| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1

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| Book Review | The Western Historical Quarterly, 40.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire Along the Inside Passage. Nature and Culture in America Series. By Robert Campbell. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007. 348 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, index. $45.00, £29.50.)

In Darkest Alaska is a critical analysis of late-nineteenth-century Alaska tourism in every sense of the word. Anglo-American travelers of the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s saw themselves as enlightened, scientific observers in pursuit of active leisure. Robert Campbell reveals instead a self-absorbed and self-serving elite blind to the complexities of Native life and labor, to the racial violence and industrial grind of large-scale gold mining, and to the labor and technology that produced and supported their own journeys. The author uses critical theory to deconstruct tourists' diaries, letters, publications, guidebooks, and souvenirs, which in their representation and consumption of nature and Native peoples denied Native history, reified a pure un-peopled nature, and prepared the way for the Klondike gold rush. Tourism thus served as "an incorporating arm of ... empire" (p. 61). In Darkest Alaska will become indispensable reading on western tourism and Alaskan history, and no one reading this book will ever consider an Alaskan cruise in quite the same light again.

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