The Nature of Gold

An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush

Kathryn Morse

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780295989877
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia de Norteamérica

In 1896, a small group of prospectors discovered a stunningly rich pocket of gold at the confluence of the Klondike and Yukon rivers, and in the following two years thousands of individuals traveled to the area, hoping to find wealth in a rugged and challenging setting. Ever since that time, the Klondike Gold Rush - especially as portrayed in photographs of long lines of gold seekers marching up Chilkoot Pass - has had a hold on the popular imagination. In this first environmental history of the gold rush, Kathryn Morse describes how the miners got to the Klondike, the mining technologies they employed, and the complex networks by which they obtained food, clothing, and tools. She looks at the political and economic debates surrounding the valuation of gold and the emerging industrial economy that exploited its extraction in Alaska, and explores the ways in which a web of connections among America's transportation, supply, and marketing industries linked miners to other industrial and agricultural laborers across the country. The profound economic and cultural transformations that supported the Alaska-Yukon gold rush ultimately reverberate to modern times. The story Morse tells is often narrated through the diaries and letters of the miners themselves. The daunting challenges of traveling, working, and surviving in the raw wilderness are illustrated not only by the miners' compelling accounts but by newspaper reports and advertisements. Seattle played a key role as "gateway to the Klondike." A public relations campaign lured potential miners to the West and local businesses seized the opportunity to make large profits while thousands of gold seekers streamed through Seattle. The drama of the miners' journeys north, their trials along the gold creeks, and their encounters with an extreme climate will appeal not only to scholars of the western environment and of late-19th-century industrialism, but to readers interested in reliving the vivid adventure of the West's last great gold rush.

1

THE CULTURE OF GOLD

It was the natural thing to do. There could be few more powerful arguments about any human endeavor than this one, that it was the natural thing to do. The gold seekers on the Chilkoot Pass and on the other trails and rivers that led to the Yukon and Alaska risked their lives in pursuit of gold. Why? The answer perhaps seems simple: gold would make them rich. But the answer goes further. Late-nineteenth-century Americans naturalized gold's value and gold rushes. They removed gold and everything gold-related from the realm of human culture, and called them nature, called them natural. According to those naturalizations, the men and women struggling up the Chilkoot acted out of fundamental human nature, in response to the powerful nature of gold and to natural economic laws. Culture had nothing to do with it. These understandings of nature, however, were profoundly cultural. They were rooted in human culture, history, and belief, and in Euro-American political, economic, and social traditions. It took a fair amount of culture, after all, to make the Chilkoot crossing seem the natural thing to do.

Of course, Americans had been calling gold rushes natural for a long time. All the way back to the first inklings of New World riches, Euro-Americans believed humans to have a natural, universal attraction to and desire for gold. In Gold Seeking, a recent cultural history of the 1850s gold rushes in California and Australia, David Goodman notes that most mining histories depict gold rushes “as though it were the most natural thing that men should leave all that was valuable to them in one part of the world, to seek for precious minerals in remote regions.”¹ The familiar explanations for gold seeking, greed, lust, and madness naturalized events by ascribing them to elemental human passions. The human drive to rush out and wrest gold from the earth occurred by nature, like an epidemic disease, “gold fever,” or in the 1890s, “Klondike fever.” Gold's value and allure worked on the nature of the human body and the human soul, beyond the realm of reason, history, and culture. Even through the twentieth century, historians continued to portray gold rushes as quasi-natural events. They unfolded far from “civilization,” close to “nature.” They remained, according to historian Paula Mitchell Marks, “essentially the same from year to year and place to place… outside history.”² In setting the context for the Alaska-Yukon gold rush, historians mention the depression of the 1890s, and little else. The economy was stagnant; people were desperate. That is all it took.³ Given the attractions of real and instant wealth, rushing off to the Yukon seemed, well, the natural thing to do. In the late 1890s, however, Americans' naturalization of gold moved beyond these general ideas about gold fever and gold rushes. During one of the most hotly contested presidential elections of the century, the culture of gold reached its highest summit.

On July 9, 1896, a little over a month before Yukon prospectors stumbled onto a rich pocket of gold along Bonanza Creek, William Jennings Bryan took the podium at the Democratic Convention in Chicago and transfixed his audience with one of the most famous political speeches in American history. With great energy, style, pacing, and poetry, Bryan railed against the gold standard for the nation's money supply, his Republican opponents' favored policy. Bryan fervently believed that the gold standard would unjustly limit the amount of currency in national circulation and bring economic oppression to the nation's workers. “Having behind us the producing masses of this nation and the world,” he declared, bringing his speech to a crowd-rousing finale, “we will answer their demand for the gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”⁴ Never had gold suffered such hatred and condemnation. The speech electrified the audience, which exploded in response, the sound likened by one reporter to “one great burst of artillery.” “‘Bryan, Bryan, Bryan!’” they shouted, twenty thousand strong, ripping off their coats and throwing them in the air, “on their chairs wildly waving hats, canes, umbrellas, anything that came to hand.” They responded next with their votes, nominating Bryan for president.⁵ Bryan's bold images, the crown of thorns and the cross of gold, appeared in political cartoons in periodicals across the nation. Those images brought the gold standard debate home to the American people. They brought clarity to an almost incomprehensible topic, and became the most powerful salvo in a long political battle over the nature of gold.

Growing in part out of the severe economic depression of the early 1890s, the gold standard debate, or “Battle of the Standards,” was at root about far broader issues: the economic dominance of the eastern region of the country and the subjugation of the West; the role of producers in an industrial economy; the power of cities in an age of rapid urbanization; and the future of the Democratic party. The fight also concerned whether the solutions to the boom-and-bust vagaries of industrialization should come from the unfettered play of natural law or from the social powers of political action. By the summer of 1896, however, those many complicated issues had boiled down to the choice between monetary standards, between a bimetallist standard (gold and silver together), or simply gold.

Advocates of the gold standard, led by Bryan's opponent in the presidential election, William McKinley, wanted every dollar in the nation's money supply backed by real, physical gold, held in the United States Treasury. They wanted any American holding a paper dollar to be able to present it at the Treasury and receive a dollar's worth of gold in return. As a commodity, a raw material used by jewelers, dentists, metallurgists, and others, gold had a market value, which determined just how much made up “a dollar's worth.” This was most confusing when the U.S. government actually coined gold. As the market value of gold shifted, a gold dollar coin might contain more or less than a dollar's worth of gold according to the current market value of gold as a commodity. This was one reason why it was easier to issue paper dollars, backed by physical gold safely stored in the nation's vaults.

Dollars backed by gold, however, meant that the amount of physical gold in the nation's vaults determined—and limited—the amount of paper money in circulation. That policy meant a stronger, more valuable dollar, but it also meant fewer dollars and lower prices. Bimetallists, on the other hand, including William Jennings Bryan, wanted the amount of money in circulation to be determined by—and each paper dollar backed by—two metals: gold and silver. They wanted any American holding a paper dollar to be able to present it at the Treasury for a dollar's worth of gold or silver, or a combination of both. This would increase the supply of money in national circulation, because the Treasury's gold and silver supplies, when combined, made up a much larger amount of precious metal than just gold alone. Although the feverish debate proved somewhat technical and confusing, at its core it boiled down to one simple question: Where did gold's value come from?

Just days after Bryan condemned the nation's crucifixion on the cross of gold, prospectors in the Yukon Territory stumbled up Bonanza Creek above the Klondike Valley and found a rich pocket of gold. The Alaska-Yukon gold rush thus began with the same simple question: Where did gold's value come from? This gold rush—any gold rush—was predicated on gold's economic value, and, based on that value, unfolded in a predictable sequence of events. In this gold rush, prospectors discovered gold in the gravels of a distant Yukon creek in the summer of 1896. The following summer, news of their discoveries reached telegraph and newspaper offices around the world and, as Mac McMichael wrote in June 1898, “set a continent on fire with greed for gold.”⁶ Millions of individual men and women heard the news, and some of them—relatively few—mulled over the possibilities of setting of in search of gold.

Within that simple chain of events, however, lay the far fuzzier process by which human beings granted gold value. The decision to grant value to any physical element of the natural world is an important but complicated one. In choosing which earthly elements to value, harvest, and use, humans powerfully shape the earth itself. Such “choices,” however, are rarely identifiable as particular historical moments; they are buried in cultural and economic processes, and, as in the case of gold (and silver), buried in the past. Gold's value, as commodity, currency, capital, and as a sacred container of pure value, was centuries old by the 1890s, unquestioned and unquestionable. Yukon and Alaska gold, however, was a recent discovery. Along Bonanza Creek in 1896, a long-standing cultural value collided with a New World nature, relatively untouched by Euro-American ideas about what was valuable and what was not.

Hence the gold miners' first connection to the natural world was a connection not to the particular, physical nature of actual gold, or to the earth which contained that gold, but rather to gold's intangible economic value. No one on the Chilkoot Trail could see gold's value, or reach out to touch it, yet no one gave that value a second thought. Gold was valuable, and gold would make the miners rich. This first and necessary connection to gold, this complicated process called value, set in motion everything that followed.

But where did gold's value come from? It came from innumerable sources, most of them shrouded by time. In the 1890s, however, those sources came into public discussion, filtered through the American political debate over the gold standard. That debate turned on further questions: Did gold's value come from nature, or from culture? Was it a natural thing, or a cultural thing? What was natural? Gold money or other forms of money? As geographer David Harvey explains, political arguments about nature, and about what is natural, are always also about conflicts over social power, as opposing sides struggle “to gain command of institutions, social relations, and material practices for particular purposes.”⁷ Thus the battle of the standards, a battle over the nature of gold, was at heart also a battle over the future of American social and economic institutions, and over the material practices of mining, making, and using gold and silver money.

By 1896, that battle had been building for thirty years. It grew out of the federal government's attempts to reduce the amount of paper money in circulation in the United States and return to the gold standard, with each paper dollar backed by gold. Prior to the Civil War, all U.S. money had been backed by silver and gold together, although due to dwindling silver supplies, gold predominated. During the Civil War, however, manufacturers of everything from guns to clothing drew heavily on existing gold reserves to finance rapid wartime production. The gold supply dwindled, and with it, the amount of money in circulation.⁸ Under pressure to finance the Union Army, Congress issued paper dollars, called greenbacks, their value determined by international exchange. Greenbacks were backed only by government guarantee, not by gold or silver. If You took a greenback dollar to the bank, you would get less than a dollar's worth of gold, if you got any gold at all; there was no direct tie between the U.S. dollar and precious metal.⁹

By 1865, when greenbacks had seen the Union Army to victory, these paper dollars, due to inflation, exchanged for less than fifty cents' worth of gold.¹⁰ A greenback was a much “cheaper” dollar than a gold dollar, worth far less, with far less purchasing power both at home and internationally. Fiscal conservatives in Congress, led by Treasury Secretary Hugh McCulloch, wanted every paper dollar to be worth a dollar in gold. He wanted the nation on a gold standard. There were half a billion greenbacks out there, and the government had to figure out a way to take them out of circulation and make the dollar once again “as good as gold.”¹¹ Through the 1870s, the treasury held the amount of paper money in circulation stable, while the economy, the population, and the nation's gold reserves all grew; this slowly increased the value of each dollar until it matched a dollar's worth of gold. Despite falling prices, high interest rates, and increased economic hardship, particularly for western farmers, the plan succeeded, and the nation resumed the gold standard on January 2, 1879. “Soft money,” backed only by government promise, had been banished in favor of “hard money,” backed by gold.¹²

Resumption of the gold standard did not go uncontested, however. Political groups and writers calling themselves Greenbackers fought from the start to keep soft money in circulation. The Greenback Party organized to argue that paper money, and the inflation that went with it, maintained high prices and helped the “producing classes,” farmers and industrial workers. When financial disaster struck in the Panic of 1873, falling prices, bankruptcy, and business failures further galvanized farmers and other producers in opposition to hard money and the gold standard.¹³ At the same time, Nevada silver miners struck rich lodes in the Comstock, ending a decades-long scarcity of silver. As silver prices plummeted, silver became more plentiful than gold, and silver dollars the more plentiful dollars. Anyone with gold coin or gold bullion profited by selling it on the open market as raw material for a greater number of silver dollars.¹⁴ Thus, if silver dollars were allowed into circulation in any amount, they would quickly replace and even eliminate the nation's gold currency supply. This would bring inflation, but also pose a significant threat to resumption of the gold standard.¹⁵

That was exactly what Greenbackers and other soft money advocates wanted. By the mid-1870s, in the midst of these economic troubles, Green-backers became silverites, or rather, bimetallists. They adopted silver as a second panacea after paper greenbacks, hoping to use the new silver supplies to back new silver dollars, expand the currency supply, and resurrect the economy. The soft money ideology became a silver ideology and a growing political force.¹⁶ Only when the 1893 depression sank the nation into severe economic crisis, however, did the money debate gain real momentum, exploding full force into the political spotlight in the 1896 contest between McKinley and Bryan.¹⁷

The arguments, accusations, and economic theories in this contest ranged far and wide, but they continued to circle around the question of where gold's value came from. Gold standard advocates—or goldbugs—argued that gold's value came from nature, and that gold-backed dollars were naturally valuable. Greenbackers, silverites, and bimetallists, demanding paper dollars, silver dollars, and gold dollars, argued that all value came from culture, that all dollars and all monetary standards were given value by human societies and governments. In speeches, articles, an...