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6 THE NATURE & CULTURE OF FOOD W hen Charlie Chaplin happened upon photographs of miners ascending the Chilkoot Pass, he was so taken by the power of the images that he decided to make a film. Chaplin’s 1925 silent, The Gold Rush, opened with the classic Chilkoot shot, a long line of miners struggling up the trail. Despite the enduring draw of that scene, the film’s mostfamousandmemorablemomentscamelater,andtheyrevolvedentirely around food. In one, Chaplin’s character, the Lone Prospector, or “little fellow ,” snowbound in an isolated mining cabin with no supplies, meticulously boils his shoe for Thanksgiving dinner with his partner, Big Jim. At the table, Chaplin carefully consumes its sole, nails, and laces as if he were dining on a fine steak, the most delicate chicken bones, and a lovely side of spaghetti (the laces). In a later scene, the Lone Prospector dreams of entertaining his imaginary New Year’s Eve guests with a dance, an amiable soft-shoe number performed by dinner rolls at the ends of two forks. Though Chaplin’s hero eventually strikes it rich, wins the girl, and returns home a millionaire, gold andminingareentirelysecondarytothestory. Mostof thetaleisabouthunger. In this, Chaplin was right on the mark. Miners were forever hungry, and they wrote constantly about food, craving it, buying it, cooking it, and eating it. As Charlie Chaplin must have surmised in portraying Thanksgiving and New Year’s meals in his film, food became a particularly intense topic at holidays. For these special meals, miners made extra eªorts to re-create traditional, festive menus with whatever they had at hand. James Cooper’s 138 diary for Thanksgiving 1897 best captured the humor and the reality of Alaska-Yukon holiday preparations. We propose to have a feast on Thanksgiving, have invited Ochs and Walter to come (and bring their dinner); following is “Bill-A-Fare” (as proposed). Fish-goose stew a-la-Bonanza . . . sour dough bread and weary Skagway butter . Potatoes, solid, a-la-evaporated. . . . Boiled Cabbage a-la-tough, Applepie (if you can eat it), Mush Straight, Vegetable soup a-la-can, Citric acid on the side, Dawson Floats, lemon flavor, Klondyke Strawberries [beans] and Coleman’s mustard, Stewed Peaches, Boiled Apricots, Liver and Bacon (minus liver), Eldorado Flapjacks and maple syrup (if Ochs brings it). . . . The foregoing may be modified or extended depending somewhat on our ability to rustle more tomato cans to complete our silver service.1 Cooper’s Thanksgiving did not proceed as planned, however, “owing to scarcity of grub.” The men tried to maintain levity but, he wrote, “we find it impossible to keep from being sober.”2 Other miners made similar eªorts. The Mosier party served a moose roast on Thanksgiving Day, with plum pudding, cranberry sauce, and potatoes.3 Mac McMichael’s crew, down the Yukon in Alaska, sat down that day to “moose stew with dumplings, bread, ginger cookies and apple pie. All luxuries with us.”4 Meals like these holiday feasts revealed the miners’ creative culinary eªorts. They also revealed the nature and culture of food during the gold rush. The miners’ food, like all food, was natural; it came from nature. Fishgoose stew a-la-Bonanza, moose roast, and moose stew came from local nature,fromnearbycreeks,rivers,andforests,providedmostlikelybyNative hunters who fueled a steady market in fresh salmon, caribou, moose, and other game. Such foods forged direct connections to local ecosystems and to local peoples. Moose and goose notwithstanding, however, most of the miners’ food—bacon, beans, flour, sugar, potatoes, canned vegetables and fruit—came across great distances from the agricultural empires of North America. Miners had at their service a vast integrated economy that harvested , preserved, stored, and then transported the energy of sunnier southern ecosystems to their far north dinner tables. Klondike miners were industrial consumers par excellence in that, in the words of Daniel Boorstin, they were simply “no longer local.”5 Through nonlocal foods, miners forged connections to far distant natures, to all the myriad places and myriad workers who produced, preserved, and carried that food north to the gold creeks. The Nature & Culture of Food / 139 Those connections to nonlocal nature took concrete form in a surprising variety of foods. In the summer, when sternwheelers brought in loads of ham, canned meats, and fresh fruits and vegetables, miners with a ready supply of cash lived well. When the Yukon froze in the fall, though, the food supply from Seattle and San Francisco dwindled, and diets grew more monotonous...

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