Claims and Speculations: Mining and Writing in the Gilded Age

6. “Talking Klondike”

110 Chapter Six “Talking Klondike” Y / I began this study with a photograph derived from the Klondike Gold Rush, and it is to the representation of that episode in writing that I want to return in drawing my discussion to its close. This was the last rush westward in North America, transposed now onto a snowy “Northland” first of the Yukon and Alaska. Even at the time, it seemed to be, as Hamlin Garland put it, “the last march of the kind that could ever come.”1 The 1897 stampede first into the far west of Canada and then into America’s northern dominion, and the two years of intense placer mining by migrants that followed, formed the dying fall of a phase in which independent prospecting and itinerant mining played a significant role within the industry. By the 1890s new technologies, new professions, and a population of skilled workers were encouraging corporations to exploit existing sites rather than to follow prospectors’ new strikes. Yet, if this last North American rush heralded the end of an era, it was also an extraordinary episode: “the most flamboyant . . . of them all,” in William Cronon’s words (2003, 1). The publicity generated, the demanding and complex inward journey required of migrants, and the numbers involved created an event full of cultural interest and significance. The writing that it produced was just as distinctive. “Talking Klondike” 111 The focus of this chapter is on the way in which this episode was, from the start, written, represented, and understood as a poor man’s rush. In Klondike writing, the experience of the working-class gold seeker lies at the very heart of interpretations of the meaning and significance of this event. Sometimes this figure is transformed into an everyman figure, sometimes to an indistinguishable speck in the landscape, and sometimes to a suffering and oppressed subject. Sometimes he appears in the form of the dimenovel tough guy from nowhere, straight-talking and practically minded. The experience of these poor men appeared in the writing of working-class migrants and in popular cultural forms, but it was also taken up by middleclass Klondike writers for whom the subject-position of the working-class gold seeker seemed interesting, usable, and even exotic. In the following discussion, I want to examine these various appearances of poor men before moving to looking at the intervention of the most famous working-class writer of the Klondike, Jack London, in this field of expression. First though, it is worth exploring this conception of the Klondike as a “poor man’s rush,” a mass movement of those that had been damaged rather than enriched by industrialism, the rise of big corporations and the play of global markets. This is a rush that has long been represented as powered by a more profound disturbance in the U.S. population than the youthful desire to escape from tiresome routine or convention into a western (or northern) adventure. Instead—and unlike the other rushes—it has been interpreted as an outcome of the very difficult economic conditions experienced by the American working classes during the severe depression of the mid-1890s: a last resort, perhaps, for beset industrial subjects.2 However, there are problems with these arguments. Firstly, they tend to set Americans at the heart of the rush to the Klondike when, according to a recent assessment, they made up only around 40 percent of the incoming population. Around the same numbers came from Canada and Britain, and 20 percent were from other regions.3 This was, in fact, a “congeries of strikes,” as David Wharton (1972) puts it, and different strikes were dominated by different ethnic populations: the Russians colonized Circle City, for example, the Scandinavians Nome, the Italians Fairbanks.4 Secondly, the rush was not dominated by those made vulnerable by industrial capitalism . A Klondiker needed to be able to raise funds to make the journey to the Yukon (and subsequently Alaska), and to get equipped to spend a year in the area of the diggings. No speedy fortune could be hoped for, in any case, in a setting where miners dug down over the winter months and Chapter Six 112 searched through the excavated material in the spring thaw. On the other hand, we find plenty of evidence in Klondike writing of the presence of wealthier travelers, young men and professionals on vacation, in search of adventure as much...