successful in getting) the indeterminate period of a lease. The lessee could continue as long as he fulfilled "the stipulated conditions." Another favorable aspect for large leasers was the low price of royalties to be paid for the use of the coal land. The amount of royalty, above a minimum of two cents per ton, was fixed by the lessee through competitive bidding.*^

The U.S. government took over the role of coal prospector fi'om the private sector.

Governmental officials determined the "the amount of probable coal of workable thickness in each of these areas, the relationship of the area to possible transportation lines, the quality of the coal, the topography of the country, and the general conditions affecting muiing." Engineers and ofBcials fi'om the Bureau of Mines and the General Land Office made surveys to divide the coal fields of the Bering River and Matanuska areas into

"leasing blocks or um'ts," or "reservations." They designated those blocks reserved for govenmiental use, not to exceed 5120 acres in the Bering River fields and 7680 acres in the Matanuska fields. The rest was open to bidding.^^

Conclusion

Even as the debate over leasing continued on a rhetorical level, new events took place in coal mining. In the end, the Alaskan coal lands story turned into a tale of ironies and bad timing. The first irony was that, by the second decade of the twentieth century, further examination of the Alaskan coal regions revealed that Alaskan coal was of inferior quality and that the region contained smaller amounts of coal than previously thought. After 230 visiting Alaskan coal fields, Pennsylvania mining engineer William GrifBth stated in 1910 that "the bulk of Alaskan fuel" was of "an ordinary quality." In 19 U he estimated that, because the Alaskan coal beds had undergone so much geologic disturbance resulting in complex and variable deposits, "firom fifty to seventy-five per cent or more of the superficial area of the region probably contains no minable coal whatever." Alfired Brooks also mentioned that "the chemical quality of the coal of the Bering River and Matanuska fields leaves little to be desired." Both fields had "much deformed" beds, "thus greatly enhancing the cost of mining and in the case of some of the beds prohibiting altogether the economic recovery of the coal." Although the coal was greatly crushed, the ore could still be used for general coking purposes.^*^

A few years later Arthur Dunn wrote in the popular magazine Sunset that "a high authority of the Government" had told him in confidence that "'a lot of people were fooled about the fabulous value of those Alaska coal fields. Even the Guggenheims were fooled!"'

At the time of this remark, however, the Guggenheims did not need coal on the level as they previously had. The Syndicate never built a smelter in Alaska, but kept a smelter they had in Tacoma, Washington. Nor did they need coal to run their railroad and ships. An even greater irony in Alaskan coal mining was that, even as coal claimants clung onto hopes of obtaining their patents, the nation was turning toward oil."

By 1911, it was already becoming evident that Alaskan coal would not become a major industry even if all restrictions were lifted. H. Foster Bain &q>iained that U.S. railroad lines and "the leading coast industries" had converted over to California oil.

Similarly, Alfired Brooks reported that in Alaskan railroads, steamers, and mine 231 companies oil was "rapidly being substituted for coal." Maurice Leehey stated in the same year that "even in Alaska the Treadwell Mines and the Copper River Railroad are being operated by California fuel oil, and it is evident that Alaska steaming coal has little demand upon the Pacific coast...in the face of such competition." Secretary of Interior Walter

Fisher warned that California oil "possesses advantages in economy and convenience of handling." Only in copper smelting and making steel did coal still have a use. In 1912

Alaska Governor Walter Clark reported that fuel oil was being utilized at Cordova "only a few miles from the dormant Bering River coal beds, at a cost equivalent to about eight dollars per ton for bituminous coal.""

With the larger market now using oil, few coal operators wanted to risk the substantial investment to start up operations with dwindling markets. As Alaskan historian

Ernest Gruening explained, the 1914 coal-leasing law did not "fiilfill the hopes of speedy development." U.S. coal demand did rise during World War I, but lack of labor in Alaska and high overall prices during the war years impeded any capital from looking Northward.

Congressional appropriations during the war decreased and railroad construction slowed.

Furthermore, due to the large task of surveying and dividing up areas to be leased, the

Alaskan coal lands were not even opened up for availability until 1916. The first coal mine that opened up along the Alaska railroad in 1916 only "produced small quantities of dirty, bony coal." Only one lease was made in 1917 and two in 1918, covering a total of 5,940 acres. By 1921, none of these properties had reached a "productive stage." There were also fourteen permits for lignitic coal for local purposes, covering around 140 acres.''

The final irony was that, between 1915-1939, the best customer of Alaskan coal was. 232 in fact, the federal government; the coal that ran the Alaska Railroad was used to reach the coal fields that produced the coal to run the railroad. By the middle of the second decade, the recently-completed Panama Canal served as the means of transporting the coal still

used along the west coast, the majority of it for the U. S. Navy. Within the next decade

the Navy would convert entirely over to oil. There remained a smaller local Alaskan

market, however, because many of the smaller mines and local residents would still use

coal. In particular, the more common lignitic coals would be mined for local usage. The

raikoad was also invaluable for transportation of goods (especially larger mining

equipment) and people, especially after it was completed in 1923.^

Once again, those other than prospectors had perpetuated images of the mineral seeker

in early twentieth-century Alaska. The individual as a subject for persuasive rhetoric was

still strong. As mentioned in chapter three, this ideal persuaded mineral seekers to come to

Alaska and search for metallic minerals. Those who argued for the opening of the coal

lands were working off associations of mining with the nineteenth-century West, and the

Western fi-eedom and individual "natural" right to find and obtain a claim. The prospector

as individual was the symbol of private property rights and the undisturbed political

economy and market system. Centering one's arguments on a popular and seemingly

innocent figure of the individual was a way to counter public sentiment of the fear of the

excessive individualism of large industry.

The image of the prospector associated with coal, however, was never effectively

fiised onto a rhetorical landscape. The prospector had been the central figure behind the

general Mining Law of 1872, but using the argument was not as successfiil in the face of 233 conservation. Muckrakers saw through the rhetoric of Congressional members in the 1908 coal law debates. GiSbrd Pinchot and Walter Fisher were not impressed with pleas for the pioneer prospector. Occasional mineral seekers did find coal, so the argument that

prospectors searched for coal and therefore needed the legal protection to obtain a claim had a basis in fact. It was much less clear than placer gold, however, what the benefit was

to the prospector. As those proponents of leasing coal lands to large mine enterprises argued, the mineral seeker was not an important part of modem coal mining. One only

needed to ask whom the laws would ultimately benefit. Coal land ownership ultimately

profited mining companies and syndicates, not prospectors. 234

1. "Alaska," The Outlook 9\ (February 20,1909), 384.

2. James W. Witten, Report on the Agricultural Prospects, Natives, Salmon Fisheries, Coal Prospects and Development, and Timber and Lumber Interests (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1904), 81-82; Alfred H. Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," in Alfred H. Brooks et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1909," United States Geological Survey Bulletin 442 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1910), 62. Nineteenth-century Russian whalers taught native peoples living on the North Slope how to use coal. Claus-M. Naske and Herman £. Slotnick, Alaska: A History of the 49^ State, 2d ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 285.

3. Hubert I. Ellis, "Prospecting Methods at Fairbanks," Engineering and Mining Journal 99 (May 8, 1915), 806; Ernest Gruening, The State of Alaska (New York: Random House, 1954), 116.

4. Alfred H. Brooks, "Coal-Mining in Alaska," Engineering mdMining Journal 80 (September 2, 1905), 391; Alfred H Brooks, "The Distribution of Mineral Resources in Alaska," in Alfred H. Brooks et al, "Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1907," USGS Bulletin 345 (Washington, D.C.: (jovemment Printing Office, 1908), 29. Alfred H. Brooks, "History of Mining in Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 8 (May 1909), 151. "Juneau, Alaska," Mining and Scientific Press 97 (August 1,1908), 146. A^ed H. Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 56, 58. Coal is made from decomposed vegetation, and the age, pressure and heat of the decomposition caused the variety of coal types. Coals are classified by their ability to bum. The lowest grade of coal, lignite, contains 30 to 40 per cent water and therefore has a low heating value. Subbituminous coal contains less moisture, followed by bituminous, or common coal, which makes excellent coke (a concentrated coal used for fuel and making steel). At a slightly higher rank is semibituminous coal, which bums almost smokeless, and has the highest heat efficiency of all the coals. Semianthracite is harder, but not as hard as anthracite. The highest grade and hardest coal is anthracite. It is more difficult to ignite, but gives out the greatest heat, burning "without flame or smoke." It is preferred where a continuous and steady heat is needed. United States Department of the Interior, A Dictionary of Mining, Mineral, and Related rerwj (Washington, D.C.: United States Department of the Interior, 1968), 222; R.A.S. Redmayne, Modem Practice in Mining, vol. 1, Coal: Its Occurrence, Value, ami Methods of Boring (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1908), 29. Redmayne included the United States in his discussions.

5. Robert W. Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation," chap, in Paul W. Gates, History of Public Land Law Development (Washington, D.C.: Public Land Law Review Commission, 1968), 124-125. See also, "An Act Providing for the Sale of Coal Lands, March 3, 1873," reprinted in William T. Doherty, Conservation in the United States, A Documentary History (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1971), 642-643. An individual or a bonafide association made an entry for the desired land at a nearby 235

General Land OfiBce and, after payment, could receive a title, or patent, to the land. Henry N. Copp, American Mining Code (Washington, D.C.: Henry N. Copp, 1893), 35. In 1900, Congress extended the general provisions of the 1S73 Act to Alaska, to help supply a fuel source for river steamers. Under the original law, coal land entries could only be made for surveyed lands, or those within established base and meridian lines. In 1900, Alaska had neither, so no entries could be made. A1904 statute better fit US. coal laws to Alaskan conditions. One could now obtain claims on unsurveyed lands, but the entryman had to pay for a survey to be made. A person could obtain 160 acres at $10 per acre. It was against the law for an individual to open more than one claim. Each person had to take the land for his own use and could not consolidate claims before entry, to "prevent appropriation by corporate groups." Gruening, The State of Alaska,ll6', Witten, Report, 85; Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 64; Falcon Joslin, "The Conservation Policy in Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 (May 1910), 342; Winifi-ed McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," The Inter-University Case Program Case Series Number 4 (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1952), 80-81. Claim locations were to be "set off in rectangular tracts containing 40,80, or 160 acres 'with north and south boundary lines run according to the true meridian' and described with reference to natural or permanent artificial monuments." Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation," 729.

6. Redmayne, Modem Practice in Mining, 79,109-111; Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 56, 58,77-78, 79. The shape and nature of the coai deposit was also important. Crushed, or broken, coal beds were less desirable than uncrushed beds (coal burned longer if the pieces were of a uniform and larger size). In addition, any geological movement of the coal beds after they were deposited made extraction more challenging and thus increased the cost of mining. In this regard, Alaskan coal was difficult to prospect. A Pennsylvania mining engineer who had inspected the Alaskan coal fields reported in 1911 the difficulties of prospecting and developing the northern coal. Unlike the more uniform horizontal coal beds of the East, volcanic activity had disturbed the Alaskan coal beds, resulting in irregular and less predictable deposits. Some coal beds were almost vertical, or contained "steep dips"; others were separated by intrusions of lava, or crushed by such geologic action. Figuring out all these parameters would require extensive drilling. Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 78; William Griffith, "The High Grade of Coals of Alaska," Report ofProceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, Chicago, Illinois, October 24-28,1911 (Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1911), 330- 331. The Engineering and Mining Journal described Griffith as an "experienced mining engineer" fi'om the coal-mining region of Scranton, Pennsylvam'a. "Value of Alaska Coal is Overrated," Engineering and Mining Journal 89 (April 9,1910), 786.

7- George C. Martin, "Bering River Coal Field," in Alfi-ed H. Brooks et al, "Report on Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1904," USGS Bulletin 259 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908), 146; Redmayne, Modem Practice in Mining, 32. See also 32-36 for details of such analysis. 236

8. F. E and C. W. Wright, "Economic Developments in Southeastern Alaska," in Alfred H. Brooks et al., "Report on Progress of Investigations of Mineral Resources of Alaska in 1904," USGSBulletin 259, 56; A. Dudley Gardner and Verla R. Flores, Forgotten Frontier: A History of Wyoming Coal Mining (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1989), 35.

9. Gardner and Flores, Forgotten Frontier, 39, 126; Witten, Report, 85; Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 78.

10. Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 65; H. R. Harriman, "Alaska's Fuel Resources," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Twelfth Annual Session, Goldfield, Nevada, September 27-October 2,1909 (Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1909), 278.

U. Ann Chandonnet, "Evan Jones and Alaska Coal Mining," Alaska Journal 9 (Spring 1979), 92; "The Prospector's View-Point," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 11 (April 1911), 24- 25. Another example of prospectors in search of gold and stumbling onto coal is Nelson Jepson, who located several coal claims in addition to quartz property in the interior Susitna area. Fairbanks Sunday Times, August 2, 1908.

12. Brooks, "History of Mining in Alaska,"151; Witten, Report, 82-83; Chandonnet, "Evan Jones and Alaska Coal Mining," 92; John E. Lathrop and George Kibbe Turner, "Billions of Treasure: Shall the Mineral Wealth of Alaska Enrich the Guggenheim Trust or the United States Treasury?," McClure's 34 (January 1910), 339. Another source stated that local native peoples led the first Euro-American prospecting trip for Bering River coal in 1897. In 1898 Native Americans also showed U.S. Army officials coal sources along the Chinaldna River, in the general region of the Matanuska Coal Fields. Publicity League of Katalla, History of the Location of the Bering River Coal Fields (Katalla, Alaska: Publicity League of Katalla, 1912), n. p.; H.G. Leamard, "A Trip From Portage Bay to Tumagain Arm and up the Sushitna," in U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee of Military Aflfairs, Compilation of Narratives of Explorations in Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office), 668.

13. Harriman, "Alaska's Fuel Resources," 278; Joslin, "The Conservation Policy in Alaska," 342.

14. McCuiloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 81; "Alaska," The Engineering and Mining Journal 95 (March 15, 1913), 589. Stewart claimed that he withdrew from the scheme in 1907, but was freed because a three-year statute of limitations had passed. Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 65. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was not uncommon for coal and railroad companies outside of Alaska to use dummy entrymen to increase their holdings beyond the legal limitations of the 1873 Act. In the early twentieth century, for instance, the federal government charged the Union Pacific R^oad and Wyoming coal companies with evading the 1873 Act. Railroads needed coal to operate their steam-driven engines. Dummy entrymen sometimes charged a 237

fee, or they were employees or colleagues of a coal operator or investor. Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation, "726; James Penick, Jr., Progressive Politics and Conservation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 81.

15. Penick, Progressive Politics and Conservation, 81; Lathrop and Turner, "Billions of Treasure," 340; photo and short biography of T. P. McDonald, Alaska-Yukon Magazine 13 (Feb 1912), 19.

16. E. S. Harrison, "What is the Alaska Syndicate Doing?; Facts About the Morgan- Guggenheim Interests in Alaska Taken From the Testimony of Stephen Birch, Managing Director," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 (May 1910), 379; Witten, Report, 83; McCulloch, "The Glavis-Baliinger Dispute," 81.

17. McCulloch, "The Glavis-Baliinger Dispute," 81. By 1910 the Alaska Syndicate holdings amounted to the Northwestern Commercial Company (in the mercantile business in Nome and Teller), the Alaska Steamship Company (with a line of steamers between Seattle and Alaskan ports), the Northwest Fisheries Company (with eight salmon canneries), the Kennecott Mines Company, and the Copper River and Northwestern lUilroad Company. The Alaskan Steamship Co. owned twelve vessels, compared with five competing compam'es operating around twenty-eight vessels. Harrison, "What is the Alaska Syndicate Doing?," 375-76. See also Chapter 16 in Harvey O'Connor, The Guggenheims: The Making of an American Dynasty (New York: Covici Friede, 1937); Robert A. Steams, "Alaska's Kennecott Copper and the Kennecott Copper Corporation," Alaska Journal 5 (Summer 1975), 130,135-136; and Robert Alden Steams, "Tlie Morgan-Guggenheim Syndicate and the Development of Alaska, 1906-1915" (PhJ>. diss.. University of California, Santa Barbara, 1967).

18. Evangeline Atwood, Frontier Politics: Alaska's James Wickersham (Portland, Oregon: Binford and Mort, 1979), 214. For the Guggenheim involvement in Yukon gold mining, see the advertisement, "Yukon Gold Company," Seattle Post-Intelligencer, March 27,1908. See also Lewis Green, The Gold Hustlers (Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Northwest Publishing Co., 1977); O'Connor, 77w Guggenheims; Ken S. Coates and William R. Morrison, Ltmd of the Midnight Sun: A History of the Yukon (Edmonton, Alberta: Hurtig Publishers, 1988). In 1910 Stephen Birch stated in Congressional testimony that Clarence Cunningham and his assodates "offered a one-half interest" in the thirty-three 160-acre claims in the Bering River coal field to Daniel Guggenheim "if he would put up enough money to develop the property and provide a means of transportation to markets." Harrison, "What is the Alaska Syndicate Doing?," 376-377. In 1911, Simon Guggenheim stated that their "only interest in the Alaskan fields" was to be a "common carrier." "S. R. Guggenheim Replies to Attacks," Seattle Sunday Times, July 16, 1911.

19. Yehoshua Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), 337; Gabriel Kolko, The Triumph of 238

Conservatism (New York: Free Press, 1963), 18, 31-33,61.

20. David M. Wrobel, The End of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety from the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 80; Theodore Roosevelt, quoted in Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, 341.

21. Charles Edward Merriam, American Political Ideas: Studies in the Development of American Political Thought, 1865-1917 (New York: The Macmillan Co., 1920), 332; Koiko, The Triumph of Conservatism, 69-70,128-29; John Whiteclay Chambers II, The Tyranny of Change: America in the Progressive Era, 1890-1920, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1992), 177.

22. Stephen Fox, The Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1981), 108,121,129-30; WiUiam R. Hunt, ^ Bicentennial History (New York: W.W. Norton, 1976), 98; Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 65. Pinchot was not the only one to support withdrawal. In 1906 Senator Robert M. LaFolette proposed withdrawal of coal, lignite, and oil deposits to explore more efScient mioing methods. Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation," 726. It is important to note here that J.P. Morgan and the Guggenheims were not the only larger corporate bodies interested in Alaska. Other interests included Standard Oil Company, the United States Mining, Smelting, and Refining Co. (based in Boston), a large English Pierson syndicate, and F. Augustus Heinze (with important New York connections; he had already made a fortune in the Porcupine, Ontario area). William Thornton Prosser, "Big Capital and Its Promise for Alaskan Development," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (August 1911), 59-61.

23. Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation," 726; McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 81. Withdrawal did not happen aU at once. The Secretary of the Interior withdrew the lands between July 26 and November 12,1906. The Alaskan withdrawal came on this final date. Ibid. Another source stated that the total western amount of withdrawn land was 68,000,000 acres. Roy M. Robbins, Our Landed Heritage: The Public Domain, 1776-1936 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1942), 367. For the Alaskan forest reserves, see GifTord Pinchot, Breaking New Ground (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1987,426. For a report by the forest supervisor on creating the Chugach reserve, see W.A. Langille, "Boom Times at Valdez," (ed. by Lawrence Rakestraw) Alaska Journal 7 (Spring 1977), 95-102. See also Hunt, Alaska, 98.

24. Carl J. Mayer and George A. Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion: A History of Public Mmeral Policy in America (SaaYTaaasco: Sierra Club Books, 1985), 133,139.

25. Lathrop and Turner, "Billions of Treasure," 349,354. One example of a claim-holder who voted for the bill was Congressman McLachlan of California. (351) McClure's was a 239 publication appealing to an educated audience with a broad range of interests, and included both fiction and poetry and nonfictional work. Early contributors in the 1890s comprised distinguished authors like Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling, and early interviews included eminent Americans like Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. The magazine also published information about scientific discoveries, politics, and current events. Other muckraking essays in 1909 and 1910 focused on the white slave trade, public welfare, organized crime, and the American criminal system. Advertisement, "McClure's Magazine is Published Monthly with Dlustrations," A/cC/wre'j A/agar/we 1 (June 1893), 94-96; "Contents of McClure's Magazine, Volume 34," bound with issues oiMcClure's Magazine 1 (November 1909- April 1910).

26. Congressional Record, 63"* Cong., 2'^sess. (31 August 1914), p. 14489; U.S. Congress, House of Representatives, Committee on the Public Lands, "To Encourage the Development of Coal Deposits," Report No. 1578,60"" Cong., I" sess. (28 April 1908), p. 2; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on the Public Lands, "To Encourage the Development of Coal Deposits," Report No. 1728,60"' Cong., 1st sess. (12 May 1908), p. 2.

27. U.S. Congress, Report No. 1578, p. 2; U.S. Congress, Report No. 1728, p. 2.

28. Congressional Record, 60"* Cong., T sess. (25 May 1908), p. 6923.

29. Lathrop and Turner, "Billions of Treasure," 351; Congressional Record, 60* Cong., 1" sess. (25 May 1908), p. 6924.

30. Congressional Record, 60"" Cong., l" sess. (25 May 1908), p. 6925.

31. Lathrop and Turner, "Billions of Treasure," 351; Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation," 729-730. Aspects of the law meant to limit consolidation and prevent monopoly left room for interpretation. Agreements to consolidate before each person made the initial claim entry were not valid, since this showed an intent to consolidate; parties could consolidate, however, if the agreement was made after claims had been separately obtained. As Alfired Brooks related, "a strict interpretation of the statute raised the question whether even a tacit understanding between claim owners to combine after patents had been obtained was not illegal." Another clause put in to prevent monopoly "invalidated the title if any individual or corporation at any time in the future owned any interest whatsoever, directly or indirectly," in more than one 2560-acre tract. The Mining and Scientific Press reported that Alaskans believed this clause was put in place to "prevent the Morgan-Guggenheim interests fi-om gobbling up too much of the coal resources of Alaska." The Journal warned that "the immediate effect" might be "to discourage the investment of capital in any comprehensive scheme, such as seems to be necessary to make coal mining a financial success." Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 65; "Juneau, Alasksi," Mining and Scientific Press 97 (August 1, 1908), 145; 240

McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 83.

32. Brooks, "Alaska Coal and Its Utilization," 65; Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation,"730.

33. McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 80, 81, %2, Alaska's Magazine 2 (September 1906), 4; Hunt, Alaska, 98; Penick, 174. Although withdrawal remained in effect, claimants hoped that if they went through the process of obtaining claims this would encourage the reversal of the coal withdrawal.

34. McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 83. Cunningham's journal contained a "memorandum of agreement to consolidate" (dated 1903), proof that the claimants had planned to deed the claims to a company. Cunningham cooperated with Glavis because he mistakenly thought that Glavis was on his side. Meanwhile, as attorney, Ballinger prepared an afiBdavit to "negate the evidence" that Glavis had received from Cunningham. Ibid.

35. McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 83; JohnL. Mathews, "Mr. Ballinger and the National Grab-Bag," Hampton's Magazine (December 1909), reprinted in The Environmental Debate: A Documentary History, ed. Peninah Neimark and Peter Rhoades Mott (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999), 134; Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 134. McCulloch wrote that it was not apparent if Taft knew of Ballinger's former actions or involvement in the Cunningham claims. McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 83.

36. Address by Giflford Pinchot, Addresses md Proceedings of the First National Conservation Congress at Seattle, Washington, August 26-28,1909 (n.p.: The Executive Committee of the National Conservation Congress, n.d.), 72, 73,74.

37. McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 83-84.

38. Penick, Progressive Politics and Conservation, 178; McCulloch, "The Glavis- Ballinger Dispute," 85-86, 87. The Joint Committee of Congress investigating the actions of the Interior Department and the Forest Service resulted in split resolutions down party lines. A minority report from the Committee's four Democratic members condemned Ballinger and suggested that he resign. One Republican agreed with the minority report, but the seven Republican members behind the majority report supported Ballinger and recommended coal leasing. The M Committee adopted the majority report. McCulloch, "The Glavis-Ballinger Dispute," 87; Penick, Progressive Politics cmd Conservation, 172- 73.

39. William G. Robbins, Lumberjacks and Legislators: Political Economy of the U.S. Lumber Industry, 1890-1941 (College Station: Texas A and M University Press, 1982), 8; Mayer and Ril^r, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 134. 241

40. Theodore Roosevelt, State of the Union Address (December 3,1907), in Doherty, Conservation in the United States, 529.

41. Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 135; Robbins, Lumberjacks and Legislators, 11. Historian Gabriel Kolko has defined "progressive" as "a movement for the political rationalization of business and industrial conditions, a movement that operated on the assumption that the general welfare of the community could be best served by satisfying the concrete needs of business." As William Robbins explains, the conservation movement was thus "not removed from the realities of the political economy." Kolko, The Triumph of Conservation, 2-3-,BiobhiDS, Lumberjacks and Legislators, 11.

42. Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 136. William Robbins has shown how leaders in the lumber industry used conservation propaganda as a means to achieve stability and to control overproduction. Robbins, Lumberjacks and Legislators, 10.

43. George Otis Smith, "What the West Needs in Coal Land Legislation," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, Chicago, Illinois, October 24-28, 1911 (Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1911), 285-288, 290; Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 131. See also, George Otis Snuth, "What the West Needs in Coal Land Ltffslation," Mining and Scientific Press 104 (November 11, 1911), 612-613.

44. H. Foster Bain to the Editor, Mining and Scientific Press 97 (September 5, 1908), 320. In 1908 Dr. Bain was the state geologist for Illinois.

45. Ibid.

46. H. Foster Bain, "The Cunningham Claims Decision," Mining and Scientific Press 103 (August 5,1911), 156.

47. H. Foster Bain, "Alaska Coal-Land Problems," Paper given at the October, 1911 meeting of the American Institute of Mining Engineers and proof copy for publication in Transactions of the American Institute ofMining Engineers, 811, 820, 822, 824. It was printed in the 1912 Transactions. H. Foster Bain, "Alaska Coal-Land Problems," Transactions of the American Institute ofMining Engineers 43 (New York: American Institute of Mining Engineers, 1913): 595-612. See also his very similar essay in H. Foster Bain, "Alaska Coal Mines and a Coal Monopoly," Mining and Scientific Press 103 (September 30, 1911), 406-408. In 1911, he was the editor otiht Mining and Scientific Press. He later became the director of the Bureau of NGnes (in 1921). E(htorial, "Alaska and Its Problems," Mining and Scientific Press 104 (November 11,1911), 611.

48. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 129-132, 188. One claim was located on the Kenai Peninsula and the other on Admiralty Island; together the total amounted to less than 320 acres and containing low-grade coal. James Wickersham, testimony before the House of 242

Representatives, Congressional Record, 63"* Cong., 2"* sess. (31 August 1914), p. 14S00. By 1911, only one commerdai coal mine was in operation, the Chignik Coal Mining Company, near Chignik Bay. They sold their coal to "local steamers and canneries." Alfred H. Brooks, "The Mining Industry in 1911," in Alfred H. Brooks et al, "Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1911," USGS Bulletin 520 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing OflBce, 1912), 42.

49. George Hick, Pioneer Prospector: The Account of a Pioneer Prospector's Search for Riches During and After the Klondike Gold Rush, ed. Charles E. Bunnell (College, Alaska: University of Alaska, 1954), 26; Duncan Stewart, "Transportation in Alaska," Report of Proceeding of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, Chicago, Illinois, October 24-28, I9II (Denver, Colorado; AMC, 1911), 324. In 1903, before withdrawal, 110,176 tons of coal were imported to Alaska; 56,104 tons came from the lower states; 54,072 tons were from British Columbia. A large shipment from Australia to Nome helped defray the high costs of imported coal from Canada (which ranged from $8 to $30 per ton). In addition, transportation and cannery companies imported coal. Only around 3,000 to 5,000 tons came from Alaskan sources. Alaskans believed that local coal operations were working to reverse this trend, but then withdrawal halted all progress. Conditions did not improve over time. In 1907, coal cost a high $17 to $20 per ton in Nome, and $45 to $50 in the interior of Alaska. Witten, Report, 81; John Scudder McLain, Alaska and the Klondike (New York: McClure, Phillips and Co., 1907), 173, The communities of Candle Creek and the Squirrel River gold fields on the Kobuk River were two locations where the local prospectors and miners illegally used the local coal in steam boilers to thaw the placer ground. J. J. Underwood, "The Crime of Conservation," printed article written for the Seattle Times (1911), in Roll 46, Alaska Mining Records, 1867-1900, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska.

50. Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 138-139; Carl Scholz, "The American Mining Congress and Its Work," in Proceedings of the Second Pan American Scientific Congress, vol. 8 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 586, 587. Discussion on a resolution regarding the Bureau of Mines, Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, 97.

51. Scholz, "The American Mining Congress and Its Work," 586; James F. Callbreath, "Resolution No. 14," Reportof Proceedings of the AMC, Tenth Annual Session, Joplin, Missouri, November 11-16, 1907 (Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1908), 104-105; Henry R. Harriman, et al, "Report of the Committee on Alaskan Mining Laws," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Thirteenth Ammal Session, Los Angeles, California, September 26-October 1,1910 (Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1910), 78-79; "Next Session American \fining Congress," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 ^lay 1910), 420; Resolution "Concerning Amendments to Alaska Mining Laws," Report of Proceeding of the AMC, Eleventh Annual Session, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, December 2-5,1908 ^Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1909), 59; Resolutions, "Alaska Coal Patents," and "Building Roads in Alaska," Report ofProceeding of the AMC, Twelfth Annual Session, Goldfield, Nevada, 243

September 27-October 2, 1909 (Denver, Colorado; AMC, 1909), 64-65.

52. J. L. Steele, "American Mining Congress," Alaska-Yukon Magazine DC (December 1909), 76; "Conservationists Return," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (November 1911), 299; J. L. Steele, Discussion of Alaskan resolutions. Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fifteenth Anrtual Session, Spokane, Washington, November 25-29, 1912 (Denver, Colorado; AMC, 1913), 70; Advertisement, "Alaska Petroleum and Coal Co.," Alaska's Magazine I (June, 1905), n. p.; Henry R. Harriman, et al, "Report of the Committee on Alaskan Mining Lsws," Report ofProceedings of the AMC, Thirteenth Annual Session, 78, 84.

53. Maurice D. Leehey, "Coal and Transportation in Alaska," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, 345. Not all Alaskans were on the side of the Guggenheims. Part of the strength and popularity among labor unions in Alaska, for example, hinged on their anti-Guggenheim position (as described in chapter three). The most vocal Alaskan to speak out against the Alaskan Syndicate was James Wickersham. For many years, Wickersham was a voteless delegate to the House of Representatives. He accused the Alaskan Syndicate of taking over Alaska. Alaska historian Claus-M. Naske has suggested that part of Wickersham's anti-Guggenheim stance had more to do with the popularity of such a platform, to gain votes from those districts with large populations of miners. Claus-M. Naske, An Interpretative History of Alaskan Statehood (Anchorage, Alaska; Alaska Northwest Pubh'shing Co., 1973), 27. Those who attacked the Guggenheims, however, still had an overall stance similar to other anti-conservatiom'sts. Like others, the anti-Guggenheims argued against leasing because they feared that monopoly would predominate. Private ownership was the best system, encouraging competition and an equal chance for everyone. Wickersham, for example, argued for private ownership of coal lands. He beUeved that, under leasing, "the individual Alaskan coal miner would become a vassal in a huge feudal kingdom" held by "the big interests." Atwood, Frontier Politics, 238. See Atwood for details of Wickersham's life.

54. Arieli, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology, 285-286.

55. Leehey, "Coal and Transportation in Alaska," 349; Photo and short biography, Alaska-Yukon Magazine 11 (July 1911), 19; Maurice D. Leehey, Discussion of Alaskan resolutions. Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fifteenth Annual Session, 71; "Maurice and John Omitted the Short Ugly Word; BUT-," The Seattle Star (May 4, 1915). His mining code was M.D. Leehey, Leehey's Mining Code, For the Use of Miners and Prospectors in Washington and Alaska (Seattle; Lowman and Hanford Stationary and Printing Co., 1900).

56. "Who Owns the Public Domain?," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 (May 1910), 429.

57. Publicity League of Katalla, History of the Location of the Bering River Coal Fields ^talla, Alaska: Publicity League of ^alla, 1912), n.p., S-7. This work was drafted with 244 the help of Maurice D. Leehey. It was read before the American Mining Congress at their Chicago meeting, on October 27, 1911.

58. Joslin, "The Conservation Policy in Alaska," 344,346; Falcon Joslin, "The Alaskan Coal Situation," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, 352- 354; List of AMC oflBcers, AMC, Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Seventeenth Antmal Session, Phoenix, Arizona, December 7-11, 1914 (Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1915), 7, 8; Possibilities of the Tanana," Aiasica-Yukon Magazine 4 (December 1907), 289-293. Falcon Joslin had been a lawyer and promoter in Dawson City, Yukon, and built a narrow- gauge raikoad to a coal mine south of Dawson before moving to Fairbanks. Terrence Cole, Crooked Past, The History of a Frontier Mining Camp: Fairbanks, Alaska (Fairbanks; University of Alaska Press, 1991), 83.

59. Joslin, "The Alaskan Coal Situation," 358-359.

60. Publicity League of Katalla, History, n.p. 4.

61. Lafe Spray, "Some of the Urgent Needs of Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 (May 1910), 405-406. For information about Spray and his writings, see James Wickersham, A Bibliography of Alaskan Literature, 1724-1924 (Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, 1927), 250.

62. Alaska-Yukon Magazine 13 (Feb 1912), 19; List of AMC oflBcers, AMC, Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Seventeenth Annual Session, 8. T. P. McDonald, "The Danger of Monopoly in the Leasing System," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 13 (February 1912), 40, 43.

63. R.A. Ballinger, "A Portrayal of Bureaucratic Government in Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (November 1911), 253-254; 257-259; 261-262.

64. David Goodman, Gold Seeking: Victoria and California in the 1850s (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1994), 3,4,25,28.

65. E. S. Harrison, "Conservation Gone Crazy," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 (February 1910), 172-173.

66. Simon Guggenheim, "How to Develop Alaska," The Independent 69 (August 11, 1910), 297-298.

67. Publicity League of Katalla, History, n-p. 5.

68. H. R. Harriman, "Alaska's Fuel Resources," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Twelfth Annual Session, 273, 277,282. Italics in the original quotation. 245

69. Walter Fisher, quoted in Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 134. See also 137-138; Atwood, Frontier Politics, 213.

70. W. W. Shorthill to Walter E. Clark, May 10,1911, RoU 5, FQe 31,1911, M939, General Correspondence of Alaska Territorial Governor, 1909-1958, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska; J. Y. Ostrander, "What Conservation Does to Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 11 (January 1911), 45,46 (original quotation italicized). Cordova was the terminus for the Guggenheim railroad.

71. Telegraph, Cordova Deputy Director Whittier to Juneau Customs Collector Willis, May 5,1911, Roll 5, File 31,1911, M939, General Correspondence of Alaska Territorial Governors, 1909-1958, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska; "Alaskans Strike Blow," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 11 (June 1911), 62,64-66. The dock company refused to "swear out warrants," as the employees were sympathetic, so no one was indicted. Telegraph, Cordova U.S. Marshall Sullivan to Acting Governor Distin, May 6, 1911, Roll 5, File 31, 1911, M939, General Correspondence of Alaska Territorial Governor, 1909-1958, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska.

72. George E. Baldwin, "Conservation Faddists Arrest Progress and Seek to Supplant Self-Govemment With Bureaucracy," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 13 (February 1912), 46; George E. Baldwin, "Law Enforcement for Alaska," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fifteenth Annual Session, 195-196; Walter L. Fisher, "Alaskan Problems," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fifteenth Annual Session,365-, Short biography and photo of George Baldwin, Alaska-Yukon Magazine 13 (February 1912), 7; "What are the Needs of Alaska? A Prominent Citizen of Valdez Scathingly Denounces the Governmental Treatment of the Northern Territory" Alaska-Yukon 11 (December 1911), 341-348.

73. George E. Baldwin, "What Are the Needs of Alaska?," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (December 1911), 340-342. He gave a very similar paper at the 1911 AMC meeting. George E. Baldwin, "The Alaskw Question," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, 299-308.

74. George E. Baldwin, "Law Enforcement for Alaska," Report of Proceedings of the Ah^IC, Fifteenth Annual Session, 196-197.

75. Address by Gifford Pinchot, Proceedings of the Secomi National Conservation Congress at Saint Paul, September 5-8,1910 (Washington, D.C.: National Conservation Congress, \9\\),292,19A-,^etaak,ProgressivePoliticsmdConservation, 150-151, 174.

76. Nathan A. Smyth and Amos Pinchot, Brief on the Cunningham Coal Entries in Alaska, Submitted to the President in Behalf of Gifford Pinchot (n.p., dated January 1, 1911), 9,10. Amos hired Nathan Smith as an assistant counsel. The brief contained a series of documents (including Congressional hearings testimony, letters, and other papers) to prove that the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate had conspired to take over the 246

Cunningham Claims. The brief argued that monopolies did not help the welfare of the American people; the idea behind the sale of coal lands was to allow for free competition of coal operations that would then reduce coal prices to the public. (4)

77. Joslin, "The Conservation Policy in Alaska," 347; "Mr. Pinchot Visits Alaska," Mining and Scientific Press 103 (September 23,1911), 389; "Welcome for Pinchot," The Alaska Sourdough (Douglas), October 11, 1911; Atwood, Frontier Politics, 212.

78. Baldwin, "What Are the Needs of Alaska?," 344; Baldwin, "Conservation Faddists Arrest Progress," 45.

79. Walter L. Fisher, "Alaskan Problems," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, 363,380,384; "Mr. Pinchot Visits Alaska," 389; Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, Mining and Scientific Press 105 (September 28, 1912), 391.

80. Richard J. Barry to Walter E. Clark, July 15, 1912, RoU 9, File 31,1912, M939, General Correspondence of Alaska Territorial Governor, 1909-1958, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska; Walter Clark, "Report of the Governor of the District of Alaska to the Secretary of the Interior, 1912," Roll 6, File 31,1912, M939, General Correspondence of Alaska Territorial Governor, 1909-1958, p. 36; Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 137-38. A similar letter to Barry's was sent to Alaskan Congressional delegate James Wickersham, which he inserted in the Congressional Record. Cordova Chamber of Commerce to James Wickersham (July 15, 1912), Congressional Record, 63"* Cong., 2°^ sess. (31 August 1914), pp. 14499-14500.

81. Falcon Joslin, "Government Construction of Railroads and Leasing of Coal Lands," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fifteenth Annual Session, 168-169; Falcon Joslin, "Federal Legislation for Alaska," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Seventeenth Anttual Session, 158.

82. Chandonnet, "Evan Jones and Alaska Coal Mining," 92; Joslin, "Federal Legislation for Alaska," 156.

83. Congressional Record, 63"* Cong., session (December 2,1913), 43; Edward Fitch, The Alaska Railroad (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1967), 43, both cited in Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 96; Mayer and Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion, 140.

84. Falcon Joslin, 'Tederal Legislation for Alaska," 153; Swenson, "Legal Aspects of Mineral Resources Exploitation," 730; Gruening, The State of Alaska, 188; Department of the Interior, Regulations Governing Coal-Land Leases in the Territory of Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), 5-13; Sumner S. Smith, "The Mining fodustry in the Territory of Alaska During the Calendar Year 1915," Bureau of Mines Bulletin 142 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917), 12; "Alaska's Op^ottamty Armos," Mining and Scientific Press 108 (February 21,1914), 319. The 247

AMC committee opposed "the provision that deprives any of the existing coal claimants of the right of access to the courts." Falcon Joslin, "Federal Legislation for Alaska," 159. See also Falcon Joslin, "Government Construction of Railroads and Leasing of Coal Lands," 174. Donald Worster wrote that the coal interests "would accept leasing only on their own terms," and that the rate charged of "two cents was all but free." Donald Worster, "Alaska: The Underworld Erupts," in Donald Worster, Under Western Skies: Nature and History in the American West (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 183, 184.

85. Smith, "The Mining Industry in the Territory of Alaska During the Calendar Year 1915,"12-13; Department of the Interior, Regulations Governing Coal-Land Leases, 5- 13.

86. "Value of Alaska Coal is Overrated," Engineering and Mining Journal 89 (April 9, 1910), 786; GriflBth, "The High Grade of Coals of Alaska," 330; Alfred H. Brooks, "The Future of Alaska Coal," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, 294. The Engineering and Mining Journal described Griffith as an "experienced mining engineer" from the coal-mining region of Scranton, Pennsylvania. (786)

87. Arthur Dunn, "Yesterday and Tomorrow in Alaska: Tomorrow, An Interview with Secretary Lane," Sunset 32 (February 1914), 314; Atwood, Frontier Politics, 214. Evidence is lacking to back up the continued allegations of a Guggenheim conspiracy to control all of Alaska. There were allegations that the Alaska Syndicate attempted to cover up any wrong doing of an attempted murder of several employees of the Reynolds- Alaska Development Company/Alaska Home Railway in Keystone Canyon, by workers of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway. The railroads were competing to lay tracks in the same area of the Copper River region. The Guggenheims were also charged with conspiring to gain control of public land at Controller Bay to use for a docking site and terminal for their railroad. For information on specific allegations, see Evangeline Atwood, Frontier Politics, 151-152,243. Harvey O'Connor pointed out that their Alaskan railroad had not paid ofif for them, and they offered to sell the railroad to the federal government. President Taft, however, was reluctant to associate his administration with this railroad, especially after the Ballinger controversy. O'Connor, The Guggenheims, 352. One study of Guggenheim involvement in Alaska concluded that there was no clear evidence that the Syndicate had a straight story of influence on Alaskan afiairs, although they were successM in getting certain laws in fisheries, and in taxation (where the Congress imposed narrow restrictions on the Alaskan legislature after 1912). The author wrote that, by 1911, "the Syndicate had divested itself of its salmon canneries, and had finished the Copper River and Northwestern Railway. It showed little interest in pushing the road up into the Tanana valley or in extending its control to include the Alaska Northern Railway of the White Pass and Yukon Route (between Skagway and the Yukon gold fields). Furthermore, it was in the process of liquidating its Northwestern Commercial Company." Robert Alden Steams, "The Morgan-Guggenheim Syndicate and the Development of Alaska, 1906-1915," 346,353. 248

88. Bain, "Alaska Coal-Land Problems," 811; Brooks, "The Future of Alaska Coal," 297; Leehey, "Coal and Transportation in Alaska,"; Walter L. Fisher, "Alaskan Problems," Report of Proceedings of the AMC, Fourteenth Annual Session, 367; Walter Clark, "Report of the Governor of the District of Alaska to the Secretary of the Interior, 1912," Roll 6, File 31,1912, M939, General Correspondence of Alaska Territorial Governor, 1909-1958, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska, p. 36.

89. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 225; Ronald Lautaret, compiler, Alaskan Historical Documents Since 1867 (JefiFerson, North Carolina: McFarland and Co., 1989), 76; Claus- M. Naske, Paving Alaska's Trails: The Work of the Alaska Road Commission (Landham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1986), 88, 94, 101; Department of the Interior, Regulations Governing Coal-Land Leases, 5-13; William H. Wilson, "The Alaska Railroad and Coal," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 73 (April 1982), 67-68. The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 extended the leasing-and-royalty system to all coal and oil deposits in the U.S. public domain. Worster, "Alaska: The Underworld Erupts," 184.

90. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 225,226; Wilson, "The Alaska Railroad and Coal," 69; Brooks, "The Future of Alaska Coal," 295, 298. 249

CHAPTERS

THE WANDERING PROSPECTOR: THE ARCTIC BROTHERHOOD AND THE POLITICAL USES OF THE MINERAL SEEKER IMAGE

Introduction and Summary

In early twentieth century, many Alaskans only partly blamed the 1906 withdrawal of

coal lands for Alaska's lagging development. They also attributed a static economy to the

simple fact that, without home rule, they could not control their own resources. As

Alaskan George Baldwin put it, a "form of local self-government at least as liberal as has

ever been accorded the pioneers of any territory is absolutely necessary to our proper and

orderly development." In the wake of the Klondike Gold Rush, Alaska's population

increased and so too did frustration over a lack of self-government. Alaskans sought a

congressional representative and, after gaining such a delegate in 1906, they sought a full

territorial legislature.'

Arguments over Alaskan self-government, then, were also arguments about the

proper path toward regional industrial development. Those promoting home rule, like

George Baldwin, argued that self-government was needed before the local economy could

develop. On the other hand, large enterprises opposed home rule because they believed

that a territorial government would enact higher taxes in order to pay for a local

government, as well as impose restrictions on their activities. Capital, in turn, would be

deterred from investing in Alaskan development. And, just as images of the prospector

were used for economic goals like coal mining, they were also used for political purposes. 250

One group of Alaskans that worked to enact political change was the fraternal order of the Arctic Brotherhood (A.B.). Drawn from the professional and business middle class, they created an identity based on the individualistic placer gold miner to pursue goals centered around Alaskan development. Their initiation, based on the journey to the

Klondike Gold Rush, symbolically provided members with the necessary masculine characteristics gained from wilderness contact to become self-reUant business and professional men. This identity, however, was also politically motivated, and the A.B. expected that through such an identity they could appeal to the masculine individualism of political figures. In their efforts to enact change, however, they were inadvertently reinforcing images of Alaska as an inhospitable land to be endured and overcome, rather than a place of settlement; these images were not conducive to arguing for home rule.

The Arctic Brotherhood tried to elicit wider support for home rule, as well as to attract capital and settlers, by participating in international expositions in St. Louis,

Missouri, JamestoAvn, Virgim'a, and Pordand, Oregon. The culminating event was the

1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle, conceived and organized by Arctic

Brotherhood members. Organizers saw these expositions as a platform to display to the world the agricultural and industrial capabilities of Alaska, and to prove that Alaska had the diversity of economic development and the type of settlement needed for home rule.

Even while countering images of Alaska solely as a place of gold and individual wealth, however, these exhibitions reinforced such individualistic notions.

One of the important considerations over home rule was whether Alaska had the right 251 kind of population to warrant any form of self-government. Some critics of Alaskan independence added a racial dimension and implied that Alaska did not have a su£5cient

Euro-American population to warrant self-rule. Furthermore, just as writers used the image of the transitory miner to argue against unionism, and as those who wanted access to coal lands through large-scale leasing argued that the mineral seeker was an outdated figure of inefiSciency, those who backed large capital argued that the mineral seeker was too transient or restless a figure for settlement. In this view, the placer miner and prospector were too obsessed with individual wealth and gain and therefore was not ready for responsible self-government. Such images were remim'scent of the nineteenth-century wandering prospector, a figure too independent to settle down.

In fact, portions of the Euro-American Alaskan population did fluctuate in early twentieth-century Alaska. Seasonal labor moved with employment opportunities. A segment of the population, including many fi'om the professional and business classes, wintered in Seattle or in other locations. Prospectors seeking new mineral deposits were, by their very definition, transient. As a real figure or an ideal, the prospector was on the move. Portraying the prospector as the central regional figure, then, contained an inherent contradiction for those wanting representational government for Alaska; one of the requirements for self-government was permanent settlement, whereas the mineral seeker

was rootless, rather than roo/ec/. How was one supposed to argue that Alaskans were settled if Alaskans wandered both materially and ideologically?

Those who supported Alaskan self-government responded in various ways to the 252 debate over the transient Alaskan, either by separating the wandering mining population from "bona fide" settled residents, or by showing that, as a whole, Alaskans were permanent. "Bona fide" citizens also meant Euro-Americans, not native peoples or those of other racial goups. Proponents of self-government also used ideals of the prospector.

One way they did so was to refer back to nineteenth-century notions of an individual's right to self-rule in mining communities. Another method was to counter an image of a wandering mineral seeker with a figure who wandered with a purpose.

In 1912, Alaska was only given a limited legislature. Looking at those images used in the course of debating Alaskan home rule is a useful case study in the potency of ideals.

Images can be powerful, but images can have tangible repercussions and backfire on the image-maker.

The District of Alaska

The Organic Aa of 1884 established the first civil government for Alaska. Like

Roosevelt's coal withdrawal of 1906, the Organic Act was viewed as a temporary measure until Congress could work out a more permanent form of government. The Act designated

Alaska a "district," and forbade a local legislature. OfiBcials, including a governor, were appointed by the president. With very limited rule, and before mining laws were applied to

Alaska, Alaskan miners made their own mining regulations, and held meetings for criminal cases and for addressing other community-based concerns. In more populated settlements, elected local ofiScials such as mayors and councils, local law enforcement, and simple court systems appeared.^ 253

In 1899, Congress levied a tax on Alaskan business to help pay for Alaska's limited government. The following year, to cope with a population increase coming to Alaska

&om the Klondike, the federal government added new judicial districts with appointed judges. Congress also allowed for the incorporation of towns, with a mayor and council and restricted property and business taxes. Local businesses protested over having to pay two sets of taxes; in response. Congress abolished local license fees and gave the business federal tax revenues to the incorporated towns.^

Incorporation was the "initial taste of self-government," but left many local Alaskans frustrated by their limited powers. Since purchase from Russia in 1867, congressional bills asking for a congressional delegate had been introduced, but without a majority support.

American citizens increasingly came to Alaska from places where they had already enjoyed self-government. Due to the Klondike Gold Rush, Alaska's population swelled to 63,592 in 1900. In the same year, to the frustration of Alaskans, Hawaii and Puerto Rico had been given representation, only two years after they came under United States dominion.

Skagway residents went one step further than a delegate and demanded a local legislature.

An editorial in a Skagway newspaper in 1903 explained that "all the people of Alaska ask

of the federal government is to release its iron grasp from the throats of the commercial

and industrial interests of this district, and to permit the people to manage their own

affairs-Something to which their Americanism gives them a natural right." Those

promoting home rule argued that self-government was needed before development could

effectively take off. An editorial in a Rampart newspaper connected a growing realization 254 that the region in 190S was "not progressing as it should" to the disfranchisement of

Alaskans. "Until Alaska receives justice," the editorial pronounced, "all progress of a permanent character must necessarily be laggard."^

But not everyone approved of fiill self-government for Alaska. Those in opposition believed that home rule would create higher taxes and overall expenses; capital, in turn, would be deterred &om coming to Alaska. Large compam'es and enterprises (especially those with offices outside of Alaska) felt that under a territorial government they would end up paying a disproportionate share to finance a local government. Large mining and fishing interests (of the largely absentee-owned salmon packing industry) also worried that a local government would place increased restrictions on their relatively federally-unencumbered activities. Treadwell City, home of the large quartz gold operation, was one such example. Their dty council announced that it "heartily" endorsed an Alaskan delegate to U.S. Congress (who could not vote, but who could introduce legislation and participate in House discussions), but opposed any form of local legislature.

Alaska's population, the council argued, was "not sufi5ciently settled, nor its industries sufficiently developed, to properly support a local government." The president of the

Valdez Dock and Warehouse Co. presented another alternative. Alfi'ed lies explained to

President Theodore Rooseveh that if Alaska got a territorial form of government, it would be "the means of saddling the expenses of a wide expanse of territory on the property holders." He opposed a delegate, but instead favored a commission board of representatives from the different judicial districts of Alaska, who would make 255 recommendations to Congress.^

The Arctic Brotherhood

One group of Alasicans did more than just complain to newspapers. The fraternal order of the Arctic Brotherhood (A.B.) used an identity based on the individualistic placer gold miner to pursue economic and political goals. In February, 1899, eleven men created this fraternal organization while aboard a passenger steamship traveling to Skagway. They called one another "Arrtic Brothers." Two men who stayed on in Skagway formed a more permanent organization. By their sixth meeting, they had performed 33 initiations, and by that summer they were constructing the first Arctic Brotherhood Hall. In 1909 there were

25 established A.B. camps. The most artive camps were in Dawson, Yukon Territory, and

Skagway and Nome, in Alaska. The Grand Arctic Camp remained in Skagway.®

The Arctic Brotherhood was part of a larger middle-class phenomenon of fraternal orders at the turn of the twentieth century. At this time, between 15 and 40 percent of

American men belonged to such orders. As historian Mark Games writes, these groups were "institutions of the emerging urban-industrial middle class." Most of the members in

Masonic lodges, for example, had white-collar or professional positions. The Arctic

Brotherhood membership contained a wide array of occupations but, like other orders, had a concentration of middle-class occupations. A Nome A.B. Camp newsletter in 1905 listed fourteen lawyers, four dentists, and five physicians and surgeons. The 1909 membership roll for the Skagway Camp of those still paying their dues revealed that member occupations ranged from a general designation of "miner," to skilled labor (such 256 as machinists, blacksmiths, electricians), with a formidable number from the middle class or professional classes (merchants, attorneys, mail clerks, and those in "raihroad business"). A.B. histories and publications, however, highlighted only those who were economically or professionally successfiU. As their 1909 "oflBcial history" stated, within their ranks were found "U.S. Senators and Congressmen, Members of Parliament, millionaires, bankers, judges, doctors, lawyers, miners, business men [sic], and men in every line of profession." Also typical of fraternal societes elsewhere, these members were largely "American bom."^

It was not inexpensive to join the order. The one-time initiation fee was $10.00, but to remain an active member required $1.00 per month dues. In addition, as a mutual aid body, members were expected to help those members in need of medical care, or pay for burial expenses of a fellow member. New facilities, the annual Christmas party for children, and lavish balls and banquets also required additional monies. Such expenses would have weeded out those with less free spending money.'

Masculinity was central to the identity of fraternal orders, and the Arctic Brotherhood was no exception. Although women could partidpate in A3, public dances and banquets, membership was conferred only on men. It was not until 1913 that they aUowed an

"af51iated order of the Arctic Sisterhood, to be composed of wives, mothers and sisters of

Arctic Brothers." Member John G. Price typified their masculine-centered view when he wrote that "the brain, the brawn and the sterling manhood of the dtizenship" of the North

"are in the working ranks of the order."' 257

The most common activity was social gatherings. The A.B. sponsored formal bails for men and women, and smoicers for men. Invited guests attended these events. Every

Christmas the Skagway Camp (branches of the order were called camps) threw a party for the community's children. Local merchants donated gifts; in 1905, 600 presents were distributed. The A.B. in Council City built a library, with around 1,000 books, as well as newspapers and periodicals. The Nome Camp provided an indoor gymnasium for basketball and other athletic events. They were also cognizant of preserving regional artifacts. In 1902, the Nome Camp took on a project to build a museum, to collect and preserve "all articles and records of historical value to Alaska, such as Indian curios, weapons, utensils, relics of early Russian occupation, geological and mineralogical specimens, fossils, maps, charts, reports, traditions, literature, etc."'"

It was apparent, however, that members used the organization for economic advantage. The initial formation of the order had been, m part, politically-motivated for personal economic gain. The first men wanted to "encourage and promote social and intellectual intercourse and benevolence among its members, and to advance the interests of its members, and those of the Northwest section of North America." Their motto was,

"No Boundary Line Here." At the close of the nineteenth century, Canada and the United

States were disputing the location of the exact boundary between the Canadian Yukon and

British Columbia, and Alaska (in part due to the lack of surveys on either side). Since

Americans were mining in the Klondike and other Canadian areas across fi'om Alaska, the

A.B. wanted to nuuntain a "genuine spirit of harmony and good fellowship" between the 258 two countries. The idea of a common brotherhood also worked in a place where professional and entrepreneurial classes needed mutual aid to establish Alaskan business and industry. Those members who had moved to Seattle maintained business connections with those in Alaska. In 1900, for example, a group of fifteen A.B. members living in

Seattle took a '"Business Men's Excursion'" to Alaska. They wore their membership buttons to announce their support for the organization."

Aside firom the first members, it was not apparent that professional and business- oriented members had ever "mushed" over a formidable trail to the Klondike Gold Rush, nor had they been prospectors. Active A3, and Alaskan developer Clyde Morris, for example, arrived in Nome during the height of the Nome mineral rush at the turn of the twentieth century. Traveling to Nome fi'om the United States mainland meant sitting on a steamship, then descending onto the beaches of the mining community, rather than carrying a heavy pack over a steep trail. Morris typified those A.B. members whose careers went hand in hand with Alaskan development. He first attempted placer mining in

Nome, but quickly saw more "tangible, definite and assured results" in a freighting business, followed by contract work in building roads, telegraph lines, and especially ditches. "Canal" Morris served hydraulic mining companies and capitalists who were

"quick to see the opportunity of making immense profits by fimushing water to miners, and installing hydraulic elevators and other appliances" operated on "gravity water systems." By 1907, he had supervised the excavation of200 miles of ditches in the Seward

Peninsula, built a seventy-two mile long railroad and, as the "largest employer of men in 259

Northwestern Alaska," oversaw 1,000 workmen during the 1906 season, paying out

$1,250,000 in labors-

Member John E. Chilberg, on the other hand, did travel through interior Alaska around the same time, but not to mine gold. As a Seattle resident and a former grocery business owner, Chilberg had already established a steamship company that delivered mail between Seattle and Alaskan coastal towns. His "wilderness trek" through the Alaskan interior was to elicit more business. Later, fellow A3, member J. J. Underwood embellished Chilberg's trip. Underwood wrote that, when Chilberg heard of the discovery of gold in Nome in the spring of 1899, he traveled to Juneau, "crossed the mountains, and as soon as the ice-fettered Yukon was free went down that stream in a Peterborough canoe~a perilous journey of600 miles." Once in the interior, Chilberg distributed Seattle newspapers of the Nome rush to local miners, then waited for customers to transport to

Nome on river steamers owned by Chilberg and his associates. In Nome, he turned to financing development, ranging from large placer operations to railroads. He opened a bank in Nome, and later became the president of three different banks, financing ventures in Alaska.'^

Despite their middle-class professional orientation, the members of Arctic

Brotherhood created an identity for themselves that was based on the individualistic placer gold miner. As anthropologist Roger Abrahams notes about other identity-based groups, this fi^temity drew on "objects and actions" that were "heavily layered with cultural and historical meanings." The gold pan, pick, and shovel had long been associated with mineral 260 seekers. In the nineteenth century, these tools implied republican notions of labor, that of a self-made man using nothing but his own labor in an egalitarian setting. This ideal of the self-made man could fit into a larger masculinity movement at the turn of the twentieth century. As historian Allen Warren observes, manliness at this time emphasized practical skills and centered, in part, on anti-intellectualism. Using a pick, shovel, a pan to make one's living were the practical skills of the prospector. These objects could also denote practical self-sufficiency and manly independence. Arctic Brotherhood Recorder Godfi'ey

Chealander connected labor and masculinity with those characteristics that made up the fi-atemal order's membership. "Hundreds of men in the early days of the 'Klondyke

Stampede,'" he wrote, "with no other capital perhaps than a pick and shovel, coupled with a determination to wrestle fortune out of the ground of a virgin, unknown country, but with upright, stalwart characters," joined the order."

The A.B. used those tools associated with the prospector as the defining symbols for the order. The Skagway Camp produced an official A.B. button, described as a "gold pan, with the letters A.B. and gold nuggets just below, within it." Their official seal was a gold pan, facing forward, with a pile of gold nuggets along the bottom and the letters "AB" in the center. Behind the pan was a crossed shovel and pick. Emerging fi'om the top of the pan was an American fiag and an English flag and, over the two flags, was the fi'atemal motto, "No Boundary Line Here.""

The highest Grand Camp officers wore regalia that reflected a placer gold prospector identity. All members donned robe-like outfits of white silk or velvet with fiir trimming, 261 symbolizing the Northern snowy climate. Grand Camp Ofi&cers distinguished themselves

with royal purple parkas made from velvet or silk. Each high officer had the symbolic

emblem of their office "embroidered on the breast in gold." The highest position was the

Past Arctic Chie^ who wore an embroidered pan, pick and shovel. The Grand Arctic Chief

had a prospector's pick on his robe; the Vice Arctic Chief wore a shovel on the breast of

his outfit. The Treasurer, whose position was entitled The Keeper of Nuggets, wore a

gold key upon his chest. Other emblems reflected northern outdoor self-sufficiency. The

Grand Arctic Trail Guide had a gold emblem of a snowshoe; the Arctic Trail Blazer, a

gold axe; the Keepers of the Inner and Outer Toll Gates, symbols of a revolver. The

Grand Arctic Chaplain wore a skull and cross-bones on his robe, signifying the dangers of

the wilderness trail."

The order tied its masculine identity into a northern rugged landscape. The editor of

Alaska-Yukon Magazine, E.S. Harrison, played up an image of Alaska as an

inhospitable wilderness only suitable for those who could endure. The work of this order,

he wrote, "is in a new land, where there are hardships to be endured and difficulties to be

overcome." The Northland was "not a hospitable land" of a temperate climate, but rather a

place with a "short summer," where "winter comes with a relentless grip" and spring melt

changes "harmless streams to dangerous torrents." Harrison explained that the wilderness

was "always a place of loneliness, and fi'equently in the far north a place of desolation.

Want and famine, grizzly and cavem-eyed, have wandered through this silent land.""

The Grand Arctic Camp members worked to meld their fi-atemal headquarters 262 physically into the surrounding woods and mountains. One member decorated the &ont of the A.B. Hall in Skagway in a "rustic" design of approximately 20,000 natural wood pieces. The altar and "station of the principal oflBcers" were similarly decorated. One member noticed that, in the crevices of a nearby mountain readily seen from the A.B. building in Skagway, remaining snow pack loosely formed the shapes of the letters "AB."

Members contacted the Geographical Society in Washington, D.C., and the Society named the mountain Mount Arctic Brother. Godfrey Chealander wrote that having the order's initials naturally embedded on the side of this mountain was "considered an unusual omen, the Great Creator having stamped His approval, so to say, thousands of years before the institution of the Arctic Brotherhood.""

In many ways, the Arctic Brotherhood represented a new "masculine primitive" that formed, as E. Anthony Rotundo among other scholars has argued, as a means to counter the emasculating effects of civilization. Men, in this formulation, were the "beneficiaries of individualism." Civilized society had repressed "their independence, their courage, their drive for mastery." Professional and businessmen needed to tap their "deep reservoir of savage drives and instincts-passions which men needed in order to be men, to struggle, survive, and dominate." For a nineteenth-century male, wilderness contaa provided those characteristics needed to be a man, in a narrative of the "pioneer tradition of the moving frontier." In late nineteenth century, however, the ideas of Social Darwinism turned an individual's contact with nature into a test of the "survival of the fittest." At the center of

Social Darwinism was the individual and, as historian lUchard Hofstadter relates, Herbert 263

Spencer's ideas became "a standard feature of the folklore of individualism." In the post- bellum era of rapid industrial expansion, this test was part of an "evolutionary individualism" of the middle-class entrepreneur; those who had self-reliance and "courage, enterprise, good training, intelligence, [and] perseverance" came out on the top of industrial and business enterprises but, in scholar Yehoshua Ariel's view, within a larger idealized "framework of democracy.""

This mix of strenuous virility, morah'ty, and brotherhood was very much in line with the political and personal identity of Theodore Roosevelt. Despite his conservation ethos surrounding Alaskan coal lands, Roosevelt spoke of the individual as the fibre of the nation. As scholar Gail Bederman notes, Roosevelt had "built his claim to political power on his claim to manhood." In his 1899 address on the "doctrine of the strenuous life," he

"spoke to men across America," outlinmg what made the virile American male citizen.

Roosevelt outlined not "a life of slothful ease," but an active life "of toil and effort, or labor and strife; to preach that highest form of success which comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph." Morality was important as well; a man needed to be "resolute to uphold righteousness by deed and by word." In another speech, Roosevelt further tempered his political vision of masculine individualism with that of brotherhood between men. What Roosevelt called "fellow- feeling" was "the most important factor in producing a healthy political and sodal life."^

In their "ofiScial history" of 1909, the Arctic Brotherhood ideologically tied 264 themselves into the Social Darwinist world of survival of the fittest and into a strenuous life. Describing the eleven founders of the A.B., the two authors wrote that these men

"were seeking success in the hardest way and under circumstances which brought defeat and death, except to the strongest, the wisest, and the best. Those who could cope with nature and mankind in situations new, strange and startling." In another depiction of the group, Godfi-ey Chealander wrote about the inevitable economic success of A3. members. He described the process that led to their successful outcomes, through an allegorical reference to gold prospectors and placer miners out in the wilderness. The

Arctic Brotherhood, Chealander explained, "helped to supply" its members "in the far northern wOds in their quest for gold the things which they had left behind at their own firesides" and gave early members the "fortitude and those staying qualities so essential to success on the trails and in the northern haunts." "Most of these men," Chealander continued, "have 'made good' and are today possessed of heavy pokes filled with the precious metal." He did not mean gold mining, but rather professional and entrepreneurial careers."

This firatemal order also symbolically gave the members a model of brotherhood that nurtured their moral nature toward others; such moral behavior was an important part of fomenting a conducive atmosphere for economic development in a potential competitive environment of a new region. Raw wilderness experience and raw masculinity had to be tempered with middle-class morals from civilization. This was a variant of the self-made man, in which a man became self-reliant by enduring and overcoming nature while, at 265 other times, sharing the needed friendship and guidance of "brothers." The rugged northern wilderness brought out both self-sufficiency and fellowship. Men who met one another while struggling "with the forces of Arctic nature," explained A.B.-designated

historian 1. N. Wilcoxon, become fast friends and shared "a blanket or a half blanket

together." This bond was essential to the self-made man. He explained that "together they

share the last cup of flour, or smash the skulls of balanced animals to feast on their brains;

and then, perhaps, part, each to work out his own salvation or perish by starvation or in

Arctic Blizzards. Such men necessarily become self-reliant, brave and generous to a fault.

The social instinct at once asserts itself when men meet under the conditions found in the

"Northland.'" But not all men were equal. Wilcoxon separated Arctic Brotherhood

members from others by their superior moral values. Even those friendships "founded on

mercenary considerations" did not mean that they would last after the conditions

disappeared. "Only the good and virtuous...can be true and lifelong friends." The brothers

naturally had these qualities.^

Their written ideology was part of what scholar Eric Hobsbawm terms an "invented

tradition." Using symbols and rituals, an invented tradition acted "to inculcate certain

values or norms of behavior by repetition" in order "to establish continuity with a suitable

historic past." These fabricated heritages falsify legacies to claim precedence over an event

and create what historian David Lowenthal calls a "group identity and uniqueness." The

Arctic Brotherhood used the trip on foot over the mountain passes that many Klondike

Gold Rushers had taken as their historical reference point for their group identity. A 266 journey was a perfect mechanism to illustrate the transformatioti into an Arctic Brother.

Another scholar. Jam's Stout, notes in relation to fictional writing, a journey was a convenient technique because "its parameters are so obvious and at the same time so flexible." The journey motif could be used figuratively as a symbol or metaphor, as a way to penetrate into "different levels of consciousness." During the Klondike Gold Rush, participants were testing themselves by journeying into nature as an escape fi'om wage labor or civilization. The Arctic Brotherhood members, however, were not physically traveling over any trail to the Yukon. By the first decade of the twentieth century, travelers were no longer using these foot paths over the passes to the Klondike. Instead, they were using the improved wagon trail and the raikoad over the White Pass.^

For this fi'atemal order, the entire Sodal Darwinist test in nature could be conveniently symbolized in an initiation ceremony to "prove" that the initiate had those masculine individualistic characteristics needed to be a worthy brother. Sherry Ortner writes that rituals simultaneously reorganize reality and reorganize "representations of self" Each member could symbolically become a worthy middle-class Alaskan. The A.B. initiation, in contrast to a physical journey, was symbolically providing members with those qualities that were needed to endure an inhospitable wilderness; these were the very qualities needed as self-made and self-reUant men in the business and professional environment of early twentieth-century Alaska. The A.B. initiation ceremony symbolically depicted an enduring journey over a difiBcult trail. The Past Arctic Chie^ along with the

Arctic Trail Guide, Arctic Trail Blazer, and the Keepers of the Inner and Outer Gates, all 267 performed the initiatioQ ceremony. Each candidate wishing to "mush over the trail" had a pack strapped onto his back. Blindfolded, the Arctic Trail Guide passed him through the inner toll gate, and then "led him over a most precipitous trail, where obstacles of every conceivable nature were to be encountered and overcome." If the prospective member was

"successful," he then "took the obligation of the Order," followed by informing him of the

"password to the outer toll gate" and proclaiming him a "Brother." It is most likely that all the initiates "passed" the test. The ritual also symbolized the relationship of brotherhood among men by the pronouncement, "If a brother falls, gently lift him up; if he fails, imbue him with fortitude."^^

Arctic Brotherhood Politics

The Arctic Brotherhood also sought political goals to help with their economic interests. It is clear that the Alaskan A.B. camps wanted to make their concerns known

beyond the borders of Alaska. One of their first political acts was to elea President

WiUiamMcKinley to honorary membership. Having business or professional enterprises themselves, not all prominent members were ready to finance a local legislature. But they

did agree that they needed some form of political voice so, as a group, they worked to get

a locally-elected congressional delegate. A.B. members preferred a direct approach to

politics, namely making their presence and wishes known by hosting and speaking with

political figures. They worked to appeal to those masculine middle-class values that the

members assumed they shared with the political figures. A northern identity of a heavily

emasculated prospector on the move and enduring an inhospitable wOdemess, however. 268 may have worked more to reinforce notions of Alaska as an unsettled place, and therefore a place not ready for full home rule,^

In the summer of 1903, a group of Senators toured Alaska, in order to investigate the resources and conditions and to determine if any legislation was needed. In July, they visited Rampart to hold a public meeting to obtain opinions and suggestions on Alaskan conditions. As one of the members of the party remarked, this community held the grand jury for the region and therefore contained the "presence of men of prominence" from

various Alaskan areas who knew "the prevailing sentiment as to what action on the part of

Congress is desired by the people and would best promote the interests" of Alaska. There,

the local A.B. Camp entertained the delegates with a smoker. The next morning, the

senators were initiated into the Brotherhood. To see these visitors ofif, the entire A.B.

body dressed in their white parkas and escorted the dignitaries to the awaiting river

steamer to Nome. The A.B. men gave them a "'malamute howl'" as a sendoff. In their final

report, the subcommittee concluded that it was "the universal opinion among all classes in

Alaska...that the District should be represented by a delegate in Congress." They also felt,

however, that Alaska was not ready for self-government.^

In the same year, the northern fraternal brothers had an even more powerful figure to

influence. President Roosevelt came to Seattle, and the A.B. diligently worked on how

best to impress upon him their wishes. One of the reasons the northern order may have

been so hopeful of change through Roosevelt was that their own masculine identity tied in

with Roosevelt's masculine persona. Importantly, Roosevelt had spoken positively of the 269 right of self-government. In a 1902 speech entitled, "Manhood and Statehood," he tied virility to home rule. Having a system of states, he explained, had "preserved the complete unity of an expanding race without impairing in the slightest degree the liberty of the individual." Most needed by its citizens were those "iron qualities that must go with true manhood," such as "the positive virtues of resolution, of courage, of indomitable will, of power to do without shrinking and rough work that must always be done, and to persevere through the long days of slow progress or of seeming failure which always come before any final triumph." The Arctic Brotherhood fit ail these attributes.-'

One of the chief arrangers of A3, activities for Roosevelt's Seattle visit was William

Perkins. Perkins' Alaskan involvement was fairly extensive. With previous experience as a vice-president of a bank in Bismark, North Dakota, he was one of the first capitalists to envision dredging in Alaska, and provided financial backing for the first gold dredge in

Nome. He remained primarily a banker and financier through various bank, trust, and securities companies. He and other Arctic Brotherhood officers helped plan a speech and a presentation of A3, insignia to the President.-'

On May 23,1903, an audience of around 2,500 people in the Grand Opera House in

Seattle greeted President Roosevelt. Alaskans in general showed their patriotism. The

Alaskans hosted the members of the Grand Army of the Republic and Spanish-American

War Veterans. More than 1,000 of these were Alaskans, each of them wearing "their uniform badge with a portrait of President Roosevelt upon it and the national colors suspended fi'om a bar upon which the name Alaska was displayed." The Arctic 270

Brotherhood hosts appealed to Roosevelt the outdoorsman. They invited the President to

Alaska, and promised him fishing, hunting, and glacier tours. They also provided him with images of Alaska as a progressive region of industrial mining. They told him that if he visited Alaska he would "see the largest stamp-mill in the world" and "great hydraulic giants washing down mountain sides."^

The bulk of the A.B. presentation, however, contained images and ideals of the individual gold miner. The Brotherhood presented an image of themselves as gold rushers.

In their address, the formation date of the Brotherhood was moved back one year, perhaps to better tie it to the fClondike Gold Rush (or perhaps to better tie it in with the

Spanish-American War and Roosevelt's fame). The order, the Brotherhood explained,

"was formed in the year 1898, during the great rush to the Klondike country, to unite more closely for mutual help and fi'atemity those engaged in developing the resources of

Alaska and the Yukon Territory."^

William Perkins presented Roosevelt with a small gold pan, six inches in diameter and made out of Alaskan gold, "twenty karats fine." The A.B. insignia was printed on the pan, along with the words "Presented to Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States,

May 23, 1903," and an invitation for him to visit Alaska. Along with the pan was a bound copy of the address given by the Arctic Brotherhood to Roosevelt, and free passes from

various transportation lines, "bound between gold tablets." Perkins told the President that

they had given him a prospector's pan because it was "the emblem of the order" as well as

"emblematic of Alaska." The gold pan, related Perkins, told how Alaska had "been 271 developed by the pioneer prospectors and miners," and that "countless wealth" was in

Alaska "awaiting him who [would] search for it." The pan stood for "the searching, labor, hardship and enterprise of her citizens." The firatemai order's focus on the mineral seeker was a means to illustrate a progressive evolution, with the brave prospector as "the advance guard," followed by "great stamp-mills, cities, families and civilization." But the speech connected gold to the individual wealth and excitement of mineral rushes, not settled development: "What power, what influence lurks in the prospector's pan? A few colors of gold washed out in it, and the whole world may be thrown in a fever of excitement, and the course of the lives of countless numbers changed." Their emphasis on gold pans, gold nuggets, and wealth left a strong association of Alaska as a place to get rich, but not necessarily as a place to live.^'

When it was the Roosevelt's turn to speak, he certainly told his audience what they wanted to hear. In his formal speech, he spoke "to people abounding in youth and virile manhood." He believed that the "quality of the old-time pioneers...still survive in their grandsons and successors." He stated that he was committed to an Alaskan delegate, and that a territorial government would proceed a state government. After Roosevelt departed, the A.B. committee who had met with the President was "more convinced than ever" that the administration took "a very special, friendly and intelligent interest" in Alaska.^

But, despite his encouraging words, Roosevelt did not act, and AB. members grew impatient. In 1904 the Grand Camp sent a memorial to the President and Congress. They pointed out that the recent annual AB. convention contained "representatives from every Ill important point" of Alaska. They asked for "adequate representation, by election." Further frustrated by Roosevelt's continued silence, the following year Nome A.B. Camp members tried another direct tactic. They created a periodical for their organization, dated January,

1905. On the cover was a photograph of William Perkins, who was serving as Grand

Arctic Chief They filled the pages with news of members, membership lists, and camp social activities, and information on the history and organization of the overall order.^^

This "first" issue (and apparently their only issue) was directed toward~if not created for-President Roosevelt. It is clear that the fraternal order honed an image to appeal to

Theodore Roosevelt. In their self-depiction, they emulated Roosevelt's strenuous life, but they also appealed to his masculinity; "We don't know whether or not you have forgotten us, Mr. Roosevelt," an editorial on the front page declared, "but if you search back among the memory cells of your brain, you will find a photograph of a large aggregation of brainy and brawny men. Their frames are stalwart, and their faces wear the tan of health that can only be gained by a clean and strenuous life. The chief or leader of these men is presenting you with a solid golden gold pan and an illuminated address." More to the point, the editorial stated that "perhaps this little reminder will bring back to your memory the

promises you made to the Arctic Brotherhood." Again, the Brotherhood demanded an elected representative."

In their own exaggerated boasting, however, they perpetuated a land of men looking for wealth in a challenging climate. Focusing on masculinity to appeal to the President, the

A3, created an image of a landscape so unfiiendly that Alaskans had to endure more than 273 other pioneers—and as a result they were more manly than men elsewhere. "Besides the ordinary difficulties and dangers," they wrote, the Alaskan had "the deep snows and the

biting winds of an Arctic winter to contend with." Some suffered for years, "blaze the trail

for their followers, and make the country each year more accessible, but ever missing the

fortune...and so on until the end, when they sink into a nameless and unknown grave."

"Few places," then, "can boast a more fearless class of men than is found in Alaska." The

Nome order also emphasized their economic importance to the nation. The A.B. Nome

Camp gave themselves M credit for finding the first gold in the Nome area, as if the

members had been collectively prospecting, and set off the mineral rush as a group. They

had added "nearly thirty-one million dollars...to the nation's wealth." The publication also

reprinted those parts of the A.B. 1903 speech relating to the significance of the gold pan

as the basis of "a fever of excitement.""

Alaska Gets A Congressional Delegate

Roosevelt did come around slowly to some kind of political change for Alaska. In his

Fifth Annual Message to Congress in December, 1905, he recommended "giving to Alaska

someone authorized to speak for it." The next May, Congress passed a delegate bill. The

Alaskan delegate, however, had no power to vote, but could participate in discussions on

the floor of the House, and could introduce legislation. A.B. recorder Godfi'ey Chealander

proclaimed in the firatemal organization's "offidal history" that the Arctic Brotherhood

"was the strongest factor in urging upon the national lawmakers" the need for an elected

representative. This achievement, however, was not entirely due to the fraternal order nor 274 to Roosevelt. Other factors contributed toward altering Alaska's political status.^

Since 1900 the Supreme Court had rendered a number of opinions (called the Insular

Cases) on the legal status and differences between the non-contiguous possessions Hawaii and the Philippines, as well as the older places like Alaska and Arizona. The Court also oversaw cases involving these possessions. The Court called Alaska an incorporated territory, and determined that the residents had constitutional rights. Calling Alaska a territory suggested that some sort of change in political status was needed. The Supreme

Court also made it clear that the ultimate status of Alaska was to be decided in Congress.

Thus, Congress was pressed to make some decision. Meanwhile, Alaskans confidently began to refer to their region as a territory."

Alaskans other than the Arctic Brothers increasingly voiced their own frustrations. In

190S, Valdez residents held a mass meeting and sent a telegram to Roosevelt. "On behalf of60,000 American citizens," who were being "denied the right of representation in any form," they asked that Alaska be annexed to Canada. The telegram story was picked up by national newspapers and placed Alaskan neglect in the public imagination. And, because of coal, copper, and gold discoveries in the interior and a resulting population shift, the War

Department had connected the various communities in this region by telegraph, and by cable connections to the rest of the United States. Telegraph communication helped

remind the rest of the country of Alaska's existence. In addition, some congressmen visited

the North, adding to a growing number of members of Congress becoming more familiar with Alaskan issues.^^ 275

The Arctic Brotherhood members may not have been directly responsible for an elective delegate, but they got their wish. And, although the position of congressional delegate was chosen by the larger Alaskan population, the early delegates were all A.B. members. The first delegate Frank Waskey, was a member of Camp Nome No. 9; he was followed by Thomas Cale and then James Wickersham, both fi-om Camp Fairbanks No.

16. It is difiScult to assess what influence their Arctic Brotherhood membership had on their ability to get elected. Such political success on the part of these specific individuals may have reflected their economic and social standing, or simply their personal efforts to get elected, rather than any influence of being a member of the Arctic Brotherhood.^'

Alaska at the Expositioos: The Prevailing Individual

There was another way to try to influence opinions of both the general public and of policymakers. The Arctic Brotherhood and other Alaskans participated in early twentieth- century international expositions as another political strategy to educate the public about the "real" Alaska. Expositions were a perfect platform, because the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876 bad emphasized the nation's industrial capabilities and future direction of industry, and thus set the tone for expositions as a means to, as historian

Robert Rydell writes, "teach a lesson about progress." And progress was "related to 'the glorious principle of self-government, and the rights of man.'" At the very least, exposition supporters hoped to dispel notions of Alaska as an inhospitable land of snow and ice, or as a land solely for gold and self-seeking miners. If Alaskan supporters could show off Alaskan agricultural possibilities and industrial development to the greater world. 276 capital would pour in, and home seekers would flock northward. To this end, the federal government also participated in these early e.xhibitions. Congress provided funds, and departments like the United States Geological Survey housed displays of Alaskan minerals provided by Alaskan mine companies (both large operations and smaller companies).^

Exposition organizers of Alaskan exhibits were also hoping to change the opinions of

policymakers, in order to obtain some form of self-govenunent. Prior to 1906 they hoped for a delegate and, after 1906, worked to get an elected local legislature. Arctic

Brotherhood members who had been reluctant to back a legislature changed their position as events like the 1906 coal withdrawal frustrated A.B. members who would have

benefitted from coal mining. They wanted more local jurisdiction over resource decisions.

Robert Rydell has also observed that expositions placed great emphasis on symbols.

These events provided visitors "with a galaxy of symbols that cohered as 'symbolic

universes.'" These collections of images "ritualistically afiSrmed fairgoer's faith in American

institutions and social organization, evoked a community of shared experience, and

formulated responses to questions about the ultimate destiny of mankind in general and of

Americans in particular." But symbols could also reinforce ideals that ran counter to what

exhibition organizers intended. Each of these early twentieth-century expositions that

included Alaskan exhibits, and especially the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition,

contained a "symbolic universe" of the placer gold miner. Promoters were paradoxically

attempting to dispel ideas of the North as solely a place of placer gold mines, while still

appealing to the ideal of individual opportunity that was found in those symbols of gold Ill nuggets, placer mining, and mineral rushes. Thus, the prevailing "symbolic universe" of

Alaska as a land of individual opportunities, in effect, worked to countermine the promoters' political goal of Alaska as a place of settlement and organized development/^

The first international fair that included Alaska was the 1904 Louisiana Purchase

Exposition, in St. Louis, Missouri. The federal government supported the Alaska Exhibit, with Alaskan residents and companies providing samples of Alaskan products and other objects of interest, including canned sahnon, fishing equipment, furs, paintings and photographs, maps, cereals and grasses, vegetables, fioiits, Indian baskets and curios, and stuffed animals and birds. There were also school exhibits fi"ora grammar, science, history, and other classes. All these material objects were meant to demonstrate that "the pioneer to Alaska will not be dependent upon his success in finding gold, but that, availing himself of the Homestead Laws, and securing 320 acres of land, he can always resort to agriculture with satisfactory results." The Alaska Exhibit would be "a surprise to such of the visitors at the World's Fair as have supposed that Alaska was a fiigid region and incapable of development." In a letter to the Secretary of the Interior, Alaskan Governor

John Brady commented that "thousands of people visit the halls," and "very many express surprise and satisfaction at what they see. I think that we shall feel repaid by seeing emigration started our way.'"*^

Closely tied to advertising Alaska's agricultural possibilities and industrial development was the expectation of self-government. Joseph Smith reported on the

Alaska Exhibit for the Alaska-Yukon Magazine, and declared that, "when the world 278 knows half the truth, there will be the up building here of the northwestern Empire, a worthy rival to our present great West, and a mighty Commonwealth, well deserving of recognition upon our flag, by an immortal star of Statehood." The overall Alaska Exhibit certainly hinted at the variety of Alaskan products. The mineral display, however, reinforced images of Alaska as a land of gold, suggesting a place to come and accrue great wealth. One case contained gold nuggets and dust, including gold quartz samples valued at $50,000 per ton. The Treadwell Mine displayed stacked gilded (as opposed to pure) gold bullion representing almost $22,000,000.^^

It was resolved at the 1904 session of the Arctic Brotherhood Grand Camp to petition Congress for "adequate representation" at the next exposition. Following this meeting, fellow A.B. member Governor Brady appointed Skagway resident and Grand

Arctic Recorder, Godfrey Chealander, as the Alaskan commissioner for the Lewis and

Clark Exposition, to be held in Portland, Oregon in 190S. The Alaska displays at this event contained similar material evidence of northern agriculture and industry, as well as indications of settlement from school and women's club exhibits.*"

Even more than St. Louis, however, the Portland event contained images of Alaskan gold and individual placer mining. The illustrations on the cover of the Alaska Exhibit book, for example, included no depictions of industrial mining. The sole mining image was a scene of three men running a small placer operation. One man was swinging a pick, another panned gold in a rocker, and a third oversaw a water-operated sluice. In the foreground were a pan, shovel, and pick. Although the displays pointed out the great 279 variety of minerals found in the North, as well as the existence and operation of hydraulic mining, gold dredging, and copper mining operations, gold displays emphasized large monetary values. The mineral exhibit contained a "gilded cube about three feet in diameter, representing the size of a block of gold worth $7,200,000, which [was] the amount paid by the United States to Russia for Alaska." The Treadwell Mine had its

"gilded pyramid of blocks representing the amount of gold taken out of the Treadwell mines in Alaska each year since 1882, aggregating in value $21,800,000." The "Gold and

Mineral Exhibit from Nome" included the "largest nugget found in Alaska," at 182 ounces.

There was also a sizable collection of "gold, gold nuggets and dust."^®

Expositions always set off areas for amusements. In addition to carnival rides, some of the popular attractions at the Lewis and Clark Exposition were the "Infant Incubators"

(supervised by doctors), "Darkness and Dawn" (where one descended into "caves of the dead" and heard screams and wails of ghosts), and "The Galveston Flood" (with a re­ creation of gathering clouds, wind, lightning, and "rain falling in torrents"). One of these entertainments was a placer mining operation. This display was housed in a large concrete building, with large letters along the front; "Alaska-(Qondike Exhibit/Placer Mine in

Operation/$10,000 Clean-up Pure Gold Dust." Here, visitors could watch "a sluicing process, with a clean-up of $10,000 each performance." This activity reinforced notions of

Alaska as an opportunity-laden land of great individual wealth. Promoters of this exposition played up these images. Next to a short description of the ofScial Alaska

Exhibit in an Union Pacific Railroad promotional booklet, for instance, was a drawing of a 280 man out in the Alaskan wilderness, standing near his cabin and working a small gold sluice operation. Another illustration was mset inside the larger drawing, depicting the building of the "Alaska Klondike Mining Exhibit." The Railroad was highlighting this "amusement" as one in the same with the formal Alaska Exhibit.^

While canvassing Alaska for exhibits for the Lewis and Clark Fair, Godfrey

Chealander suggested holding such an exposition in Seattle, and having Alaska as the central theme. He asked the members of the Alaska Club in Seattle for help (the Alaska

Club was a meeting place for Alaskans visiting Seattle as well as an organization of Alaska and Seattle businessmen). They endorsed such an idea, and gave Chealander funds to return to Alaska to visit each Araic Brotherhood Camp to gain their support. As president of the Alaska Club, banker and A.B. member John Chilberg took a great interest, and he became the president of what would be the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909, in

Seattle.*^

One of the strategies of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (AYPE) organizers was to advertise at the Jamestown Exposition, in Virginia in 1907. The secretary of the AYPE

Commission, Lloyd McDowell, maintained the AYPE booth inside the Jamestown event.

McDowell observed that many of the attendees in Jamestown were "unfamiliar with the rapid development of the West within the past few years." Yet at Jamestown were those very Alaskan images that perpetuated the North as a timeless land of the individual gold miner, rather than as a place of development. What McDowell called a "helpfiil adjunct to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Commission at Jamestown" was the amusement area exhibit 281 managed by Alaskan P. R_ Ritchie, named "Klondike, on the War Path" (the "War Path" was the name of the entire amusement area for the Jamestown Exposition). This large building contained "an exact representation of one of the rich placer mines on Eldorado

Creek, in the Klondike District." Its facade was made from long logs, giving it the appearance of a giant log cabin. On the front of the building, above the sign, were the ubiquitous three tools most associated with the prospector; a gold pan, pick, and shovel.

This exhibit was interspersed with other Alaskan images of totem poles, glaciers and outdoor scenes. Each group of visitors was led into the building by Ritchie and some assistants. The men were dressed "in the garb of the Alaskan miner," and they showed the visitors "the method used in separating the gold from the gravel and exhibit[ing] $10,000 in dust and nuggets.

The large sign announcing the exhibit was entitled, "The Klondike/A Real Trip to

Alaska/Placer Pioneer Gold Mine in Operation." Like the "Alaska Klondike Mining

Exhibit" at the Portland Fair, Ritchie was perpetuating a common misconception that the

Klondike Gold Rush took place inside Alaska when, in fact, it was in nearby Yukon

Territory. As Alaska historian Terrence Cole notes, "Klondike was a word with the Midas touch." During the mineral rush and continuing afterward, Klondike was a word known internationally. After the rush, more than forty communities across the United States were named Klondike. Promoters used the name on their products, and new mineral discoveries were proclaimed a "new BQondike." Webster defined Klondike as a "'source of valuable material or wealth.'" Using the word "Klondike" in his exhibit undoubtedly 282 attracted visitors who remembered the Rush. These memories, however, did not involve industrial mining, but rather the ideals associated with gold prospecting and mineral rushes

(as discussed in chapter one).**'

For the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, organizers invited Asian countries as well as all American territories and states to participate in their 1909 event, in a hopefiil scheme to draw larger economies into trade with Alaska and Seattle. They also invited the Yukon

Territory. Like Alaska, the Yukon needed more population and capital. The U.S. government took part, and Congress voted to contribute S600,000 for federal buildings and exhibits (including the USGS). Those with close Alaskan ties hoped to dispel images of Alaska as an inhospitable place of only placer gold mining, while emphasizing images of agriculture and industry. AYPE President John Chilberg stated that the object of the exposition was to "properly and effectively advertise the marvelous resources and vigorous industries," and to "assist in the development of Alaska." Alaska needed a permanent population, he wrote, not just prospectors. "Instead of the gold-seeker going to

Alaska to rob the country of some of its gold," he continued, "the future will witness the home-seeker going to Alaska to join in the development of the country's resources and to aid in increasing the wealth of the country."^"

Despite the grand intentions of the organizers, their exposition was a "symbolic universe" of gold and individual gold miners, in a wild and snow-bound Alaska. The grounds next to the University of Washington were placed in a symbolic landscape of a northern mountain wfldemess. The men responsible for "the design fi-amework" of the 283 entire layout were the noted Boston landscape architect firm, the Olmsted Brothers. They remarked that "one of the remarkable advantages of the site" was "its command of views of mountain ranges and especially Mt. Rainer," and the exposition needed to "take full advantage of this majestic feature." The adopted plan of the Exposition layout included two principal centers and seven secondary centers, with centers marked by "circular ornamental places." The main center was called Arctic Circle, containing a large waterfall depicting a geyser, with a direct view of Mt. Rainer. The two most secondary circles were the Nome and Klondyke Circles, "forming a pair, each equidistant fi'om the Mt. Rainier vista line, and connected by a straight avenue, Yukon Avenue.""

Gold was symbolically used in their ceremonies. Two years before the event, on June

1, 1907, John Chilberg performed the ground-breaking ceremony for construction of the

Exposition, by using a "golden shovel and pick." On the opening day, June 1,1909,

President William Howard Taft pushed a button in Washington, D.C., and then Chilberg announced the Exposition open. The "button" was a telegraph key designed with an

Alaska gold nugget."

Importantly, the organizers did diverge away from heavy masculine imagery by including female representations to symbolize Alaska. The official emblem of the

Exposition was created by "Miss Adelaide Hanscom," a Seattle resident whose entry was selected in a design competition for an AYPE emblem. Hanscom used the popular notions of Alaska as a land of snow and of gold. The design was a circle containing the Exposition name, location, and date. This artist, however, also employed three female figures inside 284 the circle. Hanscom explained her intentions: '"The figure to the right typifies the Pacific

Slope with right hand extended in welcome and the left holding a train of cars representing the Orient, and the ship in her hand represents commerce by the sea. The central figure in white is that of Alaska, the white representing the North and the nuggets in her hands representing her vast mineral resources.'" As historian Katherine Morrissey observes with a similar female figure operating around the same time in Eastern Washington state, Miss

Spokane, such representations "echoed other national personifications of women as icons of civilization and domestication." Such gender representations were fitting for the AYPE, to illustrate the settled and civilized nature of Alaska.

Another important image that included domesticated female representations was on the cover of the first issue of the Exposition's daily newspaper. Three giant human figures stood in the middle of the Exposition grounds. The two outside figures were young women, one a depiction of a Japanese woman in a kimono, the other a depiction of a woman fi'om the Early Republic, dressed in a Roman draped robe. The figure in the middle was a mustached and rustic prospector, dressed in high boots, and with slightly unkempt hair covered by a hat. To make sure he was recognized as a mineral seeker, the figure carried a heavy pick over his shoulder. It was rare to see a female figure associated with a

prospector. These figures may have served to denote the event's international and

"hosting" nature. The inclusion of female figures were important representations, though,

to suggest that Alaska was not a male-dominated, and thus an "undomesticated" and

uncivilized regioiL They represented the type of positive settlement that would appeal to 285 those deciding Alaska's political fate. Since the 1910 Census reported only 6,066 white females compared with 30,334 white males, Alaska needed a female ideological presence to cover up its small female white population."

Far more numerous at the AYPE, however, were the pervasive representations of the

masculine individual mineral seeker. A postcard for the event contained a photograph of a

Seattle street on one side, and a photograph of an Alaskan prospector on the other side.

The mineral seeker was standing next to a wide stream with a snow-covered mountain in

the background. He was looking down at a gold pan he was holding in his hands, while

leaning on a shovel. The insigm'a of the AYPE was between the two photographs. Another

postcard was a photograph of two men operating a small placer gold rocker along an

Alaskan beach, with the AYPE insignia on the back."

A drawing very similar to the photograph of the prospector on the postcard served as

part of the design on the front cover of the "OflBcial Daily Program" issued each day of the

Exposition. The prospector covered the top half of the cover (along with the title, "OfiBcial

Daily Program"). Instead of holding a gold pan, however, in this depiction the figure was

emptying a shovel filled with gold nuggets onto a Seattle street scene on the lower half of

the cover. Along with the street scene, the bottom half of the cover contained small

drawings of two separate steamships, a steam engine and part of a train, a horse-drawn

wagon and two passengers exiting a hole cut at the base of a large tree in a forest; a tall

totem pole; a fish packing operation, with a floor covered in large fish; and a woman

dressed in a Japanese-styled robe who sat facing the Seattle street. The official AYPE 286 emblem was below the Program title.'®

The Arctic Brotherhood membership embellished their own identity at the event, and connected their &atemity to mineral rush memories by working to reproduce, "although on a greatly enlarged scale, a typical Alaska log building, a type of which hundreds were erected in the north along the trails and in the towns, hamlets and villages in the early days of the great rush." Lumber for the log building came from the Ketchikan area, with a roof of Alaskan shakes and an interior of Alaska cedar. The entrance had "an illuminating feature," designed to represent the aurora borealis. The twenty-two A.B. Camps were asked to contribute items for display in the building, what one writer described as a collection of Alaskan "curios, souvenirs and relics." Flowers, shrubs and other plants from

Alaska were planted around the building. Two prominent A.B. members wrote an

"official history" of the fraternal order for the Exposition. They touted this publication as a

"souvenir history of the order.""

The Alaska Building contained 36,000 square feet of exhibits, divided into seven divisions: "Agriculture, Horticulture, and Forestry; Furs, Animals, and Birds; Fish and

Fisheries; Mines and Nfinerals; Transportation; Ethnology and Native Work; Schools,

Women's Work, and Art." This building also contained a ninety-foot square "big panoramic picture." The painting included a wide array of Alaskan scenes, but did not leave out the mineral seeker. Here, visitors would see depictions of "placer mining in actual operation, quartz mills, the prospector rocking for a grubstake, the gardener cultivating the fields."^' 287

Like the previous expositions, the mineral displays included all minerals found in

Alaska. This time around a three-ton copper "nugget" found in the Chitina River copper district was on display, with claim that it was the largest in the world. But "the central feature of the Alaska exhibit" was "one million dollars in virgin gold that [sunk] automatically every night into a steel vault." This display of gold dust, bricks, and nuggets was planned as "one of the big attractions on the exposition grounds." Three of "the largest gold nuggets ever found in Alaska" (includmg the 182 oz. specimen) were on display, worth "in excess of $7,000." Visitors were allowed "to handle the nuggets.""

In an article on the Alaskan exhibits for his publication, Alaska-Yukon Magazine, E.

S. Harrison wrote for Exposition visitors, walking the audience through the exhibits and

providing commentary. The editor related that there were only two displays in the mineral

exhibit "impressive to the lay mind." These were the gold exhibits, and for Harrison they

symbolized great wealth and individual opportunity. The first "distinctive feature" was a

display containing gold worth $1,250,000. "This is an object lesson," the editor wrote. "It

tells a marvelous story, a story of vast hidden wealth which needs only the qualities of

initiative and enterprise to secure." The other exhibit of import was gold dust from Nome.

Behind glass panels was a collection of gold pans containing beach sands and gravel from

Nome, to illustrate that these substances contained gold. Next to these pans were other

gold pans containing "from $50 to $100 worth of gold dust...washed out of a pan of

gravel just like the one beside it." Harrison commented, "it is a wonderfiil country, isn't it,

where all this real money is lying loosely scattered through the sands and gravel?" 288

Harrison was perpetuating a pervasive notion that gold lay upon the ground for easy picidng."

"At no time," John Chilberg assured, "did the promoters of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific

Exposition contemplate a show to amuse and entertain the public or attract the curious."

The fair had "a higher aim" to educate the public about Alaska, and to change misconceptions. "While the gold discoveries of the past decade have done much to advertise it, the idea still prevails east of the , and may be found nearer home, that Alaska is a country with such a rigorous climate that it is fit for habitation only by the hardy and strong." Despite Chilberg's expectations, the entertainment and amusement section at the AYPE reinforced any public notions of Alaska as a "rigorous climate" of snow and ice. Called the "Pay Streak," this area was an important component in the AYPE "symbolic universe" of Alaska as a place of gold and the individual. This long street of amusements began just to the right inside the main entrance, and angled around the Klondike Circle, joining the circle via "Bonanza Avenue" and "Eldorado Avenue."

Another section of the Pay Streak continued straight to a boat landing on Lake Union.

The Alaska Building was materially close to the amusements, on "Alaska Avenue," one street over fi-om the Pay Streak.®^

As one guidebook to the AYPE explained, "Pay Streak" was a term of "great significance," being the "best and richest form" of gold. The name was chosen because it was "suggestive of the northern character of the Exposition." The pamphlet assured that the pay streak was "the best, the 'summon bonum' [sic] of the entire country, the end of 289 the search, the treasure of the seeker." Alaskan Frank Waskey (an A.B. member and the first congressional delegate) told a newspaper that the name "pay streak" was appropriate, for "mining interests are strong in all the districts that will be exploited by the Alaska-

Yukon-Pacific Exposition, and therefore all participants will be eager to strike "The Pay

Streak.'" The phrase was suggested by Nome resident C.A. Ferrin to Waskey when he was on a steamship fi-om Nome, with "the indorsement of all passengers."^"

Like the Jamestown and Portland expositions, the AYPE had a similar placer mining exhibit in the amusement section. Housed in an ornate white building, it was identified with raised gold letters as "Gold Camps of Alaska." Inside the building was the placer gold operation, "an exact reproduction of Capt. E.W. Johnson's famous No. 8 Copper Gulch in

Alaska." As the daily Exposition newspaper related, this "amusement" had "proven to be one of the most attractive," because it provided visitors "an opportunity to pan real gold for themselves and thus procure their own souvenir of the far North.""

Images and notions of a cold landscape, rough mining camps, and a "Wild West" all commingled. Part of the "Gold Camps" amusement was "Cariboo Bill's famous dog team."

Visitors could go for a ride on the sled pulled by a team of huskies, on a "seemingly perilous journey over snow-clad peaks." Nearby, visitors could ride in boats and venture

"Down the Yukon" with scenes found along the actual river. Visitors could also eat at the

"Alaska Road House." Here they could dine on reindeer and moose meat, "the dainties of the rough mining country." In firont of the "Gold Camps" building was a raised platform that held "Alkali Ike's ^d West" show. The "Klondike" had its own show in a separate 290 building, advertising "Klondike as it is," but in efifea it was stuck in a timeless mineral rush. This amusement had a saloon, dance hall, and "gambling room." Nearby visitors could ride "The Scenic Railway," a created landscape of snow, forests, stuffed wild animals and steep mountains.*^

Paid admissions for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition totaled 2,763,683. This total was more than the attendance at Lewis and Clark Exposition, but less than that at the

St. Louis Exposition. It is not known what images left in the minds of over two million individuals, but the organizers never attained any of their material goals of increased trade relations between Asia and the Northwest (only Japan participated), or increased permanent economic activity in Seattle. More important, there was no tangible change in interest toward Alaskan investment or settlement. Many of the AYPE participants likely attended for entertainment, rather than education or homeseeking. W.M. Geddes, the U.S. commissioner of the exposition, observed that the visitors of the federal government exhibits "simply wandered about aimlessly, ignoring the guides and looking only for novelties." "Gold Camps of Alaska" was certainly one of the more popular attractions of the "Pay Streak." Apparently the emphasis on gold was working; gold nuggets became such a popular theme of the Exposition that someone was making a lucrative practice of selling visitors false pieces of gold jeweby. These seemingly-innocent images of placer mining and gold nuggets reinforced notions of Alaska to the public as a region with scattered placer mines where the individual predominated. This was the very identity that these middle-class organizers were trying to dispel in the public mind. Gold nuggets and 291 placer mining were associated with gold mineral rushes. Mineral rushes implied movement and instability and impermanence. Gold and placer mining were also images of a transient life of searching for mineral wealth. Using these images inadvertently sent a message that suggested that Alaska was still materially in a state of flux.^^

President Taft's Visit: The Wandering Prospector

As part of their overall strategy, Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition organizers and other advocates of Alaskan home rule used the event as a springboard to gain an elective territorial legislature. The elected Alaska delegate at the time of the Exposition was James

Wickersham. He timed the AYPE with his introduction of a territorial bill in Congress, on

June 9,1909. He sent "several thousand copies" of the bill to Alaskans and Alaskan newspapers. On September 29, a telegram was sent to President Taft, signed by all but two of the Alaskan newspapers, all the mayors of incorporated towns, and by "heads of certain commercial bodies." The telegram urged the President to support "the creation of an elective Alaskan legislature in substantial conformity with Delegate Wickersham's bill introduced at the recent special session of Congress."*^

This telegram was also a careMy-timed move, for the President was on his way to

Seattle to visit the AYPE before it closed. The Arctic Brotherhood was there in M force.

On September 30, they gave Taft the honorary position of Past Grand Arctic Chief The

A.B. made elaborate invitations for this occasion. On the cover of the folded invitation was a sepia photograph of the AB. building, and on the top of the invitation was a colored insignia of a gold pan with a large nugget, and a golden shovel and pick. Taft was 292 presented with the A.B. Grand Camp Officers' majestic purple robe. Nome resident and

Alaskan financier William Perkins also presented an A.B. button to Taft.'^

By the time they had preformed this initiation, however, the Arctic Brothers had aheady had their hopes dashed. Before the A.B. ceremony, Taft had spoken before an estimated 25,000 people at the AYPE. Not wasting words, the President stated that "it would be a great mistake" to give Alaska "a locally elected legislature of such authority."

Taft did not think that the territory had "a population of sufficient stability and permanence of residence to warrant" such a form of home rule. One of his criteria for population was an ample amount of Euro-American settlers. Shocking the Alaskan home- rulers in the audience, Taft equated Alaskans with Filipinos. The President pointed out that such a conmiission was very similar to the form of government given to the

Philippines. The Philippines version, however, had more "legislative authority" than

"would be wise or necessary to give to the Alaska commission." By his remarks, Taft had placed the question of race as an impediment against Alaskan self-determination. The president was not working in a vacuum; the political fate of Alaska was being considered alongside such other places as Arizona and New Mexico. Senators like Albert Beveridge of Indiana viewed non-Anglo residents of Western territories as obstacles toward political self-determination. The 1910 Alaska Census had counted 25,331 Indians, and 36,400 whites. Without a large white majority, race remained a viable issue.®*

More importantly, Taft was concerned over the transient makeup of the white

Alaskan population. "Many of the places in Alaska where there [was] a considerable 293 population," he explained, were "nothing but mining camps with all the migratory and temporary features of such settlements." He suggested a commission form of govenmient as an alternative, where "local legislation be vested in a resident commission of five or more members to be appointed by the president, and to act in conjunrtion with the

Governor of Alaska."®

Taft's argument that Alaskans were transient because they were largely wandering miners was not new. One of the important considerations over home rule all along had been whether Alaska had the right kind of population to warrant self-government. Those who argued against home rule stated that the mineral seeker was too transient or restless a figure for settlement. The placer miner and prospector only sought individual wealth, and therefore was not suited to a responsible self-government. Such images were reminiscent of the nineteenth-century wandering prospector who had sought out mineral regions to escape the rigors of settled society.

Alaskan Governor John Brady (who served fi-om 1897-1906) had stated that Alaska's population was largely "transient." He was followed by Alaskan Governor W. B. Hoggatt who, in 1906, cited the "tremendous area embraced within Alaska, its small population, its widely scattered settlements, [and] the uncertainty of the permanency of the placer camps" as factors that would place high expenses to run a territorial government "b^rond their present capacity to bear." Two years later, speaking before Congressional committees on territorial matters, Governor Hoggatt afiBrmed his belief that territorial government was too premature, because the "population was too transient." Hoggatt declared that he 294

"represented the views of those with a fixed business in Alaska and not the floating mining population."™

The Arctic Brotherhood did not give up their efforts to get an elective legislature, but found out that the image of a wandering mineral seeker was persuasive in the minds of political figures. In 1910 Secretary of Commerce and Labor Charles Nagel and Attorney-

General George Wickersham visited Alaska to investigate issues of fisheries and seals, but they also listened to other issues. As the Alaskan Conunittee of the American Mining

Congress reported, the two political figures joined the Arctic Brotherhood and "started on their important journey wearing its emblem, and with the hand of fellowship for every

Alaskan, and the greatest desire to inform themselves, first hand, of the conditions in

Alaska." Any effort to persuade Attorney General Wickersham that Alaska was ready for home rule were unsuccessful. Commenting on Alaska at a later date, he explained that, "'in considering a government for Alaska, you must consider that the people do not go to

Alaska to live as they came to Washington [state]. They go there to make their pile and then get out. For that reason the population of Alaska is transitory.'""

Part of the problem was the fact that Alaska didhsst a transient population, not only on an symbolic level, where goldseekers could come and seek their fortune, but also to a certain extent on a material level. Prospectors did move firom place to place, in search of a rich mineral deposit. Mineral seekers and gold miners took on seasonal work in labor, and winter seasonal work on their mine claims. When news of a mineral rush circulated, laborers and prospectors ran off to take part. E. S. Harrison tried to discourage those 295 attracted to Alaska for temporary opportunities. "Alaska does not want stampedes," he explained, "but it does want immigration." In 1901, an editorial in a Ketchikan newspaper traced the transient population to laborers, not prospeaors or placer miners. High wages, stated the editorial, made a population that was "of a transitory and ever shifting character." The Alaskan salmon industry was also seasonal, operating from late spring until early fall. Cannery owners were largely absentee and, after 1906, laborers were brought in for the season."

Prospectors, placer miners, and laborers were not the only groups on the move.

Certain activities ceased during the winter months, such as road construction and steamship travel in the colder areas. Some mining operations stopped, or cut back operations. Alaskan businessmen overseeing these activities, along with other middle-class professionals, wintered elsewhere. Many federal government ofBcials also made up this transient seasonal population. Newspapers always made a note of the last boats out for the season-usually in October—before the interior rivers and the northern ocean waters began to freeze over. No one took accurate statistics of population fluctuations, so it is very difficult to chart movement. One exception was Nome. This gold mining community reflected a high rate of seasonal fluctuation. In 1909 E.S. Harrison noted that Nome's population was about 3,000, "augmented by 500, possibly 1,000, during the summer season, or period of mining activity." During the summer Harrison estimated that there were "at least" 10,000 people in the greater Nome region. Other places, especially those more temperate communities along the sea in southeastern Alaska, had less fluctuating 296 populations."

Many of these Alaskans went to Seattle for the winter, or took the opportunity to visit family members elsewhere, or ventured down into warmer climates. Prominent members of the Arctic Brotherhood such as John Chilberg and William Perkins wintered in

Seattle. Some businessmen had offices in this Washington seaport city, traveling back and forth to their Alaskan activities. Canal builder and freighter C.L. Morris' winter address was in Seattle, and during the summer, in Nome. One gathering place in Seattle was the

Alaska Club. Alaskans from various communities in the North had little opportunity to get together. The steamships between Alaska and Seattle were early meeting places for

Alaskans. The Alaska Club began in 1903 as an alternative gathering or meeting place for

Alaskans, coming to or from the North. The club maintained an Alaska newspaper collection, government documents, photographs, and mineral collections from Alaska.^^

In 1908 the Alaska Club merged with the Arctic Club. The Arctic Club had been organized, in the words of one member, "to form a home for people of the Northland

while sojourning in Seatde, and to provide a general rendezvous where the people of

Alaska and the Yukon Territories might meet and mingle socially with the people of

Seattle and of the Northwest." In fact, it was a "fraternal order of Alaska and Seattle

businessmen" and a domain of the middle-class male, similar to the Arctic Brotherhood.

Many of the prominent A.B. members (such as William Perkins and John Chilberg) were

also members of the Arctic Club. Alaskans coming in from the North and spending their

winters in Seattle were noted in the Arctic Club minutes. On November 11,1911, for 297 example, "some 104 Alaskan members" paid their dues owed the previous year as they arrived from the north."

The new Arctic Club building in 1909 was hardly designed for mine laborers or roughly-dressed prospectors. Visitors were greeted at the entrance by bellboys, and the reception hall contained "large easy chairs, upholstered with a rich green tapestry." The building housed a large reception room library, billiard room, dining room (with capacity for 200), a "ladies' tea room," and 255 bedrooms. Membership was not automatic, and new members "need[ed] to be proposed." It was expensive to join. The "entrance fee" was

$100. In addition, a monthly fee of $4.00 was required for "resident general members" and for non-residents, $15.00 per year. In addition, admission fees were required for smokers and other social events. A list of new members during one club meeting included no prospectors. Ail the seventeen new members, excluding two "miners" were businessmen or professionals. In short, this club was a refuge for middle-class transient Alaskans.^^

Responses to the Wandering Prospector

Tail's comments disappointed not only Arctic Brotherhood members, but all those hoping for home rule. Furthermore, to be compared with a non-white population of the

Philippines insulted the dominant Euro-American Alaskan residents. These Alaskans were already frustrated that Alaska was economically static. As mentioned before, the continuing coal lands disputes made them realize increasingly that they had little control over their own resources. Alaskans who had been largely complacent over political issues before joined with adherents of home rule to unify Alaskans and create a greater advocacy 298 in support of home rule."

As with the coal lands, home rule debates fed newspapers and periodicals.

Discussions also moved to the floors of Congress. The A.B. claimed that it was "a strong factor" in Washington, and took the "initiative in requests for needed legislation." Most likely this was a reference to the legislative careers of New York Senator William Sulzer and Alaska Delegate James Wickersham. Both men had joined the Arctic Brotherhood in its early years. Even though they had non-mining careers, both men had their own economic mining interests in Alaska. These two men introduced (or influenced others to introduce) much of the Alaska-based legislation in the first two decades of the twentieth century. In addition to submitting bills concerning coal leasing, mining law, and railroad construction, they also introduced an almost constant stream of home rule bills.^'

Having a large shifting populace, however, was not helping change Alaska's prevailing identity as a place of transience. The mineral seeker and the placer miner were the figures most associated with the white Alaskan population, and by their very definition were transient. Portraying the prospector as the central figure in the region's mining economy (including coal) contained an inherent contradiction for those wanting representational government for Alaska: the mineral seeker necessarily moved fi'om place to place, whereas one of the requirements for self-government was permanency.

Therefore, any effort to argue for home rule had to counter the notion that Alaska was peopled with wandering prospectors. And, just as important, supporters of self- determination had to counter criticisms of race by emphasizing a strong Euro-American 299 presence.

Advocates for home rule provided material-based explanations for why the population fluctuated. Some reasons why mineral seekers did not stay in an area were high expenses and inadequate mining laws, including deceptive practices like power of attorney. Others blamed inadequate homestead laws. C. L. Andrews wrote that "when a country for over thirty years has no law permitting the acquisition of an aae of land, how can it be expected to have a population attached to the soil? When the government for more than forty years does not survey the lands for settlement, how can it be expected to have a permanent population?""

Home rule proponents either justified away seasonal migration, or avoided the issue altogether. Referring to the annual winter migration out of the region, one author wrote that "if some of them have acquired a competence and exercise the privilege of spending a winter in Southern California or Florida, that is not evidence of a shifting population." On the floors of Congress, one representative asked Delegate Wickersham whether the white

Alaskans "really live there permanently, or whether there are about that many transitory people in Alaska most of the time-what per cent of the 64,356 people in Alaska can be considered permanent residents?" Wickersham never answered this question. He was interrupted by feUow territorial committee member Senator Flood of Virginia, who stated that the Alaskan delegate would answer this question "in the course of his remarks."

Instead, Wickersham sidestepped the question altogether, complaining that the "&cpioiters of the wealth of Alaska" lived in New York City, but the permanent population in Alaska 300

"were of the same character and people that settled California." He turned to agriculture and livestock possibilities, exports, and density of population.'"

Some accused the larger operations and capital in opposition to home rule as the real

"transient" population. The second Alaskan delegate, Thomas Cale, explamed that objections to Alaskan home rule came from "a few who make short periodical visits to the

North to look over their properties, calling themselves Alaskans, and then hurry back to their homes in the States, where they can enjoy self-rule." Another tactic of home-rulers was to separate out transient placer miners from settled Alaskans. In 1911, Congressman

William Sulzer distinguished between those who went to Alaska with no intention of staying and those who were "bona fide" permanent residents. Author W.F. Beers noted that Southeastern Alaska was more populated and developed. The area north of the

Yukon River and Tanana River basins was "purely and simply a prospector's and summer miner's country," Beers wrote, and the climate forbid "stable democratic communities."

Senator Sulzer likewise suggested that certain regions like north of the Yukon River would "always be sparsely inhabited by a migratory population," while other regions had a permanent population, and therefore deserved self-government."

It made sense, then, to divide Alaska into political sections to reflect the varying degrees of settlement. A commission-run government was not the only unusual solution to governing Alaska. In 1908, Beers suggested giving home rule to a divided "South

Alaska." Let Nome and the Seward Peninsula "rest content with any effective government they can arrange for with Congress," he continued, but allow the more temperate and 301 settled southeastern Alaska to have a territorial government. William Sulzer proposed another plan in 1911 to divide Alaska into three full territories. The more settled

Southeastern Alaska would enjoy one territorial government, while another territory would comprise the area in southwest Alaska, "west of Mount St. Elias and south of the

Yukon River," and a third fiill territory would exist north of the Yukon River.*^

The term "bona fide" resident, however, had a double meaning. Suitable residents for home rule were not only permanent, but they were white. Senator Sulzer explained that

"the people who have gone there [to the North], and who have lived there for years, and who are bona fide residents of Alaska, they want territorial government." In short, they were "honest, brave, sober, manly. God-fearing people who are of our kin, and who ought to be treated as American citizens." Sulzer and others not only argued that Alaska was full of desirable "citizens," but such a definition of "citizen" or "Alaskan" had to include a

Euro-American identity in order to counter accusations of an insufiBcient white population.

These rhetoridans knew that they were speaking to an audience of fellow Euro-

Americans. Arguing before Congress meant appealing to the racial consciousness of representatives like Albert Beveridge. James Wickersham made sure that Congressional members knew who he represented in Alaska. Leaving out the non-white population, he stated that "there are 40,000 of us who have the ideals of American citizens" who want to be treated "like you ought to treat your own brothers and sisters who are engaged in nation building on the distant fi'ontier.""

Defenders of home rule supplied material-based evidence to show that Alaska's 302 population was sufiBciently settled. Delegate Wickersham gave lengthy congressional testimony on Alaska's agricultural capabilities, plentiful resources, and sufiBcient population. He also wrote an article for Colliers outlining why Alaska was ready for its own government. Wickersham wrote in his diary that, by reaching the public, "the Echo will get into Congress even if my voice cannot." In his article he went as far as to suggest that Alaska should receive statehood. Similarly, a Cordova newspaper complained about the "old, worn-out, and threadbare statement" that Alaska was "too sparsely settled" and had a population "too migratory." One only needed to look at "the schools, the many fine residences, the many and growing number of farms, the costly public buildings, and more especially the thousands of women and children who now form a part of this northland."

Emphasizing families may have been a reaction to comments on the disproportionate number of women in Alaska. Ohio Congressman White, for example, pointed out that the second judicial district (in western Alaska, including Nome) had 3,492 white males, but only 938 "white women." He complained that this proportion did not "promise a settled community life" nor "a necessary foundation for a self-governing people.""

More importantly, advocates reverted to the level of ideals to argue for home rule.

The idea of the self-seeking individual constituting a governable society, was one ideal.

Just as the economic individual ran the market best without govenrniental interference, the political individual made his own decisions best. This idea harked back to nineteenth- century notions of the political individual, but also to nineteenth-century self-governing mining communities. Charles Harwood Shinn had connected the ideals of self-government 303 with Western miners. Like Shinn and others in the previous century, writers specified a hereditary Anglo-Saxon fitness for self-government. This political ideal, then, was particular suited to address those race concerns connected with Alaska home rule. A

Seattle paper, for example, attacked Taft's implied comparison of Alaska with the

Phillippines and Cuba. Unlike those "tinctured with Latin blood," Alaskans were

"generally of Anglo Saxon stock~the race above all others in the history of the world that has embodied the genius of self-government." Closely connected to race as a characteristic of self-government was masculinity. One person writing under the name "an Alaskan" responded to Taft's reference to the Philippines by chiding that Alaskans "do not wear breech clouts and live half naked in the jungle." Instead, "these American citizens are the type of the best manhood of our country.""

Arguing before the House Congressional Committee on Territories, Fairbanks resident and president of the Tanana Valley Raikoad, Falcon Joslin, used the idea of self- governing miners. He spoke of past Western communities and their ability to govern themselves peacefully. Joslin pointed out that previous to the fClondike Gold Rush, miners

"lived there ten years and more before there was any governmental authority, and showed that the people have the power to govern themselves without authority fi'om anybody."

Government, Joslin argued, came "fi'om the people upward and not fi'om the authority downward." Similarly, California mining communities had the ability to self-govern. "I understand that it is the history of California that the people assembled and established their constitution without any authority fiom anybody," Joslin pointed out. "I think the 304 same thing might be done in Alaska."^

Home rule proponents countered the image of the transient and wandering mineral seeker with an idealistic figure who wandered with a purpose. Like with coal land leasing, this prospector appeared as the sole player in a struggle, but this time for home rule. Not intrinsically nomad, their idealized figure had to wander in order to build. Rather than impatient goldrushers, they settled and developed. Rather than trail-blazers, they were town and home builders and, because of these efforts, they had earned the right to run their own aflfairs. And, like their predecessors, they were Euro-American.

Just as home rule adherents had delineated between transient and settled populations, certain writers separated out "good" and "bad" wandering. One correspondent calling himself (or herself) an "Alaskan" asked that, "if prospectors explore a new region and discover valuable resources that add to the wealth of the nation, are they to be deprived of constitutional prerogatives because in the search for a competence they shift their habitat?

Is not such a shifting population more valuable than a shiftless herd of human spawn that never can become an integral part of the United States?"^^

James Wickersham created a heroic image of a mineral seeker as the ideal Alaska citizen. Wickersham agreed that the notion that Alaska's population was "transitory and migratory" had "some merit," since the North was "peopled in large part by prospectors and miners, men who search the hills and the valleys for gold, copper, or other precious minerals." Ultimately, however, these transient figures would stop wandering, and settle down as responsible citizens. He made a parallel back to the California Gold Rush, 305 illustrating that mineral rush partidpants had also been builders. Alaskans, he stated, were

"of that type" that traveled to California "and, remaining, became the pioneers of the

West." This heroic Alaskan also contained those desirable masculine characteristics emphasized by the Arctic Brotherhood. Where Alaskans were known, he explained, "their worth is appreciated, and they are not barred from responsibility for deficiency in morals, courage, or manhood.""

They did not remain nomadic, Wickersham continued, but settled down and became

homebuilders, bringing with them their families. His logic was similar to that behind the

1872 Mining Law, equating mine claims to homesteading. He combined a transcendent

and romanticized lone prospector out in the wilderness, with that of a homesteading family

man, enduring for the greater good of his loving family:

It is a mistake to suppose that prospectors and miners are entirely transient, nomadic, or migratory. Nothing in the character of their calling renders them incapable of performing the highest and best public service as citizens of the Territory...Whenever the prospector and miner in the West found the pot of gold in the wilderness he set his stake, brought his family to it, and became the foremost citizen of the camp, the town, the city, and the State. And such is the prospector and miner in Alaska. His constant hope by day and his prayer by night is t^t he may find the "homestake.' With his pack on his back he trudges into the wQdemess, bravely facing the rigors of the climate, the dangers of mountain and stream, and the hardships of a lonely life, ever seeking that golden store which will enable him to bring the far-away family to the land of bis labors and success, which then becomes his haven of rest-his home.

"Instead of denouncing him as a transient and migratory character, unworthy to entrust

with the duty of pioneer work in nation building," Wickersham concluded, "Congress

ought to emulate his civic virtues, applaud his work in Alaska, and give him sympathetic 306 aid and encouragement."^

Another creator of this heroic mineral seeker argued that prospectors had to wander.

The comments of Erastus Brainerd, editor of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, came in response to Attorney General George Wickersham's complaints about Alaskan impermanency. Like Alaskan Delegate James Wickersham's depiction, Brainerd portrayed the Alaskan prospector and placer miner as having a "strong, manly virtue." "The prospector and placer miners of Alaska, like those of California, Colorado, and the placer- mming territories of the West, are migratory," he explained. "Of what earthly use would a

"prospector" be who is not?" For Brainerd, prospectors were not wandering; they were buOding the West. He depicted this figure in a similar romantic fashion as a hero who endured for the good of the nation;

With his pack on his back he trudges into the wUdemess, along the old Indian trail, oS up some unmapped river, facing the rigors of the climate, the dangers of mountain and stream, bravely meeting the hardships of a lonely life, ever seeking the golden pay streak which nature has so cunningly hidden in the gravel beds in the most out-of-the-way and unexpected places. Migratory? Certainly: he travels from stream to stream, digging shafts and scraping the rim in search of colors. Disappointed for ninety-nine times, often in the hundredth hole he finds the colors, which bring a stampede of his kind fi'om less-favored localities, and in a day a new camp is "struck," a town is built, lines of transportation established, judges and ofiBcers appointed, banks and business houses estabUshed. Ten million dollars per annum in virgin gold is gathered firom the gravels and put into the general wealth of the Nation, all because the prospector and placer miner is "migratory."

In the end, however, these wandering prospectors, despite their focused intentions as community builders, were still perpetuating the notion of an individual and masculine figure out in a harsh wilderness.^ 307

Second Organic Act

As with the earlier delegate bill, a changing political climate was probably the greatest factor that led to a territorial legislature in 1912, rather than convincing images and ideological arguments. Tafl softened his position away from a commission and toward a compromise with Alaskans. In the mid-term elections of 1910, Taft lost control over

Congress. The editor of Alaska-Yukon Magazine in 1911, John Troy, explained that the primary and congressional elections "were a revelation" to Taft. The President realized that his "Alaskan policies [had] been unpopular in the Northwest and [had] estranged the people whose support he very much desires to regain." As a result, Taft agreed not to veto any bill that would establish some form of "republican institution" for Alaska. At the same time, however, representatives of both large mining and fishing interests influenced members of Congress on their position that an Alaskan legislature would regulate their industries and impose high taxes. Alaskan delegate James Wickersham and other members of the Senate and House Committees on Territories had to accept a compromise of a limited legislature in order to attain any kind of home rule for the territory.''

The Second Organic Act that passed in 1912 allowed for an Alaskan legislature of an eight-member senate and a sixteen-member house of representatives. Residents in each of the fourjudicial districts were allowed to elect four house and two senate members. But, as Henry Clark observed in his 1930 work on Alaskan history, this legislature was

"nothing more than the agent of Congress with certain limited powers to be exercised as long as Congress may allow." Congress had control over matters of divorce, gambling, 308 liquor sales, and the incorporation of new towns. Territorial taxes were limited to one percent of property assessed values (two percent inside incorporated towns). Most important, the Alaska legislature could not pass any legislation concerning the Territory's resources. The Act forbade the territorial legislature "to alter, amend, modify and repeal measures relating to fish and game, or to interfere with the primary disposal of the soil."

Congress had the ability to repeal territorial acts. The President continued to select the governor and the district judges. Coal and other mineral lands remained under the control of the federal government.®^

Ironically, it was the laborers-many of them prospectors~who made out better than anyone else in 1912. Miner's associations and unions wanted an elective legislature so that such a body could create local mining statutes to better their own conditions. The Tanana

Miner's Association, for example, had sent a telegram to President Taft in 1909. The first legislature was composed of members who supported mine labor. Many of the mining measures were introduced by an attorney and former miner, Henry Roden. There were nine other legislators who were either mine operators or miners. They established an eight- hour work day, and an act "'to prevent employees fi-om being oppressed by reason of an employer compelling them to board at a particular boarding house, or to purchase goods or supplies at a particular store.'" Another act provided for arbitration in mdustrial disputes. They created the office of mine inspector and enacted a mine-safety code. They also worked to "remove the evils of unlimited powers-of-attomey claim-staking and to protect the true prospector and miner. 309

Conclusion

Just as ironic twists in coal mining dashed hopes for economic independence,

Alaskans also seemed destined to fateful ironies that countered any political independence.

To the frustration of Alaskan Delegate James Wickersham, while the Alaska-Yukon-

Pacific Exposition promoters worked hard to present a view to the outside world of a settled and populated Alaska, those Alaskan residents who attended the fair and who stayed over in the mainland were not all counted in the 1910 Census. These census statistics were used in congressional hearings. The Census, as it was, presented a snapshot of those who were in Alaska at a specific time of year. It would have been diflBcult to argue in fi-ont of skeptical members of Congress that the census was inaccurate because

parts of its population were wintering elsewhere.'^

When the first U.S. President ever to set foot in Alaska arrived in 1923, hopes for

political independence rose again. President Warren G. Harding visited Alaska to drive a golden railroad spike and symbolize the completion of the government-funded Alaska

Raikoad. The President was silent about Alaskan issues until after he departed. Stopping

over in Seattle after leaving Alaska, Harding spoke of his plan "in a few years" to "set off

the Panhandle and a large block of the connecting southeastern part as a state." Alaskans,

espedally those in the southeast, were elated. Residents of southeastern Alaska had

petitioned Congress to create a fiill territorial government for "South Alaska." In part,

they felt that th^r were paying a disproportionate amount of taxes that went to support

less-developed parts of the territory. But one week after the most encouraging political 310 speech Alaskans had beard in years, Harding fell over dead and, with him, any hopes for home rule. The "separationist movement" did not last.'®

World War I~an economic boon for other regions of the United States-had exacerbated Alaska's lagging economic conditions. Alaska's population decreased during the war years, and never My recovered until the 1930s, making it difiBcult to argue for statehood based on an increasing populace. Even in the 1940s, Secretary of the Interior

Harold Ickes argued that Alaska was not ready for statehood because of "the Territory's seasonal economy and unstable population." Part of this transient population was the U.S. military during and after World War II. Once again, Alaskans who wanted self- determination were hopeful as military personnel poured into Alaska, and other Americans came as part of the military-industrial complex. Military leaders, however, were leery of

having an independent populace making political decisions that might conflict with their

own goals of military strategy within Alaska. Large outside mining interests still opposed

statehood because of fear of high taxes. Some local residents also worried that statehood

would raise their own taxes, and were satisfied with having the federal government

provide finandal help. Ultimately, however, it was this influx of Americans into the region

during and after the Second World War which was crucial in forming the successful drive

toward statehood in the 1950s.'®

Why did the Arctic Brotherhood and other Alaskan promoters place so much

emphasis on the prospector or gold placer miner? Agam, as with the Alaskan coal land

debates, one needs to look at who was deploying images, and for what ultimate 311 purpose(s). And, once again, the actual prospector was neither the image-maker, nor part of the desired end. Rather, this figure was the means to a goal of regional development and industry. Middle-class men employed the masculine qualities of the prospector to legitimize their own goals of Alaskan development, as well as convince policymakers to give them a stronger voice in determining the direction of their development. Exposition organizers wanted to entice more people to move to Alaska, as well as convince the world that they were an expanding region.

It would seem logical, then, to utilize illustrations of magnificent gold dredges and powerful hydraulic hoses, rather than individual placer operations, as the most direct way to show that Alaska was a progressive place of industry. The large quartz rock-crushing mill at Treadwell City would have also served as a tangible image. Yet illustrated images of these activities were not predominant in places where one would have expected them to have taken center stage. The cover of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition booklet that accompanied the Alaska Exhibit, Industrial Progress in Alaska, depicted a prospector, hat in hand, standing on a rock beside his resting pan and shovel. He was overlooking a scene of a steamship passing in one direction on the placid water below, while in the background a railroad engine traveled the opposite direction, about to enter a small town containing a church. It seems that trains and steamships were more appropriate and acceptable indicators of technological progress than gravel-moving machinery. Trains had long been accepted as symbols of progress which blended into a pastoral landscape.^

It may have been that images of hydraulic mining, with the great jets of water forced 312 through giant hoses breaking down cliffs and hillsides, and massive gold dredges, beside monstrous piles of processed gravel, were not readily accepted images by the public.

Image makers were up against prevailing attitudes critical of large industry, hydraulic mining or dredging may have suggested the presence of evil corporate monopolies.

Hydraulic mining also had a bad public reputation. Since the 1860s and 1870s, the Anti-

Debris Association had fought hydraulic mining (especially in California), in part because the disturbed soil flowed to and rendered useless the nearby agricultural fields. Dredges elicited similar negative reactions, although on a smaller scale. Utilizing these earth- moving objects to illustrate development, then, might have implied that a region was not suitable for agriculture, or for homes and settlements.^^

Just as proponents of coal mining directed attention away fi'om the Guggenheims and coal claimants by focusing on the more innocent prospector, Alaskan promoters avoided filling the public's mind up with negative images of Alaskan industrial mining by sticking to the individual gold miner. Compared with large destructive earth dredgers, mineral seekers appeared pastoral.

Mineral seekers were not just harmless pastoral figures, though; they were also

figures. The mining industry, federal government agencies like the United States

Geological Survey, and Alaskan promoters were using the individualistic ideals of the mineral seeker to entice real prospectors to come to Alaska. Because this romanticized figure carried with it all those compelling ideals of the individual, the prospector could at the same time more broadly represent individual opportunity in a perceived "new" land. 313

In a nation that had defined its firontiers as closed, a representation of a mineral seeker was a welcoming image that there was still a place to come and make a new start for oneself.

An idealistic figure that wandered was not a negative image to those transient Americans who were looking for new possibiUties and new beginnings.

No other figure was as potent. As much as promoters wanted to convince the world that Alaska was destined to be an agricultural center, using a representation of a farmer as a central figure would have been misleading, if not potentially ridiculous. Early twentieth- century Alaska did produce a limited quantity of foodstuffs, but it was not a land filled with yeomen. And a yeoman was a gigantic leap of imagery for a place that prevailed in the public mind as a land of snow and glaciers. Besides mining, Alaska's other major industry was fishing. Although a fisherman conjured up a notion of a rugged individual, this figure had never made it to a national level as a compelling image to draw a

population to particular shores. And there was no ideal based around the potential of accruing great wealth fi'om one large salmon. The prospector was Alaska's symbol of the

individual and all the compelling ideals associated with the individual, including opportunistic possibilities that would draw more settlers to the region. Image makers

could not ignore such a potent symbol connected to Alaska in any setting where they

wanted to draw attention to Alaska.

At the same time, the Arctic Brotherhood and others did not seem to realize that,

while individual opportunities attracted prospectors and others to the north, the image of

the individual was not conducive to the policy they desired. The promoters conversely sent 314 a message that Alaska was too individualistic, and not ready for settlement, nor self- government equal to other territories and states. Broadcasting a strong masculine identity may have inadvertently sent a message to the Outside that Alaska was not only a bastion for the individual, but was also the domain of the male. Such a notion of an atomistic

masculinity would have worked against images of a settled and stable community, which

necessitated a gendered female landscape.

And, even while images of Alaska as a promising frontier of individual opportunity

could attract those seeking new vistas, the frontier story was not as effective in other

arenas. Those who argued for home rule by explaining the necessary process of the

pioneer prospector's transient activities as a precursor to settlement were using what they

thought was still an active means of convincing policymakers. And certainly when orators

like James Wickersham gave such florid speeches on the congressional floor about brave

mineral seekers, these appeals always received a round of applause. But the congressmen

from other sections of the country may have been entertained, instead of converted into

supporting legislation. The United States was no longer a nineteenth-century world of

continuous westward expansion, and therefore such an argument may have not been as

convincing to those who lived in settled communities with established governments. In

other places in the West in the early twentieth century, self-described Euro-American

"pioneers" were creating simOar histories of their own communities based on the narrative

of pioneer development. This was unproblematic to communities with estabh'shed self-

rule. They were writing their pioneer narratives looking back to explain and to embellish 315 what they had aheady accomplished, and to define and celebrate the accomplishers. As part of this chronicle, their "wandering" pioneers had settled down as the political and economic leaders of their respective settlements. Alaska, on the other hand, more than other western areas, needed to prove itself first as an established settlement on a material level, before it could take the luxury of basking in a narrative of ideals about the origin of its development (or, for that matter, in sending ofiTdignitaries with a malamute howl). In this case, then, images of a transient mineral seeker backfired. 316

1. George E. Baldwin, "What Are the Needs of Alaska?," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (December 1911), 342.

2. Claus-M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, Alaska: A History of the 49^' State, 2"^ ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 73; Claus-M. Naske, An Interpretative History of Alaskan Statehood (Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Northwest Publishing Co., 1973), 15.

3. Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 86. In 1905 the Nelson Act created an "Alaskan fund" from liquor and trade license fees collected outside of incorporated towns, with monies going toward schools, "care of the insane," and road construction and maintenance. Ernest Gruening, The State of Alaska (New York: Random House, 1954), 123-24.

4. Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 86; Gruening, The State o/^/osAa, 138-39; "Just Let Us Alone," Daily Alaskan (Skagway), May 24, 1903; The Mining Journal (Ketchikan, Alaska), March 10, 1905; Rampart Forum (Rampart, Alaska), quoted in The Mining Journal, March 24, 1905.

5. Daily Alaska Dispatch (Juneau), April 9,1902, quoted va Alaskan Historical Documents Since 1867, Ronald Lautaret, compiler (Jeflferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1989), 48; Alfred B. lies to President Theodore Roosevelt, November 28,1905, Roll 13, M430, Interior Department Territorial Papers, Alaska: 1869-1911, Record Group (RG) 48, Records of the Secretary of the Interior, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska, p.I.

6.1. N. Wilcoxen, History of the Arctic Brotherhood (Seattle, Washington: White & Davis, 1906), 7-8,16-19; Godfrey Chealander and Richard Mansfield White, Official History of the Arctic Brotherhood, Northermost [sic] Pioneer, Fraternal ami Secret Organization in the World (Seattle, Washington: Acme Publishing Co., 1909), 8, 15. In addition to A.B. Camps across Alaska, membership also stretched to all of the Yukon and Northwest Territories in Canada, in British Columbia north of "parallel 54 degrees, 20 minutes, north latitude." Camps were forbidden from forming below this parallel. Chealander and White, Official History, 9. Canadian historian David Neufeld has found that the Yukon-based fraternal organization, the Yukon Order of Pioneers similarly created an identity based on the gold panner. David Neufeld, "Public Memory and Public Holiday: The Gold Panner and the Yukon's Discovery Day Holiday," paper given at the International Symposium on Minii^" Fairbanks, Alaska, September, 1997.

7. Mark Cames, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1989), 2-3,13; "A.B. Professional Cards," The Arctic Brother l(January 1905), 11; Chealander and White, Official History, 8,35,37,39; "The A3.-The Typical American," The Arctic Brother I (January 1905), 5. According to their 317 own 1905 statistics, they were largely "American bom." The compiled statistics indicated that 32 members were Canadian, 64 European-bom, 10 from other locations, and 376 were "American bom." "The A3.-The Typical American," 5.

8. Wilcoxen, History^ 8. As an example of mutual aid, in one case they helped a man suffering from blindness. "Big Meeting of Arctic Brothers," Fairbanks Daily Times, August 5, 1908.

9. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, My 16, 1913; John G. Price, "The Arctic Brotherhood," Alaska's Magazine 1 (April 1905), 22. Mark Cames wrote that nearly all the fratemal orders were masculine organizations, and shared similar "concerns about gender." Caraes, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America, 14.

10. J. H. Kelly, Arctic Brotherhood Historical Museum, to Arctic Chief and Brothers, February 11, 1902, Arctic Brotherhood-Whitehorse Camp No. 12, Folder 6, Box 1, MSS 3, Yukon Archives, Whitehorse, Yukon; Chealander and White, Official History, 27; Wilcoxen, History, \2,26; "Indoor Sports," The Arctic Brother I (January, 1905), 9.

11. Chealander and White, Official History, 25; Godfrey Chealander, "The Arctic Brotherhood," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (December 1907), 346; Wilcoxen, History, 11. An 1825 treaty divided Russian and British lands at 60-degree north latitude, leaving the boundary unsurveyed and not clearly defined. It was not until the Theodore Rooseveh administration that a tribunal of American and British-Canadian delegates met to begin a plan of surveying and negotiating the boundary. Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 87.

12. "Alaskans Who Are Doing Things," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (June 1907), 335; Arthur Bush, "Canal Morris Leads a Strenuous Life," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 2 (January 1906), 17, 18-19.

13. J. J. Underwood, "A Man of Quiet Force-John E. Chilberg," Sunset, the Pacific Monthly (February 1914), 402-405. Chilberg was one of the directors of a bank and mercantile business in Valdez. Advertisement, "Valdez Bank & Mercantile Co.," The Alaska Prospector &Val(kz News, July 25,1907.

14. Roger D. Abrahams, "The Language of Festivals: Celebrating the Economy," in Celebration: Studies in Festivity cmd Ritual, Victor Turner, ed. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1982), 163; Allen Warren, "Popular Manliness: Baden- Powell, Scouting, and the Development of Manly Character," m Manliness ami Morality: Middle-Class Masculinity in Britain and America, 1800-1940, J. A. Mangan and James Walvin, ed. (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1987), 200, 202; Chealander and White, Official History, 7. Abrahams discussed "objects and actions" in the context of festivals, but I am arguing that th^ can be applied to fratemal symbols and 318 rituals.

15. Cheaiander and White, Official History, 18; Illustration of the A.B. seal, in Wilcoxen, History, front cover.

16. Arctic Brotherhood, Organizational Rules, Arctic Brotherhood-Whitehorse Camp No. 12, Folder 11, Box 1, MSS 3, Yukon Archives, Whitehorse, Yukon, pp. 9-10.

17. E. S. Harrison, "The Arctic Brotherhood," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (December 1908), 236.

18. Wilcoxen, History, 9; Cheaiander and White, Official History, 21. The Arctic Brotherhood building still stands in Skagway, as one of the principle tourist sites. I have seen this mountain in the summer and, with a little imagination, it does indeed like an " AB" on one side. A.B. photographs of this phenomenon appear to have been retouched, however, to enhance the image. See, for example, Cheaiander, "The Arctic Brotherhood," 346.

19. E. Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Trcmsformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modem Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993), 232,292; Richard Hofstadter, Social Darwinism in American Thought, 1860-1915 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1944), 26, 30,35-36,44; Yehoshua Ariel, Individualism and Nationalism in American Ideology (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1964), 341. See also pp. 334-35.

20. Gail Bederman, Manliness & Civilization: A Cultural History of Gender ami Race in the United States, /550-/9/7(Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 171, 192-93; Theodore Roosevelt, "The Strenuous Life," in Theodore Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life: Essays and Addresses (New York: The Century Co., 1902), 1,21; Theodore Roosevelt, "Fellow-feeling as a Political Factor," in Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, 65.

21. Cheaiander and White, Official History, 17; Cheaiander, "The Arctic Brotherhood," 345.

22. Wilcoxen, History, 48.

23. Eric Hobsbawm, "Introduction: Inventing Traditions," in The Invention of Tradition, Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger, eds. (Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 1983,1; David Lowenthal, "Fabricating Heritage," History and Memory 10 (Spring 1998), 11-12; Janis Stout, TIk Journey Narrative in American Literature: Patterns and Departures (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1983), 13-14. A railroad from 319

Skagway to the Yukon Territory, the White Pass and Yukon Railway, was completed in 1899, and a year later "it carried nearly all the trafiSc headed for the Canadian interior." The Chilkoot Trail was abandoned. David Neufeld and Frank Norris, Chilkoot Trail: Heritage Route to the Klondike (Whitehorse, Yukon: Lost Moose, 1996), 147.

24. Sherry Ortner, quoted in Barbara Myerhofi^ "Rites of Passage; Process and Paradox," in Turner, ed.. Celebration, 129; Godfrey and White, Official History, 8; Arctic Brotherhood, Organizational Rules, Arctic Brotherhood-Whitehorse Camp No. 12, Folder 11, Box I, MSS 3, Yukon Archives, pp. 25, 31-32; George T. Williams, "Origin of the Arctic Brotherhood," The Arctic Brother 1 (January, 1905), 4.

25. Chealander and White, Official History, 25. The Canadian A.B. camps gave King Edward VH honorary membership.

26. John Scudder McLain, Alaska and the Klondike (New York: McClure, Phillips, & Co., 1907), 103-106; James Wickersham, Old Yukon: Tales, Trails, and Trials (Washington, D.C.: Washington Law Book Co., 1938), 415; U.S. Congress, Senate, Committee on Territories, Conditions in Alaska, (January 12,1904), Senate Report 282, 58"^ Cong., 2*^ sess., pp. 1,32. McLain was the editor of a Minneapolis newspaper and accompanied the senators on their investigative trip to Alaska.

27. Theodore Roosevelt, "Manhood and Statehood," in Roosevelt, The Strenuous Life, 251,257.

28. In 1907, as one example of Perkins' Alaskan finandal backings, he had 500 shares of stock in the Nome Mining Company. Nome Mining Company, Shareholders Statement, September, 1907, "Correspondence Incoming," Folder 2-17, "Nome Mining Company," Box 2, William Thomas Perkins Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, University of Washington, Seattle, p. 1. Perkins joined with fellow member John Chilberg to serve as officers for the Northern Bank and Trust Company, a Seattle bank that handled "Alaska and other out-of-town business for banks and individuals." Advertisement, Northern Bank and Trust Co., Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (January 1908), n. p. In 1909, Perkins became the Vice President for Alaska of the American Banker's Association. Biographical sketch, WiUiam Thomas Perkins Papers.

29. Chealander and White, Official History, 11; Wilcoxen, History, 43.

30. Wilcoxen, History, 51.

3LIbid,43,5L 320

32. "President Will Aid Us," The Daily Alaskan, May 26, 1903; The Seattle Post- Intelligencer, May 25, 1903.

33. The Mining Journal, December 17, 1904; "Lest Ye Forget!" The Arctic Brother 1 (January 1905), 1. James Wickersham lists this January printing as the camp's only published issue. James Wickersham, A Bibliograpf^ of Alaskan Literature, 1724-1924 (Fairbanks, Alaska: Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, 1927), 2S6.

34. "Lest Ye Forget!," I.

35. The Arctic Brother I (January 1905), 2,3; Williams, "Origin of the Arctic Brotherhood," 4.

36. Chealander and White, Official History, 13.

37. Unlike the territories of Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma, Alaska had no delegate or local legislature. Jeannette Paddock Nichols, Alaska: A History of its Administration, Exploitation, and Industrial Development During its First Half Century Under the Rule of the United States (Cleveland, Ohio: The Arthur H. Clark Co., 1924), 249-251, 261.

38. Valdez Resolution, quoted in Nichols, Alaska, 246. See also pp. 253-55.

39. Chealander and White, Official History, 13.

40. Robert W. Rydell, All the World's a Fair: Visions of Empire at American International Expositions, 1876-1916 (Chicago, Illinois: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 17, 19.

41. Rydell, All the World's a Fair, 3.

42. United States Department of the Interior, The Exhibition of the District ofAlaska at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition, Saint Louis, Missouri, 1904 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Department of the Interior, 1904), vii. A listing of all the Alaska Exhibit collection contents is on pp. 23-55. John G. Brady to Secretary of the Interior, July 4,1904, Roll 10, M430, Interior Department Territorial Papers, Alaska: 1869-1911, Record Group 48, Records of the Secretary of the Interior, National Archives Record Center, Anchorage, Alaska, p. 3.

43. Joseph H. Smhh, "Alaska at St. Louis," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 1 (April 1905), 16; United States Department of the Interior, The Exhibition, 24-25.

44. WUcoxen, MsTo/y, 46. 321

45. Secretary of the Interior, District of Alaska Exhibits at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition, Portland, Oregon, 1905 (Washington, D.C.: Secretary of the Interior, 1905), cover, 18,41-43.

46. Olin D. Wheeler, The Lewis & Clark Exposition, Portland, Oregon, June I to October 15, 1905 (St. Paul, Minnesota: Northern Pacific Railway, 1905), 49; Robert A. Reed, Sights and Scenes at the Lewis and Clark Exposition Portland, Oregon (Portland, Oregon: Robert A. Reed, 1905), n.p.; Union Pacific, The Lewis and Clark Exposition, Portland, Oregon, 1905 (n.p.. Union Pacific, 1905), 58, 61,63-64.

47. Wilcoxen, History, 49; William M. SheflSeld, "Work of the Alaska Club," Alaska- Yukon Magazine 1 (October 1906), 106-107; Chealander and White, Official History, 15.

48. Lloyd W. McDowell, "Alaska and Seattle as Seen at Jamestown," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (October 1907), 183-185.

49. McDowell. "Alaska and Seattle as Seen at Jamestown," 185; Terrence Cole, "Klondike Visions: Dreams of a Promised Land," chap, in. The Alaska Journal, 1986, Terrence Cole, ed. (Anchorage, Alaska: Alaska Northwest Publishing Co., 1986), 87,90, 93. Cole wrote that in early twentieth century, just as during the Klondike Gold Rush, the public associated the names "Klondike" and "Yukon" and "Alaska" as "the same place." He pointed out that "even today the vast majority of Americans do not realize that the Klondike River is actually in Canadian territory." Cole, "Klondike Visions," 87.

50. J. E. Chilberg, "Object of Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 1 (February 1909), 347-348; George A Frykman, "The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 53 (July 1962), 92. Terrence Cole has pointed out the view of some Alaskans that Seatde took full advantage of promoting itself^ overriding Alaska's goals. Western historian John Findlay would agree, believing that Seattle was a pivotal economic center for Alaska, if not also trying to gain control of Alaskan development in early twentieth century. This idea is compelling, and needs more research. My focus of the AYPE is on the Arctic Brotherhood members and other Alaskan promoters, and use of Alaskan imagery. Terrence Cole, "Promoting the Pacific Rim: The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition of 1909," Alaska History 6 (Spring 1991), 26; personal conversation with Professor John Findlay, History Department, University of Washington, Summer 1998.

51. Norman J. Johnston, "The Olmsted Brothers and the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 75 (April 1984), 50; Olmsted Brothers to C.J. Smith, November 5,1906, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, General Correspondence, 1906, Folder 1-6, Ohnsted Brothers Papers, Manuscripts and Archives, University of Washington, Seattle, p. 5; John Olmsted to William M. Sheffield, January 24,1910, 322

Alaska-YukoQ-Pacific Exposition, General Correspondence, 1909-1910, Folder 1-13, Olmsted Brothers Papers, pp. 3-4. It is not apparent which Ohnsted brother wrote this letter dated January 24,1910.1 used John Olinsted's name because other letters around the same time are from John.

52. Frank L. Merrick, "Ground Breaking Ceremonies of Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (July 1907), 415; J. E. Chilberg, "The Organization and Management of the Business of the Alaska Yukon Pacific Exposition of 1909," typed manuscript, dated 1953, Seattle Room, Seattle Public Library, p. 9; Johnston, "The Olmsted Brothers," 56.

53. "OflBcial Design Selected for Fair" Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (August 1907), 508; Katherine G. Morrissey, Mental Territories: Mapping the Inland Empire (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1997), 115. See ^so illustrations on p.116 and the front cover. The significance of using female figures also may be associated with the female as a bearer of gifts, or as an appropriate "hostess" for international relations.

54. The A.Y.P. Daily News, June 1,1909; this first issue was also published as "The Exposition Edition of the Nome Daily Gold Digger" Department of Commerce, Population 1910, Nebraska-Wyoming, Alaska, Hawaii, and Porto Rico, vol. 3, Thirteenth Census of the United States Taken in the Year 1910 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing OflSce, 1913), 1152. The Republican Woman could also denote a figure who promoted political diplomacy but from her proper "sphere" of maintaining the values of the Republic. See, Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Bfill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980).

55. Postcard, "Seattle, the Gateway to Alaska and the Orient," "AYPE" Folder, and Postcard, "Rocking on the beach, BlufiTCity, Alaska," "Alaska-Mining" Folder, both in the Postcard Collection, Special Collections, University of Washington, Seattle.

56. For an example of the AYPE program cover, see the "Official Daily Program," September 4,1909, front cover.

57. Chealander and White, Official History, "Souvenir History of the Order" is part of the subtitle on the cover. Godfrey Chealander, "Arctic Brotherhood Building at the Alaska- Yukon-Pacific Exposition," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 5 (May 1908), 208; "The Northland Fraternal Society," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (December 1908), 169; Chealander, "The Arctic Brotherhood," 347.

58- E. S. Harrison, "Alaska at the Fair," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 8 (July 1909), 240; Lloyd W. McDowell, "Alaska at the Exposition," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (January 1909), 328,329. 323

59. McDowell, "Alaska at the Exposition," 329-330; A. Sauerdo, "Phantom Nugget," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 8 (July 1909), 283.

60. Harrison, "Alaska at the Fair," 244-245.

61. J. E. ChUberg, "Object of Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition," 348; Offidal Ground Plan, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, Souvenir Book of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Official Photographic Fiews (Seattle, Washington: E. P. Charlton & Co., 1909), n.p.

62. Vulcan Iron Works, Meet Me in Seattle 1909, General History, Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition (n.p., 1909), n.p.; "Strike the Pay Streak in 1909," unidentified newspaper clipping, n.d., in Folder, "Newspaper Articles, Re: AYPE," AYPE Boxes, Spedal Collections, University of Washington, Seattle. Waskey referred to his work as a delegate that would begin in December, 1906, so this places the article before that time.

63. Photographs, "The Pay Streak" and "A Pay Streak Medley," in Souvenir Book of the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition: Official Photographic Views (Seattle, Washington: E. P. Charlton and Co., 1909), n.p.; "Thousands Pan Gold at the Gold Camps," A.Y.P. Daily News, June 5,1909; "'Streak' Shows All Aid A.-Y.-P.," A.Y.P. Daily News, June 10, 1909.

64. Photographs, "The Pay Streak," "A Pay Streak Medley," and "The Scenic Railway," in Souvenir Book, n.p.; "Thousands Pan Gold at the Gold Camps,"; "'Streak' Shows All Aid A.-Y.-P."; Advertisement, "Klondike As It Is," A.Y.P. Daily News, June 4, 1909.

65. Fryman, "The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition, 1909," 94, 98; "Phony Gold Being Sold for Real," A.YJ* Daily News, June 9,1909. The quoted words concerning the U.S. Commissioner's observations are those of Fryman.

66. Congressional Record, 61^ Cong., sess. (24 April 1912), p. 5261; Congressional Record 62''Cong., 2"^ sess. (17 April 1912), p. 4936.

67. The New York Times, October 1,1909; "Invitation to be Present at the Initiation to Honorary Degree Membership, President William H. Taft, September 30,1909," Folder, "Memorabilia," AYPE Collection, Archives and Manuscripts, University of Washington, Seattle; "Did an Alaskan Originate Reciprocity?," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (August 1911), 57.

68. The New York Times, October 1, 1909; Clyde A. \filner, n, "National Initiatives," chap, in The O^ord History of the American West, ed. Clyde A. Milner, H, et al. (New York; Oxford University Press, 1994), 191. Department of Commerce, Population 1910, 324

1152. Other groups counted in the 1910 Census were 1,209 Chinese, 913 Japanese, 209 "Negro," and 294 "AU Other." Ibid.

69. New York Times, October 1,1909. Alaskan historian Jeannette Paddock Nichols wrote that the Grand OflBcers of the A.B. realized that they had "overstepped themselves" by granting membership to Taft, because it was against their rules to welcome someone into the order while physically outside of Alaska. At the same time, realizing that his speech had upset the A.B. members, Taft offered to renounce his A3, title. Nichols, Alaska, 332.

70. The Arctic Brother 1 (January 1905), 7; WB. Hoggatt to President Theodore Roosevelt, November 30,1906, in Theodore Roosevelt, Needs of Alaska in Matters of Legislation and Government, Message from the President of the United States, U. S. Congress, Senate, Senate Document No. 14, 59"* Cong., 2"* Sess., December 5,1906, p. 2; Walter E. Clark, "Cale Says Real Alaskans Favor Home Rule Bill," The Seattle Post Intelligencer, April 2,1908. All quotations of Hoggatt are paraphrased by reporter Walter Clark. Hoggatt owned gold lode operations north of Juneau and was therefore part of the group of property owners and business interests still opposed to territorial government on the grounds that local legislators would look to industry as a source of taxable revenue, as well as possibly impose new regulations. The Guggenheim family also opposed home rule for similar reasons. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 131,144.

71."Report of the Committee on Alaska Mining Laws," Report ofProceedings of the American Mining Congress, Thirteenth Annual Session, Los Angeles, California, September 26-October 1,1910 (Denver, Colorado; American \Cning Congress [AMC], 1910), 79; George Wickersham, Seattle Post-Intelligencer, quoted in, "Permanent Population," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 10 (November 1911), 356; Nichols, Alaska, 361. The Alaska AMC in 1911 endorsed "some form of local self-government" for Alaska. Falcon Joslin, "Resolution No. 13," Report of Proceedings of the American Mining Congress, Fourteenth Annual Session, Chicago, Illinois, October 24-28,19II (Denver, Colorado; AMC, 1911), 73. George Wickersham and the Alaskan Delegate, James Wickersham, were distantly related, although not close enough to share views on home rule. Evangeline Atwood, Frontier Politics: Alaska's James Wickersham (Portland, Oregon; Binford & Mort, 1979), 2.

72. E. S. Harrison, "Go North Young Man," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 5 (March 1908), 57; "Of Highest Importance," The Mining Journal, February 9,1901; Henry W. Clark, History of Alas^ (New York: The Macmillian Co., 1930), 163-66; Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 69, 98. Ernest Gruening specified that, out of the imported fishing industry laborers, the majority were whites, but the remaining numbers included those of Chinese, Japanese, Filipino and Mexican extraction. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 211.

73. E. S. Harrison, Industrial Progress in Alaska (n.p., 1909), 26. 325

74. Advertisement, "C. L. Morris Has the Largest and Best Equipment in Alaska for all Kinds of Contract Work," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 3 (May 1907), 273; Terrence Cole, "Home of the Arctic Club: The Alaska and Arctic Buildings in Seattie," The Alaska Journal 15 (Winter 1985), 9-11.

75. Maurice Leehey to Skagway Daily Alaskan, October 6,1911, Folder 1-13, "Correspondence Incoming, Arctic Club, Box 1, William Thomas Perkins Papers, p. 1; Cole, "Home of the Arctic Club," 11; Arctic Club Minutes, November 11,1911, "Minutes, 1910-59," Box 1, Arctic Club Records, Manuscripts and Archives, University of Washington, Seattle.

76. "The Arctic Club," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (February 1909), 445-46; Arctic Club By-laws, December 5, 1910, "Minutes, 1910-59, Box 1, Arctic Club Records; Arctic Club Minutes, November 14,1910, "Minutes, 1910-59," Box 1, Arctic Club Records. It was not until December of 1910 that the club decided that "lady members and members' families" could be admitted. Arctic Club Minutes, December 23,1910, "Minutes, 1910- 59," Box 1, Arctic Club Records. Women were still restricted from the billiard room, and had limited hours elsewhere. Arctic Club By-laws, December 5,1910, "Minutes, 1910- 59," Box 1, Arctic Club Records.

77. Naske, An Interpretative History, 28.

78. "The Northland Fraternal Society," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 7 (December 1908), 167. Also known as "Sourdough Bill," William Sulzer began visiting Alaska on a regular basis after 1893. In 1899, while a senator, he acquired a interest in some copper mine claims on the southern end of Prince of Wales Island. From this venture, William Sulzer formed the Alaska Industrial Company. His brother Charles began helping to run the operation after 1902, but William Sulzer returned frequently to check on the mine. The Jumbo copper mine expanded and the town of Sulzer was bom. By 1908, copper ore production "averaged a thousand tons a month." Patricia Roppel, "Sulzer," Alaska Journal 3 (Winter 1973) 41-43,46.With previous legal experience in Illinois and Tacoma, Washington, James Wickersham came to Alaska to work as a government-appointed U.S. District Judge (in Nome, Eagle, Fairbanks, and Valdez). In 1907 he turned to private practice in Fairbanks. He owned several mining operations, employing others to manage them Evangeline Atwood and Robert DeArmond, ffTio's Who in Alaskan Politics: A Biogrcphical Dictionary of Alaskan Political Personalities, 1884-1974 (Portiand, Oregon: Binford & Mort, 1977), 106; Atwood, Frontier Politics, 121, 232.

79. ex. Andrews, "Why Alaska Has Troubles," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (August 1911), 11-13. Similar to coal land laws, an act (in 1898) extended homestead laws to Alaska, provided the properties were on surveyed lands. Andrews explained that because "there were no surveys in Alaska of public lands the only lands that could be taken were 326 those taken under additional homestead scrip or other land scrip which called for lands 'surveyed or unsurveyed.'" In 1903 the law was amended to permit entry of unsurveyed lands, but the prospective settler had to pay to survey the land. A surveyed ranged between $150 to $500. Andrews, "Why Alaska Has Troubles," 11-13; U.S. Congress, Senate, Conditions in Alaska, Report of Subcommittee of Committee on Territories Appointed to Investigate Conditions in Alaska, 58"' Cong., sess.. Senate Report 282, January 12,1904, various pages.

80. "An Alaskan," "President Does Not Favor Home Rule," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 8 (September/October 1909), 470; Congressional Record, Cong., 2"^ sess. (24 April 1912), pp. 5269-5283.

81. Walter E. Clark, "Cale Says Real Alaskans Favor Home Rule Bill," The Seattle Post Intelligencer, April 2, 1908. Quote is that of Waiter Clark, the news reporter, and not Cale. Congressional Record, 61" Cong., 3"* sess. (14 January 1911), pp. 916-917; WJ. Beers, Jr., "The Government of Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 4 (January 1908), 373; Congressional Record, 62'*' Cong., 1"^ sess. (17 April 1912), p. 4940.

82. Beers, "The Government of Alaska," 373; "Sulzer's Alaskan Plans," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (October 1911), 208. While serving as a U.S. District Court Judge in Alaska, James Wickersham had devised an early plan to divide up the region. He recommended dividing up Alaska into four territories; the territory of Alaska, with a capital in Valdez; a territory of Seward, with a capital in Nome; the territory of Sitka, with a capital in Juneau; and the territory of Tanana, with a capital in Rampart or Eagle City. James Wickersham, Alaska: Its Resources, Present Condition and Needed Legislation (Tacoma, Washington: Allen & Lambom, 1902), 2,14-16.

83. Congressional Record, 61" Cong., 3"* sess. (14 January 1911), pp. 916-917; Congressional Record, 62'"' Cong., 2'"' sess. (24 April 1912), 5283. Italics are mine.

84. Congressional Record, 61" Cong. 2'*' sess. (16 June 1910), pp. 8344-45; James A. Wickersham, Diary, January 16,1910, Microfilm, Alaska Division of State Libraries, Juneau, Alaska; James Wickersham, "The Forty-Ninth Star," Collier's 45 (August 6, 1910), 17; "Mr. Taft on Home Rule," North Star (Cordova), n.d., quoted in Congressional Record 62'*' Cong., 2'*' sess. (24 April 1912), p. 5264; Congressional Record, 62'*' Cong., sess. (17 April 1912), 4951.

85. "Why Should Alaskans Not Govern Themselves?," Seattle Times, n.d., quoted in Congressional Record, 62'"' Cong., 2'"' sess. (24 April 1912), p. 5263; "An Alaskan," "President Does Not Favor Home Rule," 470. 327

86. "Falcon Joslin Before the House Committee on Territories," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 9 (May 1910), 364.

87. "An Alaskan," "President Does Not Favor Home Rule," 470.

88. Congressional Record, 61" Cong., 2™* sess. (16 June 1910), pp. 8340-41.

89. Ibid, p. 8341. Wickersham's speech on home rule received applause.

90. Congressional Record, 62°^ Cong., sess. (24 April 1912), p. 5268.

91. "Tail's Ambition is Alaska's Hope," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (August 1911), 58; Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 94. Another editorial specified that Taft wanted to "improve his standing" not only with Alaskans but also Washington residents. "In Line for Home Rule," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (October 1911), 203-204. Taft explained that, although he still felt a commission form of government most appropriate, he realized that such a plan had not "met general approval." He was willing "to make a concession so that we may have a partial elective and partial appointive government in Alaska." "President Discusses Alaska," Alaska-Yukon Magazine 12 (November 1911), 296.

92. Clark, History of Alaska, 134; Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 95; Gruening, The State of Alaska, 151. Gruening explained that the Alaskan legislature did have a limited power to tax the fisheries, although the canned-salmon industry managed to influence the legislation and keep the regulation and management of fisheries under federal control. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 152.

93. John Roan to American Mining Congress, September 30,1909, in Report of Proceeding of the American Mining Congress, Twelfth Annual Session, Gol(^eld, Nevada, Sept. 27-Oct. 2,1909 (Denver, Colorado: AMC, 1909), 43-44. The Miner's Association also requested that the AMC send Taft a similar appeal. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 160-163. This first legislative session also passed laws giving Alaskan women the right to vote, providing aid to schools, and establishing old-age pensions. Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 96.

94. James Wickersham related that the Alaskan census was taken in December of 1909 when "firom twenty to twenty-five percent" of the white population was attending the AYPE. According to Wickersham, the census was taken against protests of Alaskans. Nichols, Alaska, 355. The Census compilers, however, were aware of such complaints and claimed to have varied their census-taldng in Alaska by time of year to avoid inclement weather, and to have made "the systematic effort on the part of the agents to secure the information for people known to be outside." Department of Commerce, "Alaska; Number of Inhabitants an Composition and Characteristics of the Population," in 328

Population 1910, 1131. See also p. 1127.

95. President Harding, New York Times, July 28, 1923, quoted in Naske, An Interpretative History, 42; Naske, An Interpretative History, 41-43,48, 53. James Wickersham introduced a bill in 1916, asking for a full territorial government. Other bills followed by other delegates. Attempts were made to present bills to Congress to at least make the position of governor elective, to no avail. Alaskans continued to hope that they would gain more political self-determination, but statehood did not emerge as a formidable issue again until the 1940s. Congressional Record, Appendix, 64th Cong., 1st sess., (July 25, 1916), 1518-23.

96. Gruening, The State of Alaska, 227,291,306; Naske, An Interpretative History, 61, 74, 85-93,153. The quotation concerning Ickes is paraphrased by Naske.

97. Harrison, Industrial Progress in Alaska, front cover. Leo Marx is associated with the notion of nineteenth-centuiy scenes incorporating the railroad into pastoral landscapes. Leo Marx, Vie Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (London; Oxford University Press, 1964). There were around a dozen dredges operating in Alaska in 1909, and 36 by 1917. In addition, hydraulic mining had been used as a method of Northern placer mining since the Klondike Gold Rush. Thus, image makers could have used them as an accurate reflection of Alaskan mining development. Clark C. Spence, The Northern Gold Fleet: Twentieth-Century Gold Dredging in Alaska (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996), 11.

98. Duane A. Smith, Mining America: The Industry and the Environment, 1800-1980 (Niwot, Colorado; University Press of Colorado, 1993), 67-74,90-92. 329

CHAPTER 6

CONCLUSION: ALASJCA PROSPECTS

Conclusions

Mining regions were composed of two concurrent, or dual-extractive landscapes; a material or physical landscape where minerals were extracted; and a perceptual or mental landscape from which images were extracted and refined. Prospectors played a central ideological role and, to a certain extent, a material role in these dual spheres. In the nud-

nineteenth century, the prospector as a distinct social and economic type came out of this

material landscape. This Western character, however, was simultaneously a mythical

figure and a real person. The actual mineral seeker roamed the West, while the figure of

legend became a vehicle on which to attach American cultural, economic, legal and

political ideals of the individual.^

Various nineteenth-century groups and individuals (none of them mineral seekers)

used this seemingly innocuous figure to deploy their own messages, cover up their own

intentions, and reach their own goals. Those who supported mining applied the yeoman

ideal to the mining landscape. Comparing the miner to the romanticized yeoman was, in a

sense, a public relations move to make the mining landscape more acceptable to those who

viewed agriculture as regenerative, and mining as destructive. Calling mineral seekers

land owners made them appear to be responsible and dedicated American citizens, not

irresponsible self-seekers. Republicanism could then expand into remote western regions. 330

U.S. Senators employed this courageous and enduring figure to enact the legal means through which the mining industry could obtain mineral resources fi'om public lands.

Writers of fiction like Bret Harte had a firesh subject for their imaginations, and aging

Americans had a heroic symbol for their revisionist pioneer memories. Shaky financial ventures, publishing houses, transportation companies and suppliers had an icon to attract and persuade the consuming public during mineral rushes.

In early twentieth-century Alaska, this pattern continued. In the first two decades, the prospector~as a living person and as an image-aaed out the economic and political struggles of early twentieth-century Alaska. Ideals and images developed through the nineteenth century were applied to early twentieth-century circumstances. The lingua franca of individualism became a technique to stake a rhetorical claim for real resources and for home rule. Invocation of the figure was central to debates over natural resource use and land use policy, and over political self-rule. The actual prospector was neither the image maker nor always part of the desired end. Indeed, these image-makers who concentrated on prospectors and individual placer miners fi-equently wanted an outcome that was quite different firom images they projected. Industrial interests, for example, did not want a landscape dotted with egalitarian small mines. Instead, the prospector as individual was mobilized both as a real life labor force as well as a rhetorical image in the service of various corporate visions for Alaskan industrial and regional development.'

Did the use of this imagery have real consequences? Did beliefs shape events? What is apparent is that everyone involved with prospector images-including the mineral 331 seekers-believed that Ideals could lead to material outcomes. Image-makers believed that they could employ ideals to get specific material results, whether through a straight­ forward appeal, or by covering up certain material realities, or by promising specific material ends that never existed in the first place. The mining industry, federal government officials, and Alaskan promoters used ideals and miages to draw mineral seekers northward. Speakers used images to win struggles on the floors of Congress. Those who argued for and against self-government and coal land policy used images for their material-based goals. The trailblazer image served to conceal the fact that the federal government, mining industry, and promoters directed the mineral seeker. Promoters used the pastoral figure to obscure the realities of dredging and hydraulicking.

Images were relatively fluid. One could transfer images fi'om their nineteenth-century origins in precious metals and onto other ideological platforms, such as with the debates over Alaskan coal fields. The Arctic Brotherhood appropriated prospector ideals to create their own identity; and then they used their own invented and idealized identity as a means to communicate on the level of politics. It is not clear, however, if images could be used in a reflective manner, Theodore Roosevelt employed masculine ideals to create his own political persona, but Roosevelt may have not been as impressed with others (like the

Arctic Brotherhood) emulating his persona to seek policy changes.

Imagery did have material consequences. Mineral seekers did not travel all the way to remote areas in the Alaskan interior because they felt that there was no possibility of ideals not living up to their material ends. They came to Alaska, hoping for wealth and success. 332 for new beginnings, and to become self-made men (and self-made women, and self-made families). Conversely, portraying the prospector as the central regional figure became an impediment toward the material goal of seeking full self-government. The pervasive images of wandering mineral seekers as impermanent citizens conflicted with the portrayal of Alaskans as brave pioneering civilizers.

The actual mineral seeker was never~nor could ever be-completely independent.

Alaska was not a place for poor men, nor was it a completely "fi-ee" life. "Self- sufiSciency" needed the assistance of the mineral markets, supply centers, and nearby entrepreneurial and employment opportunities. Nor did the corporations and business associations involved in Alaskan development want a mineral seeker who was entirely independent or individualistic. These groups were very selective about whom they wanted as settlers. No one wanted Immigrants who were unwilling to work hard physically or unwilling to fit into the economic goals of an industrial landscape. Mining industry, federal government agencies, and Alaskan promoters wanted a citizen who would find mines but then become a wage worker. Home-rulers wanted a citizen who would settle down and populate the territory.

The federal government and the mining industry were more than willing to diverge fi'om individualism if it fit their desired material goals. These groups accepted a modified laissez faire policy with the leasing of coal lands. And, as image-makers, they could just as readily argue on an ideal level against the individual when the ideal of the individual worked against their own goals. Those against Alaskan mine labor unions used the image 333 of the transitory miner, in this case as an ever-evolving figure of economic advancement who would move from laborer to mine owner and thus need not union support. Those who wanted large-scale coal leasing argued that the mineral seeker was inefficient and outdated. Those who did not want home rule (nor to pay for home rule) argued that the wandering prospector was too transient for settlement.

Prospectors, then, were never entirely independent individuals, while those upholding and using prospector images and ideals often had goals at odds with individuaUsm as applied to the prospector. This ideology of individualism was purposely propagated in the face of reality that contradicted it. The ideological mining landscape became less a fimction of fact than a shared set of values, beliefs, and desires. In the end, much of what the prospector has represented since the ISSOs had little to do with actual experiences of mineral seekers.

If the ideals were false, then why were they employed, and why were they apparently accepted? Individuality itself was an ideal, and individualism has been one of the strongest of American myths. Scholar Charles Mitchell writes that there were "few people" who wanted "to be seen as opposing the most dominant trait in our national character." The greatest opposition to individualism came only when the individual had threatened other cherished American values; one example would be when environmental destruction from hydraulic mining impeded individual opportunities for others?

It is the potency of the ideal of the individual that has made the prospector such a useful and (at times) effective ideological tool for image-makers. As policy analysts Carl 334

Mayer and George Riley observe, since the nineteenth century the "slightest change" in

American mining policy "was assailed as an encroachment on the special rights of miners." One can see the ideological clout of the "individual rights" of the mineral seeker in the public debates over the 1872 Mining Law. These are ideological battles that have continued to the present. Similar to the Alaskan coal land debates, the prospector has served as a symbol of private property rights, to further the economic interest of larger mining concerns. As a case in point, Patricia Nelson Limerick mentions late twentieth- century comments by Western senators. Speaking on debates over reforming the 1872

Mining Law, Wyoming Senator Malcohn Wallop argued that reforms "'would really hurt the small prospector, and believe me, there are a lot of them out there.'" Wyoming Senator

Alan Simpson remarked that reforms were '"not about money. We are defending our

Western heritage.'"''

The prospector has also persevered and endured on an ideological level because this figure has been able to carry different meanings for different people. It was the prospector's "inherently elusive quality" that allowed for diversity of interpretation.

Historian Mary Ann Clawson has written that the "power of a cultural product may depend precisely on its ability to engage people at different levels of meaning." In his study on image transference and usage, Kenneth Boulding explains that a public image produces a fluid "transcript" that is handed down from generation to generation; images in this transcript can adapt to current needs while retaining overall "sameness" through time.

The relatively unchanging figure of a man bent down before a stream panning gold has 335 managed to carry an anay of ideals over time. Thus the same icon of the mineral seeker could simultaneously represent equal individual rights, a desire to accrue great wealth, self-government, a laissez faire market, a masculine test in nature, and a transient and ineflBcient character/

But these images were also problematic; ±e perceptual, or image-extractive mining landscape, continued well beyond the last mining operations in an area and affected the ways in which people of subsequent generations perceived the mining regions and, in particular, the history of mining. The selective perceptual "extraction," or memorialization and remembrance of material aspects of nineteenth-century mining, has created romantic and simplified notions of the mining past, conveniently cutting off diese images at the end of the boom eras and denying the complexity of the nineteenth-century mining regions, as well as the continuation of mining operations in these regions into the twentieth century.

In Alaska, as historian Stephen Haycox explains, the "popular imagining" focused on the

"the freedom and tenacity of the lone sourdough" even though most mining was

"collective in character and corporate in organization." Tliis persistent image deterred

American policy makers and the public from viewing Alaska as a place of extensive economic development.^

One ideal that all parties seemed to treat as a material certainty was that the actual prospector served as the means for facilitating development. The prospector as an ideal was a "natiiral" part of the political economy, as the basis of the entire mining industry.

Nfinerai developers, federal government officials, and regional promoters assumed that the 336 mineral discoveries of prospectors were automatically followed by large amounts of capital and extensive development, and then succeeded by settlement. Everyone from the federal government to Alaskan promoters to mineral seekers were operating on nineteenth-century beliefs in growth and development; in Alaska, as Ken Coates notes,

"Americans assumed that the frontier meant wealth and opportunity and acted on that assumption even when faced with contrary evidence." Mineral seekers and others in

Alaska would find wealth, and wealth would create development. The nineteenth-century ideology of such a natural course of development in mining simply did not work in early twentieth-century Alaska where great physical distances, limited transportation, and high costs impeded progress.^

The political economy, then, had greater influence in Alaska than any ideals or activities of the working prospector had on the political economy. Alaskans welcomed any expansion of infrastructure and capital, because the final outcome was expected to be competition and resulting lower prices for equipment, supplies, and transportation, ultimately benefitting industry as well as Alaskan settlement. It was difficult, however, to attract capital if a mining district did not yet have a reputation as a mineral-rich area; this criteria included proof that existing mining operations were actively producing ore. But it remained a vicious circle of interdependence; capital remained reluctant because of a lack of an economic infirastructure; lack of capital and competition resulted in high transportation and supply costs; high costs and limited development created fewer opportunities for wage work and thus fewer prospectors and others to find minerals, and 337 so forth. The number of mining companies and amount of outside capital also fluctuated with the overall economy, mineral prices, and transportation and supply costs. Minerals did measure economic progress of a region, as shown by the United States Geological

Survey reports that included mineral production amounts. At the same time, mines had limited life spans and thus could place limitations on the economic progress of a particular location dependent on mining. Perhaps the greatest factor in western regional development is the fact that mining has never been rooted in economic stability. Unlike agriculture, depleted minerals could not be regrown or recreated. Changing technology such as new techniques to process lower grades of mineral ore helped to extend mines, and mining regions could take on new values as tourist sites (and use the memory of mining as a means to support the local economy); but, beyond these cases, mining has been part of the boom-and-bust extractive industries of the American West, and not the most dependable basis for regional growth.^

Epilogue: The Individual Prevails

Regardless of the material realities, however, many of the ideals of the individual mineral seeker remained both persuasive and pervasive in Alaska. This bearded figure lost its appeal as a political tool, but those involved in Alaskan growth and development continued to use images and ideals through the twentieth century. Although non-Alaskan senators like Malcolm Wallop employed the prospector in larger U.S. mining law debates, the mineral seeker declined as a rhetorical figure in Congressional discussions of Alaska. 338

Having a local political voice in the Alaska territorial legislature-albeit limited-decreased a need to work for change in U.S. Congress. Congressional issues after the establishment of the Alaskan Territorial Government (1912) and of coal leasing (1914) turned to the

Alaskan fishing industry. The prospector did not show up in these debates, suggesting that the image of the prospector did not have the ideological reach to be effective in other

natural resource questions. More importantly, during World War I, Alaskan mining decreased. In the 1920s mining became secondary to the fisheries. N'fining "declined

steadily" in the 1920s, and in 1933 hit the "lowest point since 1904."'

Another important group that had used imagery on a larger level declined in numbers.

As the Seattle Times reported, the Arctic Brotherhood had "been dying for years," and in

1927 the last camp in Wrangell, Alaska, disbanded. This decline was part of a larger trend.

Mark Cames writes that ftatemalism in the United States generally had decreased by the

1930s. A new generation of younger men abandoned "the individualistic and competitive

norms that had prevailed during the nineteenth century," and masculinity lost its strength

as women gained more economic and social power.

Furthermore, the overall mining industry was moving toward larger low-grade mining

operations firom known ore-bearing areas, or deeper subsurface operations. Rock and

mineral outcroppings exposed above the surface or leaving telltale signs such as mineral

staining and paucity of plant growth had made for easier discoveries, but those working in

the mining industry realized that, in order to keep up with a continual demand for

minerals, particularly during and after World War I, subsurface exploration and developing 339 mines at greater depths would be a necessary means to finding future ore bodies.

Specialized positions such as mining geologists and engineers took over the role of systematic exploration, using technology fi'om World War I."

Some contemporary observers noted that as more Alaskan locations had been combed over by prospectors for the obvious outcrops of minerals, it was becoming increasingly hard to prospect. Not only did one need "time, skill, and money," but "in the already prospected regions of Alaska there [were] no easily recognized surface indications of large bodies of primary ore." In the mid 1920s Alaska experienced, as Alaskan historian Ernest

Gruening explains, an "increasing transformation of much individual and small-placer mining into the big business of hydraulicking and dredging-by 1929, 71 per cent of

Alaska's placer gold was extracted by dredges."'^

Reflecting these changes in the overall mining industry and in Alaska, federal government agencies overseeing mining decreased their mvolvement in Alaska. President

Calvin Coolidge remarked that federal government money expended in Alaska seemed to be "'far out of proportion to the number of its inhabitants and the amount of production.'"

He worked to reduce appropriations. The Bureau of Mines closed the Fairbanks

Experimental Station in 1924 "to comply with the demand for reduced expenditures by the

Federal Government." The United States Geological Survey had an annual figure for

Alaska of $100,000 fi-om 1914 to 1918, then decreased appropriations for the next seven years. By 1926 the budget was only $72,000; and, in 1927, $50,000. Gruening writes that

"the entire Alaskan appropriation for the Geological Surv^ narrowly escaped elimination 340 in the closing days of the Hoover administration."'^

United States Geological Survey director George Otis Smith reflected the deaeased attention toward the mineral seeker. This figure was not part of the new "fi-ontier."

Speaking before a Mining Congress meeting in 1926, he stated that "the days of the pathfinder were not passed," but that a "new West called for the opening of new trails."

"The fi-ontier," he continued, "was industrial, not geographic." There was no mention of a prospector in this fi-ontier. The Interior Department's view became a complete reversal

&om the early twentieth century, where this governmental agency had played the role fomenting the individual initiative of mineral seekers. In the 1920s they instead used the rhetoric of Individual initiative to justify decreased federal involvement. Officials rationalized their cuts in funding by explaining that government involvement had been detrimental. In 1925, the Secretary of the Interior reported that Congress should study whether or not the federal government should continue overseeing Alaskan resources. He stated that "'without the inspiration of self-government or fireedom of local initiative, opportunity for expansion has been curtailed by bureau officials made hesitant by limited authority.'""

Encouragement for the mineral seeker did not disappear, but stayed at a local level, with reduced federal support. The territorial government picked up this responsibility, continuing the "ideal" or expectation that the prospector provide the basis for growth and development. The Alaska Territory believed that mining was still a key resource to encourage settlement. Territorial Mine Inspector B. D. Stewart remarked in his 1921 341 report that "thorough and efiScient prospecting forms the very foundation of the continued and healthy growth of the mining industry of any country." The Bureau of Mines gave their mineral testing equipment to the Alaska College of Agriculture and Mines. This newly-formed college took over the assay work of the Bureau of Mines. They also

provided courses for prospectors. The Alaska Territorial Government conducted safety

mine investigations, and also provided assay tests and technical advice to mineral seekers."

High costs and limited transportation continued to impede prospecting. In response,

the Alaska Territorial Legislature established the Alaska's Aid Act in 1927. The plan was

to "grubstake" prospectors by providing them with travel funds of $150 per year, along

with "ofBdal advice and guidance." Like the federal government and others had done

before, this "advice" included directing them toward certain locations. Territonai records

show that mineral seekers in 1920s Alaska were just as adaptable to varying terrain and to

modem technology. As B. D. Stewart related, transportation methods included the older

"'necking' a sled" (pulling a snow sled by one's neck, without a dog), back-packing, dog-

team sledding, horse teams, and poling boats; but travel now included "river boats with

outboard motors" and "the use of one of the most up-to-date models of airplane." A

"number of resident Alaskans of the younger generation" had "successMy undertaken the

re-sluicing of old placer dumps." They also searched for minerals other than gold.

Program enrollees in 1932, for example, searched for the mineral witherite. Overall,

however, the Territory did not benefit greatly through this assistance. By 1929, 149 342 prospectors had received aid, prospecting in 107 locations; only one discovery, however, was of "possible importance." The Territorial Legislative session of 1931 made the last appropriations, for 1931-32, which supported the last lOS prospectors in the program.'^

The territorial governor's ofSce published informational pamphlets on Alaska to try to promote a more modem portrayal. This office declared that the "Alaska of today" was not the "Alaska of the Klondike Gold Rush," and towns of the rush era were replaced by permanent dwellings. The pamphlet complained that "whenever a fiction writer desires to give his story about Alaska local color he fills it with gunmen, blizzards, dogteams, dancehalls and their women, and throws in all the wUd and woolly imaginative touches he thinks necessary." Yet these same promoters perpetuated an image of Alaska as a place of individual fi-eedom. Alaska needed practical-minded settlers, and "the restoration of individual initiative and the revival of the pioneer spirit." Alaskan promoters still appealed to the "poor man." "In truth," the pamphlet continued, "life in Alaska is similar to life in any other part of the United States, with the distinction, however, that the poor man has more independence in the northern territory, can earn more money, as a rule, and has better chances for advancement. The man with little capital or with great capital will find in Alaska good opportunities for investment."^^

But it was a changed world. Alaskan promoters worked to attract a new generation of prospectors by assuring them that they had to endure few hardships. Near Juneau, there were "new fields of promise for the trained prospector" but, the promoters assured, all the recent locations of discoveries were "easily accessible by small boats and prospectors 343 would have to give less time to transportation problems than is usually is the case in newly discovered mineral fields." The basic economic framework, however, remained the same; mineral seekers would sell their prospects to large mining enterprises, and work as their wage labor. Prospectors who made "Juneau their headquarters" had the "advantage of being in the neighborhood of large mining organizations which are on the outlook for new properties all the time." These same companies always had "employment for skilled miners and prospectors, so that it would be an easy matter for a prospector at any time to secure work at wages which would enable him to replem'sh his grubstake and thus permit further prospecting and development." These 1920 promoters also were appealing to a type of prospector that would make a good settler. Not only were there few hardships, but all the amenities of civilization were nearby. "There is no place in the United States that offers more desirable residence to men, single or with families, who desire to follow the prospecting and mining game..Xiving conditions are very satisfactory and houses can be secured at reasonable rentals. The schools are the very best and churches are numerous," and there were "two good theaters and reCTeation halls without number."'^

The next fifty years showed similar patterns. The territorial and then state government continued to support the independent mineral seeker in hopes that a mineral discovery would aid the Alaskan mining industry. Meanwhile, large mining operations prevailed, but did not lead to widespread economic development or settlement. Prospectors continued to come to Alaska, but never in great numbers. They remained dependent on the federal government and the economic market for their individualistic opportunities. The federal 344 government and the market place controlled the price of gold and other minerals, and thus the degree of self-suf5ciency that could be attained through prospecting and placer mining.

The Depression in the early 1930s revealed that, once again, the prospector was not independent, but depended upon the federal government to "blaze the trail" for the mineral seeker. Writers worried over the loss of individualism and self-reliance in the face of the

Great Depression. The philosophy behind Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal was that both pioneering and homesteading were over but, as historian David Wrobel notes, federal government assistance and "a stronger community ethic" could secure "a higher individualism." In a presidential order, Rooseveh increased gold prices from $20.67 an ounce in 1932 to $35.00 in 1934. Under the Gold Act of 1934, small-scale gold miners could sell their gold to licensed "bullion buyers."

At the same time, however, the federal government did not encourage mineral seeking in Alaska. The high costs in Alaska were an extra burden to the unemployed in an ah'eady severely strained economic climate. A Works Progress Administration book on gold mining and prospecting did not include Alaska. United States Geological Survey official

Philip Smith warned in 1936 not to come to Alaska, and suggested that Alaska had changed;

The lack of employment throughout many parts of the States proper and the glamour that distance usually gives have induced increasing numbers to look to Alaska as an outlet for their activities, and some have gone there to try their fortunes. It should be realized, however, that for more than a third of a century hardy pioneers, who are at least somewhat experienced in mining, have toiled over 345

most of the more accessible parts of Alaslca. A novice should therefore be warned that much more is required in finding a workable deposit than a mere desire for wealth, and that the chances of finding bonanza deposits that merely await the summons of the newcomer to disclose their treasures are extremely poor.

The Depression redefined "hardship." Hardship was no longer a positive masculine quality, nor a characteristic to fall back on-but an impediment. Government ofQcials encouraged large-scale development in Alaska. Smith stated that there were "extensive areas" where

"large, well-organized, and well-managed companies will find placers that can be mined profitable for many years.

The territory, on the other hand, continued to help prospectors. The Territorial Mines

Commissioner B. D. Stewart noted in 1936 that mining work had ""been largely confined to properties already in operation and there [was] a distressing lack of new finds in new fields, due to insufficient prospecting.'" The University of Alaska offered "the short mining course" at the "larger coast towns." These classes, funded by the Alaska Legislature, were fi-ee. ISO attended classes in Ketchikan in the winter of 1935; 250 enrolled in Juneau.

Additionally, "anangements were made" for Civilian Conservation Corps camps to take the classes, "and one hundred twenty-two enrollments of such men indicated the interest in these organizations." In addition, the University broadcast through area radio stations "a series of instructive talks on fundamentals of mining and prospecting."'^

As historian Terrence Cole writes, due to the high gold prices Alaskan gold production "rose to record levels between 1938 and I94I." In 1940, as before, "the bulk of Alaska's gold production came fi-om nearly 50 floating dredges." In 1942, however, the 346 federal government "oflScially declared gold mining in the United States to be a nonessential industry and ordered most gold mines to shut down their operations." The

War Production Board closed gold mines with Limitation Order L-208. Alaskan mining and prospecting declined during the war. As Stephen Haycox explains, as in World War I

"the wage was more important to most laborers than the place," and many left Alaska for better wage opportunities elsewhere.-

Mine Inspector Stewart reported again in 1944 that "the demand for mining properties in the Territory now far exceeds the number of proved deposits available." He recommended that "efforts should be directed toward acquiring and disseminating knowledge of these non-metallic [industrial] metals...the existence of commercial deposits will be the deciding factor in the possible establishment of new industries to produce materials for local consumption thus creating a more stable economy." The Territorial

Department of Mines and (after statehood in 19S9) the Division of Mines and Minerals

"maintained assay offices and [gave] techm'cal assistance to prospectors." They emphasized needed minerals. During the Cold War, Alaska, like other Western states, turned to looking for radioactive ores like uranium. The Department of Mines conducted

&ee assay tests to "bona fide prospectors and miners," as well as "numerous geiger counter tests and demonstrations." The 19SS Territorial Legislature created a program to provide rental equipment to prospectors. Equipment included diamond core drills, Geiger counters, Nfineralights, and a gasoline jack hammer. In 19S7, the Alaska Territorial

Legislature created a Prospector Assistance Program, instituted in 1958.^ 347

Independent prospectors searched for radioactive minerals, as well as iron, molybdenum, copper, and nickel deposits. An overall poor response, however, was

"indicative of the small interest in M-time independent prospecting in Alaska." The report also complained that, "of the independent prospeaors, only a relative handful of serious professionals are active for a significant period of time each summer. A large number of the 'weekend' variety make short trips, but many of these have scant prospecting knowledge and experience." The 1961 report reiterated that the professional prospector was "becoming mcreasingly rare." The author attributed this trend to the changing

"economics and methods of exploration and mining," and stated that "selective company- financed exploration ventures have to a great extent replaced the efforts of a large number of individual prospectors as a means of mine finding." The Department of Mines instituted another Prospector Assistance Program in 1963, but interest remained low. In 1969, for example, only twenty-five individuals requested information, with fifteen applicants, and

with only eleven approved.^*

In 1967 the federal government removed the fixed standard of gold. Gold prices

fluctuated on a firee market and "inflated dollars" helped to raise the price of gold to $400

an ounce by the 1980s. This economic change brought a new influx of American citizens

to Alaska to make their fortune and to escape wage labor and modem life in a perceived

land of the individual. This group was solely interested in finding gold for themselves, not

in mineral-seeking for other needed minerals.^

The prospector image as a representation of individualism, however, had another 348 mechanism or conduit of image transference through the twentieth century. After World

War I, Alaskan promoters moved to tourism as another strategy to attract settlement and capital. Alaskans who promoted tourism expected a natural scenario; if they could attract outsiders to visit Alaska, these visitors would see Alaska for what it was, and be induced to stay or to invest capital in business enterprises. The result would be an increased population, a productive regional economy, and eventual national recognition of statehood. As one editorial in 1924 explained, "as the number of tourists who circulate through the Territory increases the greater will be the return for all the time they are within the Territory they are spending money. While they are here the population is increased and a greater market is created for Alaskan foodstuffs. Out of the ever increasing numbers of visitors a few will remain or become interested in the development of some natural resource of the Territory."^

Before World War 1, most tourists stayed on steamers that traveled along southeast

Alaska waters (called the "Inside Passage"). After the war, as Alaskan historian Frank

Norris explains, "a nation-wide boom in leisure activity and a multiplication of Alaskan

travel routes" increased tourism. Most tourists had been "'round trippers'" who stayed in

Alaska towns only while their ships were in port. Local Alaskans worked to get tourists

off the steamers and into their communities and to "secure lietter tourists' for the

Territory." Th^r worked to improve local transportation and accommodations. "Alaska

cannot afford to have dissatisfied tourists," one promoter wrote. "One pleased and

satisfied tourist is worth a ton of advertising, while a few disgruntled ones can undo the 349 work of years. Make them like Alaska and her playgrounds-treat them right. Better side- trips make better tourists."-'

Tourist literature produced inside and outside of Alaska used images of the mineral seeker as an individual to draw tourists. The public already associated Alaska with individualistic actions. Historian Dean MacCannell writes that, for those living in a modem society, tourists believed that "reality and authenticity" were in other places, in the past, in other cultures, or in "purer, simpler lifestyles." Promoters created a commodified individual, and the traveler became a consumer of individualism. Canadian scholar Robert

Jarvenpa explains that tourism resulted in "packaging of shared meanings, moral tone, and ethos for external consumption" in a landscape that perpetuated notions of "material wealth" and an "ethic of individualism." Tourism was a temporary individualist escape, an adventure in an untouched landscape, and a place to experience individual freedom.^

Frank Norris writes that highUghts for passengers on the Inland Passage steamships included "totem poles. Native communities, glaciers in Glacier Bay, Sitka's Russian

Orthodox Church, and miles and miles of rugged, beautiful coastal scenery." Those tourists prior to Worid War II, however, "were keenly interested in the region's gold rush past." Outsider visitors were "trained" to look for those very "place cues" created during the BClondike Gold iUish, such as the town of Skagway and the nearby White Pass. Gold mine operations were also a tourist draw. The Pacific Coast Steamship Company planned to visit the large quartz gold mine operation at Treadweil, near Juneau. "At nearly every port," the brochure promised, "the curio stores offer beautifiil specimens of nugget jewelry 350 for sale." "We may not discover gold in Alaska," the same pamphlet summed, "but we may surely see one and experience a little of the prospectors' spirit while viewing its wonders."^

In towns like Fairbanks, tourists also went to the creeks to see gold mines in operation. Fairbanks promotional materials had changed from their earlier pamphlets of the first decade of the century. Instead of encouraging mineral seekers, the promoters portrayed mineral seekers as simple dated figures. Norris observes that tourists welcomed

"a comfortable throwback to an earlier time." A1928 promotional brochure explained that the town was "the most picturesque city in Alaska" because it had retained "the

picturesque exterior of its frontier days." The trailblazer image for tourists was a romanticized ideal eliciting images of past adventure and wealth. The prospector was the

"harbinger of civilization-he blazes the trail and paves the way for the gold-mad

thousands to follow. It was the gold digger who popularized Alaska-it was a gold strike that made Fairbanks." The brochure included an illustration of a bearded man on his knees

panning for gold next to a stream. A pick rested against a nearby rock. In the background

was a forest and snow-covered mountains. Such an image suggested that Fairbanks was a

technologically simple mining community when, in fact, mining companies prevailed.^

The federal government also viewed tourism as a way to promote the territory. In the

1920s, the Department of the Interior advertised the federal government-operated Alaska

Railroad as a vehicle to escort tourists into the Alaskan Interior. It was never expected

that visitor-based revenues would ever get the railroad out of debt, but tourism might 351 bring in those who would invest in the region. More industry would mean more railroad commercial traffic. Alaska Railroad manager Noel Smith wrote in 1927 that tourism was

'"a method of advertising the Territory of Alaska rather than a revenue producing proposition.'"^'

Image-makers for the federal government used the mineral seeker as a means to attract tourists. The front cover of a 1929 brochure for the Alaska Railroad included a mountain scene along the top, with a modem passenger steamship and an end of a passenger rail car with tourists standing along the rail; images on the bottom half of the cover included a totem pole depiction of a bird, a mountain sheep, a bear, deer, moose, and a bearded man stooped down before some water, panning for gold. The Railroad featured the "Golden Belt Tour," a trip through various mining districts in the interior,

where there was "much today that reminds one of the humming activities of twenty years ago...individual outfits are still mining gold by the placer method. To witness a gold 'clean­ up' is an experience tremendously interesting and worth while." Similarly, a 1930 pamphlet

contained photographs of a man panning gold in a stream; a man with a pack on his back,

with a dog carrying a pack, with the title, "A prospector ready for the trail"; and a small

cabin sitting high on log-stilts ("a prospector's food cache")- There were still enough

working prospectors to be seen in nearby streams to help authenticate the region for

tourists as a bonafide place of the individual. Not more than ten percent of Alaskan

tourists took the Alaska Railroad, however; most preferred the Inside Passage. There were

around 30,000 overall Alaskan tourists in 1929.^^ 352

By the end of the decade, though, critics wondered i^ instead of tourism leading to industrial development of extractive natural resources, tourism might be instead displacing such anticipated economic growth. Henry Clark wrote that each Alaskan visitor was a

"publicity agent for the territory in the future." He worried, however, that Alaskans were catering "to the immediate benefits firom tourist visitors" during the summer, while neglecting "the most lasting and substantial advantages to be secured fi'om catering to capital and industry." Similarly, Alaskan Roads Commission director Wilds P. Richardson complained that "the rich discoveries of placer gold deep under the fi'ost have gripped the public mind with a romantic interest which is not readily displaced by talk of material development." Despite his complaints, however, Richardson saw these images as valuable for a rising tourism industry. He questioned whether tourism might not make more sense and "might well supplant the ends enshrined in the traditional 'Develop Alaska.'"^^

Tourism was indeed becoming an important Alaskan industry. At the same time, however, tourism was a particular kind of economic development where the landscape had to remain unchanged. Tourists preferred experiencing the local qualities that were set apart fi'om any modem narrative of progress and growth. Alaska became a repository for an untouched wilderness and an unchanging nineteenth-century fi'ontier with the associated individualistic values of independence and freedom. Promoters had to balance precariously a promise of modem comfort with a wildemess or frontier experience. As one writer assured in a tourist edition of an Alaskan publication, "it is today a frontier region scarce changed or marred by the hand of man. It has been changed Just sufiBciently to 353 enable one to travel through it in ease and comfort, but not enough to destroy, or to make one forget, its marvelous beauty."^

From conventional sightseeing tourism grew into an experience of directly

participating in nature through outdoor recreation such as hunting, sport fishing, and fur trapping. Outdoor adventure-based tourism changed prospecting and gold panning fi-om self-employment into an outdoor form of recreation. Trailblazers became "outdoorsmen."

A new magazine in the 1930s, The Alaskan Sportsman, included prospecting along with

fishing, hunting, and trapping. The description of the prospector's opportunities, though,

sounded much like previous promoters, promising individual opportunities and an equal

chance in life: "No fees, no taxes, no h'censes are required. Just a few dollars for grub,

tools and gas~for the boat most Alaskans own~a rifle, trout tackle and maps and reports

showing favorable formations, enabling one to cut out barren areas fi'om his search. A

simple enough outfit-one which gives everyone a gambling chance."^'

The democracy of the mineral-seeking adventure began to carry a wider meaning in

the 1930s. As an ideal, the prospector was losing his masculine edge. As a visual image,

he remained a man in rugged outdoor clothing. But women visitors were trying their hand

at gold panning. A1938 travel brochure for the Alaska Steamship Company, for example,

included a drawing of an old bearded prospector, wearing a plaid shirt and suspenders and

an old hat, next to a woman holding a gold pan with nuggets inside the pan; the woman

was wearing a crisp short-sleeved shirt. Letters in front of the illustration read, "From the

Pageant of the Past come the Riches of Today." As historian Susan Ware notes, despite 354 the economically troubled times of the 1930s, American women actively participated in leisure activities, with greater freedom. For women who could afford Alaskan tourist travel, gold panning was one such activity that symbolized a broadening of acceptable leisure choices for women. To appeal to this important group of consumers, the Alaskan tourist industry responded by including images of women partaking in Alaskan tourist leisure.^

By the time of the serious Congressional debates leading toward statehood, in the

1940s and 19S0s, the mineral seeker figure had lost too much of its political potency to be

part of the rhetorical arguments. Alaskan Governor Ernest Gruening became one of the

foremost rhetoricians for statehood. He still employed the ideals of Individualism to

portray Alaskans, but without the identity of the mineral seeker. In the "last frontier,"

Gruening explained, Alaskans were "prosperous, strong, self-reliant," and tired of being a

colony of the federal government. As part of his overall strategy to appeal to the American

public, Governor Gruening convinced author Edna Ferber to write a fictional work

supporting statehood. He felt that "thousands who would never have been interested in

any of our pro-statehood non-fiction articles" in national magazines "did read novels." In

her 1958 work. Ice Palace, Ferber relayed the Alaskans' fioistration of their inability to

control their own natural resources. As an Alaskan character complained, "Everything

goes out and nothing stays in. Gold. Copper. Timber. Fish. Millions and millions and

millions a year. Outside. We're slaves." Her novel shows the centrality of tourism in mid-

century, and the role of the prospector in tourism rather than as a device for political 355 rhetoric. On "Gold Street" of her Alaskan town, locals had built the "Fish and Gold

Saloon," a place "rigged for hicks from Outside." An "Outsider" arrived and asked an

Alaskan, "you mean nobody pans gold anymore, or hunts bears or lives in igloos? Or shoots up saloons?" The Alaskan replied, "Course we do. There's gold, lots of it. Like to pan some? That's part of our tourist-entertainment programme."^'

Final Thoughts

Looking at Alaska in the decades after the 1920s reveals a chronology of the invocation of the image of the prospector as a function of changes in the economy and political economy of Alaska. In the earlier part of the century, the federal government, the mining industry, and Alaskan promoters perpetuated the ideals of individualism through the prospector because mining was central to the regional (and national) economy.

Likewise, those debating Alaskan coal lands and Alaskan self-government could use mineral seeker images to further economic and political ends even though the prospector was not directly involved in home rule or coal mining because the actual prospector was still an important Western economic actor.

The same icon, however, could not be used when it bore no relation to current economic needs. Ernest Gruening and other Alaskans used the frontier pioneer, rather than the prospector, as an image device to fight for statehood. Individualism found new rhetorical vehicles since the material role of mining in Alaska had become tertiary. The tourist industry (and, by extension, local promoters) could maintain the mineral seeker image because the Klondike Gold Rush and general mineral rush images remained central 356 to tourist memories. When mining decreased in importance after World War I, the prospector found a welcome home in this expanding Alaskan tourist industry. Rhetorical imagery, then, does have connections with the political economy, but ceases to be relevant when certain kinds of development projects are unviable.

In early twentieth-century Alaska, however, the prospector was an active and potent figure. Different constituencies had different imagined positions on how to develop

Alaska, often prior to setting foot in the North. Groups like the Guggenheims and other mining ventures, the Arctic Brotherhood, the federal government, coal claimants, local promoters, and prospectors were in a bidding war as to whose vision of mineral exploitation was going to triumph. This Alaskan story was not a new struggle, nor was the playing field ever level. Part of the struggle over resource exploitation or economic development was in aafting the ground rules in a particular way to help one's own position. Senator Benton in the 1820s and Senator Stewart in the 1860s and early 1870s were nineteenth-century examples of creating such ground rules. Benton shaped legislation for his friends, with the legal criteria anticipated on what level of federal intervention would be beneficial to private interest. The federal government helped to set the ground rules for who got to use the public domain for their own needs with the 1872

\fining Law; in early twentieth-century Alaska, Interior Department policies established which groups would prevail.

It was an effort, then, to position oneself and have one's particular position predominate. Again, economic policies and political debates employ potent images to 357 serve these ends. As the actual individual became part of an industrial-centered world in the nineteenth century, the individual as an ideal was increasingly used as a rhetorical means to pursue goals for industry. Senator Stewart helped to connect the figure of the lone prospector to Western mineral lands utilized by larger mining ventures. Even as corporate mining leaders invoked the prospector in order to conceal their own interests, they were equally interested in perpetuating positive messages of individual wealth and success to the mineral seeker. This dissertation reveals the disparity of views of development within the broader framework of capitalist individualism. This was not a focus of this dissertation per se; but it was the unspoken presupposition that made this focus important.

This dissertation also reveals that those individualistic values connected to twenty- first century Alaskans come out of a process in which particular groups deliberately perpetuated the individual as an ideal for their own goals counter to the individual. As

Alaskan scholar Stephen Haycox suggests, humans did define Alaska by "how they approached and used it." Euro-American Alaskan citizens helped maintain images of the individual for their own identities (and collective identity) after they were established by others in early twentieth century. Elaycox explains that "the image of the independent sourdough supporting himself in the wilderness while prospecting for gold universally symbolizes the more independent, unique culture supposed to have existed in historic

Alaska, and the staying power of the image and the idea seems to fulfill the need for a past which would have produced a more independent, self-reliant populace in the present, or at 358 least the conditions for such a culture." Haycox continues that it did not matter that "there were few truly self-reliant individualists in the Alaskan past." In a "remarkable reversal of preconceptions," Alaskans think of themselves as "rugged individualists" while living in towns "with all the amenities" and with activities little diflFerent from "any small town in

Ohio or California."^*

Image retention and transference, then, has been a dialectical process. As Haycox notes, those outside of Alaska have associated Alaska with "rugged individualism and primitivism"; the tourist industry has done all it could "to capitalize on that expectation"; and Alaskans "still expect it of themselves, and often represent themselves to Outsiders as more unique than they really are." The figure of the rugged individualist "represents the values Alaskans wish to see in themselves~freedoni, independence, and the equality of ordinary people." The individual became an Alaskan mantra. Alaska became a repository of these collective ideals, as a place of individual opportunity and self-sufficiency, a place to test oneself out in nature, a place to find golden dreams and prospects.^' 359

1. Thanks to Sally J. Southwick for the idea of a dual extractive landscape.

2. My thanks to Douglas Weiner for this particular application of lingua franca.

3. Charles E. Mitchell, Individualism and Its Discontents: Appropriations of Emerson. 1880-1950 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997), 2.

4. Carl J. Mayer and George A. Riley, Public Domain, Private Dominion: A History of Public Mineral Policy in America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1985), 44; Malcohn Wallop and Alan Simpson, quoted in Patricia Nelson Limerick, "The Gold Rush and the Shaping of the American West," California History 77 (Spring 1998), 41.

5. John Mack Faragher, Daniel Boone: The Life and Legend of an American Pioneer (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1992), 362; Mary Ann Clawson, Constructing Brotherhood: Class, Gender, and Fratemalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1989), 12; Kenneth E. Boulding, The Image: Knowledge in Life and Society (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1956), 64, 132, 167.1 took John Mack Faragher's observation that the icon of Darnel Boone had an "inherently elusive quality," and applied the idea to prospectors. Faragher, Daniel Boone, 362. Kenneth Boulding wrote that the public image is a product of the universe of discourse, a process of sharing messages and experiences. Each person does not receive the same messages and perceives the situation from his own position. Nevertheless, "the image of the situation which is built up in each of the individuals is highly similar, at least in regard to the spatial and temporal image." With the development of symbolic messages we build up the public images by messages from each other. Boulding, The Image, 64,132,167.

6. Stephen Haycox, "Rediscovering Alaska: Ways of Thinking About Alaska History," Pacifica I (September 1989), 119-20.

7. Ken Coates, "Controlling the Periphery: The Territory Admim'stration of the Yukon and Alaska, 1867-1959," Pacific Northwest ^arterly 78 (October 1987), 151.

8. Mining engineer wrote in 1909 that "the life of any given is short" The exceptional ones lasted one generation, but with modem methods, only 1-2 decades. He explained that "mining works are of no value when the mine is exhausted; the capital invested must be recovered in very short periods, and therefore all mining worked must be of the most temporary character that will answer." Herbert Hoover, Principles of Mining: Valuation, Organization and Administration, Copper, Gold, Lead, Silver, Tin and Zinc (NY: McGraw-Hill, 1909), 188-89.

9. Ernest Gruening, The State of Alaska (New York: Random House, 1954), 192-211, 277; and Claus-M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, Alaska: A History of the 49^ State, 2"^ 360 ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 104-105.

10. "Arctic Brotherhood Expires When Wrangall Camp Quits," Seattle Times, December 4,1927; Mark C. Games, Secret Ritual and Manhood in Victorian America (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1989), 151, 154.

11. Up through World War I, large-scale exploration consisted of finding likely sites through mineralogical observations and regional geological studies, then drilling sample bore holes into rock to determine mineral content. These exploration costs were time- consuming and expensive. One editorial in a 1923 issue of the Engineering and Mining Journal compared a fee of $5,000 for hiring a geologist to spending $10,000 to drill, suggesting typical rates for one limited search. T. A. Rickard, "The Scientific Search For Ore," En^neering and Mining Journal 116 (August 11,1923), 226. Electrical and geophysical prospecting beginning in the 1920s used electrical radio waves to determine the size and shape of geological formations, followed up by expensive drilling. T. A. Rickard, The Romance of Mining (Toronto: The Macmillan Co. of Canada, 1944), 70; see also "Finding New Mines," Engineering and Mining Journal 116 (October 6,1923), 573. The costs of geophysical work varied, but were also costly. In the late 1920s, one geophysical company's standard rate was $5,500 per month. This company stated that such a geophysical survey could cover 200,0Q0 acres in one month, however. Engineering at^Mining Journal 125 (February 25,1928), 350.

12. Engineering and Mining Journal 127 (June 8,1929), 907; "An Occasional Correspondent," "Mining Copper at Kennecott, Alaska," Mining & Scientific Press 118 (January 11,1919), 53-54; Gniening, The State of Alaska, 273.

13. , quoted in Naske and Slotnick, Alaska, 108; "Bureau of Mines Curtails Work as Economy Measure," Engineering and Mining Journal-Press 118 (December 20,1924), 991; Gruening, The State of Alaska, 276.

14. George Otis Smith, quoted in A. H. Hubbell, "Denver's Mining Congress a Success," Engineering & Mining Journal 122 (October 2, 1926), 551; "The Alaska lUilroad and Territorial Development," Engineering and Mining Journal-Press 120 (December 5, 1925), 903-04.

15. B. D. Stewart and B. W. Dyer, Annual Report of the Territorial Mine Inspector to the Governor of Alaska, 1921 (Juneau, Alaska; Alaska Daily Empire Print, 1922), 25; B. D. Stewart, Report on Cooperation Between the Territory of Alaska and the United States in Making Mining Investigations and in the Inspection of Minesfor the Biennium Ending March 31,1931 (Juneau, Alaska: Supervising \fining Engineer, 1931), 96, 101. A "cooperative arrangement" between the Territory of Alaska and the U.S. Government oversaw mine investigations and safety protection for miners. Since 1921, the cooperation 361 included "rendering assistance to prospectors and small operators who are financially unable to employ the services of private engineers [and] the dissemination of information as to the results of such investigations." The USGS assigned the Supervisory Mining Engineer duties like supervising coal and other mineral leasing, as well as supervising the field staff of the U.S. Bureau of Mines. This person also examined mining properties as well as conducted geologic mapping. Stewart, Report on Cooperation, 96,101. The Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines began classes in 1922, offering a program for mining engineering, as well as a short course for prospectors and independent miners. Alaska Governor's Office, Glimpses of Alaska From 1728 to the Present Date (Juneau, Alaska; Alaska Governor's OfiBce, 1926), S3; "Bureau of Mines Curtails Work as Economy Measure," Engineering and Mining Journal-Press 118 (December 20, 1924), 991.

16. "Alaska and the Prospector," Engineering and Mining Journal 124 (July 2, 1927), I; "Helping the Prospecting in Alaska," Engineering and Mining Journal 127 (June 9, 1929), 906. Applicants had to fill out a "Certificate of Prospector" to state that they were "bona fide prospectors." B. D. Stewart, Report on Cooperation Between the Territory of Alaska and the United States in Making Mining Investigations and in the Inaction of Minesfor the Biennium Ending March 31, 1929 (Juneau, Alaska: Supervising Mining Engineer, 1929), 12-13,19, 31;B.D. Stewail, Mining Investigations and Mine Inspection in Alaska, Including Assistance to Prospectors, Biennium Ending March 31, 1933 (Juneau, Alaska: Supervising Mining Engineer, 1933), 6-7, 152-54; B. D. Stewart, Report of the Commissioner of Mines to the Governor for the Two Biennia Em^d December 31, 1944 (Juneau, Alaska; Territory of Alaska, Department of Mines, 1945), 33.

17. Alaska Governor's Office, Alaska: Outline ofIts History and a Summary of its Resources (Juneau, Alaska: Alaska Governor's Office, 1924), 42; Scott Bone, Alaska: Its Past, Present, Future (Juneau, Alaska: Alaska Governor's Office, 1925), 15.

18. "Miners and Prospectors," The Pathfinder 2 (November 1920), 28-29.

19. David M. Wrobel, The E/ui of American Exceptionalism: Frontier Anxiety firom the Old West to the New Deal (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1993), 142, see also 124-136; Charles White Merrill, Charles W. Henderson, and O.E. Kiessling, Small-Scale Placer Mines As a Source of Gold, Employment, and Livelihood in 1935, Mineral Technology and Output Per Man Studies, Report No. E-2 (Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: Works Progress Administration, National Research Project and Bureau of Mines, May, 1937), 1,41.

20. Merrill, Henderson, and Kiessling, SmallScale Placer Mines, xi-xii; Philip S. Smith et al., "Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1936," USGS 362

Bulletin 897 (Washington, D.C.: Govenunent Printing OfiBce, 1939), 6-7; Philip S. Smith, "Mineral Industry of Alaska in 1932," USGS Bulletin 857-A (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing OflBce, 1934), 24. The Works Progress Administration report concluded that operating a small gold mining was not lucrative anywhere in the West. The report stated that placer gold mining was "probably the most romanticized and exaggerated" of employment, and that "the low and uncertain income of the small-scale placer miners holds little possibility of providing a reasonable standard of living for large groups of people." In gold mining, the "average daily gross income" was only $1.60 in 1935, and the "gross yearly earnings of the 28,000 miners averaged $72 per man." Merrill, Henderson, and Kiessling, Small-Scale Placer Mines, 6-7.

21. B. D. Stewart, quoted in, "Nuggets From the Cleanup," The Alaska Sportsman 2 (February 1936), 22; Victor Shaw, "The Sluice Box," The Alaska Sportsman 2 (February 1936), 22,26.

22. Terrence Cole, "Golden Years: The Decline of Gold Mining in Alaska," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 80 (April 1989), 62; Um'ted States Geological Survey, "Geology of the Prince William Sound Region, Alaska," USGS Bulletin 989-E (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing OflBce, 1954), 294; Haycox, "Rediscovering Alaska," 124. Terrence Cole wrote that "the low esteem in which Washington officials held gold and gold mining during World War II was a marked departure from the past. During previous wars, gold mining in the United States had been considered a strategic industry. In classic econoim'c theory, a nation with more gold could buy more goods and services, enabling it to wage more war. But since the U.S. had abandoned the full gold standard in the early 1930s, and at the same time banned the possession of gold bullion by private citizens, the metal had lost much of its value as a medium of exchange." Cole, "Golden Years," 65.

23. Stewart, Report of the Commissioner of Mines to the Governorfor the Two Biennia Ended December 31,1944,33; James A. Williams, Report for the Year 1961 (Juneau, Alaska: Department of Natural Resources, State of Alaska, 1962), 15; Leo H. Saarela, Report of the Commissioner of Mines to the Governor for the Biennium Ended December 31,1950 (Juneau, Alaska: Territory of Alaska, Department of Mines, 1951), 9-10; Phil R. Holdsworth, Report of the Commissioner of Mines for the Biennium Ended December 31,1958 (Juneau, Alaska: Territory of Alaska, Department of N^es, 1959), 11. Holdsworth explained that the 1957 Prospector Assistance Program required that a person "prospect for at least 30 consecutive days and shall be allowed a maximum of $200 for transportation for the trip and $100 per month for supplies while 'in the bush.' Only bona fide residents of Alaska are eligible." Holdsworth, Report, 11.

24. Phil R. Holdsworth, Report of the Division of Mines and Minerals for the Year 1959 (Juneau, Alaska: Department of Natural Resources, State of Alaska, 1960), 22; James A. 363

WUliains, Report for the Year 1961,6,15; James A. Williams, Report for the Year 1969 (College, Alaska; Division of Mines and Geology, Department of Natural Resources, State of Alaska, 1970), 6, 15.

25. Richard H. Timberlake, Monetary Policy in the United States: An Intellectual and Institutional History (Odcigo, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1993), 131. Terrence Cole explains that "not until the U.S. government was forced by international economic pressure to raise the price of gold in the early 1970s and to rescind the ban on private ownership of gold in 1975, did the long decline of gold mining in Alaska end." Cole, "Golden Years," 70-71.

26. "Tourists, An Asset," The Pathfinder 6 (July 1924), 12.

27. Frank Norris, "Showing Of Alaska: The Northern Tourist Trade, 1878-1941," Alaska /fc/o/y 2 (Fall 1987), 1; "Better Tourists," 7%e 6 (February 1924), 1-2.

28. Dean MacCannell, The Tourist: A Mew Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), 3; Robert Jarvenpa, "Commoditization Versus Cultural Integration: Tourism and Image Building in the (Clondike," Arctic Anthropology 31 (1994), 42. Jarvenpa looked at contemporary Dawson City, Yukon, and the prevailing image of the Sourdough. He wrote that Euro-Canadians and Euro-Americans shared "infatuation with material wealth and the ethic of individualism." Jarvenpa, "Commoditization," 42.

29. Frank Norris, "Tourism, Mining, and the Evolving Gold Rush Landscape," Paper given at the International Symposium on Mining, Fairbanks, Alaska, September 11, 1997, n. p.; Pacific Coast Steamship Co., Alaska Excursions (n. p.: Pacific Coast Steamship Co., 1915), n. p.

30. Norris, "Tourism, \fining, and the Evolving Gold Rush Landscape," n. p.; Fairbanks, The Heart of Alaska (Fairbanks: Fairbanks Commercial Club, c. 1928), n. p.

31. Noel Smith, quoted in William H. Wilson, "Ahead of Our Times: The Alaska Railroad and Tourism, 1924-1941," Alaska Journal 7 (Winter 1977), 18.

32. United States Department of the Interior, Alaska 1929 (n. p., U.S. Department of the Diterior, 1929), cover, 26; United States Department of the Interior, See Alaska Via The Alaska Railroad (Chicago, Illinois: Poole Brothers, 1930), 7,10,11; Wilson, "Ahead of Our Times," 20-21.

33. Henry W. Clark, History of Alaska (New York: Macmillian Co., 1930), 151; Wilds P. Richardson," Alaska," Atlantic Monthly 141 (January 1928), 120-21. 364

34. "What Alaska Oflfers to the Toimst," The Pathfinder 6 (April 1924), 1.

35. Shaw, "The Sluice Box," 21.

36. Alaska Steamship Com^dXiy, An Alaska Interlude (Seattle, Washington: Alaska Steamship Co., c. 1938), n. p. Likewise, a 193S travel pamphlet for the Canadian Pacific included a photograph of a man in suspenders holding a gold pan full of nuggets, while a woman in a crisp dress also held the pan and smiled down at the nuggets. By her side was a male companion in suit and tie. Under the photograph was the title, "at the gold smelter" and, under the title was the heading, "Gold ^sh Days Trail of'98'." Canadian Pacific, Cruises to Alluring Alaska and the Yukon (n. p., Canadian Pacific, 1935), n. p.

37. Congressional Record 85"* Cong. 1" sess. (January 14, 1957), 470-476; Ernest Gruening, The Battle for Alaska Statehood (College, Alaska: University of Alaska Press, 1967), 102-03; Edna Ferber, Ice Palace (London: Victor Gollancz, 1958), 12,16.

38. Stephen Haycox, "Rediscovering Alaska," 104, 107-108, 124, 127-28. Another historian, Jeanette Nichols, complains that such a romanticized focus on "casting Alaskans in the mold of perennial pioneers" resulted in "maximizing those aspects of the ecology of Alaska which stress the early pioneer picture of life 'in the bush,' so that much of Alaskan life has not resembled the literature that describes it." Such a myopic view "perpetuated an incomplete, inaccurate picture" of the diversity of the Alaskan landscape. Jeannette P. Nichols, "Alaska's Search for a Usable Past," Pacific Northwest Quarterly 59 (April 1968), 58-59.

39. Haycox, "Rediscovering Alaska," 123-24. 365

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Saarela, Leo H. Report of the Commissioner of Mines to the Governor for the Biennium Ended December 31,1950. Juneau, Alaska: Territory of Alaska, Department of Mines, 1951.

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Report of the Commissioner of Mines to the Governor for the Two Biennia Ended December 31,1944. Juneau, Alaska: Territory of Alaska, Department of Mines, 1945.

Report on Cooperation Between the Territory of Alaska and the United States in Making Mining Investigations and in the Inspection of Mines for the Biemiium Ending March 31,1929. Juneau, Alaska: Supervising Nfining Engineer, 1929.

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Ending March 31,1931. Juneau, Alaska: Supervising Mining Engineer, 1931.

Stewart, B. D. Stewart, and B. W. Dyer. Annual Report of the Territorial Mine Inspector to the Governor of Alaska, 1921. Juneau, Alaska: Alaska Daily Empire Print, 1922.

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