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Book Review
| In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire Along the Inside Passage. By Robert Campbell. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. Nature and Culture in America series. 348 pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. Cloth $45.00, paper $22.50; Pioneering Conservation in Alaska. By Ken Ross. Boulder: University Press of Colorado, 2006. xxiv + 540 pp. Illustrations, maps, tables, notes, bibliography, and index. Cloth $34.95.
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| These books share at least two major themes: the longstanding public fascination with Alaska and the influence of reportage on the far north on national values and policies. Far from portraying Alaska as an isolated and ignored corner of the continent, both Campbell and Ross emphasize its strong connections with a larger national experience. |
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Campbell's book explores the bleaker implications of these connections. "Alaska's history," he explains, "serves as an indicator of a far flung culture of imperialism" (p. 11). Darkest Alaska likens the exploitation of the far north—in print as well as in terms of extraction of natural resources—to that of Africa, focusing on the travelogues of wealthy tourists who sailed the thousand-mile waterway between Puget Sound and Glacier Bay during the late nineteenth century. According to Campbell, these accounts attracted a large international audience "that came to understand the north through sightseeing eyes" (p. 10). More important, they laid the groundwork for development of the far north long before the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897–1898 (the gold strike, this reviewer thinks worth noting, occurred in the Yukon, not in Alaska). Tourism was neither a benign nor a passive presence. "The thirty years of travel preceding the gold rush fixed Alaska's possibilities in the national imaginary," Campbell writes. "Elite travel and cultural production helped to make American Alaska into a place of colonial conquest and the natural resource extraction it entailed" (p. 9). Early travel writing in Alaska thus fostered more than an interest in tourism. It proved "effective at incorporating Alaska into the nation," while helping "assemble the new political order" (pp. 9, 14). |
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Readers might find Campbell's discussion of the commodification of Alaska scenery and the cultural roots of travel to be especially compelling. As I write this review, thousands of passengers are boarding massive cruise ships on Seattle's waterfront, hoping to experience an Alaskan adventure from the comfort of a floating city. Similarly, nineteenth-century guidebooks promised an easy excursion on a large, comfortable steamer. Passengers could observe grandiose scenery without having to negotiate "raw nature," including the tangled, impassable vegetation onshore, and without serious threat from the rapids that dot the narrow channels of the Inside Passage (p. 73). The conventions of the picturesque and sublime provided tourists with the means to interpret this novel landscape, and mastering the vocabulary of the picturesque and sublime in their writings assured their "elite status." Travel to Alaska, Campbell explains, "carried a social cachet," serving as a mark of prestige (p. 101). |
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The social and political implications of this elite tourism are perhaps most evident in travel writing about native people—and Campbell's analysis of the search for curios and collecting of artifacts is fascinating. Yet at that point—midway through the book—the author's cynical tone becomes distracting, if not disturbing. Deriding his subjects as "scribbling tourists," Campbell condemns their "punishing judgments" with a degree of bitterness that renders the latter phrase an apt description for his own approach (p. 151). |
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