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THE
HAMLIN GARLAND COLLECTION
The Trail
of Gold Seekers
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Garland in camp (USC
Garland Collection)
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Garland
perceived his error early on, yet the balance of his book shows him pressing
forward against one adversity after another (rain, mosquitoes, torrential
streams, marshy ground -- some of which he could have spared himself by
starting later). |
| At
hand are the faithful companion (Burton Babcock) and his no-less-faithful
horse ("Ladrone"), every step of the way. Although Garland eventually arrives
at the gold fields near Dawson, it is only to turn around and head home
again. He had come not as a goldseeker, he writes, but as a nature hunter.
Yet, "The trail was a disappointment to me, not because it was long and
crossed mountains, but because it ran through a barren, monotonous, silent,
gloomy, and rainy country. It had almost no wild animal life, which I love
to hear and see. Its lakes and rivers were for the most part cold and sullen,
and its forests sombre and depressing." |
| Out
of his journals (which are in USC's collections) Garland wove a narrative
to be published the following year. |
Battling mosquitoes
(USC Garland Collection)
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| More
than he could have realized, The Trail of the Goldseekers is a document
of a unique moment in history. By the time the book appeared, gold had
been discovered on the sandy beaches near Nome on the west coast of Alaska;
and a second stampede began. In a matter of months, Dawson and the Klondike
were emptied of prospectors, all traveling downriver on the Yukon to try
their hands where the shovel would replace the pickaxe. The fierce competition
for mining claims ended just about the time the White Pass and Yukon Railroad
was completed from Skagway up the heights to the Canadian border, where
so many had perished or turned back along the way. Garland's narrative,
like the opening of the narrow-gauge line, thus becomes a footnote to that
single tumultuous year of 1898. |
Watercolor by Ernest Shaw (USC
Garland Collection)
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At
the same time, this gloomy journey to the North, undertaken not out of
necessity or even the impulse to explore, may mark the beginning of today's
"adventure for its own sake." |
Garland,
a man in his prime at thirty-eight years of age, sensed the imminent closing
of the frontier and deliberately chose to undergo the hardships of the
trail, both to test himself and to re-live "one more time" the pioneering
spirit that had brought his parents' generation to Wisconsin. The results
were mixed at best, but his book is an honest record of the limitations
of such an adventure. The lure of gold had very little to do with it.
[Garland's personal copy
of his book is in the USC Special Collections, illustrated not only with
his own photographs but also with exquisite watercolors done after-the-fact
by a Canadian acquaintance of Garland's, Ernest Shaw (1875-1969), who labored
up the same route two weeks behind the Garland party in the summer of 1898.] |
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