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Book Review
| The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush. By Kathryn Morse. Weyerhaeuser Environmental Books series. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003. xviii + 290 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, selected bibliography, index. $29.95.
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| The Klondike gold rush of 1897–1898 delivered a dose of excitement during a bleak decade. In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner provoked a sense of national loss by noting the demise of the frontier and the resulting shortage of free land as the primary formative force in the development of American character. The nation also suffered through a protracted economic slump throughout much of the 1890s. The Klondike gold rush provided a welcome remedy by offering a chance to engage in one last frontier adventure and perhaps get rich in the process. As a result, historians often have portrayed the gold rush as a celebratory experience representing yet another step in the inexorable process of American Manifest Destiny. |
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The Nature of Gold by Kathryn Morse supplies a welcome corrective to the triumphal school of gold rush historiography. She graphically demonstrates that the quest for gold had serious consequences for animals, people, and the land. Intrepid miners rounded up all available horses, dogs, and even goats to tote their supplies over frozen mountain passes, but often abused the animals in the process. Native peoples suffered previously unimagined assaults as the "stampeders" competed with them for jobs as river pilots and wood suppliers, while intensifying the pressure to harvest scarce food supplies. Miners tore into the earth and left scars on the fragile northern landscape that remain visible today. Morse adds an important dimension to the body of gold rush literature that often tends to focus too heavily on glitter, champagne, con artists, gunfights, and lively dance halls. |
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The author draws heavily on William Cronon's work in Nature's Metropolis to argue that the remote gold fields were inextricably beholden to global forces far removed from the actual mining sites. Morse details the numerous points of connection: political debates surrounding the merits of free silver versus the gold standard, the demand for transportation improvements, the dependence on food from the "outside," and the reliance on Seattle merchants to outfit the miners. Just as the distant Klondike could not escape these powerful influences, neither could the pursuit of gold ultimately free miners from the burdens felt by workers throughout the industrial world. Most miners, after all, did not become rich, but rather found themselves employed as wage laborers having to cope with very trying working conditions. In the end, increasing reliance on industrial technology tended to distance miners from the natural world that had produced the precious metal in the first place. |
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Both well written and provocative, the book sometimes succeeds too well in downplaying the melodrama of the Klondike rush. At times, theoretical propositions trump events to the point that resurrected miners may not recognize the lofty motives attributed to them. Countless other acts based entirely on impulse are difficult to explain. Although not cited by Morse, one example would include the case of Seattle Mayor William Wood, who found the lure of the Klondike so irresistible that he abruptly left his elected office to try his luck in the mining fields. The rather sanitized gold rush described in this book does not readily account for many similar acts of unadulterated exuberance. However, these points constitute only a minor critique of a book that otherwise deserves great credit as a valuable addition to the literature of the Klondike gold rush. |
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Bruce J. Noble, Jr., is the superintendent of Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park in Skagway, Alaska. He has published an article on a hydraulic mining project in the Annals of Wyoming and has co-authored a National Park Service bulletin on nominating mining sites to the National Register of Historic Places. |
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