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| ISBN-13: | 9781602231528 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Alaska Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2006 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 176 |
| File size: | 4 MB |
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EMPIRE'S EDGE
American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934By PRESTON JONES
University of Alaska Press
Copyright © 2007 University of Alaska PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-889963-89-1
Chapter One
FORGING AMERICANNESS
Nome City was a veritable beehive of industry. It is astonishing when one stops to think how, of a sudden, a town of five or six thousand souls sprung into existence on this bleak and barren arctic waste. No fuel, no timber, no food-stuffs, were there to provide the necessaries of civilization, as all were imported from a base of supply three thousand miles distant. The general public but faintly realize the energy and indomitable push manifest in the upbuilding of this now world-famous town of Bering Strait. -George Edward Adams, Harper's Weekly, August 4, 1900
To surround one's home life with the refinements and comforts of a more easterly civilization is to express the confidence in the future that is negatived by the uncouthness of bare walls and makeshifts, and to the extent that it is adopted will hasten the period when Alaska shall be considered as beyond its primary stages and its residents entitled to permanent political institutions. -Council City News, January 20, 1906
Several years before thousands of men, and a few women, went to Nome, Alaska, on the treeless southern coast of the Seward Peninsula, one of America's great intellectuals penned his thoughts on the concept of the "self." A "man's Self," wrote William James, "is the sum total of all that he can call his," including his reputation and accomplishments. If these things "wax and prosper a man will feel triumphant," James wrote; "if they dwindle and die away, he feels cast down." James maintained that people's sense of self, or search for such a sense, drives them to "find a home of [their] own which [they] may live in and improve"; the search for usable selves spurs people to accumulate property and, thus, to fortify their selves-for the loss of hard-earned property leads to a "sense of the shrinkage of our personality." James's thinking about the self, and what people do to create identities for themselves, is a good place to begin a discussion of early twentieth-century Nome, for when their town prospered its residents felt triumphant, when it dwindled and grew frail they felt cast down, and, despite everything, the early Nomeites who remained in their city strove to improve it. Nomeites continually looked for the next great thing.
Whether the miners, hustlers, and businessmen who went to Nome in the last years of the nineteenth century had heard of William James cannot be known. His name does not appear in any of the newspaper articles, diaries, memoirs, and letters consulted for this study. In early twentieth-century Alaska, moreover, James would have been associated with the effete East, which was scorned by Nome's rugged gold seekers, partly because of its associations with blue blood, and partly because most sentiment against the recent popular war against Spain had come from there. Few of the twelve thousand people officially counted at Nome in the census of 1900 came from the eastern United States.
At the same time, relative to other boomtowns in fin-de-siècle Alaska-Skagway and Dyea, for example-Nome hosted a well-informed business and merchant class; the city saw the advent of impressive newspapers between 1898 and 1902; and the late-Victorian homes built there included book-filled parlors decorated with the busts of Shakespeare that were typical of the day. Clichés about gold-rush Alaska's swashbuckling con artists and happy prostitutes aside, many of Nome's residents were engaged readers. Indeed, the biographical sketches E. S. Harrison provides in his encyclopedic Nome and Seward Peninsula (1905) suggest a surprisingly well-educated population. Deemar Traphagen, for example, who became principal of the public school in Nome, had studied at the University of Michigan. J. Potter Whittren, a consulting engineer for the Council City and Solomon River Railroad, graduated from Harvard University in 1895. And P. H. Watts graduated from Miami University in 1897. Nome's challenges and hardships provided educated people with an opportunity to be philosophical. The writer Elizabeth Robins noted in her diary that a stay in Nome would give her a rare chance to study "primitive man." Gold rusher Edwin Shurzer wrote in a letter home that Nome provided a person with a good opportunity to learn about human nature. And by 1903, popular psychology had arrived in Nome. In June of that year one newspaper editor mused, albeit inconclusively, on the psychology of Nome. "Bleak, dreary and unforbidding [sic] the country may be," said the Nome News without elaboration, "but it exerts a strange psychological influence on most people that have been here." So even if none of Nome's residents knew about William James's reflections on psychology, they would have understood what he had to say about the efforts people make to find and pursue plausible selves. For the men and women who went to Nome gambled not only on finding gold and acquiring wealth-they were also risking their selves in a psychological sense.
In Nome at the beginning of the twentieth century we find dreams of riches dashed along with the possible selves of those who had sought new identities-as self-made men who no longer wanted to be the slaves of employers in the Outside, as engineers who could build sustainable railroads on the Seward Peninsula's spongy ground, as ordinary young men who wanted to settle down. "I don't want to come home unless I can afford to get married," wrote one Nomeite who failed to meet his goal. In 1900, May Fleming of Montreal intended to found a hospital at Nome. She failed, too, although she may have succeeded instead at operating a lodging house. By August of 1900 many who had gone to Nome had endured suffering and disappointment, while some who had been bent on getting rich by any means had given up. Others were disheartened that only hustlers seemed to succeed. The first impression one had of summertime Nome was of chaos and filth. The city "was filled with promiscuous humanity ... where the riffraff and the criminals were dumped." Not surprisingly, "[h]undreds of adventurers immediately threw up the sponge, cursed the Nome 'fake'; and if they could pay the fare, departed for home."
As far as this book is concerned, fortune seekers who went to Nome and left after a few weeks or months can be placed to the side; the unrealistic possible selves they had conjured in ignorance soon evaporated. The newspaper editors who stayed at their presses did not write for the fainthearted. The commentators who declared, factually if sometimes unconvincingly, that Nome was a permanent town were not trying to rouse the spirits of the irredeemably discouraged. The businessmen and homebuilders who, after 1900, demonstrated their commitment to carving Americanness into northwestern Alaska's tundra using Victorian and Edwardian designs-and by shipping wood into a nearly woodless zone-did not work for the weary who left the city when the going got tough. Nomeites had said from the beginning that too many were arriving who should have stayed home. As was always true-according, at least, to the trendy Social Darwinism making its rounds at the time-there were only a few who were sufficiently strong to endure drudgery and relentless challenge. Not many could lead the strenuous life promoted by the new American war hero, Theodore Roosevelt. The Nomeites who stayed past the rush of 1900 believed that they could.
Forging Americanness
In 1890 William James had made the now commonsense observation that the environment a person creates is an extension of his or her identity. We identify ourselves, for example, with the clothing we wear, and our homes become extensions of our selves.
It is not surprising that turn-of-the-century Nome's residents hurried to build a city that looked much like the small American cities they had come from or had lived in before they went to Alaska. To be sure, some elements of Nome's American subculture were unusual. Some Nomeites, for example, expressed the unusual view that whites were in some ways inferior to Alaska's Natives-that whites corrupted Natives. This idea was partly driven by noble savage mythology (one writer called Natives "American Stone Age people"), and this provided Nomeites with a justification for separating the "races" as was typical of the American experience to that point. The assumption that Alaska's Natives, devastated by imported disease, were destined for rapid extinction seems to have drawn pity from some observers who, nevertheless, clung to a socio-evolutionary creed which dictated that such was the way of the rough-and-tumble world where some kinds of humans were, naturally, more hardy than others. Simultaneously, though, intermarriage and sexual relations between white men and Native women did not outrage Nome's residents. One local poet wrote openly about his "Eskimo girl" who set his heart "awhirl," and with whom he, apparently, produced "fruitage rare indeed."
More striking than the differences that set Nome's subculture apart from norms in the Outside were the powerful, yet quite ordinary, ways in which the Americans in Nome asserted their cultural identity. Lawyers swarmed Nome, arguing for and against stampeding claim jumpers. (One diarist wrote that Nome's gold was locked up by litigation. Another recalled that lawyers there were "as thick as Alaska mosquitos.") Literary and debating societies formed. Books were in demand even among miners in the field. Nomeites wanted, and received, a reliable if cumbersome mail service that kept them in touch with the Outside. Middle-class, respectable residents worked to assert order in what was, through the summer of 1900, an anarchic society. Nomeites informed family and friends of the modern amenities they enjoyed, such as thermometers and alarm clocks. And as was trendy among New England's cultural elite, photographs of Japanese scenes found their way into at least one house in Nome. At the time of the rush to Nome, a much broader craze for bicycles was underway (in 1890 some 312 firms manufactured ten million bicycles), and some of the Americans who went to Nome brought their bicycles with them, while others who did not enquired about them in letters. And, as everywhere, young people in Nome got married, and the beds of newlyweds squeaked in the night-in one case to the chagrin and frustration of a Victorian gentleman far from his wife but separated from vigorous youth by a mere thin wall.
In the early twenty-first century, Alaskan businesses would be eager to assert a specifically Alaskan identity: The Alaska Used Computer Source, the Alaska Valuation Service, and the Great Alaska Pizza Company are among the business names entered in the 2003 edition of Anchorage's telephone book. And while Nome's businessmen soon asserted a local identity-founding, for example, the Bank of Cape Nome, the Sourdough Road House, and the Nome Drug Company-in 1900 many shops and taverns in Nome were given names that asserted their Americanness: the Alaska and Chicago Commercial Company, the California Bakery Café, the Golden Gate Store, the New York Kitchen, the Montana Restaurant, the California House, the Southern Saloon, the Portland.
Also on display in Nome was that certain take-charge, "can-do" spirit that, for good and ill, has done so much to shape American history. "A thoroughly energetic and enterprising American spirit pervades [Nome's] business world," an observer noted. As was true of non-evangelical American Protestantism generally, in Nome the word progress had come to be synonymous with the will of Providence, which always favored material prosperity. According to this creed, the faith and works of the New Testament could be transformed into "faith in our great northwestern possession" and "works in opening up ... [Alaska's] treasury"; interior Alaska could be likened to a bright and heavenly paradise; and the merchant marine and navy could be christened "joint apostles for the greatness of the United States."
And if the planting of flags indicates an assertion of national identity, then turn-of-the-century Nomeites were committed to asserting their Americanness. Even in 1899, when Nome's Front Street was essentially a tent city, its residents displayed U.S. flags. They were posted outside taverns, and one visitor to Nome observed an undertaker's tent with a U.S. flag on its top. An early photograph shows a group of Nomeites standing on ice, enjoying a "sourdough picnic." Incongruously, a women is holding-displaying, really-an American flag. More odd is a picture of an airborne skier, a member of Nome's Ski Club, flying past an American flag planted in the snow. Still another early photo reveals some nineteen American flags hanging from establishments on Nome's Front Street. The Golden Gate Hotel itself was decorated, at least temporarily, with more than fourteen American flags.
On the Fourth of July flags festooned storefronts throughout boomtown Alaska, but they were usually scarce in the gateway settlements of Skagway and Dyea. Sometimes a flag was hoisted on Broadway in Skagway, sometimes it was not. Significantly, the only other flag the author found in pictures of fin-de-siècle Skagway was posted outside the German Bakery and Restaurant. No flags could be seen in photographs of Dyea.
The Americans in Nome, who were eager to show that they could indeed Americanize the inhospitable region in which they had settled, also felt threatened-not in this case by foreigners (although that would come) but by their city's isolation and the rigors and oddity of the Seward Peninsula's environment. As the hoisting of British flags was one way Dawsonites reassured themselves of their place within the British Empire, the raising of myriad American flags in Nome bolstered the Nomeites' identity as members of a conquering people-as Americans. And when, in the early 1920s, Americans from Nome unwittingly assisted an expedition to Wrangel Island to raise a British flag there, they worried that their fellow Alaskans might consider them traitors.
Posting American flags everywhere was a way for Nomeites to show outsiders that their city was playing a part in American expansionism. America's culture and institutions "will follow our flag on the wings of commerce," Albert J. Beveridge said when campaigning for a seat in the Senate. They may or may not have been aware of Beveridge's statement, but Nome's settlers would have agreed with it.
Daily Life
Following the initial rush of 1900, Nomeites set out to create a community that was like small cities in Minnesota or Connecticut, Mississippi or Colorado. But what was hardly worth noticing in, say, San Bernardino, California, or Van Buren, Maine, was remarkable in Nome, which in the early twenty-first century remained the United States's most isolated small city. The most striking thing about Nome-particularly in an age before instant communications-is its ordinariness, its easily recognizable Americanness.
To be sure, Nome departed from the American norm in some respects. While Nomeites shared the prejudices of their day, enjoying, for example, a typical vaudeville show that presented "the appearance of a little darkey boy possessed of all the mischief known to the youngsters of color," it was also true that life on the Seward Peninsula was too difficult for its residents to have energy to spend on being actively contemptuous of nonwhites, particularly Natives-the most visible nonwhite population. Indeed, alongside prejudice grew up genuine interest in and even appreciation for Natives and their ways. Some Nomeites published glossaries of Native expressions to assist in conversation between Euro-Americans and Natives. Others pursued personal language study, writing Native words and phrases in their diaries for personal use. Some newcomers to the Nome region became fully conversant in Native languages. This latter group included American husbands of Inupiat women and traders who learned Inupiaq for business purposes. Meanwhile, children were encouraged to learn Native words, and some of them picked up Inupiaq while playing with Native friends. The city's high school students learned Native terms.
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Excerpted from EMPIRE'S EDGE by PRESTON JONES Copyright © 2007 by University of Alaska Press . Excerpted by permission.
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