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The Trail of the Goldseekers | |
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The Trail of Gold Seekers
page 1 | 2 | 3 | Further Reading | Itinerary | Rare Books & Manuscripts
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A
centenary introduction to Garland's The Trail of the Goldseekers
(Macmillan, 1899), based on materials in the Garland Collection at the
University of Southern California. Photographs are by Hamlin Garland, from
the Garland Collection at the University of Southern California.
The watercolor illustrations are taken from a unique, extra-illustrated copy of the book, presented to Garland by the artist Ernest Shaw and kept with the Garland Collection at USC. Notes and descriptions for this Website are by John Ahouse, American Literature Curator at the University of Southern California (ahouse@usc.edu) Left: Watercolor by Ernest Shaw(USC Garland Collection)
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Which
younger American writer, already famous, went to Alaska to observe and
write about the Gold Rush in 1898, sketched a series of magazine articles
along the way, and a year later published a book about his experiences
on the trail? It was Jack London, right? Wrong. It was Hamlin Garland,
and the book was called The Trail of the Goldseekers. (Jack London,
whose Alaska stories would establish his career, had already wintered in
the Klondike region at the time, trying his hand at prospecting; but as
an author, he was an unknown who hadn't published a line as yet.)
Left: Bill
of sale, Ashcroft, B.C., for Garland's journey
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outgoing decade of the 1990s marked the centenary of the major gold discoveries
in Alaska, which, after a slow start, achieved stampede proportions by
the end of 1897. The galvanizing event was the arrival of the steamer "Portland"
in Seattle, with a handful of newly created millionaires and their bags
of gold on board. Charlie Chaplin in his "Gold Rush" has helped us to visualize
this moment, as well as the frozen struggle of would-be miners up the slopes
from Skagway, the nearest approach to the Klondike. The severe sub-Arctic
winter of 1897-98 put most prospecting plans on hold till the next spring,
when the real onslaught on the goldfields began. It was at precisely at
spring thaw, in May of 1898, that Hamlin Garland set out to try to reach
the Yukon River by an overland route.
Right: Packing the horses (USC Garland Collection) |
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Garland
established his early reputation as an outdoors writer chronicling not
the western advance across the plains or the Rockies, but rather the opening
of the "Middle Border," as he called it, the rough-and-ready existence
of the homesteaders along the frontiers of the Upper Midwest. Born in rural
Wisconsin and raised in Iowa and the Dakotas, Garland lost no time in moving
to Chicago and New York to join the cultivated literary establishment.
He knew and assisted the unlucky Stephen Crane, met Mark Twain, and became
a disciple of William Dean Howells, the reigning literary light of Boston
in those years. Garland "wrote what he knew," however; and his first collection
of stories, which propelled him to overnight fame, told of the harsh conditions
of the "Middle Border," gaining him the reputation of a "realist" author,
as compared to the popular writers of romances and humorous tales of country
life. A novel, Rose of Dutcher's Cooley, followed up on that success
in the same vein, while his carefully researched life of General Grant,
based on interviews with Civil War survivors, found him many more appreciative
readers.
Right: Watercolor by Ernest Shaw (USC Garland Collection)
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