Border regions, where differing cultures or political systems meet and trade influences, make especially fertile subjects. Between Dawson City, Yukon and Circle City, Alaska, lies the quintessence of Canada’s and the United States’ northwesternmost frontiers, a subarctic region romanticised in tales of gold-seeking prospectors of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The Yukon River’s banks and the country stretching back uphill from the great river and its larger tributaries used to be thinly but steadily populated. The size of the indigenous population living in this region before the Klondike Gold strike is a guess. By 1900, an estimated 500 to 1,000 people lived between Eagle and Circle. At mid-20th century, Dawson City, Eagle and Circle had all been reached by roads. In 1973, a formal survey estimated that the human population living away from road access between Eagle and Circle consisted of 16 year-round residents. In 1977 a count of such residents (including children) found 28 (p. 136). In all, during the two decades between 1970 and 1990, O’Neill could identify 80 individuals grouped into 35 households who lived outside organized, road-connected communities between the Canada-Alaska border and Circle. By 2005, the number of families permitted to continue living within the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve had dropped to zero (p. 233).
O’Neill’s surveys of space and time by means of several canoe trips through this country can impress readers in several ways. One impression is the improbable tectonic, glacial and erosion events that formed the Yukon drainage (p. 23–25). Another is to marvel at how many different explorers between 1778 (James Cook, p. 14) and 1883 (Frederick Schwatka, p. 31) fitted pieces into the geographic puzzle of the source and all the dendritic tributaries of the Yukon River. Yet another impression is of the subtle yet significant differences between two nations and their two respective territorial governments’ public policies toward the contiguous land and river systems coursing through this boundary region (“Canadians have an impressive knack for ‘stick handling’ around dicey problems.” p. 44).
Something commonsensical yet heroic has seeped out of this country, although the author does not hurry to judge this seepage as sinister. Percy DeWolfe, for example, spent 35 years delivering the mail between Dawson and Eagle, back and forth, summer and winter, from 1915 through 1950. A letter made the 160-km trip either way by dog team or riverboat in about four days. Once the U.S. and Canadian postal systems replaced Percy’s surface delivery with airplanes in 1951, his 160-km, four-day trip was perverted into a 5 000-km odyssey through Whitehorse, Vancouver, Seattle, and back north via Anchorage and Fairbanks. Now, although it is moved by high-flying aircraft that reach two-thirds the speed of sound, a letter spends the first half of its average 10-day transit between Dawson and Eagle traveling 2 500 km almost directly away from its destination (p. 25-27). That vignette early in the book suggests nothing more than innocent absurdity resulting from technological innovations.
Another couple of vignettes concern the modern tour boat, Yukon Queen, hustling passengers between Eagle and Dawson. This modern high-speed catamaran lacks any of the leisurely and stately luxury of the steam-powered sternwheelers that plied this section of the Yukon River for 88 years (1867–1955, p. 6). Instead, O’Neill finds Yukon Queen’s “…sleek, swept back lines reminiscent of absolutely nothing in this country” (p. 36). Worse, passage of this noisy, fuel-guzzling vessel with its payload of 104 passengers throws breaking waves ashore on both banks of the Yukon River that have caused a number of observers to wonder at the destruction of vegetation by erosion undercutting the banks and the fatal grounding of fingerling salmon. Mew gulls appear to have learned to congregate for a free lunch on grounded juvenile fish at the twice-daily approaching roar of the Yukon Queen (pp. 20-21). Here, technological innovation hints at more sinister conclusions about this land “going lonesome.”
This book is about people as much as it is about the environment or environmental policy. A Land Gone Lonesome features characters of near-legendary dimensions. They include the enigmatic Dick Cook of Eagle country (p. 92–117), and firebrand Joe Vogler (p. 202–220) who rose and fell as a maverick miner and a maverick politician. Had I not happened to know both men, I might have found it hard to accept them and some of their associates as nonfictional characters.
O’Neill carefully credits the National Park Service and other federal agencies with helping to avoid some boondoggles in public lands management. One of these was the scarcely believable notion of building an enormous hydroelectric dam at Rampart, widely championed from 1959 until the “Rampart Project” died of its own financially preposterous dimensions (pp. 230–232). Another wild-eyed dream so far deterred by the National Park Service is that of connecting Circle City and Eagle by road paralleling the river (p. 232).
A Land Gone Lonesome gradually becomes an erie sequel to John McPhee’s (1977) book, Coming into the Country. McPhee examined events and people in Alaska at a watershed in the state’s historical development. The Trans-Alaska (oil) Pipeline was under construction while McPhee traveled the state. More relevant to O’Neill’s contribution, however, the second stage of land distribution heralded by the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA–1971) was underway. Teams of experts were picking lands to become preserves and parks following enactment of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA–1980). The title essay in McPhee’s book concerned this upper Yukon River country and its inhabitants, between Eagle and Circle City. McPhee portrayed a stream of zealous latter day pioneers fleeing urban life. Effectively, they were supplanting earlier generations of indigenous peoples, miners, fishermen and trappers who were leaving the country in the 1960s and 1970s, either feet first or of their own will. This final lot of settlers was a heterogeneous amalgam of refugees, disenchanted with war, cash economies, comforts or pipelines, united by determination to live directly from the land. McPhee admired these idealists’ pluck and described Dick Cook as the “acknowledged high swami of the river people.” These idealists, more ready, perhaps, than their predecessors to embrace hardships, seemed immune to forebodings about how uniformed government agents might regard their spontaneous individual land tenancies in the future. Within a year of publication of McPhee’s book, most of the land between Eagle and Circle had been selected for the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. Land stewardship there would be transferred after the 1980 ANILCA enactment from the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management to that of the National Park Service.
O’Neill follows the fates of some of the very people introduced to readers by John McPhee three decades earlier as those who “came into the country.” This chronicle introduces additional recent arrivals. Besides the fates of his and McPhee’s people, A Land Gone Lonesome also traces the capital amassed by individuals and small family groups while they mastered the skills to allow them to subsist in this country. That capital should not be confused with monetary wealth, but it did consist of histories, valuable know-how and the dwellings these latter-day pioneers built during their tenancy on the land. As a cabin builder himself, Dan O’Neill shares with readers his appraisals of buildings constructed by former inhabitants.
This book proposes that value added to lands and waters by the human experiences gained by living upon them was irreversibly diminished upon exclusion of residents (p. 82–83). Detailed analysis of value bled from the country after 1984 as the result of entrusting stewardship over public lands to the National Park Service masquerades as a travelogue but is really a sobering lament. Appropriately enough to 1984’s metaphoric overtones, O’Neill injects an Orwellian hue into my imagination of uniformed Park Service officials managing lands and manipulating people. Thus, thought police (however unintentionally they may have done so) have created a dystopia built around bureaucratic doublethink and justified by revisionist history in which whole inconvenient pages of the heritage of people who not long ago were living from the land are simply blanked out.
The final ironic footnote is that this review should appear in the very issue of The Polar Times [January 2007 issue] that is highlighting northern tourism. How else to see the last quarter century of local history than as illustrating that the U.S. National Park Service has sanitized the landscape of the Yukon Charley Rivers National Preserve, as the agency’s preferred way to open the country to tourism?
People who believe (as I used to) that protecting wilderness or recreating it by excluding human residency is axiomatically the purest form of environmental stewardship should find this book particularly thought-provoking. Dan O’Neill finishes in his Afterword (pp.238–242) by examining real-life alternatives to the policies that result in driving all people (except itinerant tourists and uniformed rangers) out of Park Service-administered lands.
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