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CHAPTER 1
From Fur to Gold
by William Schneider
At the 1915 meeting of Native leaders, both Chief Ivan (Evan) and Chief Thomas recalled the time that had passed since the purchase of Alaska and they wanted to learn what they could expect from the government. There was little evidence of government in the forty-eight years between the signing of the treaty and the Chiefs meeting, but then, with the gold rush, their way of life was threatened and they needed to determine a relationship with the new government. Government officials, caught off guard by the new urgency, looked to the language embedded in the Treaty of Cession and this guided their policy toward Natives in Alaska. Under Article III of the Treaty of Cession with Russia, the population of Alaska was divided into the "inhabitants" and the "uncivilized tribes." Most Natives were classified as "uncivilized"; they were not citizens. Instead, they had tribal status, which meant that the government had to recognize their "aboriginal title" to land, but, in the language of the treaty, they were to be "subject to such laws and regulations as the United States may, from time to time, adopt in regard to aboriginal tribes of the country" (Case and Voluck 2012:62–63). The full implications of this classification and its impact on land claims became ever more evident as pressure built on land and resources. In this chapter we describe those changes.
William Seward, the secretary of state who had negotiated the treaty would not live to see the full richness of his investment, the gold rush that would transform life in even the most remote places. But there is some evidence that he thought Alaska was destined to be a "white man's land" and the fate of Natives was inevitable in the onrush of Western civilization. Addressing the citizens of Sitka in 1869, Seward summed up the fate of Alaska Natives: "[They] can neither be preserved as a distinct social community, nor incorporated into our society. The Indian tribes will do here as they seem to have done in Washington Territory and British Columbia: they will merely serve the turn until civilized white men come" (Seward 1869:13–14).
Early Traders
After the purchase, independent and corporate traders set up operations on the Yukon River. They introduced a greater volume of trade goods, particularly after steamboats were introduced to the Yukon River. They competed for the Natives' fur and their total livelihood depended on the trade. They had no interest in the Natives' land, just the fur that was brought to trade. In Interior Alaska, for many years, there was no sign of government and the Natives were beholden to no one but themselves, but that didn't last.
During the latter years of the nineteenth century, three of the most noteworthy early traders were Leroy Jack McQuesten, Arthur Harper, and Al Mayo. These three came into the country in 1873 following the old Hudson's Bay Company route from the Mackenzie drainage and down the Porcupine River. All three men married Native women (Satejdenalno Kate McQuesten, Seentahna Jennie Bosco Harper Alexander, and Neehunilthonoh Margaret Mayo), and they made long-term investments in the country (Haigh 1996:41–45). Their families are still prominent in Alaska today.
While these traders depended on fur for their livelihood, they were also interested in the mineral wealth of the country and they played a role in opening up the country to prospecting. Harper was an active prospector on the White and Tanana Rivers, and McQuesten grubstaked other men to look for gold, such as Sergai Cherosky and Pitka Pavaloff who discovered gold on Birch Creek in 1892 (Webb 1985:324). They were unable to hold their claims. In one account this was because they did not know the legal steps to stake claims (Callahan 1975:127). In another account, white prospectors claimed they couldn't legitimately hold title to land because they were Natives and therefore not citizens. McQuesten tried unsuccessfully to intervene (Haigh 1996:50). Of course, both interpretations may have been the case. In 1898, United States Geological Survey (USGS) geologist, Harold Goodrich reported similar sentiments in the Rampart area. The miners considered the Natives unreliable, claiming that they lacked "the perseverance and steadfastness of purpose which sustain the white man under difficulties and reverses" (Goodrich 1898:161–162).
John Minook (Mynook, Manook), a Native miner in the Rampart district where Goodrich had made his report, fought for his right to hold a mining claim and his case, adjudicated by Judge Wickersham, stands out as an early example of how the legal process was entangled with common attitudes about what it meant to be "civilized."
In an irony of history, Minook was related to both Pitka Pavaloff and Sergai Cherosky. Pitka was his brother and Sergai his brother-in-law (Callahan 1975:127; Haigh 1996:49).
Two Pivotal Law Cases
Minook would, in time (1904), win his case and his right to citizenship, in part because of his Russian blood but also because he had "voluntarily taken up his residence separate from any tribe of Natives and had adopted the habits of civilized life" (Cohen 1986:404; Wickersham 1906:224). In essence, this meant evaluation and approval of the way he was living: his housing, clothing, and conduct, his knowledge of white ways, and his abstaining from Native ceremonial or social life. The description in the legal report of the decision is instructive:
John Minook, whose true name is Ivan Pavlof, is the son of a Russian trader at St. Michael and an Eskimo mother. Both parents were members of the Russian Church, were married in and according to the rites and observances of the church, and their son, the applicant herein, was born in 1849 at St. Michael in the Russian possessions in North America. Both parents resided in Alaska at the time of the cession to the United States on March 30, 1867, and continued to reside there until their death. The applicant was married subsequent to 1867 to a native woman. They have reared a family of children whom they have attempted to educate and teach the principles of the Christian religion. The largest mining stream in the Rampart mining district was named "Minook Creek" in recognition of his worth as a man and miner. He has adopted the habits of civilized life, in dress, manners and habitation, has considerable knowledge of and renders obedience to the laws of the United States and speaks the English language. His witnesses and neighbors testify that he is a fit and proper person to be made an American citizen. (Wickersham 1906:201)
The judgment reached on Minook is significant to our unfolding story because it stands in contrast to the legal opinion reached one year later in the Berrigan case, a Native land dispute on the Tanana River. In the Berrigan case, white prospectors on the Little Delta River, a tributary of the Tanana River, were eager to purchase the rights to land occupied by Chief Jarvis and another Indian named Henry. They are the men who appear on the legal documents, but the group of Natives consisted of a small number of families. John Jesson, a witness who gave testimony at the inquiry said there were six or seven men and five women and several children and three houses. The prospectors wanted to use the land where the Natives lived as a staging site for the mining prospects up the Little Delta River that they expected to become very important. The legal proceedings did not include Chief Jarvis or Henry; the questions were addressed to white men from the area with some knowledge of the Natives. The questioning itself followed a familiar pattern with inquiry about how well the Natives understood white culture, business practices, the value of fur, sale price for a cord of wood, and how well their living standard approximated that of white society. There was a question raised about whether this was their permanent village. To this question, the respondent said it was their permanent village, "winter quarters," but earlier in the questioning it was noted that they sometimes went on hunting trips to Salchaket, Shaw Creek, Goodpasture (Goodpaster), and sometimes the Big Delta.
This line of questioning was designed to determine if they lived in one place — a basis for evaluating how civilized they were and therefore how qualified they were to function in white society and apply for citizenship, the prerequisite to owning and selling land. Permanent residence was a persistent theme in the evaluation of whether an individual was worthy of the rights of citizenship.
Wickersham ruled on the case, finding that the prospectors could not legally purchase land from Chief Jarvis and Henry, nor could these Natives hold a legal claim to land because they were not citizens. The prospectors were to stop cutting the timber on the land in question and to vacate the site. In making this judgment, Wickersham legally established the government's responsibility for the Natives and the land they depended on for survival. How much the questioning of the witnesses had influenced his decision is not known. We do know from his journal entries that Wickersham was familiar with the Native village, having stopped there on March 5, 1905, and reported: "[G]ood log houses and the Natives seem well and to have plenty." There is no question that Wickersham's action protected the Natives from immediate exploitation and raised awareness that there was need to find other legal ways to protect their land-use rights.
In both cases (Minook and Berrigan), the social yardstick of evaluation imposed on Natives and their lifeways at this time in history is clearly evident, if not the determining factor in determining their rights. Natives were not entitled to legally hold land until and unless they became like white men. This was the case, even though it was legally recognized that they had claims to land that had to be settled at some point. The Minook case stands out as the first legal ruling on Native rights to ownership of land in Interior Alaska, and the Berrigan case established the federal government's responsibility to protect Native interests in the land, even though those interests were unspecified. This meant that Natives would remain subject to the decisions and care of the United States government until the relationship was resolved. There were legal and circumstantial differences between the two cases and there were practical considerations, but there were two common threads: competition for land and questions about ownership and use. These considerations hadn't been issues until the Cherosky and Pavaloff discoveries on Birch Creek in 1893; up until then, there hadn't been land disputes between Natives and whites, that is, in Interior Alaska.
When the prospectors arrived they wanted to claim and patent land, to get legal title. This brought into stark relief the question of who qualified for land rights and the differences between a Western legal system based on individual ownership of land, with boundaries and legal rights of acquisition, disposal, and trespass, and the Interior Native concepts of land-use rights. The Native system was based on groups of related kin, dependent on each other and operating as loosely defined (because of changing conditions) groups, dependent on hunting and fishing free-ranging game.
Native Land-Use Patterns at the Turn of the Century
Descriptions of Athabascan society at the turn of the twentieth century (Callaway and Friend 2007: McKennan 1959:121, 1965:102, 1981:566) depict small isolated groups of related families, referred to in the anthropological literature as "bands," but what in legal parlance might be termed "tribes." Each band occupied a particular region where they could benefit from a variety of seasonally available resources. The Middle Tanana region is of particular interest in our reconstruction of band life at the end of the nineteenth century because it remained relatively isolated from Western influences until the gold rushes spilled over into the Tanana Valley and then it felt the full force of the prospectors. We are fortunate that there are detailed genealogical, photographic, and archival documents that help depict life at this time, just before the advent of prospectors streaming into the Tanana Valley.
The Healy Lake band plays a prominent role in this story. This band occupied the territory from Healy Lake on the Middle Tanana north up into the Forty Mile country. They relied on the whitefish that spawned in the Healy River and on the caribou that migrated through the Forty Mile country (Callaway and Friend 2007:148; Brewster 2013:5). They traded for Western goods at trading posts on the Yukon River at Eagle, Forty Mile, and Dawson. The band size was determined by the resources available to support the group of several related families. Group size was determined by the impact of disease and by allegiance to the leadership of a headman or chief. The chief's primary role at this time (before the movement of white people into the country) was to provide for the band members. The chief ruled by virtue of his skills as a hunter and his ability to provide for people (for Upper Tanana, McKennan 1959:131–132; for Ahtna, de Laguna 1975:91). As an indication of their ability to provide, chiefs might have more than one wife, a sign of wealth, competence, and ability to support an extended family. For instance, Chief Healy's father, Chit'ai Theeg, (Callaway and Friend 2007:145) was reported to have had two wives (genealogical information provided by Lee Saylor).
Marriage partners were recruited from other bands and often came from a considerable distance. Traditionally, marriages were arranged and followed a matrilineal pattern; children were members of their mother's clan and when they grew up, they married a person from a different clan, often from a different band. For instance, intermarriage between the Healy Lake and the Ketchumstuck bands was common, but it was not uncommon for people to seek marriage partners from even more distant groups. The marriage pattern assured that the ties between different bands were continually reinforced. Potlatches were another way ties were built between groups, and they were a way for an important person to demonstrate his wealth and influence as well as strengthen relations with neighboring groups.
Band structure was flexible, with movement between groups based on personal circumstance, including death of a spouse or the search for marriage partners. Bands had recognized territories based on protection of hunting and fishing rights, but this was less a concern over trespass and more about protecting one's own access to resources. Sometimes groups came together for communal hunts. This was the case at the caribou fences in the Forty Mile where Healy Lake and Ketchumstuck people were known on occasion to participate together in the hunt (Callaway and Friend 2007:x).
Before 1900, traders and settlers knew little about the Natives inhabiting the vast country stretching between the Tanana River north to the Yukon River. Native bands of the Middle and Upper Tanana came to the Yukon River trading posts but then returned to their homelands. It is fair to say that, at this time in history, these Natives knew more about the traders than the traders knew about them or their homelands. Natives of the Middle and Upper Tanana could selectively trade and learn about Western culture and then return to a way of life undisturbed by newcomers. Trips to the trading posts and the missions provided opportunities to learn rudimentary English and to gain familiarity with the customs of the traders and missionaries. This knowledge became important when the gold rush awakened the government to the need for exploration and development of routes into the Interior. In several cases, Native knowledge and assistance proved invaluable to the exploration parties. We turn to that record now because it depicts life on the brink of rapid change and stands in such contrast to Native–white relations after the turn of the century. Considered in this way, this record gives us a basis to see the changes chronicled in the next chapter.
Gold and the Military Explorations
In the years after the purchase up until a few years before the turn of the century, the United States government showed little interest in Interior Alaska. Alaska historian Morgan Sherwood argues this is because the United States had little need to pay attention to Alaska, given "more pressing matters nearer home" (1992:5). There is one exception that stands out because of the magnitude of the feat and because of what we learn about the Natives and their role in assisting the explorers. This is the expedition of Lieutenant Henry Allen, who in 1885 ascended the Copper River, descended the Tanana, and ventured up the Koyukuk River before making his way to St. Michael on the coast (Allen 1900:411–487). As he traveled through the Copper River country, the band leaders shared both knowledge of the route and their food with him. On the hundredth anniversary of Allen's trip, a gathering was held with Ahtna elders and at that gathering, Katie John related the history of Lieutenant Allen's trip from the perspective of her mother, who was a young girl at the time. Her account tells how they trusted Allen and his men, fed them, and ensured that they were guided through the country, from one camp to the next: "Some time before, the one called Lt. Allen came up here from down the Copper River. He went among the Ahtnas as he came up the river and some Ahtnas went along with him. He did not know the Ahtna trails. From Chitina, he came upriver with some Chitina people" (Kari 1985:115–116; full account is 115–121).
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Tanana Chiefs"
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