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FOLLOWING THE FOOTSTEPS OF JACK LONDON:
A Journey to the Yukon and the Legacy of the Gilded Age
By Jeanne Ferran
AUTHOR’S NOTE: I am a teacher at Polk County Middle School, where I teach AIG Language Arts, coach the ski team, and run the trail crew. For the past few years, we have been working on efforts to restore Laughter Pond, and this year, we are starting to build an outdoor classroom. Due to these efforts, I received a grant through the Polk County Community Foundation to travel to the Yukon with the intention of drawing connections between wildness and its importance to the American mind. No author has been more instrumental in this concept than Jack London, so for my grant, I wanted to follow the footsteps of the great American writer who has captured the imagination of wilderness and adventure seekers for the past 120 years.
“I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.”
-Robert Service, “Spell of the Yukon”
In July of 1897, a handful of gold seekers- tired, ragged, and filthy, stepped off the steamboat Exelsior in San Francisco Bay. They had been panning and sluicing in a vast expanse of wilderness, the Klondike region of the Yukon Territory. From their appearance, no one would have imagined that in their cargo was half a million dollars worth of gold dust. These gaunt, worn men were rich beyond their wildest dreams.
When the news broke, the entire world turned to frenzy. Outfitters cropped up along the Pacific coast. One million people made plans. One hundred thousand actually left. And those who had always longed for a grand adventure walked out of jobs the day they heard the sensational news. 30,000 people, rich and poor, from all over the world, made it into the Klondike from all over the world. Some prospectors’ dreams ended before it even began, when, in the port of Skagway, boatmen tossed a year’s worth of supplies overboard, their provisions sinking to the bottom of the harbor. But still, tens of thousands convened in one year in Dawson City, a boggy, mosquito-filled indigenous fishing camp at convergence of the Klondike and Yukon Rivers.
After enduring food shortages, price gouging, climbs over steep passes, blizzards, months of sub-zero temperatures and shortened days, and an arduous river journey filled with deadly rapids, the gold seekers, worn, beaten, tired,and malnourished, realized that the good claims had been taken. The trip, if they survived it, would be nothing but a good story to tell. One of these men was a 21 year old by the name of Jack London.
AMERICA’S FIRST GOLD RUSH
The Wild still lingered in him and the wolf in him merely slept."- Call of the Wild
One hundred years prior, in Cabarrus County, twelve year old Conrad Reed found an abnormally dense rock out in the field near his home. For three years, the family used the seventeen pound hunk as a doorstop before bringing it to a jeweler, who bought it for $3.00 ($74 modern money). The gold rush in North Carolina had begun, albeit slowly. Local pioneers scanned the creeks and waited until after the harvest to search for gold in their fields.
In 1825, as Cornish immigrants brought steam engine technology, gold mining moved underground, requiring a larger workforce. At some of the camps, miners spoke up to thirteen different languages, The estimation of gold seekers in North Carolina is around 30,000 people. The Cornish remained in settlements around the piedmont, but most miners, single immigrants, moved with the news of other gold rushes. In 1828, gold was discovered in Georgia. Two years later, Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act. The Cherokee were forced out of their ancestral lands, and the settlers poured in. Within a hundred years, almost the entire southern Appalachian region, an area of land that has more biodiversity than the entire European continent, was logged, its soil eroded, its creeks and rivers silted, and its wildlife eradicated. Only a few isolated tracts of virgin forest remained.
THE GILDED AGE:
The desire for gold is not for gold. It is for its means of freedom and benefit. -Ralph Waldo Emerson
At the time of the Klondike Gold Rush, Saluda had a population of roughly 200 people, more in homesteads in the surrounding hills. Hydroelectric power was just starting to creep into the numerous valleys from burgeoning towns like Asheville and Spartanburg, but the first plant had yet to be built in our valleys. The goal of these plants was not to illuminate Saluda, but to send power downstream to expand output in the textile mills of distant towns. In fact, some rural areas would not get power until the 1950s. What Saluda did have was a railroad, transporting goods and passengers, roughly 3,000 each year, up the steepest grade east of the Mississippi River.
During the railroad’s construction, a tent city sprung up at the top of the grade. Men looking for work followed the railroad, laying track and rail. When the work took longer than expected, the first mayor, Colonel Andrew Tanner, pressed convict labor. At last, on Independence Day of 1878, the Southern Railroad sent its first engine up the tracks, and Saluda was forever changed. Wealthy lowcountry families looking to escape the heat and mosquitoes built summer homes. The town incorporated itself to protect schools and churches from whiskey distribution. The American Missionary Association opened a seminary in 1889 at what is the present day Saluda School.
In 1888, George Washington Vanderbilt visited Asheville with his mother, who was seeking respite from symptoms of malaria. By 1895, he had built the grandest home in America, wired with electricity, thanks to his friendship with Thomas Edison. But George Vanderbilt did not want to simply be the owner of a grand home: he wanted to run a self-sufficient estate. He bought up everything in view- 125,000 scarred, overgrazed, burnt, overlogged, eroded acres- and hired Gifford Pinchot, one of two foresters in the country. Vanderbilt gave Pinchot an unlimited budget to convert the tract of land into a working, sustainable enterprise. He told Pinchot to look to the old growth coves that had been too rugged, isolated, and steep to exploit as inspiration. Pinchot immediately started planting pines and hardwoods on the scarred land. At the same time that tens of thousands were setting out for the fabled riches of Bonanza and Eldorado Creek, Vanderbilt commissioned Carl Schenk to open a forestry school, the first in the country, as a way to train young men to manage and restore his vast landholdings. Courses included art, logging, silviculture, forestry protection, surveying, plant and animal identification, music, history, literature, and botany.
JACK LONDON’S HUMBLE BEGINNINGS
“It was the masterful and incommunicable wisdom of eternity laughing at the futility of life and the effort of life. It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.” -White Fang
London lived in a world where labor laws did not exist. Unbridled capitalism was fed by the extraction of resources by any means possible through the exploitation of a restless underclass with no social mobility and few rights. Poverty was rampant, and men, women, and children took on dangerous work for next to no pay just to scrape by. Education was a privilege for the elite. Companies thought nothing of underpaying laborers doing risky, backbreaking work for ten to twenty hours a day, seven days a week, at a dime an hour. Thousands lost limbs, ruined lungs, even died.
Jack London’s hardscrabble life in San Francisco paved the way for his survival in the Yukon. An illegitimate son with a spiritualist mother who often gambled away the rent money, London dropped out of school due to financial difficulties. But he was a precocious young man with a passion for literature and writing. While continuing his education through a rigorous program created by a sympathetic librarian, he worked 12-20 hour shifts in a cannery until he realized he could make more money as a thief. At fourteen he loaned money to purchase a skiff from his childhood nanny and pirated the oyster reefs owned by the railroad company. Realizing the risks of this endeavor, he got a job patrolling the very waters that he had stolen from. When a power company lured him with a promise of higher pay, they stuck him with the task of feeding boilers for 10 hours a day, 7 days a week. He found out that he had actually replaced two men, and he quit on the spot. He joined a seal hunting expedition that sailed up the Bering Sea and across the Pacific Ocean.
London spent the next few years of his life crisscrossing the country in railcars, begging and stealing for food. He re-enrolled in school at seventeen, years older and more seasoned than his peers, earning his keep as a janitor. He published 8 of his autobiographical stories in the school literary journal. London was admitted into a prep school, but the headmaster did not want the wealthy students outdone by this working class boy. He was kicked out, studied independently, passed the rigorous entrance exam of the University of California at Berkeley, and borrowed tuition money from the barkeeper who owned the saloon where he studied. He attended university for one year, but again, he was forced to leave due to family poverty.
London left San Francisco 11 days after the Excelsior docked in San Francisco harbor with news of gold. He and his brother-in-law, who had mortgaged his wife’s house to pay for the expedition, sailed to Seattle in an overcrowded steamer, then paddled Tlingit canoes up a fjord the last hundred miles to Dyea. When they got there, 3,000 prospectors were already organizing to climb the steep coastal range with over a half-ton of supplies, enough to survive a year in the frozen wilderness. The entire load had to be carried on their backs in hundred-pound increments, up and over the 1500 ice steps, the “Golden Staircase” section of Chilkoot Pass, pitched at a 45 degree angle, “like a column of ants,” London said, 20 or 30 trips a season. In London’s pack were copies of Milton and Darwin. Those who brought horses did not bring enough food. Animals either starved to death and dropped dead in the trail or fell down ravines. The men who wintered at the top of the pass had to dig their supplies out from under seventy feet of snow.
London and his partners constructed a boat at Lake Lindemann, the headwaters of the Yukon. The “float” downstream included running giant rapids big enough to capsize crafts and deadly whirlpools. Many drowned before his eyes. But London, an experienced boatman, made it to through the rapids, then turned around and helped others. By the time they floated to Lake Laberge, the northern wind was pushing them upstream. They reached the Thirtymile river just before the rapidly closing ice froze them in.
IN THE FOOTSTEPS OF JACK LONDON
“For the pride of trace and trail was his, and sick unto death, he could not bear that another dog should do his work.” -Call of the Wild
When I was a young girl growing up in Louisiana, my family spent half our time at a fishing camp in a little strip of marsh called Chenier Caminada. Our front “yard” was Bayou Thunder, where we laid out crab traps and launched pirogues to catch redfish and speckled trout. In the summer we would wake well before sunrise and set out offshore past the muddy fan of Mississippi River water past and line of sargassum that separated the clear blue of the Gulf of Mexico. Here we would catch tuna and mackerel, pompano and mahi-mahi. Dolphins would dance in the bow of the boat and schools of flying fish would glide across the water’s surface. The other half of our time was spent in a deer stand or a duck blind at our hunting camp just across the state line in southern Mississippi. The cycle of life and death was not strange to me, but instead of hunting I preferred disappearing in the woods all day with a backpack and snacks, a notebook and pen, Audubon field guides, and a trusty dog. While “exploring” the 40 acres of tannin-stained creeks and hardwood bottomlands, I would curl up on a sandy bank and try my hand at writing. I penned stories about seeking pirate Jean Lafitte’s treasure and pioneer Cajuns scratching out a living on the bayous that I knew. Writing is hard, especially without life experience, so I would eventually give up and read. It was in this world that I read Call of the Wild, a novel about survival in extreme conditions, where humans were not the top of the food chain, where characters were a match strike away from life or death. What did I know about the extremes of cold, of fear, even of mountains? The book transformed the course of my life.
My sons and I arrived in Carcross, Yukon Territory, on a beautiful crisp day. The town, short for Caribou Crossing, is a Tagish settlement of about 500 people nestled in between Lake Bennett and Nares Lake. We are on Jack London’s trail, a few miles north of Chilkoot Pass, but it looks nothing like the tent city that cropped up here in the late 1800s. London writes in Call of the Wild, “[Buck and company] made good time down the chain of lakes which fills the craters of extinct volcanoes, and late that night pulled into the huge camp at the head of Lake Bennett, where thousands of goldseekers were building boats against the break-up of the ice in the spring.” Here, the goldseekers had slashed down an entire section of boreal forest to craft vessels that would carry them 500 miles to the gold fields. But now, very little of the gold seeking mass remains, except the tracks of the railroad line that hauled supplies from Skagway toward Whitehorse, the territorial capital (population 35,000) that opened in 1900. In front of the First Nations center stand the totems of the clans. A Tlingit immersion school, a swimming pool (closed for the season), a restaurant (also closed), a health clinic, a library, and an air strip round out the rest of the town, surrounded on all sides by tall, snow-capped peaks and boreal forest. The Yukon’s total land mass is somewhere between the size of Texas and California. The entire population of the territory numbers around 45,000.
Bertrand Bellencourt is our guide for the week. Originally from France, he moved to Montreal, then the Yukon, where he operates Boreal Kennels. Bertrand has worked in the gold mines, living underground for weeks at a time. Now, he guides, runs dog sleds, and works construction. He is no-nonsense, clear-thinking, brutally honest: the kind of guy you want in a crisis. Two WWOOFers, both young men from France, help take care of his 37 huskies and run dog sledding trips. Bert’s wife Julie is a teacher at the school in town (65 students grades K-8), where his two younger children also attend. His oldest son boards at the high school in Whitehorse. This fall his oldest shot his first moose, butchered it, and portaged it across a lake.
As soon as Bert and Max go outside to harness the chosen dogs, every husky howls maniacally. The cry is deafening, and we can hear it long after our loaded sleds run along the tracks and cross the Klondike highway, where we weave through lodgepole pine and spruce toward the bed of the Watson River. We glide over the ice and snow, the dogs running at a steady trot. The smartest dogs are in the front, the strongest in the back. We jump off the sleds and push as we climb the hills and laugh as we drop and drift back down them, the sled responding to our weight and the quality of the snow. When we stop, the dogs howl in frustration and slam in their harnesses. I get the sense that the dogs would go on forever if they could, but as we cruise into a long alpine valley filled with willow shrubs, we slow down as we approach a small ridge. Home for the night.
Snow is blowing off the top of Montana Mountain, a 7,000 foot Cretaceous volcano to the south.The mountain is the sacred place where, according to the Tagish nation, Game Mother created all of the animals and gave them the traits they have today. Beavers have created a dam that is slowly flooding the valley, which would disrupt the moose population and affect caribou migratory routes, so the boys break it up, freeing thousands of gallons of water trapped under ice a foot thick, and we feed whiskey jacks, especially one gregarious jay my son nicknames “Doctor Chunky,” trail mix out of our hands. The dogs curl up in neat little balls and rest, watching Bert’s every move. When the stars start to twinkle in the twilight and a Great Horned Owl begins to hoot, it is time to sleep. Our tent, a double-insulated yurt with deerskin rugs as the floor, has a woodstove in it, a luxury I will certainly miss.
The next morning we set out again. The temperature hovers around freezing, but parts of the river have softened and turned to slush. The huskies stop dead in their tracks and will not continue, and Bert, leading the dogs via snowmobile, notes that the ice will not support his machine. We turn and head back toward camp. Fresh moose tracks the size of dinner plates crisscross the river.
The next morning, we backtrack to the Watson River, then drop down through an aspen forest, then onto the open, broad expanse of Lake Bennett. Two thumbs of a giant lake stretch out before us, snow capped peaks rim the shore. Ice crystals sparkle across the surface. I have traveled all over the world. Spent many summers galavanting across the American West. Hiked countless miles all over the southern Appalachians. This was one of the most beautiful places I had ever seen. Vast, remote, and wild.
THE CITY OF ELDORADO
“If you have it, spend it, that’s what it’s for.” -Pat Galvin, a Klondike King to his nephew, who advised Galvin to be cautious of his spending. Galvin was bankrupt by 1899.
By mid-October, the Yukon River, the third largest river system in North America, freezes solid. On October 9, 1897, London and his company reached the Stewart River, a mere 80 miles from Dawson when they encountered prospectors leaving the frozen North with bad news. The productive gold claims that provided instantaneous riches had already been claimed. Their advice? Turn back. London and company would ultimately have two choices: either toil for one of the Klondike kings, early muleskinners and hardscrabble miners who had staked million dollar claims on Eldorado and Bonanza creeks, or work their own claim, digging through thirty feet of permafrost, then sifting and sluicing out the contents by hand. Men who chose this route lived and worked in their muddy holes without finding any gold or, if they were lucky, finding enough to pay for their passage home. London and his partners found an abandoned shack and settled in for the winter. They found traces of gold, so Jack floated downstream to Dawson to stake the claim: 500 feet on Henderson Creek.
By the time London arrived in Dawson in October 1897, thet city consisted of 5,000 men living in tents and skiffs, 6 boats deep, in a giant flotilla. Sawmills and saloons lined the muddy streets. Whiskey was plentiful but food and medicine were not. Men milled around, barhopping to stay out of the cold, bartering gold dust for overpriced goods such as candles and kerosene.
London spent most of his time in extravagant saloons conversing with the “sourdoughs,” the seasoned miners who regaled him with stories of hunger and cold, and the “cheechakos,” the tenderfeet, whose follies were just one lucky chance from death. Women in silk and lace charged a dollar per dance, gold kings wagered fortunes on single hands of poker and bought enough wine to fill their bathtubs. One left an oil can by his front door, filled with nuggets with a sign that read, “Help Yourself.”
London camped in Dawson City for roughly two months. His neighbors, the Bond brothers, sons of a wealthy judge in the Santa Clara valley, had a dog, a 140 pound Saint Bernard-Scotch Collie mix named Jack. The seeds of London’s most famous work, a novel penned in one month that has never been out of print since its initial publication in 1903, had been planted. But London was already showing signs of scurvy. He promised himself that if he made it through his twenty-second winter, he would never again toil as a laborer, shoveling coal or mending clothes for ten cents an hour. He was going to be a writer. This adventure would provide the fodder to sustain that dream.
In November of 1897, the temperatures dipped to -67 degrees. Trees cracked from frozen sap, malnourished men couldn’t breathe. A dance hall girl threw an oil lamp at another, and the building immediately went up in flames. The water in the hoses froze before it could battle the spreading conflagration, and Dawson burnt to the ground. London returned to his company, living “in an icebox” for the winter, a 10x12 foot cabin, bent over his books and a deck of playing cards. The winter was so cold that even whiskey froze solid. Yet weary men still found their way to the cabin, and they regaled the young writer with stories of gold booms and busts, trusty sled dogs, indigenous hunts, and brushes with wild animals, including wolves.
By 1898, over 17,000 claims were staked in the Yukon. Many of them were too small to even cover the fees. Still, tens of thousands of men from all over the world poured into Dawson with the spring thaw. Steamers started arriving, carrying barrels of liquor, lemonade, lobster, even watermelons. London floated toward town as well, on a raft constructed from the logs of his cabin. He was severely malnourished, crippled from the waist down, and his teeth were falling out. He found a lemon and a potato, the first fresh food he had eaten in almost a year, then he and John Thorson, his kindly neighbor on Henderson Creek and inspiration for Buck’s beloved John Thorton, floated 1500 miles downstream to the Bering Sea, where he earned his keep shoveling coal on the schooner that brought them back home. When he stepped off the boat in San Francisco, London held the value of his toil in gold: dust and nuggets equating $4.50.
In April of 1899, Dawson had already reached the pinnacle of its gold rush. By this time, the bloated boomtown had electricity, telephone lines, dance halls, and theaters. It was more modern than most American and Canadian cities. Yet another fire caused by “Dawson’s curse: its low women” started in an apartment over a saloon. This time, however, the firemen were on strike. Over 110 buildings went up in flames like matchsticks, including the bank, whose “flimsy vault” could not withstand the heat. Paper money and land deeds were lost. Gold holdings melted together. The total loss in that building alone was a million dollars ($38,000,000 today). Hardly anything was insured. An ill- equipped fire department’s attempt at fighting the blaze was, according to the New York Times article about the tragedy, ridiculous: with only one engine and no water supply, they could only watch as the fire raced down Front Street.
Brothel cribs and saloons emptied into the streets in the early dawn, patrons in various states of dress, gripping the only thing that mattered: leather satchels of gold dust. Those who disapproved of Dawson City’s vices lauded the fire for essentially reducing the town to ash, even though the saloons that had salvaged liquor sold it in the street the next day for double and triple the price.
Theft was rampant. Provisions in the town were all but gone and would take five weeks to arrive from Skagway. But large mining camps, whose provisions were off site, maintained operation. 774,000 ounces of gold would be extracted from the ground in that year, over a million the following year. While some men still struck it rich on what were thought were worthless claims dozens of miles from the rush’s zenith, most men left penniless. In the summer, once news got out that gold had been found on a beach in Nome, Alaska, 8,000 men left within a week.
The Dawson airport is a single-room building that resembles a train station more than an airport. It has a waiting room, a bag drop, and a ticket window. The runway was paved in 2019. We arrived on an Air North prop plane. Air North’s roots began 50 years ago with a single Cessna, but now, after heavy investment from the Gwich'in First Nation, it has a small fleet that runs flights all over the Yukon. The food on the plane is so good that the kitchen staff offers a home delivery service in Whitehorse. Our flight to Dawson only lasted a little over an hour, long enough to nibble on my in-flight charcuterie board. We can see the tall peaks of Kluane Park and into the coastal ranges of Alaska. These ranges dwarf the Yukon Range, roughly 3,000 feet, but they encompass a tremendous territory: 140,000 square miles. There is no sign of human habitation for the entire flight until we start descending. There we can see faint scars of the gold rush: cuts from abandoned sluices, glimmers of dilapidated metal, uniform hills piled along the Klondike River-- tailings from mining dredges. During the rush, nearly every tree would have been cut down, but now, evergreens dot the landscape. Below us run the frozen creeks where, at one time, thousands of men toiled in vain hope to strike it rich beyond their wildest dreams.
Dawson is as much a postcard town as it is a set for a Wes Anderson movie. Most of the buildings are relics of the gold rush and the entire town is part of a National Historical Complex. A local ordinance forbids chain stores (not even a Tim Hortons!), and because we are not visiting during tourist season, hardly any place is open, except a corner grocery bursting to the gills with food and snacks. The packaging is bilingual (English and French, and with much healthier ingredients). Despite the fact that almost all food is imported into the Yukon, and virtually all fruits and vegetables in the winter, our bill is still cheaper than what we would pay back home.
Most of the Victorian buildings are painted in bright colors. For example, the Robert Service School serving K-12, is painted bright orange with yellow trim. Each student in the Yukon has painted a wooden cutout of a salmon and they are hung all over the fences of each schoolyard we have seen, though the ones at the French immersion school in Whitehorse are covered with a thick layer of road salt. Here, they are bright, with images of the aurora borealis. The students, dropped off by snowmobile or sled, are at recess when we pass, playing in a foot of snow on the playground. It is 18 degrees. We amble through town, and I can’t help but laugh as I wander through the hardware store, gazing at the necessities of life in the Yukon. I think about standing in line for an ice cream at Pace’s store, giggling at the tourists who marvel at our Saluda essentials: canned preserves and tomato stakes, mouse traps and sourwood honey. Today I am that tourist, examining wool long johns thicker than any sweater I own, a multitude of ice axes, and gas powered log splitters. A Tr'ondëk Hwëch'in storyteller named Terry approaches to see if I need help. I tell him no, that I am far from home, and even though I want to, I can’t haul a log splitter back to North Carolina. When I tell him I am a teacher, he says he has a message for my students. He recounts the story of Raven the helper, and he tells us how it is not in the way of his people or our people to separate ourselves. In fact, in his language, there is no distinction between “you” or “I.” “Once we start calling ourselves one thing or another, we have failed. It is not in our nature to be separate,” he says. “We are all one.” When I tell him it was nice to meet him and goodbye, he shakes his head. “We have no word for goodbye either. See you again.”
The Yukon and the Klondike Rivers are frozen solid, so much so that trucks are driving upstream, so we hike south, our boots crunching on the snow dusting the great river that in a couple months will be running fast and clear, carving new channels and oxbows from the spring thaw. As the riverbed changes, different layers of sediment are exposed, and in those layers hide fossils and bones that date back to the Ice Age. Miners were as likely to find gold as they were to find remains of scimitar cats, wooly mammoths, short-nose bear, the Yukon horse, and atlatls and obsidian tools from ancient hunting parties. We head up the Klondike River to a dilapidated stable on the far bank, wading through hip-deep snow, then backtrack to catch the trail system that winds up Midnight Dome, a metamorphic knob marking the Tintana trench: to the north, heavy metals and coal. To the south, gold. We pass the cabins of Klondike writers Robert Service, Pierre Burton, and the reconstructed Jack London house, fashioned from the logs he floated down from Henderson Creek.
THE END OF AN ERA:
“He was sounding the deeps of his nature, and of the parts of his nature that were deeper than he, going back into the womb of Time.”-Call of the Wild
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
-”Spell of the Yukon” by Robert Service
We fly back to Whitehorse, and we have one last thing to see: the aurora borealis. Kyle, our guide, is a native from a small Saskatchewan settlement, and he has the most intense Canadian accent of anyone we have met. He makes a living by leading ice fishing and moose hunting expeditions. He picks us up at our hotel in a ‘92 Ford diesel and drives us out to Lake Laberge, far from the lights of the city. It is here that Robert Service’s poem “Cremation of Sam McGee” is set, and it is here that, in Call of the Wild, Buck’s team is overtaken by a pack of starving huskies. But tonight, a clear night in mid-March, we drive on the quiet lake, the ice cracking deep underfoot, and the lights above start to dance and swirl. They are over 200 miles above our head, but they seem like at any minute we could reach them with our hands. “It is easy to see how the Inuit believed the lights were spirits of their ancestors,” Kyle comments. “The lights are alive.”
London did not set out to write a social commentary about social Darwinism or Marxism. He just wanted to write a good adventure story. While London was praised for giving human thought to his animal characters, there are some historical and biographical inaccuracies. First of all, in the first part of White Fang, a starving wolf pack stalks two men as they travel through the wilderness, ultimately killing one of them. While gold seekers did essentially clean out the Yukon of migrating game, there are no recorded wolf-caused human deaths in living memory. According to Yukon biologist Bob Hayes, the wolf pack would disintegrate and members would hunt alone. Also, Buck, the shepherd-Saint Bernard in Call of the Wild, joins a roving pack at the end of the novel. In reality, Buck would have probably been abandoned the first day when his heavy feet and short legs would have punched through the snow, rendering him too worn out after a single day's worth of travel.
Few animals’ right to live in our history have been as debated and contested as the wolf. Native tribes throughout the continent followed wolf packs, migrating along with food sources and learning how to hunt. To them, the wolf was the only animal smart enough for man’s soul to enter. Others thought wolves could understand human thought. For most indigenous people, to follow the wolf’s way was a spiritual practice rooted in their tribe’s survival.
Wolves are the embodiment of ruthless, uncompromising, unforgiving wildness. As London says, to follow the wolf is to “go back into the womb of time.” However, due to the wolf’s ability to adapt to any environment, their migratory nature, and their penchant for eating the same food settlers wanted, the 19th and 20th century invited their unregulated killing across the continent. The last western North Carolina gray wolf was shot in Haywood County in the 1880s. North Carolina’s Albemarle Peninsula is the home of the last pack east of the Mississippi: a paltry twenty red wolves.
Wolves are part of the cycle of life, an intricate part of the trophic cascade. In Yellowstone, where wolves have been reintroduced, elk and moose populations have become healthier, riparian zones replenished. Wolves are not just dangerous and beautiful. They restore ecosystems to a natural balance. An in-tact ecosystem is a key element to what makes London’s world so beautiful- the hardship required to be there, the humility brought about by its vastness. That was part of the wolf’s appeal to me. When I was in college I spent a summer working in Yellowstone. I camped in Montana’s Beartooth Mountains for a few nights. Snow was falling in July, and temperatures dropped to the teens. I cuddled up and listened to a roving pack move through the night, their howls coming closer and closer. In the morning, when I stepped outside, dozens of fresh tracks circled my tent. At a time when I was struggling to understand my own place in this world, I felt connected to this primordial beauty of ancient systems that reach back to the dawn of time. It reminded me of when I was young, watching the sun rise across the endless expanse of the Gulf of Mexico, no sign of human habitation in sight, with only a fiberglass hull separating us from a thousand feet of water. It is a sense of awe, a sense of respect. Once the wolves are gone, either by their own will or forced out, man becomes the “dominant primordial beast” and can do with the world what he wants. There is no true wilderness without them.
London became the richest and most famous writer of his day. He bought up one thousand acres in Sonoma county and laid plans to establish his own working estate, continuing recounting his adventures. He died young, an effect of alcohol abuse. Back in North Carolina, George Vanderbilt also passed away. His wife Edith sold off the land to the United States government under the condition that they honor her late husband’s wishes and keep the land pristine. That tract of land is now part of Pisgah National Forest, part of a contiguous passage of land that runs across the southern Appalachians.
While we cannot return to the state of balance that existed prior to the gold rush, it is comforting to know that our landscape will, in all likelihood, never return to the widespread degradation and biotic extinction caused by the unregulated development our country experienced in the 19th and 20th centuries. And it is good to know that people of all walks of life, from ordinary folks like Horace Kephart, Jack London, John Muir, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Wanda Dykeman can have an impact on our biotic communities just like George Vanderbilt and Teddy Roosevelt.
This trip opened my eyes to a broader, wilder world, both longitudinally in time and latitudinally in space. I feel so fortunate to live in Saluda, in the here and now, where the big topics of conversation are about where the trillium are blooming and whether anyone has spotted a morel. We are so very fortunate to be here.
Here is a link to a video with images from the trip! https://youtu.be/fJPJSW31w9g?si=Gt9xlc1yfA5zZy1E
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