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The Power of Place: Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848-1988

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Demuth, Bathsheba Rose

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2016

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The Power of Place:

Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848-1988

Bathsheba Rose Demuth

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the

requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

History

in the

Graduate Division

of the

University of California, Berkeley

Committee in charge:

Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair

Professor Brian DeLay

Professor Alexei Yurchak

Summer 2016

Abstract

The Power of Place:

Ideology and Ecology in the Bering Strait, 1848-1988

Bathsheba Rose Demuth

Doctor of Philosophy in History

University of California, Berkeley

Professor Yuri Slezkine, Chair

At the Bering Straits, Russia and Alaska share a common ecology: rolling tundra and icy mountains

divided by the narrow ocean. Every living thing exists without plentiful solar energy, curtailing the

productivity evident in temperate climates. Yet over the course of the long twentieth century,

Russians and Americans were drawn north by its potential riches, from the energy in walrus blubber

to the currency of gold. They stayed to make converts, fortunes, and states. This dissertation

chronicles the environmental, political, economic and cultural revolutions that came in their wake.

These revolutions map onto the distribution of energy in arctic space. Europeans began by

harvesting whales, moved to hunting walrus on coasts, attempted to farm reindeer on land, sought

gold underground, and finally returned to hunting whales at sea. Organized around these spaces, the

following five chapters trace a narrative from the stateless meetings of indigenous Yupik, Inupiat,

and Chukchi with commercial hunters, to the inception of national borders and ideas of citizenship,

through to the region’s division along ideological lines. Using ecological and anthropological

scholarship and sources from twenty local, regional, and national archives in the U.S. and Russia, it

examines how capitalism and communism, which imagine history as universal, progress as inevitable,

and production as infinite, met with the constraints of the far north.

The common extremity of the Beringian environment provides a unique space in which to compare

the twentieth century’s two great economic systems. The resulting insights transcend the peripheral

geography, and contribute to major questions in the histories of capitalism, socialism, and the

environment. First, comparing how people understood their northern environs, and how they chose

to change them, demonstrates how both economies were laced with normative assumptions about

the trajectory of people’s lives and history. Capitalism was never simply about how commodities

were owned and traded, any more than communism was only about collective ownership of the

means of production. Rather, both were ideologies that shaped what was thinkable, valuable, and

rational. Second, these ideas did not exist outside environmental context. In ways specific to marine,

coastal, and terrestrial habitats, local ecologies changed the practice of communism and capitalism.

By investigating how intent became action, and action shaped new intents, this project shows

instances of socialist rationality, market irrationality, and unexpected resemblance. Above all, both

economic and ideological systems were contingent on factors beyond human control. Attention to

the non-human, from animal behavior to climate, demonstrates how agency, in the sense of

individual or collective will working on the world, was situational. The result is a history of how

human intention and action were negotiated in concert with the environments they inhabited.

To Stanley, who taught me how the land speaks.

And to Alex, who understands why I listen.

THE POWER OF PLACE:

IDEOLOGY AND ECOLOGY IN THE BERING STRAIT, 1848-1988

Bathsheba Rose Demuth

iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

iv M

AJOR ARCHIVES

v M

vi INTRODUCTION

1 CHAPTER ONE: The Sea

1848-1900

41 CHAPTER TWO: The Shore

1870-1960

81 CHAPTER THREE: The Land

1890-1970

124 CHAPTER FOUR: The Underground

1900-1980

166 CHAPTER FIVE: The Ocean

1920-1990

206 CONCLUSION

BERINGIA, 2015

211 BIBLIOGRAPHY

iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

There are many ways to begin a dissertation. This one started on the back of a dogsled when I was

eighteen. Along the banks of the Porcupine River, I learned to hunt, fish, mush and love the north;

even in the dustiest library that landscape and its tastes and smells stays close. As does the wit and

wisdom of Stanley Njootli, who kept me alive then and keeps my head filled with questions still.

Wisdom and wit were also the gifts Yuri Slezkine brought to advising this project. I am indebted

more than I can say to the years he spent offering written or spoken guidance, always filled with

rigor, curiosity, and compassion. I hope to take from his example and never stop adventuring,

intellectually and otherwise, or lose the sense of sardonic joy that comes from writing history.

My other intellectual debts are numerous. Brian DeLay enriched my understanding of U.S. history

and the historian’s profession. Ryan Tucker Jones sent files, comments, and letters from every

corner of the Pacific. Alexei Yurchak lent me an anthropologist’s perspective. Victoria Frede always

asked the impossible but perfect question. Kerwin Klein taught me how to speak. Many other

people have read and commented: Robert Chester, Daniel Sargent, Alan Roe, Chris Casey, Erica

Lee, Tehila Sasson, Julia Lajus, and Dolly Jørgensen. The Berkeley Russian History Kurzhok

suffered insightfully through years of reading about walrus, as did the Berkeley Environmental

History working group, the Borderlands Writing Group, and the Global History Workshop.

A fleet of archivists, contacts, and friends foreign and domestic, made my research possible. In the

United States, I benefited from experts from Fairbanks to Anchorage to Washington, D.C. In

Russia, Edvard Zdor showed me Chukotka. Gennady Zelenskii made it possible for me to go to

Chukotka at all. Anastasiia Iarzutkina made me feel at home in Anadyr. In Magadan, Maksim

Brodkin took me exploring; Olga Gdurdovna plied me with tea; Liudmila Khakhovskaia was an

excellent guide; and Anatolii Shirokov shared wisdom and assistance. Elena Mikaelovna made me a

Vladivostok Thanksgiving. In Moscow, the archivists at GARF, RGAE, and Memorial managed not

to laugh when I asked for material on a place and people that are the butt of many a Soviet joke.

Meeting all these far-flung people was funded by a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research

Abroad Fellowship, a Jacob Javits Fellowship, a Reinhard Bendix Memorial Fellowship from the

Berkeley Institute for International Studies, a Mellon-ACLS Dissertation Completion Grant, several

rounds of Foreign Language and Area Studies funding, and small but consequential grants from

Berkeley’s History Department and Institute of Slavic, East European and Eurasian Studies.

Because research and writing requires sanity and a sense of adventure at least as much as funds, this

dissertation has its deepest roots with my family, especially with my parents, who had the courage to

pack their daughter off to the arctic many years ago and have supported me ever since. Without the

encouragement and bedrock belief of my long suffering spouse Alex, I would never have made it

through years spent thousands of miles distant or doubtful hours close. When at home, the only

things vying for the importance of husband, coffee, and wine, were Oakland’s Redwood Regional

Park, Peggy O’Donnell’s constant companionship across hundreds of single-track miles, and the

unadulterated glee with which my dog Murphy throws himself at a foggy morning run.

I am grateful to all of you.

MAJOR ARCHIVES

APRCA Alaska and Polar Regions Collections & Archives, Fairbanks AK

BL Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley CA

ChF TFGI Chukotskii filial, Territorial’nyi fond geologicheskoi informatsii po

Dal’nevostochnomu federal’nomu okrugu, Anadyr

ChOKM Chukotskii okruzhnoi kraevedcheskii muzei, Anadyr

GAChAO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Chukotskogo avtonomnogo okruga, Anadyr

GAMO Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Magadanskoi oblasti, Magadan

GAPK Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Primorskogo kraia, Vladivostok

GARF Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi Federatsii, Moscow

GWBWL G.W Blunt White Library, Mystic Seaport Museum, Mystic CT

IWC International Whaling Commission, Digital Collection

MSA Memorial Society Archive, Moscow

NARA AK National Archives and Records Administration, Anchorage, AK

NARA MD National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, MD

NARA DC National Archives and Records Administration, Washington D.C.

NARA CA National Archives and Records Administration, San Francisco CA

NBWM New Bedford Whaling Museum Research Library, New Bedford MA

PRIPL Providence Rhode Island Public Library, Providence RI

RGAE Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, Moscow

RGIA DV Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv Da’nego Vostoka, Vladivostok

SI Smithsonian Institution Archives, Washington D.C.

TsKhSDMO Tsentr khraneniia sovremennykh dokumentov Magadanskoi oblasti, Magadan

UAA University of Alaska Archives & Special Collections, Anchorage AK

BERINGIA

The piers are pummelled by the waves;

In a lonely field the rain

Lashes an abandoned train;

Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the evening gowns;

Agents of the Fisc pursue

Absconding tax-defaulters through

The sewers of provincial towns.….

Unendowed with wealth or pity,

Little birds with scarlet legs,

Sitting on their speckled eggs,

Eye each flu-infected city.

Altogether elsewhere, vast

Herds of reindeer move across

Miles and miles of golden moss,

Silently and very fast.

- W. H. Auden

INTRODUCTION

THE MIGRATION NORTH

In late spring, the air along the northern pacific coast fills with beating feathers bearing up the

bodies of snow geese. In a cacophony of honking, they rise by the thousands from a night adrift on

patches of open water. The flocks turn north. As they strive for the arctic, the geography of Pacific

Ocean’s terminus passes beneath their wings. The North American coast pulls in at Norton Sound,

mirrored by the Gulf of Anadyr on the eastern edge of Asia. The Chukchi and Seward Peninsulas

reach toward each other through the Bering Sea, with the Diomede Islands rising between them like

two fingerprints in the narrow Straits. Twenty thousand years ago, during the last ice age, this water

was land. People hunted mammoths and caribou across united continents, over a corridor of earth

forgotten by glaciers.

Even now, cleaved by fifty miles of ocean, there is a geological and biological

unity to the territory roughly encircled by the Mackenzie and Yukon Rivers in North America, the

Anadyr and Kolyma Rivers in Asia, and the oceans north of St. Lawrence Island and south of

Wrangell Island. The space from river to river and sea to sea is called Beringia.

The white geese fly north over white country: the sun has not yet melted back all that winter

froze. The existence of ice here, approaching the Arctic Circle, is the product of a history even older

than the glaciation that made Beringia. More than two hundred and fifty million years ago, when all

land on earth was a single mass, the climate at the northern pole was temperate. Rich forests grew in

the sun of long summers. Then the continents divided. A new polar sea formed along the backs of

Siberia, Greenland and North America. Isolated from the warming currents of the world’s oceans,

the capacity of this intercontinental sea to store heat diminished. The land cooled. Ice and snow

accumulated during the winter, piling too thick to melt in summer. The white surface of frozen

water refracted rather than absorbed warmth from the sun. For the past three million years, the

arctic land has been so cold that two-thirds of the sun’s energy refracts back into space.

Since it is

the sun that feeds most life on earth, through the calories fixed in plant tissue and passed on into the

muscles of animals, every living thing in the north is adapted to scarcity.

The snow geese manage this paucity by fleeing: they settle in the arctic to nest and molt,

turning the summer’s brief riot of growth into new feathers for the return south. But many animals

do not leave Beringia with the sun. Seals stay on their icebergs. Caribou migrate through the winter.

Bears hibernate. And for some twenty thousand years, Beringia has been home to a procession of

human civilizations. The chapters that follow examine a small sliver of this timespan: a long

twentieth century starting in 1848 and ending with fading years of the Soviet Union. Over this

century and a half, life in Beringia confronted a tide of new migrants. Like the snow geese, these

Recent genetic and linguistic evidence points to long-term human habitation of the now-submerged Beringian land

bridge. See Mark A. Sicoli and Gary Holton, “Linguistic Phylogenies Support Back-Migration from Beringia to Asia,”

PLOS ONE (March 12, 2014): DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0091722; and Maanasa Raghavan et. al. “The Genetic

Prehistory of the New World Arctic,” Science, (August 29, 2014): DOI: 10.1126/science.1255832.

Temperate climates, by contrast, absorb about 70% of solar energy. For a concise overview of the geological processes

shaping the current polar climate, see G.E Fogg, The Biology of Polar Habitats (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 27-

29. The general cooling of the poles is a longer term process than periodic glaciations, which also influence the severity

northern climate. See Thomas Ager and Lawrence Phillips, “Pollen Evidence for Late Pleistocene Bering Land Bridge

Environments from Norton Sound, Northeastern Bering Sea, Alaska,” Arctic, Antarctic, and Alpine Research, Vol 40 No 3

(2008): 451-461.

vii

outsiders came at first for energy. They stayed to make converts, fortunes, and states. Motivated by

ideas of making human history – be it one of capitalist democratic freedom, Christian salvation,

imperial expansion, or communist utopia – Europeans brought a cascade of revolutions: in local

ecology, politics, economy, and values. The revolutions began with of capitalists in the nineteenth

century, diverged between Soviet and American ideologies and economies in the twentieth, and, as a

coda to this story, collapsed into a neoliberal order in the twenty-first. This is a history of ideas going

forth to compose the world and how the world played back.

SPACES OF CHANGE

The deep past has molded scarcity into the earth’s poles. But the scarcity lies unevenly across the

region’s geography.

Unlike temperate climates, where terrestrial and marine photosynthetic

organisms are similarly fecund, the Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort Seas are far more productive than

the land. The polar seas are covered in ice for much of the year, but when liquid the water retains

most of what the sun gives. As a result, the seas around Bering Strait support life from microscopic

plankton to 200-ton bowhead whales. Some of this richness is only half marine, as walrus, seals, and

birds build their bodies at sea and bring them to rest on the shore. Inland, nutrients and energy exist

on a visible gradient: from taiga in the south, which can support small trees, to the ice-lined soils of

the tundra, in places bare of all but rocklike lichen. Many herbivores and their predators must

migrate to make a life off this country. To say that the oceans are richer than the land is not

metaphorical: a bowhead whale is fifty percent lipid by volume. A walrus is thirty. A caribou, maybe

fifteen.

ERRITORY OF NATIONS

That life grows thin farther from the coast is significant to Beringia’s human history, from

ice age hunters to the rise of the Thule civilization five thousand years ago through to twenty-first

century debates about drilling for oil in the Chukchi Sea. For this narrative, the importance of

Beringia’s spatial energy distribution begins with how it shaped the political geography of indigenous

societies in the immediate pre-contact era. Three peoples, distinguished by their languages, called the

region home: the Inupiat and Yupik in North America, and the Yupik and Chukchi in Asia. In

Alaska, Yupik speakers lived on St. Lawrence Island and along Norton Sound, while Inupiaq

communities extended from the Seward Peninsula north to the Beaufort Sea, west as far as King

Island, and east into the Brooks Range. In Chukotka, Yupik peoples lived along the coast,

sometimes in villages mixed with maritime Chukchi. The interior of the Peninsula was loosely

divided between reindeer herders. Although sharing broad cultural similarities, Beringia’s peoples

lived in small nations, each with defined territorial spaces, economic strategies, and variations on

linguistic and cultural practices.

By the seventeenth century, Alaska Inupiat had some twenty-five

Other historians using energy as a way to frame their work include Richard White, The Organic Machine (New York: Hill

and Wang, 1995); Ryan Tucker Jones, “The Environment,” in David Armitage and Alison Bashford eds. Pacific Histories:

Ocean, Land, People (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014), 121-142; J.R. McNeill, Something New Under the Sun: An

Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); Alfred Crosby, Children of the Sun: A

History of Humanity’s Unappeasable Appetite for Energy (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006) and William Cronon, Nature's

Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1991).

The anthropologist Ernest S. Burch Jr. argues, drawing on decades of nuanced and locally detailed fieldwork for the

use of the word “nation” to describe the social units of Beringia. See Burch, The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northwest

Alaska (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998), 8.

viii

distinct, named nations, the Alaskan Yupik ten, with another fifteen among the Asiatic Yupik and at

least fourteen among the Chukchi.

National distinctions were shaped by the resources of their territories. An Inupiat nation like

the Tikigagmit, living on a bowhead migration route, killed enough whales to support a settled

village. The Nunamiut nation, with territory spreading into the mountainous tundra, was nomadic.

Others, including many Yupik nations, combined months of village life on the coasts with periods of

transient hunting. The reindeer Chukchi were nomads but not hunter-gatherers; they owned their

domesticated prey. The political precision of borders varied, but few nations had enough territory or

people to be completely self-sufficient. Whale hunters needed seal skins. Walrus hunters needed

baleen. Reindeer herders wanted fat. The products of nations moved through trade, and trade

reduced the capriciousness of life in the north. The necessity of exchange also introduced the

caprice of politics: Beringian peoples fought many small wars, for vengeance, power, and profit. But

the need to bring goods across ecological and political lines also forged longstanding alliances. On

both continents and between them, nations met at annual fairs to present gifts to relatives and

bargain with strangers. By the end of the eighteenth century, these networks carried goods from the

edges of the Russian and British Empires: tobacco, tea, metal tools. But the landscape of personal

connections, familial ties, and political negotiation connecting the Makenzie Delta with the Alaskan

coast, and the Alaskan coast with the Chukotka interior, predated European contact by at least half a

millennia.

The one constant in this world of small nations was its lack of constancy. Peace could

reverse into war on the turn of an insult, a murder, a bad trade. Reindeer populations crashed. Ice

bore seals far from shore. Fish runs dwindled in warm years. Whales came late or not at all. For the

Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi, the inability to completely predict the universe that sustained them was

a sign of that worlds’ broadly distributed sentience. With considerable variation in practice and

emphasis, the peoples of the Bering Straits engaged in taboos, rituals and invocations meant to

appease landscapes filled with thinking beings, and seascapes inhabited by animals that judged the

morality of human action. From stones to seals, Beringia’s non-human world was a reciprocating,

constitutive part of the social world. All things had voices, in Chukchi cosmology, and among the

Yupik and Inupiat, the animate universe responded to the thoughts of others, making intention and

thoughtful action critical to not injuring the minds of other beings.

Such minds could take their life-

sustaining energy elsewhere. Thus, alongside the practical business of hunting and the political

business of alliance, trade and war, the Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi saw human history as balanced

Ernest S. Burch Jr. “War and Trade” in Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, ed. William Fitzhugh and

Aron Crowell (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 227-240, 228. For a slightly different map of

indigenous nations, see Ernest S. Burch Jr, Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos (Lincoln: University

of Nebraska Press, 2005), 38-39. For more on the Asian context, see Igor Krupnik and Michael Chlenov, Yupik

Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900-1960 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2013) and Igor Krupnik,

Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia, trans. Marcia Levenson (Hanover: University

Press of New England, 1993).

For a comprehensive discussion of trade politics, see Burch Jr, Alliance and Conflict. Burch disagrees with Glenn

Sheehan’s argument that resources were key to warfare, seeing nationalism as a larger issue; see Sheehan, “Whaling

Surplus, Trade, War, and the Integration of Prehistoric Northern and Northwestern Alaskan Economies, A.D. 1200-

1826,” in Hunting the Largest Animals: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic and Subarctic, Allen P. McCartney ed. Studies in

Whaling No 3, Occasional Publication No 36 (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1995), 185-206. More on this

will be discussed in chapter one.

Ann Fienup-Riordan, “Eye of the Dance: Spiritual Life of the Bering Sea Eskimo,” Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of

Siberia and Alaska, ed. William Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 256-

270., 256 and S. Ia. Serov, “Guardians and Spirit Masters of Siberia Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska,

ed. William Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 241-255, 244.

on the precarious desires of a will-infused world. Much of what made human history wasn’t human

at all.

TERRITORY OF STATES

Like the territories of indigenous nations, the geography of energy in Beringia shaped how

Europeans came into the country, and why they came at all.

Sustained contact was motivated by the

caloric richness of the sea.

A few explorers, from Vitrus Bering and James Cook in the eighteenth

century to the voyages of Otto von Kotzebue and British ships seeking the lost Franklin Expedition

in the nineteenth, encountered Bering Sea coastal peoples. Trading emissaries from the Russian and

British Empires touched the edges of Beringia by land.

But it was whaling that brought lasting and

consequential European presence to the Straits. Whalers took nearly thirty thousand bowheads,

refining their blubber into lamp oil and baleen into corset stays. With the sea mostly emptied of

great whales, hunters sought value among icebergs and beaches, killing seal and walrus for the fat,

skins, and ivory. The labor of hunting for the market was fed off the tundra’s caribou and reindeer.

When veined with precious metals, even dirt and stone became valuable. In their pursuit of gold and

tin, Europeans reversed the pattern of extracting energy from the arctic, pouring human labor into

mines. In the process, Europeans nested themselves among political alliances and conflicts that

predated them. It was indigenous trade that supplied ships and mines with fresh meat, fish, and

hides, while mines and ships altered the region’s political geography with their new diseases, new

settlements, and new weapons.

Not all of what came north in trade was as material as guns or syphilis. Europeans brought

with them expectations born of temperate climates. As eaters of grain and domestic livestock, they

were accustomed to the productive excess that the agricultural revolution lent humanity. Just as

consequentially, even the first Europeans in the arctic were familiar with the fruits of the industrial

revolution. By 1850, factory towns from New England to the Moscow outskirts turned the energy

held in inert things – trees, coal, oil – into propulsion and power. The goods made in such factories

changed how people moved, dressed, worked, and understood the world. Industry freed human

consumption from the limited productive power of human labor. Far away from Beringia, authors

I use “European” as a general signifier for all the non-indigenous peoples who ended up in Beringia, including

Americans, recent immigrants to America (mostly from Scandinavia and Germany), Russians and Russian subjects from

across the Empire and Soviet Union.

Therefore part of this project is marine, generally, and Pacific specifically. As such it answers calls put forth over the

last decade to expand environmental histories onto and beneath the waves; see Ryan Tucker Jones, “Running into

Whales: The History of the North Pacific from Below the Waves,” American Historical Review Vol. 118 No. 2 (April 2013):

349-377; Helen M. Rozwadowski, “The Promise of Ocean History for Environmental History,” Journal of American

History Vol. 100 No. 1 (2013):136-139; W. Jeffrey Bolster, “Opportunities in Marine Environmental History,”

Environmental History Vol. 11, No. 3 (July 2006): 567–597;. For works that theorize the Pacific as united historical space,

see David Armitage and Alison Bashford eds. Pacific Histories: Ocean, Land, People (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2014);

David Igler, The Great Ocean: Pacific Worlds from Captain Cook to the Gold Rush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

For particularly fine examples that unites environmental, marine, and Pacific histories, see Ryan Tucker Jones, The

Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s Strange Beasts of the Sea, 1741-1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2014) and Gregory Rosenthal, “Hawaiians Who Left Hawaiʻi: Work, Body, and Environment in the Pacific World, 1786-

1876,” PhD Diss. (SUNY Stony Brook, 2014).

First contact with Europeans varied widely based on location, from the seventeenth century for parts of Chukotka to

well into the nineteenth for parts of Alaska. Some of the best accounts of early contact in Beringia have been written by

anthropologists; see Burch Jr, Alliance and Conflict and Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations. For a thorough account of the

nineteenth century based in English-language sources, see John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The

Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009). For

histories of the earliest contact in Chukotka, see N.N. Dikov, Istoriia chukotki s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei

(Moscow: Mysl’, 1989), part one.

from Karl Marx to Andrew Carnegie wrote of the potential for industry to make progress an

objective fact. Such ideas shaped, in different ways and to different degrees, the mental landscape

and practical choices of the whalers, missionaries, bureaucrats, miners, and other outsider who came

to Beringia. Such ideas also gave some Europeans cause to stay. If human history was bound to

universal laws of progress, than even in the arctic people could be saved from the whims of natural

history. Alongside the quest to pull things of value – from the energy in whales to the gold in rivers

– out of the north, was a desire to put that value into the service of human progress, making life

freer or more equal, less filled with toil and the burdens of uncertainty. For missionaries of

Christianity, capitalist markets, and eventual communist utopia, not even the arctic was frozen out of

salvation.

These concepts of universal progress were introduced, over the course of the long twentieth

century, into the particular material and cultural context of Beringia. Ideas inhabit places, and places

bring to ideas specific contingencies. The energy-poor ecology of the north, when it confronted the

energy-acquisitive ideologies of modern industrial society, makes this back-and-forth especially clear,

and especially local. The uneven topography arctic life shaped intention and action. As a result,

contact, state-building, and ideological transformation looked different along the boundaries of

ecological communities. In each, people native and otherwise worked through ideas about how the

world should be organized. What is the right way to produce things, and to consume them? What is

valuable? Who ought to labor, and how? The questions ranged from the moral to the political. They

were answered differently by shamans, missionaries, prospectors, indigenous whalers, bureaucrats,

traders, ideologues, scientists, native hunters, and non-native miners. By the middle of the twentieth

century, some answered as communists and others as capitalists. The habits of mind behind these

answers came from central places: New York, St. Petersburg, Washington, Moscow. Yet they

became real on a northern periphery challenging to anyone trying to make a surplus for sale or for

the state. The following chapters are a history of ideologies going native, and of native circumstance

transforming the exercise of ideology.

ERAS OF CHANGE

THE YEARS OF ENCOUNTER: 1848-1923

From the perspective of human events, the long twentieth century in the Bering Straits can

be divided roughly in half: into a period of encounter, and a period of divergence. The first era

lasted from the entry of whaling ships into the arctic in 1848 until the Bolsheviks took control of the

Chukchi Peninsula in 1923. During this time, Beringia was a space of movement, transformation,

and encounter. People and goods passed back and forth between Asia and North America.

Indigenous nations met, traded, fought, married, and saved Europeans. European whalers and

traders scrambled to harvest whale oil, walrus ivory, seal skin, and gold. Trade altered the indigenous

geography of political power. Market hunting drew away much of the region’s biological energy.

And it was not only the indigenous nations who were enmeshed in the politics of arctic production.

The United States and Imperial Russia were simultaneously cheered by the potential riches of their

borderlands, concerned about protecting their sovereignty, and aghast at the human cost levied by

an unrestrained market. Beringia’s land, sea, governments and local peoples were caught in a similar

encounter with foreigners and the demands of global commerce.

Narratives of contact between indigenous peoples and outsiders initiated by trade and

imperial prospecting and cemented by nation-making, are an established tradition in North

American histories. This dissertation shares with recent scholarship on the American West a concern

for native people’s political agency and the contingency of state power at the periphery.

It also

follows a temporal arc familiar to borderlands history, beginning when Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi

had jurisdictional and territorial sovereignty, and tracing the transfer of those powers from local

control to the American and Russian states. A land of many borders between many small nations

became a land of one border between two large states.

However, Beringia’s borderland has its own illuminating peculiarities. The lack of agricultural

potential made the land, except for a few gold-rich beaches and valleys, unappealing to European

migrants. For much of the region, Europeans came seasonally, or in boom-bust mining surges, or

not at all. There were few settlers to make sovereignty. Moreover, in the nineteenth century the

primary space of contact between outsider and native took place on a border without land.

The

ocean, running through the center of Beringia, was the conduit for seasonal waves of whaling ships.

These ships acted in borderlands that also lacked a border, at least as recognized by European maps.

Russia owned Alaska until the territory’s sale in 1867, but was an absent landlord on both sides of

the Straits. After the purchase, the United States took decades to patrol its far northwest. On the

The tradition of frontier or contact histories in North America starts with Fredrick Jackson Turner, but has taken on

new analytical depth in recent decades by fusing care for the contingency of European endeavors, the reality of native

political power, and the larger political context of border regions. Monographs in this tradition include Richard White,

The Middle Ground: Indians, Empires, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1851 (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 1991); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekers, and the Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas

Press, 1998); Peter Silver, Our Savage Neighbors: How Indian war Transformed Early America (New York: W.W. Norton,

2008); Brian DeLay, War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2008), among others. Like these works, I see all ethnic histories in Beringia, indigenous and newcomer, as deserving

recovery. This is particularly important as most of the work on Beringia’s past is anthropological or archeological, and

rarely extends much past contact. While not generally using the term borderlands, Russian historiography has its own

examples; see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the North, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994);

Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: from Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press,

2004); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland

Colonization in Eurasian History (New York: Routledge, 2007). Much of what Americanist scholars call frontier or

borderland history falls for Russianists under the rubric of empire; for an example in the North Pacific, see Ilya

Vinkovetsky, Russian America: An Overseas Colony of a Continental Empire, 1804-1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2011). Alaskan history is generally seen as an extension of western frontier history, and has gone through similar debates;

see Roxanne Willis, Alaska's Place in the West: From Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness, (Lawrence: University Press of

Kansas, 2010); Robert Bruce Campbell, In Darkest Alaska: Travels and Empire Along the Inside Passage, (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007); Claus-M. Naske and Herman E. Slotnick Alaska: A History of the 49

State. 2

Edition. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987); Stephen Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony, (Seattle:

University of Washington Press, 2002).

I am using borderlands here not to discuss the borders exiting between indigenous peoples, but the imposed imperial

and national borders, with all their attendant ambiguity and contest; indigenous borders were by contrast well

established. Much of the best work borderlands the U.S.-Mexico border; see for example James F. Brooks, Captives and

Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002);

Andres Resendez, Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 2005); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New Haven:

Yale University Press, 2006).

The lack of attention to marine borders is notable; see Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett “Oh Borderlands,” The

Journal of American History Vol. 98 No. 2 (2011):338-361. For a rare example of borderlands work that does work on the

ocean, see Jean Barman and Bruce McIntyre Watson, Leaving Paradise: Indigenous Hawaiians in the Pacific Northwest, 1787–

1898 (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2006). The need for historians to pay more attention to the oceans generally

been raised in the last few years; see W. Jeffery Bolster, “Putting the Ocean in Atlantic History: Maritime Communities

and Marine Ecology in the Northwest Atlantic, 1500–1800,”American Historical Review Vol. 113, No. 1 (February 2008):

19–47; K. Wigen, “AHR Forum: Oceans of History—Introduction,” American Historical Review Vol. 111, No. 3 (June

2006): 717–721. A notable exception is Lissa Wadewitz, The Nature of Borders: Salmon, Boundaries, and Bandits on the Salish

Sea (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2015).

xii

oceanic margin, the borderland dynamics of dependency, suspicion, occasional violence and

frequent exchange played out initially between native peoples and the ragged edge of the global

market.

It was this market, and its appetite for Beringia’s biological energy, that began to make the

transnational border between Asia and North America extant. The reason was energy, and the

conflicting values placed on its disposition by states, market hunters, and indigenous peoples. In the

last quarter of the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire and the American government found

their border in a state of ecological revolution. Or dissolution: whales and other marine animals had

been hunted to the quick. Left behind were starving Yupik, Inupiat and Chukchi communities.

Faced with dying subjects and sovereign wealth that escaped sovereign control, Russia and the

United States tried to regulate commerce. The border was a tool. Policing it was a way to press for

the moral economy envisioned by states against the values imposed by the market. The United

States and Russia, sometimes in allegiance with indigenous peoples, saw worth in not emptying the

entire North Pacific of the energy needed by that region’s few permanent residents.

Thus the borderland was a region where value was contested in space. The states involved

valued the resources of the ocean, the shore, and the land for their capacity to sustain subjects and

citizens. Indigenous peoples valued many of the same resources spiritually and practically, and in

part because killing marine mammals and fur species brought access to trade goods ranging from

alcohol to metal tools. Commercial whalers, traders, and miners valued commodities. The

borderlands were, across the period of encounter, filled with debate over the role of the market, the

value of space and animal life, and the proper form of capitalism. Underlying these debates was the

mutual dependency of states, indigenous peoples, and market agents on limited northern energy for

some combination of their lives, their livelihoods, and their claims to rightful presence. Because of

this dependence, the transition of Beringia from a land of multiple borders into nations oriented

toward a singular, maritime division required the states involved become fluent in governance over

their territory at a level far more granular than assuming jurisdiction over people. Dominion needed

to go beyond the human.

The Russian Empire and the United States needed to become managers

of their respective environments.

And the environments were plural. The shape of governance was

not identical between ecological regions, making state sovereignty manifest differently at sea than on

the shore, and on the shore than on land.

Maintaining the border between the governments of Russia and the United States rested on

animals, and on the flows of energy within arctic ecosystems. These resources proved difficult to

manage, terminally delaying the attainment of sovereignty. And, countering the implied position of

much scholarship that borderlands are at once static and temporary, the problems of the narrow

Bering Sea changed rather than disappeared in the twentieth century.

Even as the market

Several chapters of this project contribute to animal history, which often overlaps productively with environmental

history, has been a field of scholarship at least since Claude Levi-Strauss called animals “good to think.” There are many

ways of integrating animals into the human past; generally this work looks at role of other species in human social,

economic and cultural change, like the pigs and cows in Virginia DeJohn Anderson’s Creatures of Empire: How Domestic

Animals Transformed Early America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004). For overviews of animal studies, see D.

Brantz ed. Beastly Natures: Animals, Humans, and the Study of History (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2010)

and Nigel Rothfels ed., Representing Animals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).

This contributes to a growing body of literature on the environmental management state. Adam Rome, “What Really

Matters in History: Environmental Perspectives in Modern America,” Environmental History Vol. 7 No. 2 (April 2002):

303-318, especially 304-305. See also Paul Sutter’s discussion of the environmental management state in “The World

With Us: The State of American Environmental History,” Journal of American History Vol. 100 No. 1 (June 2013): 94-119.

Andy Bruno argues for the Soviet version in

Hämäläinen and Truett argue that such an ossified view of borderlands is a problem in “Oh Borderlands,” 358. That

the border is still of concern is evident in the elaborate security procedures necessary to visit Chukotka.

xiii

confrontation in nineteenth century fused into clearer borders in the twentieth, valuable species

continued to swim between national waters and through uncontrolled, international killing grounds.

And some of the challenge of marine borders was less material. Ideas could migrate alongside

hunting parties on the seas. Mining companies in Nome worried about communist agitation. Soviets

worried about proselytizers on Big Diomede Island. The ascendency and relative statelessness of

market forces diminished with the close of the encounter period, but even when national borders

seemed stable on land, sovereignty, identity, and authority remained troublingly ambiguous offshore.

Water made the Bering Straits a permanent borderland.

THE YEARS OF DIVERGENCE: 1924-1988

While the problem of sovereignty never entirely dissolved, its purpose altered over the

course of the twentieth century. The advent of Soviet control in Chukotka meant that the two states

no longer worried about keeping the market in check, but in keeping each other at bay. In North

America, economic practices and debates were domesticated inside national borders. In Asia, the

capitalist market of the encounter period disappeared altogether by the 1930s. The longstanding

exchange of people dwindled and was finally severed following the Second World War. Migratory

animals moving between the two countries found their lives a different risk depending on their

continent.

The Inupiat, Chukchi, and Yupik were expected to participate in the ideological world

of the larger polities around them, an expectation sometimes borne of violence, and made more

pressing by the unnerving proximity of ideological difference. The Bering Straits was explicitly the

single periphery of two centers.

Yet the United States and the Soviet Union had, from the perspective of non-human things,

similar aims. Both states sought to organize their northern regions for maximum human benefit.

Both states sought to make citizens by changing the relationship between consumption and

production. Both tried to manage the environment in order to extend and prove national and

ideological capacity. Doing so furthered, and complicated, the ecological revolutions begun in the

nineteenth century. In the process, Beringia became an experiment in how the political, social, and

cultural reorganization of consumption and production diverged or ran parallel under the two great

industrial economic systems.

Did a capitalist reindeer live like a communist reindeer? Was it

different to kill whales for the market or the motherland? Was it easier for a Yupik man to become

communist than participate in a market economy? Did a Soviet gold mine make a different mess of

the earth than a private claim in Alaska?

These questions reflect physical change, what happened to animal, vegetable, and mineral.

But the change itself was motivated by contrasting ideologies. For a good American capitalist,

markets made freedom, although with much debate over form. For a good Soviet, communism

meant transcendent equality, reached through communal property and effort. While the means of

both ideologies were material, the ends were metaphysical. They implied an understanding the self

and the world, a way of judging the proper relations of people and the uses of resources in a just

society. Treating socialism both as an economic system and a tool by which people created a sense

The type of oppositional identity formation described by Peter Sahlins in Boundaries: The Making of France and Spain in

the Pyrenees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) thus came to the north Pacific very late.

Comparative works are few, although the potential, as Paul Sutter has noted, is considerable; see “What can U.S.

Environmental Historians Learn from Non-U.S. Environmental Historiography?” Environmental History Vol. 8

(2003):109-129. For comparative environmental works, see Kate Brown, Plutopia: Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the

Great Soviet and American Plutonium Disasters (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) and Paul R. Josephson, Industrialized

Nature: Brute Force Technology and the Transformation of the Natural World (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002). In a more

political vein, see Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor: American Slavery and Russian Serfdom (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1990).

xiv

of self, ethics, and propose is not new for Soviet scholars.

In the U.S., however, the history of

capitalism remains fixated on the material.

In comparing how people understood their

environments in the north, and how they chose to change them, highlights how both were based in

assumed normative relationships between people, and between people and things. Does commerce

solve problems in society, or make them? Does trade eliminate politics or create productive contest?

What makes a good life? The answers to these questions changed, but at no time was capitalism

simply about how commodities were owned and traded, any more than communism was only about

collective ownership of the means of production. Ideology gave people expectations, shaped what

was thinkable, valuable, and rational.

However, in both Asia and North America, norms were strained by similar geography.

Especially in the energy-poor and danger-rich far north, ideology could only remain ethereal for so

long. Intention and action are bound up with each other, and actions play out in environments that,

if not precisely filled with intent, have their own logics and rules.

Along the Bering Straits, both

nations and their citizens found themselves dealing with a disruptive climate and a singular lack of

employment for modern, industrial people. The winter cold was terrible for man and machine alike.

The summer warmth brought clouds of forest-fire smoke and mosquitoes. The supposedly universal

ideals of liberty through capital accumulation or equality through communal production met with

highly particular Yupik, Chukchi, and Inupiat ideas about what made people good, trade fair,

The role of ideology in individual and social life has been important to Soviet studies since Hannah Arendt’s

Totalitarianism. More contemporary work includes Stephen Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1995); Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge,

MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class, Consciousness, and Salvation in

Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), to name a choice few. These new works treat

ideology as a formative part of creating subjectivity – in the Soviet case, a subjectivity quite opposed to that of the liberal

subject theorized most notably by Michel Foucault; see Paul Rabinow, ed. The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon

1984). Works directing the concern for subjectivity back toward human interactions with the material environment,

however, are limited; see Andy Bruno’s forthcoming, The Nature of Soviet Power: An Arctic Environmental

History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Despite models from Weber to Foucault, treating capitalism as a set of ideological promises that help shape subjectivity

has not been embraced by American historians. A recent Journal of American History roundtable on the history of

capitalism mentions ideology only twice, while Jeffrey Sklansky sees histories of capitalism that treat it as a constructing

people’s worldviews as a new horizon for the field; see “Interchange: The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American

History Vol. 101 No. 2 (2014): 503-536 and Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign: New Intellectual and Social Histories of

Capitalism,” Modern Intellectual History Vol. 9 No. 1 (2012): 233-248. The lack of attention to ideology often reduces

capitalism to the exchange of commodities; empties it of possible normative suppositions, pragmatic assumptions, or

eschatological expectations; and thus naturalizes it into a historically variable assemblage of supply, demand, labor, and

capital. There are notable exceptions, most of them coming from British historians; see for example Margot C. Finn, The

Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). For

examples germane to the United States, see Michael Zakim, “The Business Clerk as a Social Revolutionary; Or, a Labor

History of the Nonproducing Classes,” Journal of the Early Republic Vol. 26 No. 4 (Winter 2006): 563–603; James E. Block,

A Nation of Agents: The American Path to a Modern Self and Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002); Sven

Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Knopf, 2014); Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and

the Making of Modern America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011); and Johnathan Levy, Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World

of Capitalism and Risk in America (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). The best discussions of this topic are

in review essays; see Sklansky, “The Elusive Sovereign,” and “Labor, Money, and the Financial Turn in the History of

Capitalism,” Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas Vol. 11, No. 1 (2014): 23–46; Hannah Farber, “Nobody

Panic: The Emerging Worlds of Economics and History in America,” Enterprise and Society, Vol. 16 No. 3 (September

2015): 686-695.

Here I am arguing against how much of Soviet subjectivity studies generalizes the experiences of “speaking

Bolshevik,” as Kotkin puts it, or the self-fashioning of Helbeck’s characters. In Chukotka, many Soviets spoke Bolshevik

with a northern accent, one heavily inflected by the inability to make a new world easily in the arctic. Many Chukchi

chose not to speak Bolshevik at all.

property personal, and objects valuable. Conversion to either industrial system of belief was uneven.

The sheer lack of available energy made the basic stuff of life, food and fuel, existential challenges.

The nature of the challenge varied across space: the coastlines posed the problem of migratory

species, the tundra the problem of stochastic reindeer populations. As a result, Beringia was home to

multiple captialisms, and multiple socialisms. Communist reindeer herders lived differently than their

comrades by the sea. U.S. valuation and policy toward the resources of the coast were different than

toward resources found underground.

In teasing out the comparisons between miners, herders, hunters, bureaucrats, businessmen,

and the fates of their quarries, this project challenges a line of argument that runs from influential

Soviet histories through to the work of foundational environmental historians: that the Soviet Union

was a perversion of the Enlightenment project, its ideology and absence of markets making it more

damaging to human life and ecological wholeness than capitalism.

At the most abstract, such works

contend that while free markets can be destructive of people and places, communism is inherently

worse.

These arguments use vague ideas of what is natural – either a rational market or pure

wilderness –as an implicit moral compass. Doing so flattens the very real ironies and inconsistencies

that both economic creeds brought to their peripheries. It also ignores the similar desire of both

states to make the world better for people by rending as much energy as possible from every

possible space: growth was a sign of progress, and progress was the universal outcome of the right

economic form.

This is not to say that there were no differences between people making markets

Mapping ideological variance across space and between nations is not common; Brown’s Plutopia is the nearest

example. Although not based in space, Charles Sellers argues for multiple, rival capitalisms in The Market Revolution:

Jacksonian America, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991) and Scott Marler sees capitalism as

fragmented among consumer, financial, agrarian, corporate, industrial, and proprietary forms; see Marler, “Interchange:

The History of Capitalism,” Journal of American History Vol. 101 No. 2 (2014): 503-536.

Stephen Kotkin and Martin Malia both write from this perspective about the Soviet project generally; see Magnetic

Mountain and Malia, The Soviet Tragedy: a History of Socialism in Russia 1917-1991 (New York: Free Press, 1994). Although

less interested in reifying markets, Ronald Suny takes socialist environmental destruction for granted in The Soviet

Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). Many environmental

histories of the Soviet Union sharpen this point, starting with Douglas Weiner’s path-breaking Models of Nature: Ecology,

Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in Soviet Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988) and A Little Corner of

Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). See also Paul

Josephson’s Resources Under Regimes: Technology, Environment, and the State (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).

These Soviet histories make explicit a line of critique present in North American historiography at least since Donald

Worster’s Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (New York: Oxford University Press, [1979] 2004).

Histories damning, often with cause, Soviet policy on environmental grounds, include Philip Pryde, Conservation in the

Soviet Union (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972); Boris Komarov [Ze’ev Vol’fson], The Destruction of Nature in

the Soviet Union (White Plains: M.E. Sharpe, 1980); Philip Pryde, Environmental Management in the Soviet Union (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1991); Murray Feshbach and Alfred Friendly, Ecocide in the USSR: Health and Nature Under

Siege (New York: Basic Books, 1992); D. J. Peterson, Troubled Lands: The Legacy of Soviet Environmental Destruction (Boulder:

Westview Press, 1993); Ann-Mari Sätre Ǻhlander, Environmental Problems in the Shortage Economy: The Legacy of Soviet

Environmental Policy (Brookfield: Edward Elgar Publishing Company, 1994); Murray Feshbach, Ecological Disaster: Cleaning

Up the Hidden Legacy of the Soviet Regime (New York: The Twentieth Century Fund Press, 1995); Oleg Yanitsky, Russian

Greens in a Risk Society: A Structural Analysis (Helsinki: Kikimora Publications, 2000); and Paul Josephson, ed. An

Environmental History of Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013).

John McNeill sees both socialist and capitalist development as part of a modernization project with similar

environmental consequences in Something New Under the Sun; a view shared with Dipesh Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of

History: Four Theses,” Critical Inquiry Vol. 35 No. 2 (Winter 2009): 197-222. Several recent publications add significant

nuance to the orthodox view of Soviet development’s sins; see especially Stephen Brain, Song of the Forest: Russian Forestry

and Stalinist Environmentalism 1905-1953 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011; Alan Roe, “Into Soviet Nature:

Tourism, Environmental Protection, and the Formation of Soviet National Parks, 1950s-1990s,” PhD Diss.,

Georgetown University, 2016.; and Pey-Yi Chu, “Mapping Permafrost Country: Creating an Environmental Object in

the Soviet Union, 1920s-1940s,” Environmental History Vol. 20 No. 3 (2015): 396-421. Kate Brown critiques both systems

xvi

and people unmaking them. The following chapters are filled with such divergences. Many of them

stem from the relatively undogmatic nature of capitalist ideals. The United States tended to debate

more and compel less than the Soviet Union. For every miner buying up gold claims for his Alaskan

company, there was a progressive worried about monopoly, and their resulting debates often

tempered action. Soviet citizens had a far clearer Marxist-Leninist canon to motivate their plans,

even if the final dimensions of utopia were indeterminate. As the following chapters elaborate, these

differences shaped how the Soviet and American states took to making citizens and managing their

environments.

Thus tracing the history of how the U.S. and the Soviet Union learned to inhabit their arctic

periphery highlights differences between the two governments, and how their citizens participated at

a local level. Yet the compelling challenges of the region retained importance that transcended

national difference. Sometimes U.S. and Soviet policies diverged, and sometimes they were more in

congruence with each other than with internal ideals. As a result, the following chapters contain

examples of socialist rationality, market irrationality, and unexpected resemblance. While not

collapsing the critical and often ethically forceful differences experienced in the American and

Russian Bering Straits, this project illuminates how ecological context shaped and compromised

both the assumed rationality of freedom based on market valuation and equality based on collective

production. Both ideologies were in practice variable, and capable of diverse interactions with local

ecologies, even as they lent new meanings to people’s lives and brought new changes to land and

sea. Above all, both systems were contingent. Neither was inevitable or innately better at adapting to

an environment itself subject to continual alteration. In Beringia, markets proved no more natural

than nature itself: both were the product of histories filled with chance, connection, divergence, and

the unruly wills of non-human things.

HUMAN HISTORY AND NATURAL HISTORY

The non-human stuff of the arctic has its own past. These natural histories, the trajectory of

changing species and entire ecosystems, emerge where the geological and evolutionary past meet

with the conditions of the present. Change came to Beringia because the U.S. bought Alaska,

because Lenin took a train, because of world wars and world markets. But these changes played out

in landscapes and seascapes that were never static. Populations change. Species evolve. Climates

cycle warmer or colder. Especially in the far north, this point runs against centuries of

representation, which casts the polar world as cold, remote, uninhabited, and inoculated against

change. Even contemporary discussions of anthropogenic climate change posit a static past rapidly

undone.

Yet, from a knot of wind-blown poppies on the summer tundra to fish schooling off the

unsparingly in Plutopia. For accounts of capitalism that use material conditions to decenter the rationality of markets, see

Cronon, Nature's Metropolis and Timothy Mitchell Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (New York: Verso

Books, 2011).

For further discussion of the weakness of the U.S. state in the face of capitalist interest, see Brian Balogh, “Scientific

Forestry and the Roots of the Modern American State: Gifford Pinchot’s Path to Progressive Reform,” Environmental

History Vol. 7 No. 2 (2002): 198-225 and William Beinart and Peter Coates, Environment and History: The Taming of Nature

in the USA and South Africa (London: Routledge, 1995).

For excellent recent work that remove arctic history from the ice-box, see Andrew Stuhl, Unfreezing the Arctic: Science,

Colonialism, and the Transformation of Inuit Lands (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016) and “The Politics of the

‘New North’: Putting History and Geography at Stake in Arctic Futures,” The Polar Journal Vol. 3, No. 1 (2013): 94-119.

Stuhl writes against contemporary scientific, journalistic, and some historical accounts that bifurcate arctic time into a

frozen, changeless past and a future made apocalyptic by thanks to climate change. For a particularly strident example,

see Charles Emmerson, The Future History of the Arctic (New York: PublicAffairs, 2010). More measured views on arctic

xvii

coast, the polar world does stand still. Natural history is filled with happenstance as well as pattern.

It has no closure.

Identifying the agents of change in the far north depend on the scale of time involved. From

the perspective of multiple decades, even millennia, the climate is the Arctic’s ultimate sovereign. It

rules the rise and fall of species, their distributions in space, and their numbers. On land especially,

the lack of abundant energy keeps most terrestrial life just a few blizzards away from collapse or a

few thaws from booming. Populations ebb and increase in arcs matching those of warming and

cooling. In the short duree, however, these arcs are often invisible. The number of caribou in a

mountain valley is similar across three winters, but will prove quite different over the course of a

century. What changes that count in the short term is far more likely to be some sentient thing: a

wolf, a bear, a person. Or the mess of human wills, ideals, and power we call a state. This project is a

history of people and their concerns, tracing how individuals, revolutions, governments, and markets

have all hurled their desires at the Bering Straits. The long twentieth century saw radical changes in

the way people’s daily life was lived, in the value of places and species, in how some species’ lives

came almost to the end of living altogether. Much of the transformation is decidedly human in

origin and appears indelible in consequence.

Yet the revolutions this project details nested inside, and sometimes battered against, things

quite independent from human influence. Over a century, events that seem driven by people alone

turn out to have an underlying tie with the climate. Over fifty years, species pushed nearly to the

brink of extinction prove resilient. Over a decade wolf populations begin to chew into human plans.

Investigating the diverse causes of change requires moving between time scales. And at these

different scales, distinct actors emerge: individual species, ecological interactions, geology, and

climate were all influential, if not always with intent, in determining the course of the long twentieth

century.

Just as human history is the lumpen conglomerate of individual actions, natural history is

the amalgamated effect of distinct non-human things. Often the two are inseparable. History, as a

whole, emerged from moments and spaces where human and natural pasts coalesce.

Whales

modernity can be found in John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the North in the Soviet Union 1932-

1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998; David G. Anderson and Mark Nuttall, eds., Cultivating Arctic Landscapes:

Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004); Liza Piper and John Sandlos,

“A Broken Frontier: Ecological Imperialism in the Canadian North,” Environmental History Vol. 12, No. 4 (October

2007): 759-795; Stephen Bocking, “Science and Spaces in the Northern Environment,” Environmental History Vol.12, No.

4 (October 2007): 867-894; John McCannon, A History of the Arctic: Nature, Exploration, and Exploitation (London:

Reaktion Books, 2012). Some recent collections are also countering the idea of the arctic as timeless and isolated; see

Arctic histories that emphasize its connection include Michael Bravo and Sverker Sörlin, eds. Narrating the Arctic: A

Cultural History of Nordic Scientific Practices, (Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2002); Dolly Jörgensen and Sverker

Sörlin eds. Northscapes: History, Technology, and the Making of Northern Environments, (Vancouver: University of British

Columbia Press, 2013).

This longue duree approach owes much to Fernand Braudel; for an overview, see Braudel, Afterthoughts on Material

Civilization and Capitalism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1977). See also Peter Burke, The French Historical Revolution: The

“Annales” School, 1929–89 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

Many historians call this “hybridity”; see White, The Organic Machine. Taking non-human things as actors is now such a

truism in North American environmental history that a recent review article requested scholars trouble their use of the

concept; Sutter, “The World With Us.” For a good overview of agency in U.S. historiography, see Linda Nash, “The

Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency,” Environmental History Vol. 10 No. 1 (January 2005):67-69.; and John Herron,

“Because Antelope Can’t Talk: Natural Agency and Social Politics in American Environmental History,” Historical

Reflections Vol. 36 No. 1 (Spring 2010):33-52. Russian historians are still catching up, as Zsusa Gille pointed out in

“From Nature as Proxy to Nature as Actor,” Slavic Review Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring 2009): 1-9. Some recent works do bring

in material actors: see Diana Mincyte, “Everyday Environmentalism: The Practice, Politics, and Nature of Subsidiary

Farming in Stalin’s Lithuania,” Slavic Review Vol. 68, No. 1 (Spring 2009): 31-49; Stephen Collier, Post-Soviet Social:

Neoliberalism, Social Modernity, Biopolitics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011); Julia Fein, “Talking Rocks in the

xviii

learned to avoid market hunters after a few years of pursuit. Reindeer populations rose and fell over

the course of decades, mostly due to climate but also because of political upset. Soviet collectives

bent to accommodate walrus; the tundra bent to accommodate gold mines.

Taking into account the role of a changeable material world troubles the modernist narrative

of rational competence, of the ability for intent to precede a specific result. People had intentions for

seals, or for wolves, and for tin. But the properties of animals and elements often changed the

outcome.

As a result, the next five chapters are a history not of conquest over the environment,

either failed or successful, but how human intention and action were negotiated in concert with

things human and otherwise. Thus the world, peoples’ ideas about it, and practical engagement with

it, are mutually constitutive. In Beringia, ideas taken from far away– ideas about capital and

communes, about yeoman farmers and peasants becoming comrades, came to rest. These ideas

shaped part of what many people understood as rational. Ideology gave content to intentions. But

the form rationality took in practice was hardly universal. It depended on place, other species, and

the long arm of time. Human agency, in the sense of individual or collective will imposing choices

on the world, was and remained situational. Taking the natural history seriously inverts the lessons

of the cultural turn. Nature may be a cultural construct, but humans are a natural construct. The

capacity to act is made.

FROM SEA TO SEA

The geography at the center of this narrative is both small enough to nest inside larger ecological,

economic, political, and social geographies, and large enough to require division. The organization of

the chapters follows the distribution of energy in arctic space and European contact in arctic time:

from ocean to coast, coast to land, land to underground, and finally back out to sea.

Divisions

between these regions are a useful artifice. The communities of people and other living things on the

seashore are different than those on the tundra, but in practice they shade into each other. The

borders are ragged. Within them, the archeology of the Bering Straits holds in its middens a long

history of political will and technological innovation. Where fitting, the chapters give context for this

long human past before turning to the encroachment of empire, the indigenous encounter with the

foreigner, the manufacture of nation, the contortions of ideology, and the needs of modern

Irkutsk Museum: Networks of Science in Late Imperial Siberia,” The Russian Review Vol. 72, No. 3 (July 2013): 409-426;

and Andy Bruno, The Nature of Soviet Power.

In my thinking about agency I am influenced by Timothy Mitchell, “Can the Mosquito Speak?” in Rule of Experts:

Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 19–53. See also Nash, “The Agency of

Nature or the Nature of Agency” and Tim Ingold, The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling, and Skill

(London: Routledge, 2000). Their ideas about the compound nature of agency are similar to those of Bruno Latour and

his ideas of the assemblage; see Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory (New York: Oxford

University Press, 2005).

Thus this project is in dialog with histories of the “spatial turn,” a line of analysis considerably influenced by Michel de

Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) and Henri

LeFebvre’s Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). In U.S.

historiography the best works using spatial themes are environmental or economic histories. See Kenneth Jackson, The

Crabgrass Frontier: the Suburbanization of the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Rhys Issacs,

Transformation of Virginia 1740-1790 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982); White, Railroaded; and

Cronon, Nature’s Metropolis. Recent examples for Russia include Brown, A Biography of No Place; Nick Baron, “New

Spatial Histories of 20

-Century Russia and the Soviet Union: Exploring the Terrain,” Kritika Vol. 9, No. 2 (Spring

2008): 433-447; Mark Bassin, Christopher Ely, and Melissa K. Stockdale, eds., Space, Place, and Power in Modern Russia:

Essays in the New Spatial History (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2010).

xix

production to feed modern consumption. Across these spaces, the emphasis on encounter and

divergence are not always the same; themes from the former cut often into the latter.

The first chapter traces the arrival of market whaling into the Bering Straits. Sailors shipping

from New Bedford met indigenous whalers living in Asia and North America. Examining the lives

of these newcomers at sea, and the labor through which they turned whales into commodities, offers

a study in capitalist rationality and motivation in the common space of the ocean. The need of

whalers to make a living in the short term led to the near total destruction of the bowhead stock,

spreading famine among indigenous whaling communities. As the twentieth century approached,

the United States and the Russian Empire saw their stakes in the North Pacific undermined by the

presence of market value untethered from a larger project of civilization. Whalers brought

commerce, but they were failing at progress, what with the famines and venereal disease left in their

wake. The two states tried to discipline the energy flowing from their frontiers. Formal governance

was a partial substitute for a radically altered ecology.

The second chapter, as with the third, begins with nineteenth-century commerce and ends

after the Second World War, with the Soviet Union and United States firmly established. In the

1870s, market whalers turned to walrus and seals to supplement their diminishing cetacean catch.

But unlike whales, the United States, Imperial Russia, and some indigenous groups came to see these

coastal animals as critical to sovereignty. The desire to preserve coastal species as a way to preserve

costal peoples and with them national claims led to the U.S. to advance a shifting series of

protections starting in the early twentieth century. The Russian Empire was less successful than

some of its indigenous peoples in managing the market demand for ivory. Preservation efforts gave

way after the Soviets took control, often with support from Yupik and Chukchi along the coast. Yet,

following intensive and ideologically-oriented hunting during the Stalinist years, the Soviets also

instituted successful conservation programs based on an instrumental desire to keep the species

abundant for indigenous use.

The third chapter brings the contrast between Soviet and U.S. environmental management

to the tundra, where both states sought to make the arctic agrarian through reindeer pastoralism. In

the United States, this required importing domestic reindeer from Chukotka, starting in the 1890s, in

order to create yeomen herders from semi-nomadic Inupiat hunters. Thirty years later, the Soviets

attempted to reverse that dynamic by making collective reindeer herds from the private property of

Chukchi. In the U.S.S.R., the drive for ideological consistency produced violence altercations

between the Chukchi and the Soviets, whereas in the United States the lack of market commitment

to the value of reindeer meat made the Inupiat often skeptical of participation. In the end, the Soviet

willingness to subsidize the making of collective farms, and collective farmers, made their reindeer

project more expansive than the U.S. version. Yet both countries were frustrated by wolves, and by

the climate-derived flux in reindeer populations that resisted technological intervention.

Like the fifth chapter, the fourth slants toward the experience of newcomers to Beringia and

the period of capitalist and communist variance. The narrative begins before the Soviet Union,

however, with the Nome gold rush in 1900. Thousands of outsiders came north not for energy, but

for an element containing only cultural value. Gold could not feed, warm, or move anyone directly,

but the hope of currency turned the Seward Peninsula into testing ground for ideas about capitalism,

ownership, and the rights of laborers. In Chukotka, the Imperial-era search for gold was mostly

futile. But by the 1940s, decades of exploration yielded Soviet mines for tin and gold, some worked

by gulag labor. This chapter presents a particularly stark contrast between the states. The US

managed gold exploration through chaotic influxes of prospectors and litigation over private

property. The Soviet Union managed it, at least initially, through the denial of private interest in the

use of prison labor. Yet the daily experience of working the mines was often similar in difficulty, and

in outcome. While mining required engineering and geological savvy, it was less mitigated by the

contingencies of harvesting animals. Gold and tin were a static challenge; with enough effort and

lives, extracting their value turned the landscape inside out.

The final chapter returns to the ocean. Tracing the history of whaling in the North Pacific

from the early 1930s until the 1980s, it contrasts the Soviet desire to exploit whales with the growing

American view of the animals as deserving preservation. By examining the Soviet rationale for

whaling, it shows how the socialist conception of the arctic retained an emphasis on the national

need for resources. The value in a whale was in its contribution to Five Year Plans, to individual

promotion, and to the assertion of Soviet rights on the seas. The result brought whale populations

back to the brink of extermination. In the United States, where the postwar years brought economic

boom, whales became an object of scientific inquiry and environmentalist adoration. Cetaceans were

a moral reflecting pool, a way of proving national enlightenment by letting them live. Environmental

groups requested a full ban on whaling. Yupik and Inupiat whalers asserted indigenous rights over

those of animals. The resulting conflict over cetaceans locally, at the International Whaling

Commission, and in the press, ties the themes of this project together: what is of value in the far

north, who decides it, and what are the limits of sovereignty and ideology in the face of

environmental factors.

TURNING SOUTH

In autumn, when the great flocks of snow geese take wing, ten or twenty or a hundred thousand

birds seethe together like a single being. The arc of their flight looks like it will continue in one

united direction, forever. Then the animals change course, suddenly. The collective body splits, half

rising, half dropping. Their flight is contingent on a host of things seen and unseen: the wind, the

warmth of the day, the growth of the grass, and the flight miles ahead. But for every living bird, the

flight path is a path south. The wealth of summer has leached from the tundra. The flocks wheel

away from Beringia. Under their wings passes a world never at rest. There is no one historical

moment when this land and sea were in perfect, unchanging balance.

Yet this land and sea are also

in the process of ceasing to exist in the form described herein. Climate change has put the arctic is in

the hands of new revolution. As the poles of the earth warm, the departing cold takes with it a

familiar set of instabilities and replaces them with melting ice, vanishing permafrost, new

opportunities and dangers for man and beast. Like the political, social, and ecological changes begun

by Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century, it is not the presence of change in the arctic that is

new. It is the pace.

The next five chapters put this present the context of a less abrupt past. Taking natural

history seriously shows a world agnostic to the success of the human species. Climates have changed

before, and life adjusted. Species die, and others arise. Even in the course of the short century and a

half in this narrative, the long arcs and short downbeats of the climate often thwarted the best laid

human plans. Yet saying that nature is always changing, that humans are part of nature, and

therefore human changes are all naturally occurring, is not to say they are humanly desirable or

ethical. Nature may be agnostic towards Homo sapiens but people need not be agnostic toward nature.

For an accessible discussion of how “balance” is an outmoded concept in the face of the demonstrable contingency of

ecosystems, see Emma Marris, Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature in a Post-Wild World (New York: Bloomsbury, 2011); for

a different view, see Hayden Washington, Human Dependence on Nature: How to Help Solve the Environmental Crisis (New

York: Routledge, 2013). The difference between these two ecologists’ approach is summed up by their use of “garden”

and “crisis” respectively, and mirrors a larger argument among ecologists about the ethical relation of humans to a

nature that cannot be taken as pure. For an example, see the debate in Conservation Biology Vol. 28 No. 3 (June 2014):633-

645.

xxi

The past uncovered in this project gives many examples of political debates over what is wanted, and

what is morally permissible, in the human intercourse with the non-human world. It is a vocabulary

of possibilities, and outcomes.

The complexity of understating what is valuable is only more pressing as the influence of the

non-human grows more irregular. That such irregularity is the result of human action is not

mollifying. Climate change in arctic is, in the abstract, the unintended result of the same energy

acquisitiveness that lies at the center of this story, played out across the globe and fueled by oil and

coal rather than whales and reindeer. It is the problem of intent writ large: even if humans can now

take up the title of geological actors, able to alter the very bones of the earth, people do not direct

the full course of change.

Yet what the human side of this history shows a species able and willing

to contest over the value of things. It does not put the future in the hands of a singular vision

governed by the assumed rationality of economic laws, any more than it describes a prelapsarian

past. It is the story of people working up a vision of an ideal world and sometimes bringing a

version of it to life.

I am alluding to the term Anthropocene, coined by Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer, who proposed that human-

caused change to the global environment is significant enough to warrant a new geological epoch; see “The

Anthropocene” IGBP Newsletter Vol. 41 (2000):12. The term has been embraced, to varying effect, by humanist scholars

and scientists, and motivates three journals. Among scientists, the primary debate is over when and if human impact on

the earth became so profound as to register in the geological record. Some possible dates include human mastery of fire;

agriculture; European colonization of the Americas; industrialization; and the creation of atomic weapons. For an

overview of these debates, see Richard Monastersky, “Anthropocene: The human age,” Nature Vol. 519 No. 7542

(March 2015): 144-147; Simon Lewis and Mark Maslin “Defining the Anthropocene,” Nature Vol. 519 No. 7542 (March

2015): 171-180; Colin N. Waters et. al. “The Anthropocene is Functionally and Stratigraphically Distinct from the

Holocene” Science Vol. 351, No. 6269 (January 2016): DOI: 10.1126/science.aad2622; and Will Steffen, Jacques

Grinevald, Paul Crutzen and John McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Conceptual and Historical Perspectives,” Philosophical

Transactions: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences Vol. 369 No. 1938 (13 March 2011):842-846. The difficulties of

using the term whose periodization (and indeed existence) is still debated can be seen in Chakrabarty’s “The Climate of

History,” which equates the Anthropocene with climate change, and climate change with post-Enlightenment industrial

civilization. Given the lack of geological consensus, basing an argument for the unification of geological and human

histories on this periodization makes even Chakrabarty’s most provocative arguments intellectually leaky. The

Anthropocene might be, after all, a much more general part of the human condition than the industrial period.

Moreover, humans are not the only species to have changed the climate, as Chakrabarty implies; we share that

distinction with blue-green algae. Among scientists and humanists, the best Anthropocene scholarship shares an implicit

or explicit concern with the ethical relationship between humans and the non-human world. See for example the essays

in Ben A. Minteer and Stephen Pyne’s After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2015). Generally the term Anthropocene is an excellent catalyst for debate, while lacking analytical

precision. Thus while engaging many of the concerns of Anthropocene scholarship, I do not use the term.

CHAPTER ONE: THE SEA

1848-1900

THE COUNTRY BELOW

Sometime in at the end of the eighteenth century, a bowhead whale was born along the

southwestern edge of the Bering Sea. Here in the later winter, his mother and thousands of other

bowheads spent the winter breathing and diving between open leads in the pack ice. As the frozen

ocean retreated north with the spring sun, the calf followed his parent up the western coast of

Alaska and through the Bering Strait, sometimes swimming, sometimes resting on her back. They

sang as they swam, listening for how the echoes mapped the thickness of the sea ice, warning the

danger of entrapment. Often they joined with other bowheads, following patches of bubbles exhaled

by their fellow Balaena mystictus, a trail of marine breadcrumbs leading north. By June, the pair and

their herd swam toward the Beaufort Sea, north of Alaska and Canada. As the summer waned, the

cow and calf probably migrated westward, spending September and October in the Chukchi Sea,

where the sound of their playful flipper slaps carried for miles across the ice and water. When the

storms and dark of early winter closed leads and polynyas in the ice, the whales swam south through

the Strait, moving with long deep dives and brief, blasting gasps for fresh air at the surface.

On this surface, the seas about the Bering Strait seem barren – ice choked, desperately cold,

sunless for much of the year. But the North Pacific is the terminus for the world’s deep ocean

circulation, its depths containing ancient waters that originated in the North Atlantic and have

gathered a rich burden of nutrients over centuries of global churn through the deep. At the Strait,

the undersea topography creates turbulence, mixing waters old and new, warm and cold, across deep

submarine layers. These currents, roiling minerals and nutrients from the world’s great rivers with

the sunlight of polar summer, make the waters of the Bering Strait some of the most productive and

biologically diverse on the planet. Over two hundred species of photosynthetic phytoplankton and

three hundred different species minute, fatty, swarming zooplankton form the primary form of

productive life in the ocean, giving sunlight physical form. Bowheads, their mouths filled with feet

of sieve-like baleen, concentrated this krill into their blubbery bodies.

For information on whale biology and their role in ecosystem dynamics, see Lloyd F. Lowry, “Foods and Feeing

Ecology,” in The Bowhead Whale, ed. John J. Burns et al. (Lawrence, KS: Special Publication Number 2, The Society for

Marine Mammology, 1993), 203-238; Joe Roman, James A Estes, Lyne Morissette, Craig Smith, Daniel Costa, James

McCarthy, JB Nation, Stephen Nicol, Andrew Pershing, and Victor Smetacek “Whales as Marine Ecosystem

Engineers,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment Vol. 12 No. 7 (September 2014): 377–385; Craig R. Smith, “Bigger is

Better: The Role of Whales as Detritus in Marine Ecosystems,” in James A Estes, Douglas P. Emaster, Daniel F. Doak,

Terrie M. Williams, and Robert L. Brownell, Jr. eds. Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 2006), 286-302. For information on the oceanography of the Bering Strait, see N.J. Niebauer and D.M

Schell, “Physical Environment of the Bering Sea Population,” in The Bowhead Whale, ed. John J. Burns et al. (Lawrence,

KS: Special Publication Number 2, The Society for Marine Mammology, 1993), 23-43; Committee on the Bering Sea

Ecosystem Polar Research Board, The Bering Sea Ecosystem (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996), 28-71.

In their annual migrations through the dynamic medley of arctic waters, bowheads and other

large whales were, two hundred years ago, the primary consumers of North Pacific krill, scooping up

over half of the region’s primary marine production.

In doing so, they changed the ocean’s physical

composition. The mechanical energy of their dives and ascents churned nutrient-rich deep waters

upward and increased the fertility of the ocean’s surface.

In life, whale digestion moved critical

elements, from nitrogen to iron, through aqueous levels, making photosynthetic organisms more

abundant. In death, whales brought their tonnage of fat and protein to the ocean floor, hosting

blooms of organisms on the sunken carbon.

As long-lived animals, their populations limited in

density by their demanding intake of calories, bowheads and other large whale species increased the

stability of the Bering Strait marine ecosystem, dampening the shocks of weather, predation, and

yearly shifts in the productivity of the region through their ability to adjust their consumption

spatially and in intensity, making them insulation against the stochastic arctic environment.

Whales

had value to life throughout the levels of consumption and production that make up the marine

world, from the communities of organisms that feed on carcasses to the plankton enriched by

plumes of dung to the dozens of fish and marine mammal species in-between, unconscious

participants in a world partly supported on the broad back of the largest cetaceans.

As massive as they are, the great whales are also prey. Especially when he was young, the

eighteenth century bowhead was at risk of orca attack.

As the whale grew and packed on tons of

blubber, his primary predators were the humans living along the Asian and North American

coastlines from Cape Dezhnev to the Diomedes, St Lawrence Island, Point Hope and Cape Prince

of Wales, and north toward the Mackenzie River Delta.

As prey, bowhead evolution has made them

particularly desirable: they are energy condensed, an adult’s body weighing up to a hundred tons,

forty percent of it pure lipid, more calories per pound of flesh than any other arctic species on land

Croll, et al., give the figure of 53-85% consumption of primary production by great whale species in the general North

Pacific region. See D.A. Croll, R. Kudela and B.R. Tershy, “Ecosystem Impacts of the Decline of Large Whales in the

North Pacific,” in Estes et al. eds., Whales, Whaling, and Ocean Ecosystems, 202-214.

W.K. Dewar, R.J. Bingham and R.L Iverson et al., “Does the Marine Biosphere Mix the Ocean,” Journal of Marine

Research, Vol. 64 (2006): 541-61.

J. Roman and J.J. McCarthy, “The Whale Pump: Marine Mammals Enhance Primary Productivity in a Coastal Basin,”

PLoS ONE (October 11, 2010): DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013255; C.R. Smith “Bigger is Better,” 286-302; L.

Lundsten, K.L Schlining, K. Frasier, et al., “Time-Series Analysis of Six Whale-Fall Communities in Monterey Canyon,

California, USA,” Deep-Sea Research Part I Vol. 57 (2010): 1573–1584. Whales move so much carbon to the ocean floor

that restoring whale populations to pre-commercial harvest levels could increase carbon fixing at a rate comparable to

proposed iron-fertilization climate engineering projects. See A.J. Pershing, L.B. Christensen, N.R. Record et al., “The

Impact of Whaling on the Ocean Carbon Cycle: Why Bigger Was Better,” PLoS ONE, August 26, 2010, DOI:

10.1371/journal.pone.0012444

See for example, Specer Apollonio, Hierarchical Perspectives in Marine Complexities: searching for systems in the Gulf of Maine

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2002).

Great whale species may have been the primary diet of killer whales. See A. M. Springer, J. A. Estes, G. B. van Vliet, T.

M. Williams, D. F. Doak, E. M. Danner, K. A. Forney and B. Pfister, “Sequential Megafaunal Collapse in the North

Pacific Ocean: An Ongoing Legacy of Industrial Whaling?” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States

of America, Vol. 100 No. 21 (Oct. 14, 2003): 12223-12228 and A. Sinclair, S. Mduma and J.S. Brashares, “Patterns of

Predation in a Diverse Predator-Prey System, Nature Vol. 425 (18 September 2003): 288-290.

Owen K. Mason and S. Graig Gerlach, “The Archaeological Imagination, Zooarchealogical Data, the Origins of

Whaling in the Western Arctic, and ‘Old Whaling’ and Choris Cultures,” Hunting the Largest Animals: Native Whaling in the

Western Arctic and Subarctic, Allen P. McCartney ed. (Edmonton: The Canadian Circumpolar Institute, Studies in Whaling

No. 3, Occasional Publication, 1995), 1-31, 5.

or sea. Even the smaller whales sometimes hunted in the Strait, the greys and humpbacks, weigh up

to forty or fifty tons and are more than twenty percent fat.

For humans in the arctic, never far from

the specter of non-being through non-eating, even a very small bowhead, a yearling of less than ten

tons, could feed a village for more than six months.

The killing is no easy thing; to do so humans must transcend terrestrial lungs, cold-averse

flesh, and the puny reach of weak limbs. Yet, the peoples of the Bering Strait have been landing

whales of various species for thousands years. The oldest of these cultures, emerging some five

thousand years ago, is known now only in traces: harpoon points, graveyards of whalebone.

In the

thirteenth century, the richness of whale flesh created a civilization. The Thule, a whaling-centered,

technologically adept culture stretched from their origins along the Bering Strait to Eastern

Greenland in a string of permanent villages.

Their geography mapped onto bays and inlets freed of

ice by a centuries-long warm fluctuation in the arctic climate, bringing more whales into boat range.

Thule unity collapsed along with this warmth, in a five-century cold period that, before ending in the

mid nineteenth century, reshaped the distributions and populations of bowheads and choked

accessible hunting grounds with ice.

But while the Thule did not subsist as an arctic culture,

humans as an arctic species did, forming, around the Bering Strait, the most recent whaling societies:

the Yupik, Inuit, and coastal Chukchi. By the time these peoples enter the written record, they had

reinvented and perfected the technologies and practical knowledge necessary to take human mind

and muscle into the perilous habitat and habits of their cetacean prey.

The bowhead survived these dangers and continued to map with his annual migrations the

edges of ice and flows of biotic energy in the Bering Sea. Born when the United States had not yet

purchased Louisiana and the Russian Empire owned Alaska, with Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations

only a few decades off the press and the publication of Karl Marx’s Capital more than fifty years in

the future, this whale survived our species’ dreams of utopia and courting of nuclear apocalypse, saw

the ideological and technological capacities of capitalist and communist modernity intermesh, at the

Bering Strait, with their ecological byproducts.

That the whale survived these upheavals is remarkable, for balaena mysticeus was the lure that

drew a world just beginning to conceive of itself and its actions as modern into the North Pacific.

Harnessing energy was the essence of the industrial revolution, and harvesting the singular fattiness

of bowhead flesh brought the first vanguards of the revolution to the Bering Strait. And revolutions

Peter Whitridge, “The Prehistory of Inuit and Yupik Whale Use,” 103.

Peter Whitridge, “The Prehistory of Inuit and Yupik Whale Use,” 108.

Roger Harritt argues that whaling in the Bering Strait goes back as far as the Denbigh Flint complex of 5500 years ago,

and gained intensity with the Birnirk, Punuk and Thule social forms during the past 1500 years. See Harritt, “The

Development and Spread of the Whale Hunting Complex in Bering Strait: Retrospective and Prospects” in Hunting the

Largest Animals: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic and Subarctic, ed. Allen P. McCartney, Studies in Whaling No 3,

Occasional Publication No 36 (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1995), 33-50, 33.

Igor Krupnik and Sam W. Stoker, “Subsistence Whaling,” The Bowhead Whale, ed. John J. Burns et al. (Lawrence, KS:

Special Publication Number 2, The Society for Marine Mammology, 1993), 585.

For a full discussion of Thule expansion and contraction, see Krupnik and Stoker, “Subsistence Whaling,” 580-586.

Information about the practices of the coastal Chukchi, as distinct from Yupik populations, is often indistinct in the

historical literature, where both groups are called “Eskimo,” and most contemporary anthropology focuses on the Asian

Yupik specifically. The rest of this section will therefore be dealing primarily with the Yupik and Inupiat. Krupnik and

Stoker, “Subsistence Whaling,” 582, and Igor Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern

Eurasia, trans. Marcia Levenson (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1993), 76

are known to eat their children: in the case of the industrial appetite for whales, the devouring was

nearly complete. In 1848, when the first American ship hunted off the Diomede Islands, there were

probably more than 23,000 bowheads in the Bering Sea population. When the industry sputtered to

an end in the early twentieth century, perhaps 3000 remained. How this happened is partly

technological, but distinctly ideological. People had to learn how to kill whales so efficiently it

rendered obsolete the reproductive capacity of living organisms, and they needed to not care: human

needs had to be so independent of cetacean existence that latter could perish and the former persist.

The value of a dead whale in the present had to supersede live whales in the future. For the so-called

Yankee whalers shipping from New England ports, such independence was a given consequence of

civilization; they lived in a world of new industrial marvels and the certainties of agriculture. In the

Bering Strait, long home to cultures whose geography and cosmology were shaped by whales,

independence from marine energy was a revolutionary concept.

The following chapter is a history of these interlocking transformations in ideology, ecology,

and society, initiated in the tripartite encounter between Yankee whalers, indigenous whaling

societies, and the whales themselves. It begins with two communities of whale-killers – people who

knew bowheads and other species through the labor of hunting, and follows how their interactions

profoundly altered relationships between man and man, and between man and beast, along the

Asian-North American cusp. Whaling ships did not come to the Bering Strait to create a new order,

but rather to feed the markets of the industrializing seaboard towns half a globe distant. Yet, in

doing so, they altered the physical, not just the conceptual, relationships between organisms, human

and otherwise. The Yupik, Chukchi, and Inupiat adapted – sometimes gleefully, sometimes

skeptically, and sometimes violently– by joining commercial crews, changing the loci of political

power, fighting with whalers, intermarrying, and linking their trade networks to the global

commodities market. Bowhead whales, for their part, tried to adapt, with fleeting success. As whale

energy flowed south as barrels of oil, many indigenous communities along the Bering coastline

found themselves hungry: the market had taken the blubber that sustained them and traded it back

for empty metal pots.

Commercial whaling created a void in the marine ecosystem, one that echoed from the sea

floor to the yaranga roof. What filled the void was the state: the United States and the Russian

Empire came north in no small part because the presence of the untamed market and the absence of

whales undermined their sovereignty. What good, after all, is a country that cannot discipline the

ravaging of its own resources, and what claims to progress and civilization can be made among

starving people? Modernity along the Bering Strait began after the market appropriated so much

energy from the marine biome that the state became its replacement.

THE COMMUNITY OF TRADE, 1800S-1850S

In 1852, when the bowhead was about sixty years old, two groups of whale-killers met on

Chukotka’s northern coast. The first were indigenous hunters, probably Yupik, who in late

September found thirty-three worn, unshaven people limping their way southeast across the frosty

tundra. The bedraggled men were refugees from the wreck of the Citizen, a ship from New Bedford

come to join in the fifth season of industrial whaling. The crew’s communication with their

discoverers was limited to gestures, but their desperation was clear. From the remnants of their

vessel they had salvaged a few supplies: biscuits, rum, molasses, flour, the cooked remains of their

pet pig, and a makeshift tent. Winter was already bearing down from the mountains, and with little

food, no furs, and armed only with a few knives, a broken whale lance, and a shovel, they would not

last its first weeks. The Yupik men led the group back to their settlement, where the ship’s captain,

Thomas Norton, described their hosts as showing “a degree of sympathy for us in our destitute and

dependent condition wholly unlooked for, and altogether unexpected.”

The crew of the Citizen spent nine months in Chukotka, divided among Yupik families living

in a cluster of twenty-odd circular walrus-hide huts. The crew must have seemed like absurd, comical

burdens to their hosts: constantly trying to shave with a dull knife, singing odd songs, scraping out

figures on bits of salvaged copper, and woefully ignorant of proper dress and food. The village

would have been familiar, from rumor if not direct experience, with the occasional trading vessel of

the Russian American Company, and with the goods and mores of the Russian and Cossack

merchants who traded along the Kolyma River. But these pale, inefficient men brought no rum,

beads or tobacco, and the salvaged molasses and flour, although delicious, required substantial

augmentation from the local supply of blubber and meat. The men of the Citizen were openly

grateful for these provisions, but found the daily ration of raw, slippery, tough whale fat nearly

inedible, especially since it was served, as Norton recalled, with no “further change in the

promiscuous and offensive elements than what time itself would produce.”

Yet, despite their

differences in taste, it was blubber that brought these unlikely people together: both the rescued men

and their hosts made their livings from the bodies of whales.

THE YANKEE WHALERS and their indigenous counterparts both hunted whales, but they had

little else in common. Even how whales were known and valued was markedly different. Nelson and

his crew could certainly see that whales were important, the “the staff of life,” to their hosts.

They

also observed some of the practicalities of indigenous whaling, noting the use of umiaks, open boats

large enough to carry five to ten men, made from walrus hide dried taught and tough over a wood or

whale-baleen frame. But, Nelson was wrecked in the midst of people with whom he shared nearly

nothing: not language, clothing or attitudes toward cooking, bathing, sexual propriety, religion, or

ownership. Thus separated from understanding what his hosts valued in the whales they ate and the

world they inhabited, existence on the Chukchi coast was, for Nelson, nothing more than blank

survival fed by whale fat, “listless and unprofitable […], it was simply the endurance of life...”

Whales certainly did enable the endurance of life, and the geography of their migrations had

been forming human geography for several millennia by the time Citizen wrecked. Nor was Nelson

wrong in his observation that his host’s existence was hardly assured. The biological resources that

sustained human life in the mid-century Western Arctic were then, as now, caught up in a highly

Lewis Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen or Winter in the Arctic Ocean (Boston: Thayer and Eldridge, 1861), 84. Holmes based

his book on interviews with Captain Nelson and other members of the Citizen’s crew.

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 119.

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 182.

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 115.

contingent ecology, one that made dependable access to calories uncertain. The scales of time at

which these contingences flexed into the human domain were variable: the polar climate pulsed

warmer or colder across decades and centuries and eons, altering flows of sea ice, blooms of

photosynthetic plankton and growth of mosses, and the movements of animals through aquatic and

terrestrial space. The weather, temperamental from year to year, routed flows of plant and animal life

according to the timing of blizzards and thaws, windstorms and wildfire. Beyond meteorology,

animals preyed upon each other, upon the scrum of hardy flora, overkilled both, or fell subject to

the thousand natural shocks visited by migration, infection, and reproduction. It is climate where

learning how to consume every remotely palatable organism was critical. Bowheads, however, were

comparatively stable, and brought the diffuse energy of the ocean close enough to literally taste.

It was a taste that the decedents of the coastal Chukchi, Yupik and Inupiat groups from

Enurmino, Uelen, Naukan, Ungazik, Chechen, Sireniki, Sinrak and Ninligan in Chukotka, to St.

Lawrence Island and the Diomedes, to Cape Prince of Wales, Kotzebue, Sisualik, Kivalina and Point

Hope and north toward Barrow in Alaska, cultivated. Across these communities, with adaptations

based on the particularities of waterscape and shoreline, whales were known to the indigenous

hunters by the labor of their killing: intimate, physical, dangerous knowledge accumulated across

generations and amended according to the inconstancy of the seasons. In a landscape of scarce

energy, every hunt is a balance between the risks of an exhausting, potentially deadly failure against

the massive gain of success. The oral tradition of Tikigaq, or Point Hope, Inuit described hunting as

“the acquisition, on each safe return with meat, of / knowledge: the path of each journey, worked in

with the knowledge pattern / passed vertically down kin lines.”

Hunting was a process of dealing

with the contingencies of the present moment and a pulling an inherited past into the future, the

pursuit of energy become an expression of historically resonant cultural meaning. They embodied

survival.

ART OF WHAT was passed down along kin lines was a theory of mind in which not all minds

were human. With the same local variations as the coves and bays they inhabited, each whaling

community engaged a set of non-empirical technologies – taboos, rituals and invocations – that

related to cetaceans as non-human persons: reciprocating, constitutive parts of the social world.

Whales were part of a universe without a dividing line between object and subject; all things had

voices, in Chukchi cosmology, and among the Yupik, the animate universe responded to the

thoughts of others, making intention and thoughtful action critical to not injuring the minds of other

Tom Lowenstein, Ancient Land: Sacred Whale: The Inuit Hunt and its Rituals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993),

84.

To generalize in writing about how whales were known and hunted in across the many cultural variations of the

Bering Strait is analogous to describing an improvisational jazz performance and expecting the reader to hum the tune.

Most of us simply do not regularly live in a world of sentient, moral animals capable of acting upon us should we

transgress. My knowledge of the pre-contact worldview of the Yupik and Inupiat is deeply indebted to generations of

indigenous oral historians and anthropologists, and much of what is now known comes from those beliefs durable

enough to survive into the twentieth century. Thus, use of the past tense is stylistic rather than denoting the expiration

of these beliefs.

beings.

As a result, hunting the moral, sentient whales began long before the migratory arrival of

the animals themselves, with the right mental attitude and physical actions.

Among the Alaska

Inupiat, women were responsible for welcoming the bowheads by clearing away the past year’s meat

and organizing the boat crews.

It was also women, particularly the wife of the umiak captain, who

would call the whale through shamanic rites, emerging sometimes with a whale’s tail in place of a

tongue.

The Yupik brought in a new season by feeding the whales that fed them, bringing offerings

to the sea in in act of thanksgiving and blessing for the coming year and singing in low, pleading

voices.

And the umiaks were cleaned, the kits of harpoons, ropes, floats, and spears readied.

Without the right preparations, the whales would say to each other, in the stories of some Alaskan

Inupiat, that the humans were not ready to hunt, and would stay far away, in their own country.

When the whales did come, in the spring in Western Alaska and the spring and autumn

along the Chukotka coast, hunting from an umiak was not solitary work. Sometimes flanked by

kayaks, multiple crews took to the open leads in the sea ice with precise urgency when the spout or

rounded back of a whale came into view. Whales have sharp hearing, so hunters moved on muffled

feet and with few words. Some captains would wait for the steamy rush of a whale’s exhalation

before launching the boats, the breath masking the scrape of the hull against the shore ice. Although

approached in silence, bowheads were believed by the Yupik to speak to their pursuers, signaling

with the direction of their turns and dives how long the captain would live.

And the hunters spoke

back; Paul Silook, a Yupik hunter, described how the captains would call “out the name of the

ceremonies, asking them (sic) to go ahead of the whale and stop it.”

Whalers wore light-colored

Ann Fienup-Riordan, “Eye of the Dance: Spiritual Life of the Bering Sea Eskimo,” Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of

Siberia and Alaska, ed. William Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 256-

270, 256 and S. Ia. Serov, “Guardians and Spirit Masters of Siberia,” Crossroads of Continents, ed. William Fitzhugh and

Aron Crowell, 241-255, 244.

The concept of human-animal reciprocity has been noted by contemporary anthropologists in both Yupik and Inupiat

communities. See Ann Fienup-Riordan, Eskimo Essays: Yup’ik Lives and How We See Them (New Brunswick: Rutgers

University Press, 1990), 66-67 and Chie Sakakibara, “Kiavallakkikput Agviq (Into the Whaling Cycle): Cetaceousness and

Climate Change Among the Iñupiat of Arctic Alaska,” Annals of the Association of American Geographers Vol. 100 No. 4

(2010): 1003-1012. Precise descriptions of hunting practices prior to and during contact is hardly complete, but

contemporary practice and the lateness of European influence provide a rough guide.

Lowenstein, Ancient Land: Sacred Whale, xxv, and Lyudmila S. Bogoslovskaya, “The Bowhead Whale Off Chukotka:

Integration of Scientific and Traditional Knowledge,” Indigenous Ways to the Present: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic, ed.

Allen P. McCartney (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute Press, 2003), 209-254, 237.

Edith Turner, “American Eskimos Celebrate the Whale: Structural Dichotomies and Spirit Identities among the

Inupiat of Alaska,” TDR (1988-), Vol. 37, No. 1 (1993): 100.

Versions of these rites are described in Chukotka. See Charles Campbell Hughes, “Translation of I.K. Voblov’s

‘Eskimo Ceremonies,’” Anthropological Papers of the University of Alaska, Vol. 7 No. 2 (1959): 71-90, 78. For descriptions

from the Yupik on St. Lawrence Island and the Chukchi coast, see Anders Apassingok, Willis Walunga and Edward

Tennant eds. Sivuqam Nangaghnegha Siivanllemta Ungipaqellghat, Lore of St. Lawrence Island, Echoes of Our Eskimo Elders, Volume

1: Gambell (Unalakleet: Bering Strait School District, 1985), 205-207, 223.

Tom Lowenstein, The Things that Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1992), 91.

Anders Apassingok, Willis Walunga, Raymond Oozevaseuk and Edward Tennant eds. Sivuqam Nangaghnegha

Siivanllemta Ungipaqellghat, Lore of St. Lawrence Island, Echoes of our Eskimo Elders, Volume 2: Savoonga (Unalakleet: Bering

Strait School District, 1987), 145.

SI, Henry Bascom Collins Collection, Unprocessed Box 3, File: Collins 1930.00A, p. 4-5. These are the field notes of

Paul Silook, a Yupik historian and ethnographer who worked as the key informant for multiple anthropologists on St.

Lawrence Island, and provide a particularly rich first-person perspective on Yupik practices. Silook warns that

clothing to appear, to underwater eyes, like part of the sky and ice, and the boat’s hide was often

bleached white, a color believed by the Inupiat to be beloved to the bowhead. On St. Lawrence

Island, women sent their husbands to sea with a prayer “that the hunters would go out as if

transparent, casting no shadow.”

Each boat’s captain coordinated the hunt, watching for the vulnerable moment when the

dark body surfaced to breathe. If the whale offered up a flank or back, the boats moved in with

harpoons poised. These harpoons, with backward-curving barbs, were designed to twist into the

wound, anchoring deep in a whale’s flesh. Bound by a cord to a seal-skin float, each harpoon pinned

the great struggling body to the surface. In the churning panic of frigid water and hot blood the

hunted worked to escape the hunters. Even with multiple boats, it could take up to nine hours and

dozens of strikes to kill a whale: a dangerous day’s labor spent dodging lashing fins and enraged

flukes or the whole great back coming up from under an umaik to plunge it into the spray. There

were reasons to pursue large whales, for the prestige, for their baleen and bones, and for the sheer

tonnage of calories. But the pragmatism of seeing tomorrow and surviving the winter frequently led

hunters to take yearlings or even calves, which were less risk to the whaleboats died more quickly by

a lance to the heart or exsanguination.

Once dead, the whale’s fins were pinned to its body, or cut

away along with the tail, to reduce drag in the water. During the spring hunt, a ramp was chipped

into the shore ice to haul the great bleeding body free of the water. If the whale was taken in the

autumn, boats would drag it to shore at high tide and wait for the waters to recede. Spring or fall,

once the animal was made terrestrial it became the site of focused communal effort to separate skin

from blubber from meat from bone.

WHAT A WHALE became in death was multiple. At the site of butchering, as the great body came

apart, the order of the community was assembled. Cuts and quantities of the kill were allotted

according to rank in the umiak and hunters’ performance on the water. The captain of the striking

ceremonies varied between families and clans, not to mention between continents, and were often carefully kept secrets

– so any description is highly partial and local. See Carol Zane Jolles, “Paul Silook’s Legacy” in Hunting the Largest

Animals: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic and Subarctic, ed. Allen P. McCartney. Studies in Whaling No 3, Occasional

Publication No 36 (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1995), 221-252.

Anders Apassingok, Willis Walunga and Raymond Oozevaseuk ed. Sivuqam Nangaghnegha Siivanllemta Ungipaqellghat,

Lore of St. Lawrence Island, Echoes of our Eskimo Elders, Volume 5: Southwest Cape (Unalakleet: Bering Strait School District,

1989), 157.

Bobby Kava from St Lawrence Island reported that elders specifically targeted immature whales; see Apassingok et al.,

Sivuqam Nangagnegna Siivallemta Volume 3, 15. Igor Krupnik and Sergei Kan argue that killing immature whales was safer

and more efficient for hunters and potentially served a role in controlling whale populations. “Prehistoric Eskimo

Whaling in the Arctic: Slaughter of Calves or Fortuitous Ecology?” Arctic Anthropology Vol. 30 No. 1 (January 1993): 1-12.

The technologies and rituals of whaling societies are quite heterodox. The Asian whaling cultures tended to be more

sedentary, while in North America whaling was often supplemented with nomadic activities. See Krupnik, Arctic

Adaptations, 44. The description of whaling here is compiled from multiple anthropological sources. In addition to those

already cited, see Stoker and Krupnik, “Subsistence Whaling,” 579-629; James W. VanStone, Point Hope: An Eskimo

Village in Transition (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1962); Froelich Rainey, “The Whale Hunters of Tigara”

Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History Vol. 41 No. 2 (1947): 231-283; Igor Krupnik, “Morskoi

promysel korennogo naseleniia Providenskogo raiona: problem i perspektivy” in V. Zemskii and A. Yablokov eds.

Morskie mlekopitaiushchie (Moscow: Nauka, 1984), 212-223; Sergei A. Arutiunov, Igor Krupnik and Michael A. Chlenov

“Kitovaia alleia” Drevnosti ostrovov proliva Seniavina (Moscow: Nauka, 1982); Carol Zane Jolles, Faith, Food, and Family in

Yupik Whaling Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002); Ernest S. Burch, Jr., The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations

of Northwest Alaska (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998).

boat and his wife could, in acknowledgement of their skills shamanic and otherwise, could become

powerful, at least as long as they could muster whales. To assure a successful hunt the next season,

there were more ceremonies. Some Yupik would puncture the whale’s eye, mixing the liquid with

charcoal to paint, to the lead boat with the symbol of a whale’s tale.

On St. Lawrence Island,

captains and their friends would retreat to a special, individual place of worship and burn the whale’s

flukes, and in the symbolically brush away disease and death.

A dead whale meant human lives. A

bowhead is forty percent fat, with another forty-six percent edible flesh and viscera, and their skin

prevents scurvy when eaten raw, as the delicacy mucktuck.

Beyond the ingestion of calories,

bowhead fat, in a landscape with few or no trees, was fuel to hold back long winter cold and dark.

The baleen, which becomes malleable when heated, transformed into sleds and straps. In Chukotka

and parts of Alaska, people inhabited the heads of whales, the great arches of bowhead jawbones

forming the struts of half-subterranean houses.

Known through the labor of their deaths,

cetaceans were valued as the generative origin of the human world. At Tikigaq, this potential is told

into the history of the community itself, which sits on the site one bowhead’s ancient, mythic

expiration.

Thus, the geography of human life in the Bering Strait mapped itself onto the geography of

bowhead life, plotting a world around this organism’s capacity to land sunlight absorbed into Pacific

Ocean, condensed by way of algae and krill, in human bellies. Yet as critical as baleen whales were in

constituting the physical lives and social universe of their hunters, they did not isolate people from

the rest of the arctic ecosystem, from the world of persons and beings beyond the shoreline. Whale

skin was good eating, but was not the stuff of boots, parkas, tents, sleds, boats or rope.

Coastal

villages, which became increasingly sedentary and whale-dependent from the thirteenth century on,

needed resources that were difficult to find close to home, mostly due to the natural history of

migratory whales and the inconsistencies of arctic topography. In space, whales follow their own

needs through the ocean; the best places to hunt them are often poor in other organisms. In time,

seasonal migrations sometimes overlap with those of caribou and other species. The great benefits

of hunting bowheads came, often, at the cost of harvesting reindeer or walrus or seal.

HE SOLUTION WAS trade. A good network could transform whale blubber into the walrus

hides necessary for umiaks, soapstone for carving, wood for harpoon handles, or reindeer hides for

clothing.

Annual trade fairs dotted the North American and Asiatic coastlines and up river valleys,

bringing together the surplus of one community with the needs of people hundreds of miles distant.

Apassingok et al., Sivuqam Nangagnegna Siivallemta Volume 1, 237.

SI, A. Hrdlicka Collection, Box 97, File: “Riley Moore Materials on St. Lawrence Island, 1912.”

Peter Whitridge, “The Prehistory of Inuit and Yupik Whale Use,” Revista de Arqueologia Americana No. 16, Los Modos de

Vida Maritimos en Norte y Mesoamerica: El Estado De La Cuestion (1999): 99-154, 108.

In some Alaskan communities, whale heads were returned to the sea. See Lowenstein, Ancient Land, xxiv.

Lowenstein, Ancient Land, 9.

For a detailed discussion of unequal access to trade goods, see Glenn W. Sheehan, Proto-Historic Social Organization of the

Coastal Whaling Communities of North and Northwest Alaska, PhD Diss., Department of Anthropology, Bryn Mawr College,

1992.

Glenn Sheehan, “Whaling Surplus, Trade, War, and the Integration of Prehistoric Northern and Northwestern

Alaskan Economies, A.D. 1200-1826 in Hunting the Largest Animals: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic and Subarctic,

Studies in Whaling No 3, Occasional Publication No 36 (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1995), 195.

By the mid eightieth century, tobacco originating with Cossacks in the Siberian interior made its way

to Alaska through these fairs and exchanges, which also moved manufactured goods from the

Russian and British Empires long before sustained, direct contact.

Exchange between mostly

sedentary whalers and primarily nomadic hunters or herders made both methods of existence less

open to the caprices of climate and migratory species.

When Thomas Nelson spent his winter in the walrus-hide tents, he found his hosts to be

remarkably peaceful, noting no recent or past “fighting, or war between the different tribes in that

region.”

He saw a world without politics, unmotivated by the desires for material betterment that

produced historical change and thus doomed the Eskimo to remain “in the same condition of

mental ignorance, moral blindness, and physical degradation.”

It is an observation that speaks

more to Nelson’s linguistic and cultural isolation from his rescuers than to their political reality.

Interdependence between persons, human and otherwise, did not produce harmony. Instead, the

reality of the Arctic’s uneven energy geography made trade a biological necessity and controlling it

politically desirable. The origin of struggles over the dispersion of cetacean energy was in the surplus

produced by whalers and in the highly coordinated act of whaling itself, since the hierarchies of the

whaling boat often translated into larger influence. Umiak captains had the blubber to cultivate trade

relationships, and sometimes the leadership to protect, expand or seize control of lucrative routes.

Most of the goods traded along the Beringian rim passed through multiple villages, giving some

locations highly exploitable power over the movement of calories and raw materials. Trade could

make or unmake the small nations of Beringia. By the seventeenth century, the broad cultural and

linguistic commonalities of the Yupik and Inupiat were subdivided into small nations with defined

territorial spaces, names, particular economic strategies, and, sometimes, political ambitions.

whale flesh sustained increasingly large populations, it filled small nations with need, and with bodies

ready for war. Along the Bering coastlines, the nationless marine migrations of cetaceans shaped the

geography of miniature nations, and an international form of politics in which, for boat captains

with powerful alliances, plunder could be more profitable than trade.

NDIRECTLY, THEN, WHALE flesh inflected the human social world with violence, leaving behind

graves filled with arrow-pierced bodies that Nelson, in his brief winter, could not have seen. Men

trained constantly for war, and designed elaborate body armor - in Chukotka made from metal plates

Kotzebue observed cross-Strait Inupiat and Chukchi trade in the 1815-1818, noting that the Chukchi bought skins

from North America in exchange for manufactured trade goods bought further inland in Siberia. O.V. Kotzebue, A

Voyage of Discovery into the South Sea and Beerings Straits, for the Purpose of Exploring a North-East Passage. Undertaken in the years

1815-1818, Vol. 1 (London: Longman, Hurst, Reese, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 228. More on trade fairs will be

discussed in chapter 2 and 3. For an account of the tobacco trade from Siberia into Northwest Alaska, see Lowenstein,

The Things That Were Said, 151.

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 135

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen ,138

Sheehan, “Whaling Surplus, Trade and War,” 202-203. For a discussion of trade and violence in the years just prior to

sustained European contact, see Ernest S. Burch Jr., Alliance and Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 2005).

The anthropologist Ernest S. Burch Jr. argues, drawing on decades of nuanced and locally detailed fieldwork for the

use of the word “nation” to describe the social units of northwestern Alaska. See Burch, The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations, 8.

See also Ernest S. Burch Jr. “War and Trade” in Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, ed. William Fitzhugh

and Aron Crowell (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 228.

traded from western Siberia, and across the Strait from thick sealskin and wood. In these suits, from

boats and across ice and land, the Diomede Islanders fought with Yupik and Chukchi from the

Asian coast against King Islanders allied with Kotzebue, Port Clarence and Cape Prince of Wales.

Warfare also shaped the designs of the tsars; maritime Chukchi and Yupik fought alongside tundra

Chukchi against the Russian Empire, which spent over sixty, bloody, futile years attempting to gain

territorial control of the Peninsula before surrendering in 1771.

However unwilling the indigenous peoples along the Kolyma River were to pay imperial tribute,

they were interested in adding manufactured goods to their trading networks. The Chukchi spent the

first half of the nineteenth century commanding the movement of knives, tobacco, and beads

eastward from the trading fairs of the Kolyma, across the Strait into Alaska, where they were

exchanged for furs at the annual Sheshalik trade fair in Kotzebue Sound and other. These furs were

then hauled by boat and reindeer sleigh back west, traded and re-traded on their journey to markets

from Europe to China. Like the trade in raw calories and hides, manufactured luxuries did not

produce harmony; the Chukchi warned Otto von Kotzebue that the inhabitants of the Alaskan

shore “robbed and murdered strangers without hesitation, if they were strong enough.”

For their

part, the Chukchi and Yupik protected their monopoly on trade in and out of North America with

vigor. In 1819, when the American brig General San Martin went prospecting for furs along the

Bering Strait, she was repelled from Big Diomede Island by more than two hundred coastal Chukchi

and Yupik, uninterested in losing control of the island’s strategic place in the movement of people

and things.

In the borderlands between indigenous nations and expanding empires, trade and

violence were interlinked, sometimes forcing allegiances between the Europeans and indigenous

groups, but also often internecine.

On St. Lawrence Island, raids from the Yupik on the coastline

had “a reputation for cruelty from way back,” including kidnapping children into slavery.

Taking

adult prisoners, however, was rare, while torture was apparently normal and indiscriminant;

triumphant warriors brought home heads trophies or fed the organs of the vanquished to

Edward W. Nelson, an early anthropologist in the Bering Strait, observed that “In ancient times the Eskimos of

Bering strait were constantly at war with one another,” Edward W. Nelson, The Eskimo about Bering Strait: Annual Report

for 1896-97. (Washington, D.C.: United States Bureau of American Ethnology, 1899), 330. For information on

population expansion see Stoker and Krupnik, “Subsistence Whaling,” 594, and Sheehan, “Whaling Surplus, Trade,

War,” 202. For a discussion of weapons and technologies of warfare, see Hans-Georg Bandi, “Siberian Eskimos as

Whalers and Warriors,” in Hunting the Largest Animals: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic and Subarctic, Studies in Whaling

No 3, Occasional Publication No 36 (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1995): 165-183. The authoritative

account of Chukchi warfare is A.K. Nefodkin, Voennoe delo chukchei (Saint Petersburg: PV Press 2003).

Igor Krupnik, Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900-1960 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press,

2013), 208.

Kotzebue, A Voyage of Discovery Vol. 1,262.

For an excellent account of this early attempt to open trade by Americans, see John R. Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in

the Far North: The Contest among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press,

2009), 3-40.

Here I am using the definition of borderlands as a place of contested sovereignty and competing legal/moral codes set

out in Brian DeLay in North American Borderlands (New York: Routledge, 2013), 9-10. Nefodkin describes cases of the

Russian Empire siding with its tribute-paying “small peoples” against the Chukchi, not always with success. See Voennoe

delo chukchei, 257.

Apassingok et al., Sivuqam Nangaghnegha Siivanllemta Ungipaqellghat, Volume 2, 125.

themselves or their dogs.

Warfare, like hunting, was for its Yupik and Inupiat practitioners

dependent on technologies and skills that transcended the empirical world of arrows and armor.

Some umiak captains were also powerful shamans, able to manipulate the temperamental world of

non-human beings. But individual social and spiritual influence frequently had their origins in whales

and their killing, since the leaders of Yupik and coastal Inuit war parties were also the captains of

successful whaling boats. The capacity to attain and control the flow of biological energy created

political power. A whole human history, containing centuries of victory and defeat, expansion and

retraction, trade and hardship, with all the meanings of alliances and recriminations, linked back to

the natural history of cetaceans.

FOR THE PEOPLE living that history, the value of a whale was part spiritual abstraction and

part concrete need. A whale was, in Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi life, a thing that could make the

darkness of the polar nights visible, the cold bearable, and stomachs satiable. Their flesh could

become all manner of things, their minds could speak of the future, and in dying they could make

men and women powerful. Their death in a successful hunt signaled another pass at a year of living

and giving that life meaning. And contained in the intimate labor by which whales were known,

through the killing and the prayer, was a theory of history. It was not, as Captain Nelson assumed

from the desperate isolation of his walrus-skin hut, a changeless slog through blubber and grime.

The Inupiat, Yupik and Chukchi lived a world that could be counted upon for its continued

unpredictability: routine in that summer would follow winter but alive with non-human beings and

very human politics that could alter the course of any moment or season.

There were many minds

at work, and whales were valuable because in this sentient and stochastic world they responded to

the thoughts of humans. They were also, apparently, infinite in time: given to a pattern of return,

present in hope even when absented by season or weather. What the whales knew of their hunting,

of the inflection points of danger along the Bering Strait coastline evades records oral or written, but

enough came that some ten to fifteen bowheads were killed every year in Chukotka and 45-60 in

Northwest Alaska.

Killing more bowheads and greys might well have been desired; dead, these

animals assured survival and abetted political power. But umiaks were small and to the land.

Technology put a boundary on thinkable destruction. And it was enough. The energy gotten from

the shared bodies of whales animated an entire universe, predictable only in its constant iteration.

Jean Malaurie, “Raids et esclavage dans les societies autochtones du Detroit de Behring,” Inter-Nord: revue international

d’etudes arctiques et Nordiques No. 13-14 (December 1974): 129-156, 141-142. Malaurie argues that the brutality of warfare

enabled an almost feudal level of social control on the part of victors. However, this control seems like it was often

fleeting, due to the ecological factors that also influenced political formation and human populations; see Krupnik, Arctic

Adaptations, 259-260.

In addition to the works already cited, this discussion of indigenous Bering Strait cosmology, draws on Fienup-

Riordan, “Eye of the Dance,” 256-270; Serov “Guardians and Spirit-Masters of Siberia,” 241-255; Waldemar Bogoraz,

Chukchi chast 2 (Leningrad: Glavsevmorput’, 1939), 1-45; Herbert O. Anungazuk, “Whaling: Indigenous Ways to the

Present” in Indigenous Ways to the Present: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic, ed. Allen P. McCartney (Edmonton: Canadian

Circumpolar Institute Press, 2003), 427-432.

Stoker and Krupnik, “Subsistence Whaling,” 592-594.

THE COMMUNITY OF COMMERCE, 1840S-1870S

The commercial whalers who came to the North Pacific on vessels like the Citizen were also

intimates of uncertainty. Their world, for years at a time, was contained by the decks and rigging of

triple-masted, wood-hulled, copper-plated sailing ships, their momentum dependent on the wind

and vulnerable to the tempers of the open ocean.

Whaling vessels wrecked. Sometimes they caught

fire. Ports of call featured cannibals, brawls, and unseemly diseases. Men’s bones broke, wounds

festered, scurvy threatened, bowels ran, and doctors were rare.

The price of whale products surged

and crashed while a ship was at sea. Even taxonomic and conceptual convention as to a whale was –

Fish? Mammal? Biblical terror? – remained open to debate.

And whatever they might be in

language, at sea and in the flesh whales were often notable for their absence, or for their anger.

Writing from the midst of a “thick fogg” in the North Pacific, Willis Howes, the bearded and sea-

leathered captain of the whaler Nimrod, mused that “the unequal luck attending each ship strongly

Persuades me to believe that there is a Whaling god who Presides over the destinies of all interested

in this business. The main article of this new Faith is hope ah yes hope that hope it’s the Foundation

from which springs all our aspirations.”

THE ASPIRATION WAS, as captain Edward Davoll told his crews on embarkation, to kill

whales, and kill enough to “get a cargo of oil.”

The hope of success stretched from the snow-

lashed, ice-bound seas of the North Pacific south past Hawaii and east around Cape Horn, to the

Atlantic seaboard of the young United States. Nantucket, Martha’s Vineyard, Mystic and other port

towns had ridden out the American Revolution and Napoleonic high-seas chaos to become the

center of a global whaling industry; by the 1840s and 1850s, when whale commerce peaked, it was

concentrated in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which put to sea several hundred ships a year.

With

Based on the weekly tallies of vessels published by the The Whalmen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript in New

Bedford, whaling ships were either square-rigged, which could hold a crew of at least thirty, or barks, which

accommodated a slightly smaller number of men.

Carrying medical staff was common on French and British whalers, but on American ships these duties fell to the

mates, or in some cases captain’s wives who traveled with their husbands. Where not explicitly quoted, the general sense

of ship-board life in this section is drawn from the extensive collection ship’s logs held at the New Bedford Whaling

Museum, the Mystic Seaport Museum, and the Rhode Island Public Library. Because of the vastness of this collection

(over 1500 logs in New Bedford alone), I focused on voyages to the North Pacific from the late 1840s onward.

For an excellent discussion of how whales legally became fish in the early Republic, see D. Graham Burnett, Trying

Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case that Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 2007).

Sperm whales in particular were known for their tendency to turn on whaling ships, and sometimes destroyed them.

See Zeph W. Pease and George A Hough, New Bedford Massachusetts: Its History, Industry, Institutions and Attractions (New

Bedford Board of Trade: New Bedford, 1889), 46.

NBWM, Logbook of the Nimrod (Ship), ODHS 946, p. 112.

Edward S. Davoll, The Captain’s Specific Orders on the Commencement of a Whale Voyage to his Officers and Crew (New

Bedford: Old Dartmouth Historical Sketch Number 81, 1981), 7. Giving a speech on embarkation was traditional, but

Davoll was one of the few captains to write his orders, given in the 1850s.

Of the approximately 900 ships from all nations engaged in whaling in the late 1840's, over 700 were American- a

dominance that continued through the 19

century. David Moment, “The Business of Whaling in America in the

1850's,” The Business History Review, Vol. 31, No. 3 (Autumn, 1957): 261-291, 263. For an overview of American whaling

prior to 1800, see Margaret S. Creighton, Rites & Passages: The Experience of American Whaling 1830-1870 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1995), 16-23; Briton Cooper Busch, “Whaling Will Never Do for Me:” The American Whaleman

a deep harbor and access to lumber for shipbuilding, New Bedford ran on whale: from the

carpenters, caulkers, barrel-makers, blacksmiths, rope-makers, and sail-weavers who rigged the ships,

to the agents, outfitters and financers who paid and organized whaling crews, to the refineries and

buyers who purchased raw cetacean stuff and sent it to market, New Bedford was a town committed

to turning fat from the far reaches of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans into commodities that radiated

outward on New England’ expanding network of railroads.

WHILE NINETEENTH-CENTURY RAILROADS pulled whales inland, nineteenth century whaling

ships pulled the United States outward. The demand for whales was over century old by the time the

Citizen was wrecked, and during these years whaling vessels killed their way around the world: from

the North Atlantic to the South, then as these stocks diminished and grew skittish, around Cape

Horn into the Pacific. Whalers reached Hawaii in 1819, on voyages lasting up to thirty months. With

Americans sailing – and sometimes wrecking – in exotic waters, the U.S. Navy moved resident

forces into the Pacific. It was part, as President John Quincy Adams told Congress in 1825, of

America “assuming her station among the civilized nations of the earth,” which required not only

contributing to scientific endeavors in uncharted oceans, but encouraging “a flourishing commerce

and fishery, extending to the islands of the Pacific and to China,” with a home in the United States

and requiring that “the protecting power of the union should be displayed under its flag, as well

upon the oceans as upon land.”

Formal U.S. power, however, was following in the wake of whalers. In 1828, the secretary of

the navy, Samuel Southard, commissioned Jeremiah N. Reynolds – a tireless and eccentric booster

of American maritime exploration – to compile Pacific knowledge accrued by whaling captains, a

group “better acquainted with those [Pacific] seas than any other people.”

Gathering this

knowledge would be good for the Republic, and for mankind, since the Yankee fleet introduced

missionaries to “new spheres of usefulness,” in “uncharted seas” where whalers could bring “the

trade of the civilized world.”

If combined with the formal protections of the U.S. flag, charting the

ocean in pursuit of whales would, according to one U.S. Navy Captain, “open to our commercial,

and, of course, national interests, sources of great wealth, which cannot be brought into action

without the protecting aid of government.”

The citizens of New Bedford, however, wanted more

than a compilation of their own hard-earned knowledge, and echoing Reynolds and others,

petitioned Congress for formal exploration into the Pacific.

Eventually the government agreed; a

in the Nineteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1994), 1-18. For a popular account of American

whaling, see Eric Jay Dolin, Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).

John Quincy Adams, “President’s Message,” Niles’ Register, December 10 (1825), 237-238.

Jeremiah N. Reynolds, Address, on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition (New York: Harper and Brothers,

1836), 196. This volume is a compendium of all Reynolds’ correspondence and research on whaling and Pacific

exploration.

Alexander Starbuck, A History of the American Whale Fishery from its Earliest Inception until the Year 1876 (Waltham, MA:

Published by the Author, 1878), 6.

Captain Thomas Ap Catesby Jones to J.N. Reynolds, February 28, 1828, in in Reynolds, Address, on the Subject of a

Surveying and Exploring Expedition (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1836), 264.

“Petition of citizens of New Bedford, praying that a naval expedition may be undertaken for the exploration of the

North and South Pacific Ocean and other seas visited by whale ships and others,” H.R. Doc No. 201, 20

Cong. 1

Sess.

(1828).

survey of the South Pacific was underway by in 1838, with the goal of furthering “science,

knowledge, and civilization” in a world otherwise “inhabited by savages.”

The commercial

potential of civilization, and the civilizing potential of commerce, was again at play when

Commodore Matthew Calbraith Perry went to Japan in 1853, an expedition that followed in the path

of whale ships.

Formal U.S. expansion into the Pacific was, like many 19

century Imperial adventures,

driven by economic concerns cloaked in the rhetoric of glory and progress; control of Hawaii and

treaties with Japan promised to muscle the U.S into the company of those Empires that launched

Cook and Bering. State power came from knowledge, and in the Pacific, knowledge was often

furthered at the intersection of cetacean biology and commercial gain. By following and harvesting

the mobiles paths of biologic energy that whales drew through the Pacific, the Yankee fleet fueled

and enabled ideas about manifest destiny, leading the state expansion westward, leading the state

westward from terrestrial to marine horizons.

WHALES ALSO PLAYED a role in national and local ambitions because their bodies were only

a few transmutations and hours of labor away from being hard currency. As Southard reported to

Congress in 1836, “No part of the commerce of this country is more important that than which is

carried out on the Pacific ocean….It is, to a great extent, not a mere exchange of commodities, but

the creation of wealth, by labor, from the ocean.”

Whales’ value, as in the indigenous communities

of the Bering Strait, originated in the condensed energy of their blubber and, in baleen species, the

peculiar properties of their feeding apparatus. A whale killed by a Yankee ship in the nineteenth

century, however, was not valued by New England markets because of its eatable calories.

Instead,

cetacean fats lubricated a mechanizing country: first greasing sewing machines and clocks, then the

cotton gin and power looms. Whale products did not directly fuel industry – a duty serviced by

water-wheels and the carbon stored in wood, coal, and petroleum – but it did keep this machinery

running smoothly. Baleen, meanwhile, was useful for its “fibrous and elastic structure,” employed in

the manufacture of “whips, parasols, umbrellas…caps, hats, suspenders, neck stocks, canes, rosettes,

cushions to billiard tables, fishing-rods, divining-rods…tongue scrapers, pen-holders, paper folder

and cutters, graining combs for painters, boot-shanks, shoe-horns, brushes, mattresses,” an array of

consumer objects not yet satisfied by plastics.

And from New Bedford’s barrel-studded waterfront,

blubber spread into other commodities and manufacturing processes. Whale products were critical

to cotton textile production, used to strengthen fibers for wool weaving, and smeared on sheep

before shearing. It became fine-grade soap, a base for perfume, and filler for quality leather shoes.

“On the Expediency of Authoring an Exploring Expedition, by Vessels of the Navy, to the Pacific Ocean and South

Seas,” S. Doc No. 620, 24

Cong. 1

Sess. (1836).

“On the Expediency of Authoring an Exploring Expedition, by Vessels of the Navy, to the Pacific Ocean and South

Seas,” S. Doc No. 620, 24

Cong. 1

Sess. (1836).

Nancy Shoemaker, “Whale Meat in American History,” Environmental History, Vol. 10, No. 2 (April, 2005): 269-294.

Shoemaker argues that the status of whale meat as inedible is a testament to “the remarkable endurance of taste

preferences in the face of powerful forces promoting change,” 271.

J. Franklin, “No. V. Tips for Umbrellas,” Transactions of the Society, Instituted at London, for the Encouragement of Arts,

Manufactures, and Commerce, Vol. 50, Part II (1834-1835): 89-92, 89; Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery, 155-

156n.

Orchards and vineyards employed refined blubber as an insecticide, as a wash to “prevent sheep

from gnawing trees,” and as a fertilizer.

Above all, the energy stored in whales became light. In New England, whale oil had been

used as an illuminant since the 1630s. By 1848, when the first whaler arrived in the northern Bering

Sea, the demand for safe indoor lighting was growing with America’s population, and the United

States was not yet refining fossil fuels into lamp-friendly kerosene [need to check Jones for this].

Light came, for the most part, from animal fats or seeds, and of these options whale oil - especially

that taken from sperm whales - produced a clean, bright flame. In the first half of the nineteenth

century, competitors to whale oil began to develop, but cetacean products did not smell like bacon, a

problem with refined pork fat, or explode easily, like camphene. In the early sunsets and long

winters of Boston, New York, Providence and other eastern cities, whale-fueled lamps lit homes and

factory floors, streetlamps and the headlights of trains, and guided ships home from lighthouses.

Energy gathered from distant oceans became an intimate part of domestic and civic life for people

who had never seen, smelled, or tasted a whale.

SELLING CETACEAN ENERGY also made some people very rich. On the fin in the open

ocean, whales were wild, extra-national creatures, legally and practically understood in Europe and

America to be property of no person or polity. In death, their wildness surrendered, they were

owned by their executioners.

There was, therefore, no recognized value to a live whale, since all

rights to claim them as property and sell them for profit occurred after mobile organisms became

stationary commodities. And the potential of these commodities was fully realized by New Bedford

and other whaling ports. In the 1840s and 1850s, whaling was the third largest industry in

Massachusetts, bringing in about ten million dollars a year in raw product and employing up to

20,000 people at its peak.

There were no guarantees for the investors that floated whale ships: not

only could voyages end in disaster, but oil and baleen were subject to considerable flux in price from

year to year throughout the nineteenth century.

Yet, as part of a diversified portfolio of industrial

enterprises, whaling yielded substantial profits for a few New England families. “Nowhere in all

America,” Herman Melville wrote of New Bedford, “will you find more patrician-like houses, parks

and gardens,” opulence that was “harpooned and dragged up hither from the bottom of the sea.”

Despite the protestations of its Congressional boosters, whaling capital was never a huge part of the

“Plant Watering and Sulphering,” Evening Bulletin, San Francisco, Thursday May 20, 1886; Untitled, Atchison Daily Globe,

Wednesday, January 12, 1898. Other uses for whale products summarized from Pease and Hough, New Bedford

Massachusetts.

While some whale oil was still exported to Britain, the market by the mid-nineteenth century was mostly in the U.S.,

which transitioned to fossil fuels later than Britain – a country that was also still smarting from its loss of the

Revolutionary War and imposed high duties on whale imports.

For a discussion of European legal definition of wildness, see Matt Cartmill, A View to Death in the Morning: Hunting and

Nature through History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 29.

Moment, “The Business of Whaling in America,” 263-264.

The annual reports on the market in the Whalemen’s Shipping List show highly variable prices from year to year.

Generally, the price for whale oil trended down during the nineteenth century, while baleen increased. See John

Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986),

348-349.

Herman Melville, Moby-Dick (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), 40.

nation’s production – comprising about one percent in the 1850s, and less by the 1860s – but

fortunes earned in whale fat turned into investments in shipping, railroads and textiles by New

Bedford merchants.

For the Massachusetts financer and the young Republic politician, whales were

an abstraction that fed other, grander, historically meaningful abstractions: commerce, national

exploration and expansion, and progress broadly construed. Uncertainty was ironed into the broader

faith in the “progress of science and civilization around the world.” A whale could become part of

manifest destiny, part of the theory of a forward-driving, expansive human history, but only when

no they were longer a whale.

OPULENCE AND ABSTRACTION were not the lot of the men who actually sailed the ships that

turned cetacean bodies into bottled light and concentrated wealth. Captains like Howes were, by

rank, responsible for a successful cruise, but they did not own their vessels. Instead, the capital-

intensive, perilous whaling voyages of the mid-nineteenth century were generally funded by wealthy,

land-bound investors, who often diluted their risk by sharing ownership.

Vessel proprietors

contracted captains based on their record of finding whales and their ability to manage a crew. By

mid-century, this required considerable awareness of the Atlantic and Pacific’s nautical challenges,

and knowledge of the expanded zoology of commercial whale hunting, which included any animal

that could be boiled down into sellable oil – rights, greys, humpbacks and fins. Every decision the

captain made would later be scrutinized for its contribution to a profitable voyage. As Howes wrote,

while contemplating the hazards of sailing for the Arctic in 1860, “on the results of the

determination hangs my Professional reputation as Master of a Whale Ship,” a stress compounded

by the “most unfortunate” aspect of his employment, that “the master is responsible for the

misconduct or inferiority of every other man on board.”

Every other man on board could, in reality, be any sort of man – for while whaling was

nearly exclusively a masculine domain, crews were otherwise diverse in class, rank, race, and motive.

Most ships sailing from New Bedford in the mid nineteenth century carried several African or

Native American men, and often added sailors indigenous to the ports and islands visited along their

Pacific routes.

“The crew seem to be somewhat of a mixed up mess 5 white 5 kanakas 2

portuguese [sic] 3 colored brethren with the cook who could be called black being the darkest one of

all,” wrote Mary Brewster, who sailed for the arctic in 1848 with her captain husband.

Experience

Lance E. Davis, Robert E. Gallman and Karin Gleiter, In Pursuit of Leviathan: Technology, Institutions, Productivity, and

Profits in American Whaling, 1816-1906 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 521.

Nearly half of the New Bedford ship masters were employees of owners, while those that did own shares in their ships

often owned only a small percentage. See Creighton, Rites & Passages, 220.

NBWM, Logbook of the Nimrod (Ship), ODHS 946, p. 96.

Sailors were not listed in most logs by race, although the physical descriptions of sailors recorded in the Seaman’s

Register in New Bedford gives some sense of their origins via physical descriptions. For a full analysis of race on board

ship, see James Farr, “A Slow Boat to Nowhere: The Multi-Racial Crews of the American Whaling Industry,” The Journal

of Negro History, Vol. 68, No. 2 (Spring 1983):159-170, and Creighton, Rites & Passages, 121-123. For a discussion of

Native American whalemen, see Nancy Shoemaker, Native American Whalemen and the World: Indigenous Encounters and the

Contingency of Race (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015).

Mary Brewster, “She Was a Sister Sailor:” Mary Brewster’s Whaling Journals 1845-1851, Joan Druett ed. (Mystic CT: Mystic

Seaport Museum, 1992), 337. “Kanaka” was a term for indigenous Pacific Island laborers. The international dimensions

of whaling are covered well in Richard Ellis, Men and Whales (New York: Knopf, 1991).

also varied; many crew were recruited green, with the promise of “strange lands and climes, romance

and fresh experiences” and “a pile of money.”

Fresh sailors left in debt for their oilskins, utensils,

shoes, and bedding to the men who recruited them, while often not knowing the route, duration, or

expectations of the voyage to come. The reality of weevil-studded bread, brackish water, and a home

that in bad weather tumbled and rolled, as one anonymous log stated, “like a tird in a pispot [sic]”

left some men mutinous.

Captains responded with strict discipline. “I forbid quarreling and fighting and skylarking,”

Captain Davoll told his crew, adding, “don’t let yourselves be heard to grumble in any way. I and the

officers can do all that.”

To keep the crews busy, officers promoted regimes of ship upkeep – from

smoking out rats to scrubbing the decks with lye – and non-alcoholic, morally suitable pastimes:

men quilted or made “spun yarn,” or carved stories of their desires in intricate scrimshaw.

Fighting, swearing, insubordination, drunkenness and shirking work, by contrast, were punishable by

being “seized to the mizzen rigging and flogged.”

Orson Shattuck, a middle-class mate on the Eliza

F. Mason, was dismayed by the crew, who he found “as a class the most ignorant that can be found

under American colors,” and perhaps earned their beatings. But Shattuck was also worried that his

captain “treated the laws of his country with contempt” when he flogging insubordinates.

It was an

opinion shared by terrestrial observers, who fretted that the national glory of U.S. expansion

westward was tainted by its agents. Whalers on land had a reputation for “irresponsibility, ice,

depravity, and criminality, while the discipline aboard ship was lamented for violating democratic

ideals.

Sailors, for the most part, were not absorbed with questions of democracy or national

reputation. “I wanted [a] little money,” lamented the log-keeper of the Lydia, “but I did not want it

enough to come here and go through what I am now for it.”

“HERE,” FOR THE Lydia’s, homesick diarist, was the Arctic Ocean where nineteenth century

whaling came to grind itself out against the ice. Whalers had been following their quarry north,

passing rumors of good grounds from the waters off Japan and into Bristol Bay, then near

Kamchatka, and into the Sea of Okhotsk. In 1848, following a Russian naval officer’s reports of

plentiful whales Thomas Roys sailed the small ship Superior into the Arctic Ocean.

Near Big

Diomede Island, Roys and his crew killed a new sort of whale: black, slow, exceptionally fat of body

Walter Nobel Burns, A Year with a Whaler (New York: Outing Publishing, 1913), 12, 13. Creighton notes that whaling

was also a way for young men to prove their masculinity; Rites & Passages, 52-53. Whalers of color also could expect

enhanced opportunities for career advancement aboard ship as compared to terrestrial employment; see Farr, “A Slow

Boat to Nowhere,” 165.

Quoted in Brewster, “She Was a Sister Sailor,” 344.

Davoll, The Captain’s Specific Orders, 7, 9.

NBWM, Logbook of the John Wells (Bark), ODHS 769, p. 50. For a discussion of the gendered nature of whaler’s

labor, see Creighton, Rites & Passages, 187-188.

NBWM, Logbook of the Eliza F. Mason (Ship), ODHS 995, p. 25.

NBWM, Logbook of the Eliza F. Mason (Ship), ODHS 995, p. 51. Flogging sailors was made illegal in 1850, but

continued on many ships. Lawsuits against abusive captains were frequent. For a discussion of efforts to reform

captain’s conduct and the general conditions on whaling ships, see Creighton, Rites & Passages, 87-99.

Hohman, American Whaleman, 59.

NBWM, Logbook of the Lydia, KWM 132, p. 59

BL, Charles Melville Scammon Papers, P-K 206, Vol. 1 p. 102-103 and Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript,

New Bedford, Massachusetts, February 6, 1849.

and long of baleen. Six weeks later, when Roys reported that he took 1600 barrels of oil from just

eleven whales to the newspapers in Honolulu, a fifth of the worlds’ whaling fleet was north of

Hawaii, searching seas already emptied into distant lamps.

It was an audience eager and ready for

Roys’s description: “I entered the Arctic Ocean about the middle of July, and cruised from continent

to continent, going as high as the lat. 70, and saw whales wherever I went.”

THE COMMUNITY OF ADAPTATION, 1880S-1900S

Roys’s account moved across the world’s oceans rapidly: in 1849, fifty ships turned north,

and in 1850, the number rose to over 130 vessels. “The Arctic,” Mary Brewster wrote in 1848,

“seems a long look, but from all accounts there are plenty of whale.” It was, paradoxically, the lure

of going home that drew Roys and the ships that followed him so very far away from it, since in the

arctic there was a chance of getting “the ship full,” as Brewster noted, to “shorten the voyage.”

But shortening the voyage also meant going once more before the map or the flag. When the

Yankee fleet arrived in the Bering Strait in 1849 and 1850, they entered a world empty, to them, of

formal governance. “We worked our way up more than thirty miles beyond the direction of any

chart,” recalled Captain Norton of the Citizen, not long before the ship wrecked, leaving him “at an

unknown distance from civilized life.”

The United States had not yet purchased Alaska, the British

Empire was trading only as far west as the McKenzie River and the upper limits of the Yukon, and

the Russian Empire, while active at the mouth of the Yukon and along the Kolyma, had retreated

from active patrol of the Strait eighty years before. Although the Whalemen’s Shipping List ran ads

starting in 1849 for “Polar Sea” maps “Compiled from English and Russian Authorities,” they were

as incomplete as state sovereignty.

The whaling fleet was the vanguard of the distant,

industrializing market; the map-lines that traced states and empires were decades behind.

WHAT THE YANKEE ships found were small nations and large whales. The size of the

bowhead stocks in the Bering Sea was around 23,000 animals, of which ingenious hunters took

maybe one hundred per year, from land. In the open ocean, where the species had never

experienced human predation, the animals were docile, slow, and tame. In 1849, the Tiger alone

reported “a large number of whale” on July 8

, “quantities of whale,” on July 9

, “plenty of whale,”

on July 10th and again “a great many whale,” on July 11

, “some whale” on July 13

, “any quantity

of whale just come through the straits bound north,” on July 14.

th92

Later in July, near Point Hope,

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford, Massachusetts, January 9, 1849

The Polynesian, Honolulu, Hawaii, November 4, 1848. News of Roys discovery was in most marine journals across the

world by 1849; see Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 24.

Brewster, She Was a Sister Sailor, 372. Captain Brewster heard of Roys’ discovery while on passage, probably from

another ship.

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 50, 70.

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford, MA, November 27 1849.

Brewster, She Was a Sister Sailor, 385-387. For an account of the 1849 season, see also Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men,

94-95. The Tiger left Honolulu with 1800 barrels of oil, although some was harvested before arriving in the Arctic.

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford, MA, February 19, 1850.

the Ocmulgee described the ship as “Blubber-logged and whales in every direction.”

Moreover, the

beasts were huge. The average sperm whale yielded forty-five barrels of oil, and a grey about thirty.

But the new “polar whales,” as bowheads were initially known, gave 150, 200, or 300 barrels of oil,

and sometimes upwards of three thousand pounds of whalebone.

In 1850, the Whalemen’s Shipping

List proclaimed it doubtful “if so much oil was ever taken in the same period, by the same number

of ships, and attended with so few casualties.”

The arctic discovery seemed to confirm the place of

the whale fishery, as ---- Seward testified to the U.S. Senate, “a source of national wealth and an

element of national force and strength.”

THE WHALERS THEMSELVES, zigzagging between North America and Asia, also found

whales to be an element of national strength, just not their own.

Nor did they typically use the

word nation to describe the indigenous whale hunters who, from the “seven canoes, containing forty

men each” that Roys saw crossing the Strait, were a source of fear, opportunity, curiosity, and

judgment.

Initially, whalers worried that “the bloody indians [sic,]” were violent, and the first ships

through the Strait in the 1840s scrambled to meet approaching Yupik, Chukchi and Inuit boats with

whatever limited weaponry they could assemble.

The indigenous desire, however, was not for war

but for “tobacco – they are all smokers & chewers even the children and are extravagantly fond of

it,” Mary Brewster wrote of an indigenous party that came aboard the Tiger on the Asian coastline,

“and as near as we can understand they are to be our friends.”

100

An account published in the

Whalemen’s Shipping List agreed, finding the natives “friendly and inoffensive,” and urged captains to

assure “that the natives are kindly treated” by whaling crews.

101

Most whalers were appalled by

indigenous living conditions, especially the smoky huts and diet of raw sea mammals, both of which

seemed to signal a lack of proper industriousness. One account concluded the Inuit near Port

Clarence were “extremely docile and very intelligent; but as is the case with the Esquimaux generally,

very lazy,” which left them “reduced to a state of semi-starvation” by the end of winter.

102

Captain

Logbook of the Ocmulgee, July 25 1849, quoted in Arthur C. Watson, The Long Harpoon: A Collection of Whaling Anecdotes

(New Bedford, MA: Reynolds Printing, 1929), 49.

The average oil yield varies depending on the calculations used. The numbers here are from Harston H. Bodfish,

Chasing the Bowhead: As Told by Captain Harston H. Bodfish and Recorded for Him by Joseph C. Allen (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1936), 95; Charles M. Scammon, The Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America (San

Francisco: John H. Carmany and Company, 1874), 244; and Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 95.

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford MA, December 24, 1850.

“The North West Whale Fishery, Survey of the Pacific Seas, Commercial and Political Relations Between Asia and

America: Speech of Mr. Seward,” New York Daily Times, New York, NY, July 31, 1852.

Yankee whalers developed a pattern for their work: ships left New England in the autumn, rounded Cape Horn in the

austral summer, and put in at Hawaii or San Francisco to supply and to overwinter between summer voyages to the

Strait. Ships sailed north in late March, hunted in the central Bering Sea from the middle of April until early June, when

bowheads moved toward the Beaufort Sea and the pack ice kept the whalers back until late July. From then until

October, ships pursued whales as they fed in the western Chukchi Sea and beyond.

The Polynesian, Honolulu, Hawaii, November 4, 1848.

Brewster, “She Was a Sister Sailor,” 379. Whaler’s early fears were based in violent incidents in the southern Pacific,

accounts of which were often highly sensationalized in the Hawaiian and New Bedford newspapers.

100

Brewster, “She Was a Sister Sailor,” 382.

101

“Letters About the Arctic No. VIII, At Sea Dec. 15 1852,” Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants Transcript, New

Bedford MA, June 28 1853.

102

No author, “Cruise of the British Sloop-of-War Trincomalee,” The Polynesian, Honolulu, Hawaii, October 14, 1854.

Norton of the Citizen found his rescuers to be “in their social habits, intellectual ignorance, and

moral darkness…among the most degraded of the human race.”

103

The feeling may well have been

mutual, especially in regards to intelligence. The whaling in 1849 and 1850 was so good that whalers

mostly ignored opportunities to trade with native peoples, but frequently gave away small

manufactured goods – behavior that must have seemed ludicrous to Chukchi, Yupik and Inuit

already familiar with European’s desires for fur and walrus ivory.

WHAT MUST ALSO have seemed strange, if intriguing, to the indigenous whalers were the

Yankee vessels themselves. Whaling ships were, after a century of practical adaptation, essentially

floating disassembly lines, designed from the hull up to turn whole beast into barreled commodity.

Whaler’s jobs were literally reductive – taking whale, making it dollars, through a few smooth

conversions of flesh to oil to currency. It was in reduction that value was applied. But getting to the

value required an understanding of whales that was highly detailed, practical, and gleaned from an

almost unbearable intimacy with their prey. Alongside the records of latitude, longitude, and

weather, ships’ logkeepers drew sketches of whale backs and spouts and described behavior and

anatomy. It was not knowledge based on dissecting whales into genius and species, or on the

reverential taxonomy of the Inupiat and Yupik, but instead a fiscal anatomy, a field guide to the

commercial cetacean that originated in whalers’ need to find fat whales, deal death, peel a cetacean

of its blubber, decapitate it and hack the baleen from the jaws.

Killing whales required finding them. In shifts managed with the precision of a factory floor,

whale ships kept watch constantly, the sailors on the mast instructed to “sing out for every thing

[sic] that you see,” including not just “There She Blows” at the sight of a whale’s breath but other

marks of behavior: “There goes Flukes,” “There She Blackskins” and “There She Breaches.”

104

Species of whale were identified by the shape of their backs and heads, and angles of their spouts,

from the arced spray of a right whale to the v-shaped exhalations of bowheads.

105

Sailors learned to

look not just for the sign of whales themselves, but for the ocean conditions that attracted them.

“We saw plenty of whales and the water was of a dark reddish cast caused by immense quantities of

full grown shrimp,” the Saratoga log noted, while Mary Brewster hoped during a lull in whaling that

the water would be “a little more greazy [sic],” the term whalers used to describe the appearance of

krill schooling near the surface.

106

Some sailors claimed they could smell whales on the breeze.

107

Any deck hand with experience knew what a whale could see and hear, and how to guide the small

killing boats into range unnoticed.

The labor of killing a whale in the open sea was intimate, gory, and not always successful:

harpoons “pointed,” or slipped free, and left the whale, as the Saratoga logged, to go “off spouting

good blood.”

108

If a whale did not bleed out, it had to be killed at range close enough to “fire a

103

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 136.

104

Davoll, The Captain’s Specific Orders, 8.

105

D. Graham Burnett concludes that whalers developed “a veritable natural history of the ocean” based on their

observations of surfacing sea life, knowledge that should not be dismissed as superficial or secondary to that of the era’s

naturalists even as it was based on the literal surfacing of the animals. Trying Leviathan, 125.

106

NBWM, Logbook of the Saratoga (Ship), KWM 181, p. 124; Brewster, “She Was a Sister Sailor,” 388.

107

Burns, A Year With a Whaler, 60.

108

NBWM, Logbook of the Saratoga (Ship), KWM 181, p. 87.

bomblance into the heart.”

109

Just as whalers knew, roughly, what their quarry saw and heard, they

also observed that the “weapons entering the whale’s back” caused “great pain and agony.”

110

But

the danger of being roped to twenty or fifty or seventy tons of gored meat and pained animal mind

tempered most sentimentality. Orson Shattuck wrote that “my life is perilled [sic] every time that we

are fast to a whale it requires great skill and judgment to kill one of those remorseless creatures even

the most skilled are sometimes killed.”

111

Whales dove, or fled with the boat dragging behind. The

Francis log noted one hunt starting at seven in the morning, but the whale “ran with [the starboard

boat] so fast that the other boats could not catch and them did not get him killed until 6.P.M. and

they were then out of sight of the ship 14 to 15 miles to windward.”

112

Or whales attacked. “I have

had my oar knocked out of my hand by a whale,” wrote James Munger to his family, “and the boat

cracked and set to leaking, but I escaped.”

113

Not all whalers had such luck: Cephas Thomas, log-

keeper of the Roman II, died when “the Blow of the whale’s flukes hit [his boat] edge ways which

killed him instantly, the whale struck him the second time while in the water which sunk him.”

114

Knowing where and how to sink a lance was a critical piece of applied anatomy, and one whalemen

clearly learned; it was far more often whale than human which died in spouts of thick blood.

Once dead, the whale was towed back to ship, winched free of the water, and “cut in” by the

crew, who peeled away strips blubber, sometimes as thick as eighteen inches, with sharp, long-

handled spades while balancing above the slippery body. Eventually, the whale’s baleen –sometimes

a thousand or more pounds from each jaw – was chopped into individual slats, scraped clean of

gummy flesh, and polished with water and sand to rub out any profit-ruining fishy smell. “The

windlass squealed as the tackle raised the hook, the ship heeled over several degrees as the strain on

the tackle increased, and the blubber peeled off the carcass like so much birchbark,” West recalled,

“until all the blubber was stripped from the carcass and it was set adrift to make a feast for the

petrels, albatross and sharks.”

115

What lay beneath the fat, the arrangement of bones and organs and

muscle, was of little concern. Without a market for whale meat in North America, most of the

animal’s carcass was simply a byproduct of acquiring oil and baleen.

109

David Wilkinson, Whaling in Many Seas, and Cast Adrift in Siberia: with a Description of the Manners, Customs and Heathen

Ceremonies of Various (Tchuktches) Tribes of North-Eastern Siberia (London: Henry J. Drane, 1906), 113.

110

Wilkinson, Whaling in Many Seas, 113. Sentiments about pain, and animal pain especially, were changing considerably

during the period under consideration here. See Harriet Ritvo, The Animal Estate: The English and Other Creatures in

Victorian England (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1987); James C. Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals,

Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); Anita Guerrini, Experimenting

with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Lorraine Daston

and Gregg Mitman eds., Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism (New York: Columbia University

Press, 2004).

111

NBWM, Logbook of the Frances, ODHS 994, p. 97

112

NBWM, Logbook of the Frances, ODHS 994, p. 99

113

James F. Munger, Two years in the Pacific and Arctic Oceans and China; being a journal of every day life on board ship, interesting

information in regard to the inhabitants of different countries, and the exciting events peculiar to a whaling voyage (Fairfield, WA: Ye

Galleon Press, 1967), 66. This volume includes Munger’s journal and letters to his family, from 1851-1852 voyage.

114

NBWM, Logbook of the Roman 2nd (Ship), KWM 176, p. 170. The captain wrote the entry on Thomas’s death,

writing that he lost a “man that I looked upon as my own brother,” causing him to muse that “the motto of the

whaleman must be Perseverance yes Persevere he must.”

115

West, Captain’s Papers, 13.

With the cutting-in done, the ship’s blubber room was often waist-deep in piles of fat, with

the men dicing it into pieces small enough to fit the bubbling iron pots of the tryworks, a brick oven

set into the ship’s deck. Whalers developed a rich argot to describe whale fat: there was “dry skin,”

or blubber that small amounts of poor-quality; some had reddish-tinted or yellow oil rather than the

desired clear white.

116

Young “green” whales were very fat, but their fresh blubber was hard to

process, and they were left “a day or two in the blubber room to ripen,” while whales that were not

butchered immediately or found already dead were plenty ripe, making for “nasty and stinking

work” that yielded “black” oil.

117

Whatever the quality, blubber had to be rendered. West recalled

feeing the fires day and night with fat scraps, the trypots always in danger of spilling their steaming,

flammable contents, “and a thick oil smudge hung over the deck which was awash in with blood and

gurry.”

118

Boiling off the water and straining out bits of skin, necessary to keep oil from going

rancid, could take two or three days. Sometimes the crew snacked on bits of deep-fried skin, which

had “a rather agreeable taste, although it was much like eating pickled rubber.”

119

And, as whales

were sometimes food, they were also sometimes light; at night, ships were lit with burning scraps of

fatty flesh. No surface, human or otherwise, escaped contact. Even the nose was under assault, as

the burning fat and fouling blubber produced “quite an offensive odor,” as one observer wrote, “but

I can bear it all first rate when I consider that it is filling our ship all the time and by and by it will all

be over and we will go home.”

120

Home, and going there with money, was the common incentive, and whales were the way to

it. “When I pull,” Captain Davoll told his crews, “I shall expect you to pull with me, not against, me,

and when we all pull together with a hearty good will there is easy times for all and bountiful harvest

in store for our mingled exertions.”

121

From the captain down through the specialized layers of

mates, blacksmiths, and stewards to the greenest deckhand, a bountiful harvest meant dead whales,

and dead whales became payment for months or years at sea. Over the course of a voyage, each

sailor, mate, and captain earned a percentage of the cargo’s value, or a “lay,” paid upon the ship’s

return to its origin. Captains received up to one eighth of the net profit, while artisans and boat-

steerers received from an eighth to a hundredth. Cooks, experienced sailors, and other skilled crew

might get a lay as large as a hundredth, while inexperienced seamen received as little as a two-

hundredth share in the sale of their catch.

122

The system put sailors at the mercy not just of weather

and whales, but of the temperamental market. However, regardless of rank and rank dislike of the

work, each hand on the ship knew their particular lay, giving them, according to a government

report on the whaling industry from the 1860s, “urgent, personal considerations to secure both for

116

Scammon, The Marine Mammals, 42, 54; Charles H. Stevenson, “Fish Oils, Fats and Waxes,” U.S. Commission Report

of 1902, U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1903), 177- 279, 189.

117

NBWM, Logbook of the Saratoga, KWM 180, p. 225; Scammon, The Marine Mammals, 294.

118

West, Captain’s Papers, 14. Gurry was the mix of blood and oil that coated the deck during butchering.

119

Burns, A Year with a Whaler, 147.

120

Harold Williams, ed. One Whaling Family (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1964), 196. For a detailed account of whale

hunting and butchery, see Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 62-92.

121

Davoll, The Captain’s Specific Orders, 12.

122

Hohman, The American Whaleman, 12. For a detailed description of the duties of the crew, see Creighton, Rites &

Passages, p. 28-30.

themselves and employers the greatest quantity of oil.”

123

For whalers, unlike their boosters in

Congress, the need for commerce to expand was not a nationalist abstraction. A voyage, even with

stops to replenish water, food, and crew, could only last so long, with only so many opportunities to

hunt. Going to the whales, however far afield, was a practical necessity in a world of finite chance.

It was not just the chance to pursue whales that was finite. The technology of deep water

whaling ships, able to kill and render oil at sea, had enabled the hunt to fan out across the Atlantic

and Pacific. And the voyages kept growing longer, so whalers knew, and acutely, when whales were

absent. At the very least, it was clear that their quarry was growing “more easily frightened; they

change their grounds or haunts oftener.”

124

Some attributed this to cetacean intelligence; right

whales, for example, offered “an utter impossibility” to the whaler, since “they hear a boat almost as

soon as it strikes the water.”

125

The sinking of the ship Essex by an enraged sperm whale in 1821

gave that species the reputation of particular and viscous intelligence.

126

Based on such observations,

many whalers concluded that the problem was not a question of finding whales per se, but of

finding animals still tame enough to hunt. The sheer size of the oceans sailed by whalers, so much of

them unexplored, lent credence to the idea that more whales were just a few more months away, or

hiding “in countless numbers…in the ice or in very rough weather.”

127

But by the 1840s some

observers began theorizing that whales themselves were finite, not just harried and canny. Writing in

a Honolulu newspaper in 1845, Captain M.E. Bowles found the idea that whales were being driven

to new grounds “preposterous in the extreme,” since human hunting doomed “the poor whale…to

utter extermination, or at least, so near to it that too few will remain to tempt the cupidity of

man.”

128

Bowles was not, apparently, voicing the majority opinion when he wrote. Certainly the

calculus of the hunt did not change. The whaler’s taxonomic and behavioral lexicon – detailed as it

was – did not conceptualize whales as organisms that could be husbanded toward future yield.

Whalers saw that their prey had few offspring, and were versed enough in basic biology to know that

if too many “mere calves,” were killed a region would be “rendered useless as a cruising ground.”

129

Yet the capacity of whales to reproduce seems mostly to have been used to improve the hunter’s

chances in the immediate present. Killing young whales often attracted adults, and while such

destruction might be “extremely painful” to watch, in the words of one 1820s observer, “the value

of the prize, the joy of the capture, cannot be sacrificed to feelings of compassion.”

130

If sentiment

123

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 271-272.

124

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 268

125

Saratoga KWM 180 p. 11.

126

There are many accounts of the Essex, including the popular history by Nathaniel Philbrick, In the Heart of the Sea: The

Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex (New York: Viking 2000) and a printed volume of survivor’s narratives, Owen Chase,

Thomas Chappel and George Pollard, Narratives of the Wreck of the Whale-Ship Essex: A Narrative Account (New York,

Dover 1989). There is also, of course, Moby Dick.

127

The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Honolulu, December 15, 1859

128

M.E. Bowles, “Some Account of the Whale-Fishery of the N. West Coast and Kamschatka,” Polynesian, Honolulu,

October 4, 1845.

129

The Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Honolulu, December 15, 1859

130

W.F. Scoresby, quoted in Dick Russell, Eye of the Whale: Epic Passage from Baja to Siberia (New York: Simon & Schuster,

2001), 602. Whalers did sometimes appear to feel sentimental about killing immature whales, and Betsy Morey, a wife of

the captain of the Phoenix, wrote upon seeing a calf, “Poor little creature they kill’d it for the sake of its Mother and they

was unfortunate enough to lose the Mother under the Ice. Oh! It does seem so Cruel,” in Joan Druett, Petticoat Whalers:

went against the grain of commerce, so too did agricultural pragmatism. Although the nouns

assigned to whales – bulls, cows, and calves – were probably familiar to most sailors as referents to

livestock, the marine ecology of whales was a challenge to prevailing theories of private property.

There was no way to own a whale, invest in its upkeep and harvest its progeny. Indeed, whalers

killed young cetaceans regularly. Charles M. Scammon described, with typical casualness, going after

“a Whale with a Calf. Lowered struck and killed the calf, set the cow sprouting blood.”

131

Sometimes

small animals were taken not for their pitiable quantities of oil, but “as practice for the boat crew,”

as investments in the immediate future of hunting rather than of the hunted.

132

A dead whale in the present, for the Yankee ships, was, for different reasons, as critical as a

dead whale for the Inupiat and Yupik. Wildness rendered cetaceans property only when they became

tradable commodities, and it is in this form that whales most often entered the records of their

hunters, becoming tallies of barrels and pounds of bone. Charles Scammon, who transformed his

whaling knowledge into a scientific reference, went so far as to rank bowheads, so that a first class

whale was brownish and yielded two hundred barrels of oil, while third class of black-skinned

animals only gave seventy-five – a sentiment echoed in the vigorous recording of barrels taken in

ships’ logbooks.

133

More barrels equaled less time on ship; when the Francis’ log noted that “we are 9

months out have got nearly 800 bbls,” and another hundred cooking, it meant that safe harbor was

that much closer.

134

And more barrels meant, simply, more money. A whaler’s labor was the link

between distant human desires, mediated through a market they fed but did not control, and the

oceans they sailed. The knowledge gained from that labor was often fundamentally in service to

those distant sources of value.

135

For a sailor or captain a whale could only transform into a thing of

tangible value –a corset stay in a New York shop, a lamp burning away the dark, a dollar in the

pocket – once dead. Oil and bone transmuted into currency, and the agency which currency

represented on shore: every whale killed, flensed, rendered, and rolled barrel by barrel into the hold

brought the whalers thirty-one and one-half gallons closer to going home with the freedom of

money earned.

WHALING SHIPS AND their crews were refined agents of disassembly, measuring their days,

months, and years in the currency of energy harvested. They were not, however, the only thing

acting above and below the waters they sailed. “The Arctic,” one whaleman concluded, “is a cold,

miserable, foggy place,” where rugged seas and rocky coastlines made hunting even the tamest whale

difficult.

136

And the line between terrestrial and marine was mutable, shifting as ocean became solid

ice and solid ice was pushed by wind and currents, creating landscapes of hours or months before

Whaling Wives at Sea 1820-1920 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 2001), 58. See also Burnett, Trying Leviathan,

131-132.

131

BL, Charles Melville Scammon Papers, P-K 200, p. 99.

132

Burns, A Year With a Whaler, 70.

133

Scammon, The Marine Mammals, 58. Logbooks, whalers’ memoirs and the whaler’s newspaper, The Whalemen’s Shipping

List and Merchant’s Transcript all repeatedly and consistently refer to whales by the barrels and/ or pounds of baleen they

produced, descriptions that appear more often than any other.

134

NBWM, Logbook of the Frances, ODHS 994, p. 43

135

The idea of knowing through labor here and elsewhere in this chapter is drawn from Richard White, The Organic

Machine (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995).

136

“Letter from the Arctic by a Foremast Hand,” Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Honolulu, HI, October 28, 1858.

splitting and roaring in disassembly. “Early this morning the cry of land was heard which soon

provide to be ice,” Mary Brewster wrote, adding a few weeks later of an “anxious day, for at one

o’clock this morning the ice began to come upon us.”

137

The hulls of wooden ships were hardly a

match for grinding, shifting burgs, or the suddenly-solid slush ice that ensnared rudders, frustrating

attempts to hunt. “We all feel there is an open spot of water in the anadir sea [sic],” Willis Howes of

the Nimrod wrote after days of killing nothing, “and our object is to get to it having a moral certainty

that whale will be found there as they are known to be north of us.”

138

The whalers knew their prey was to the north. It is also probable that, by 1852, the

bowheads had learned that their hunters were to the south, and were adapting to the rigors of

pelagic hunting. In 1850, the whaling fleet killed over 2000 animals in the Strait – a banner year for

the industry, but not yet enough to significantly diminish the overall population.

139

Yet, a year later,

with more than 20,000 bowheads still alive, less than 900 were harvested.

140

“Much ice in,” one

captain reported in 1851, “and whales few and wild.”

141

Bowheads could identify whaleboats by

sight; as a log-keeper noted after a failed chase, the “Whale saw the boat and rolled away.”

142

The

danger signaled by the sounds of oars or vibrations in the water were “sufficient to throw [the

whales] into a panic.”

143

To stay out of harpoon range, sailors observed their prey swimming more

quickly, and evasively. Captain Pierce of the Magnolia noted that “after the arrival of the fleet [the

bowheads] became very shy and appeared to work to their way northward,” losing their pursuers in

the frozen sea.

144

Even late in the season, when ships could sail above the Strait, as the Hibernia

found the “whales going into the Ice” when they lowered boats.

145

If cornered, the animals dove

more quickly, or even swam backwards; if struck, “the bowhead whale rubs that part of its body – in

which the harpoons have been placed – against the ice.”

146

And whales that had been harpooned and

escaped were especially canny; one animal, recognizable for the steamboat-like whistle of his spout,

evaded whalers for years because, as Jim Allen recalled, he “always seemed to know when a boat was

close to him” and would dive out of range.

147

Other whales, as the Saratoga described, seemed to be

137

Brewster, She Was a Sister Sailor, 373, 378

138

NBWM, Logbook of the Nimrod (Ship), ODHS 946, p. 205

139

Bockstoce makes this argument, and notes that the whales killed in the first three or so seasons – the exceptionally

large animals killed off Kamchatka and up to the Strait, but not further north – might have comprised a sub-population

that never migrated into the shelter of the pack ice. See Whales, Ice, and Men, 101. The archival record to my mind

supports the idea that whale adaptation to their hunters was at least partly accountable for the decreased harvest.

140

Annual catch data taken from Douglas A. Woodby and Daniel B. Botkin, “Stock Sizes Prior to Commercial

Whaling,” in The Bowhead Whale, ed. John J. Burns et al. (Lawrence, KS: Special Publication Number 2, The Society for

Marine Mammology, 1993), 390-393.

141

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford MA, November 15, 1851

142

NBWM, Logbook of the William Baylies (Steam bark), ODHS 955, p. 81.

143

Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead, 126

144

Polynesian, Honolulu, Hawaii, October 22, 1859

145

GWBWL, Logbook of the Hibernia (Ship), Log 81, p. 55. The Hibernia records chasing bowheads again on the 16

and 17

of June without success, again on June 22

and lowered for three bowheads without success and again on June

29,

with similar patterns of evasion (p. 55, 57, 58, 60).

146

Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead, 94; Wilkinson, Whaling in Many Seas, 106.

147

Arthur James Allen, A Whaler and Trader in the Arctic: My Life with the Bowhead, 1895-1944 (Anchorage: Alaska

Northwest Publishing Company, 1978), 98.

taunting their hunters: “16 boats charging one poor bowhead, who gave them all the slip, and went

off shaking his tail at them as if to say ‘oh no you don’t.’”

148

The consequence, for a few years at least, was lament over “No Whales, No Whales,” and

after a harvest of less than 150 bowheads in 1854 the fleet essentially left the Strait until 1858.

149

When the ships returned, having hunted bare the Sea of Okhotsk and the waters off Kodiak Island,

the whales kept to the dangerous edge of the ice. To achieve even moderate success, the fleet had to

come into the Bering Sea earlier in the year and scour hard the treacherous verge of the pack until

later in the autumn. In the mid-1860s, after a few cold seasons kept the annual harvest at three

hundred whales or less, favorable ice conditions allowed ships to go further north and west into the

Chukchi Sea. The result, as the Whalemen’s Shipping List reported, was that the arctic “was perfectly

alive with whales. Hundreds of vessels could easily have been filled with them without perceptibly

diminishing their number.”

150

Crews were also more accustomed to the ice, and the fleet was

increasingly comprised of barks, vessels that could maneuver more adroitly through the floes,

outfitted with lighter sails and better winches.

151

Ships began experimenting with icing themselves

into the pack over winter, since whalers knew, from the Chukchi, Yupik and Inuit, that the ice

forced the ships out of northern seas too early in the fall to take full advantage of the bowhead

migration south.

152

DESPITE THE ADAPTATIONS of the Yankee fleet to whales and ice, by the beginning of its

third decade in the arctic commercial whaling faced two existential problems: enough whales, and

enough people to buy them. The first issue was increasingly pressing. In 1869, a Honolulu

newspaper reported that “Some of the oldest and most experienced whalemen predict that whaling

in the Arctic will not pay more than three or four seasons longer. They say that they never met with

an old-fashioned bowhead of earlier days, that used to stow down from 200 to 300 barrels, but that

the present average will not exceed 80 barrels apiece – young whales. Where are the big ones? The

answer is, killed off long ago.”

153

Charles Scammon, the whaler turned naturalist, wrote in his guide

to marine mammals that many whaling grounds “have long since been abandoned, as the animals

pursued have been literally exterminated by the harpoon and lance.”

154

Harvard-based marine

zoologist Alexander Agassiz, probably during one of his frequent visits to the Hawaiian Islands,

warned in the 1880s that whales would become extinct within fifty years because of excessive

148

NBWM, Logbook of the Saratoga (Ship), KWM 180, p. 192-193

149

PRIPL, Logbook of the Bowditch (Ship), Reel 82, p. 72. During the arctic whaling pause, most of the fleet whaled

aggressively in the Sea of Okhotsk off of Kamchatka.

150

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford MA, December 22, 1863.

151

Davis et al., In Pursuit of Leviathan, 270-271.

152

In 1859, two ships attempted to overwinter in Plover Bay, to extend their hunting in October and begin early in the

spring. This practice began with the Cleone and Wailua in 1859; they unprepared for the arctic winter, and between scurvy

and hunger were too weak to whale come spring. Three other ships overwintered on the Chukotka coast in this period:

the Coral at Plover Bay in 1861, and the Zoe at Plover Bay and the Kohola in St. Lawrence Bay in 1862. The practice was

not resumed again until overwintering at Point Barrow and Hershel Island became common toward the end of the

century.

153

Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Honolulu HI, November 6, 1869

154

Scammon, The Marine Mammals, 215.

hunting.

155

Not all whalers were keen on the explanation of overhunting. Harston Bodfish

contended into the twentieth century that there was no “hint of extermination” among the

bowheads, and success depended only on the hunters’ skill.

156

A 1865 Congressional report on

fisheries contended that whales “having been hotly pursued by nearly six hundred whalers during

each of the fifteen years preceding 1860, had become, and still continue to be, wild, restless, and

suspicious; large numbers of them seeking a refuge in the Polar basin,” but would return if hunters

were less persistent.

157

On the ships, however, the state of the bowhead population was a fact lived

in the daily monotony of looking for animals that were no longer there, filling logbooks with entries

lamenting their absence.

158

However, many whalers and investors in the industry saw their own livelihoods at

considerably greater risk than the creatures they hunted. In 1860, Captain Willis Howes, in season of

fogs and few whales, spent an evening with Captain Low of the Cynthia “taking about Pumping up

Coal oil at the rate of 90 bbls per Day in fact Coal and its offspring oil was the all absorbing exciting

topic of the day and was likely to become one of the main Pillars in each Political Platform of the

various presidential nominees.”

159

Whalers had been watching alternative illuminates for years,

deriding the properties of camphene and refined pork tallow. But kerosene, refined from coal and

the petroleum deposits of the mid-Atlantic made accessible by Standard Oil, provided a bright,

stable flame without odor. It was also far less expensive than whale products, and kept getting

cheaper as the cost of transport and manufacture decreased. By 1871, a gallon of kerosene in New

York City cost twenty-five cents, a third to a quarter the price of whale oil.

160

For some observers,

particularly those living on newly gas-lit New Bedford streets rather than in ship’s quarters, having a

ready substitute for whale fat confirmed their faith in the progressive capacity of the market: for

every lack nature generated, technical ingenuity and the logic of commerce supplied a solution. As

the New Bedford boosters Pease and Hough wrote, with the “inevitable decline of the whale-

fishery… Fresh fields were sought for investment, and the capital for mills, factories, and foundries

was at once forthcoming,” a clear “manifestation of…enterprise and progress.”

161

Petroleum

allowed for growth, counteracting the “increase in population,” that would have “caused an increase

in consumption beyond the power of the [whale] fishery to supply,” with “a source of

155

Pacific Commercial Advertiser, Honolulu HI, January 31, 1902. Agassiz was a frequent visitor to Hawaii, and must have

spoken to the fate of cetaceans at one of his many public lectures in the mid-1880s, since his warning is reported at later

dates. Alexander’s father, Louis, also a renowned glaciologist and opponent of Charles Darwin, was an acquaintance of

Charles Scammon’s. See also, Barbara Charton, The Facts on File Dictionary of Marine Science (New York, NY: Infobase,

2008), 418.

156

Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead, 190.

157

“The Products of the Sea, showing the markets, their capacity, and sources of supply, including the principal national

fisheries and their produce, the home-consumption and balance of trade of forty-eight countries in 1865, “On the

Expediency of Authoring an Exploring Expedition, by Vessels of the Navy, to the Pacific Ocean and South Seas,” S.

Mis. Doc No. 33, 42

Cong. 2

Sess. (1872), 33.

158

For examples, see NBWM, Logbook of the Nimrod (Ship), ODHS 946, p. 104; GWBWL, Logbook of the Hibernia

(Ship), Log 81, p. 58, 60; NBWM, Logbook of the Lydia (Bark), KWM 132, p. 86, 96, 98.

159

NBWM, Logbook of the Nimrod (Ship), ODHS 946, p. 230-231

160

For a discussion of coal and petroleum refining for kerosene, see Christopher Jones, Routes of Power: Energy in Modern

America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014), 109-115.

161

Pease and Hough, New Bedford Massachusetts, 25-26.

illumination…at once plentiful, cheap, and good.”

162

The shift from whale oil to fossil fuel made

whales themselves seem fundamentally interchangeable with other abstracted forms of energy and

capital. It also made whales worth half as much money in the 1870s as a few decades before.

163

Not

all whalemen were so sanguine; the Whalemen’s Shipping List lamented in 1861 that petroleum had “a

most ruinous effect” on New Bedford’s primary industry, but “the whales themselves will

undoubtedly be grateful for the discovery of oil which is fast superceding [sic] that hitherto supplied

by themselves.”

164

The gratitude of the bowheads would have to wait. While petroleum products replaced

much of the demand for whale oil as an illuminant, it did not do so completely; enough of a market

remained that a refinery opened in San Francisco in 1883, taking advantage of a harbor that could fit

ships for the Arctic, an industrializing city still without the East Coast’s access to petroleum, and the

trans-continental railroad that could ship cargo East.

165

The cargo was, increasingly, whalebone.

“The inventive genius in vain has strived to supply and article which will fill the place of

whalebone,” one account described, “but none will answer the purpose.”

166

And the purpose was,

increasingly, corsets. The industrial revolution, having liberated clothing from hand spindles and

looms, made fashionable dressing a phenomenon of the masses. In post-bellum America and into

Europe, corseted waists for women, like smooth hands and pale skin, were marks bourgeois

propriety. Although cheap corsets could be made from metal and cord, strips of baleen provided the

best “elegance of fit, style and shape,” according to one advertisement, an opinion apparently shared

by the growing swath of middle-class women able to afford whalebone.

167

The result was a surge in

baleen’s price: the average bowhead was worth nearly $5000 in the late 1870s and early 1880s.

Whales were no longer hunted primarily for their energy, but for the rough fringe that strained

calories from the ocean, now for its market value “by far the most important feature of many

whalers' cargoes.”

168

From the end of the Civil War until nearly the end of the century, the value of baleen was

high enough to arrest the total decline of the whaling fleet, bringing ten to twenty ships a year to the

arctic. Chasing scarce, wild whales drove the ships further north along the coast, and many paid for

their attempts: fog, ice, and rocky shores sank twenty-five vessels from 1849 to 1867, and a

disastrous fifty-seven in the 1870s, thirty-three of them in 1871, when the sudden arrival of pack ice

forced over 1200 sailors to abandon their ships.

169

Shipwrecks were expensive: the 1871 disaster

162

Starbuck, History of the American Whale Fishery, 109.

163

Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 205.

164

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchants Transcript, New Bedford MA, July 2 1861.

165

San Francisco and Hawaii competed over whaling traffic through the latter half of the 19

century, and San Francisco

didn’t fully win the favor of captains until the opening of the Arctic Oil Works refinery in in 1883. San Francisco had

cheaper labor than the Hawaiian Islands after the rise of sugar plantations, but California gold fever made dissertation

rates higher.

166

Pease and Hough, New Bedford Massachusetts, 32-35.

167

Classified ad, “Corsets and Skirts,” New York Daily News, New York NY, June 7 1856. For a delightful history of

corsets and their relationship to social norms, see Valerie Steele, The Corset: A Cultural History, (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2001).

168

Pease and Hough, New Bedford Massachusetts, 36.

169

Miraculously, no lives were lost in the 1871 disaster. See Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 143-165. In addition to

shipwrecks, the American Civil War briefly spilled into the Bering Strait, when the Confederate warship Shenandoah, on a

mission to disrupt the North’s economy by razing whalers, burned or bonded twenty-four Yankee vessels in June of

alone cost $1.6 million. The Whalemen’s Shipping List commented in 1865 that despite good

whalebone prices “the enormous expense attending a whaling voyage in these times will require a

much larger catch to make any favorable compensation for the owners of these vessels.”

170

Captains

strove to fill their holds faster, tested the ice more, and employed new technologies in the hunt.

Some tried bazooka-like shoulder-loaded bombs, which proved unreliable in rough arctic seas. There

was a brief discussion of poisoning whales, abandoned since “nervous people at dinner parties are

beginning to look anxiously at their…fish, lest perchance it should have eaten any… part of the

poised whale."

171

More successfully, San Francisco investors built up a fleet of steam-powered ships,

which could power deeper into small open leads in the spring ice, catching bowheads as early as

April.

172

In the 1880s, the catch from steam ships was more than twice that of vessels under sail,

leading one captain to observe that technology had made whaling into a business like any other,

governed by investors and the principle of doing “whatever will make money or save money, that is

the thing.”

173

Whaling, however, was not an industry that obeyed the simple economic formula of

innovation creating efficiency and efficiency leading to more production. With every technological

adaptation to increase the speed, durability, lethality or range of the whaling kit, more whales died,

and profits became less certain. Efficiency could not produce more bowheads, although it could kill

more. The results, by the 1890s, made “Arctic whaling…as big a gamble as arctic gold mining. The

profits are big when whales are found, but when their fail to appear the sailor man is in a bad

way.”

174

From the perspective of the bowheads, however, even voyages that turned little human

profit were a gross cetacean loss. While the whales adapted their behaviors to the threats of

commercial hunting, the very largeness that made them attractive to humans also made them

existentially vulnerable; bowhead cows give birth only once every three or four years, and do not

reach maturity until they are over fifteen years old, a process too coded into their slow-growing

generations to alter in the few decades of commercial harvesting. The species could neither swim

nor breed itself to safety. By 1875, commercial whalers had killed over 13,000 Balaena mysticetus, more

than half of the animals historically present in Bering Strait waters.

175

EVASIVE, VANISHING WHALES were, inadvertently, the agents of human collision. As Yankee

ships wrecked and wintered, the native peoples of the Strait had to deal with whalers as more than

1865, unaware or unconcerned that the war had ended a few months prior. For a full account, see Bockstoce, Whales, Ice,

and Men, 103-128.

170

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford MA, January 10, 1865.

171

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford MA, December 31, 1872.

172

The definitive account of this period of whaling is John Bockstoce’s Steam Whaling in the Western Arctic (New Bedford,

MA: Old Dartmouth Historical Society, 1977).

173

“The Whaling Fleet: Interesting Statistics on the Trade,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco CA, November 10,

1889.

174

“Editorial,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco CA, August 15, 1899.

175

Assessing the total number of whales killed by commercial whalers is difficult, since the records are not complete and

ships struck and killed more whales than were eventually processed. Bockstoce estimates the kill total, including struck

whales, 13,471 in 1875, while Woodby and Botkin put the number at 13,335. This is about two-thirds of the total whale

harvest during the 19

century commercial period, which killed approximately 20,000 whales by 1914. See Bockstoce,

Whales, Ice, and Men, 346-347 and Woodby and Botkin, “Stock Sizes Prior to Commercial Whaling,” 390-391 and 402-404

for a discussion of estimating past bowhead population density.

occasional visitors. Marooned crews, like those on the Citizen, were increasingly common and

required care and feeding. Moreover, sailors were beginning to offset lean whaling years with trade.

Now, instead of giving away tobacco and metal goods, whaling ships were bartering for furs,

reindeer hide clothing, and walrus tusks, and, as the next chapter will discuss, actively killing walrus

to augment their take of ivory. Unlike whale blubber, which had to be refined and barreled to be

valuable to whaling crews, baleen could be bought from indigenous hunters as well. The reversal of

protocol, from the easy gifts of early voyages to hard barter and competitive hunting, must have

seemed glaringly inconsistent to indigenous traders.

Perhaps more trying was the refusal of whaling ships, especially in the early years of trade, to

sell alcohol. In Chukotka, as Mary Brewster observed in 1849, the “demand is usually for rum,” a

taste probably acquired at the Ostrovnoe trade fair, held inland along the Kolyma river, where the

Russian American company observed in 1848 that the basis of the Chukchi trade “with the Siberian

merchants is strong drink.”

176

While whaling ships initially carried little to no liquor, Roys’ report “of

valuable furs that could easily be purchased,” tempted a few trading ships north from Hawaii, eager

to turn cheap fermented sugar into the hides of foxes, polar bears, and beavers traded from the

southerly interior.

177

For the Chukchi and Yupik, the whaler’s reticence to trade alcohol must have

seemed deliberately withholding, given the liberality of Hawaiian ships and the increasing availability

of alcohol along the Kolyma.

178

Whaling crews, at least initially, did restrict their trade in liquor. Coming from the context of

North America’s bloody Indian wars and sometimes their own experience in the southern Pacific,

worried about violence, and also unrest with liquor. When the Citizen wrecked, Norton commanded

his crew to “knock in the head of the rum keg,” an act of “self-preservation” since he assumed

native consumption would lead to fighting.

179

Norton’s fears were not unfounded. A dispute on the

ship Armata “ended in the death of eight natives and one English sailor,” Asa Tobey reported in

1852, and “Rum was the cause of the trouble.”

180

But as the business of killing whales became

progressively tenuous, more ships were willing to trade anything, and sometimes by any means.

Captain Brummerhoff, earned a reputation for “giving poor rum mixed with pepper, etc.” that

produced “a strong hatred naturally…among the natives.”

181

Some indigenous traders retaliated by

trading fox tails sewn onto rabbit pelts, or weighting their walrus tusks with rock to get a better

price. Other frictions must have emerged in the meeting between indigenous women and sailors,

many of whom seemed to agree that the “girls were extremely pretty, with glossy, coal-black hair,

176

Brewster, She Was a Sister Sailor, 392; Russian American Company, Otchet Rossiisko-Amerikanskoi Kompanii Glavnago

Pravleniia za odin god po 1 ianvaria 1848, (Saint Petersburg: Tip. Shtaba inspektora, 1848), 42.

177

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford MA, February 6, 1849.

178

Dorothy Jean Ray, “Early Maritime Trade with the Eskimo of Bering Strait and the Introduction of Firearms,” Arctic

Anthropology, Vol. 12 No. 1 (1975): 1-9.

179

Holmes, The Arctic Whalemen, 92.

180

“Letter About the Arctic,” Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford MA, July 4, 1853. The

Francis reported that the same incident killed two sailors and fifteen natives; NBWM, Logbook of the Frances, ODHS

994, p. 52. Tobey wrote that the rum in this case came from a trading vessel out of Hong Kong. Little is known about

many of these Pacific trading voyages. The best account can be found in John Bockstoce’s Furs and Frontiers.

181

Herbert L. Aldrich, Arctic Alaska and Siberia, or Eight Months with the Arctic Whalemen (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1889),

230-231. Brummerhoff was eventually killed by natives in revenge for his own role in a drowning.

bright eyes, red cheeks, lips like ripe cherries...”

182

In 1860, the second mate of the Cleone described

how his captain spent the summer with a native woman named “Pinanear,” who the next season

became the object of gawking, as the fleet tried “to get a grimce…[sic] to see if the Child had any

rezemblence to its Father [sic].”

183

Rules of sexual conduct along the Bering Strait were considerably

less rigid than those prevalent among the whalers, and included the exchange of wives to establish

kin ties.

184

Yet, prostitution was a new concept around the Strait, and became frequent, especially

where ships overwintered on the North American coastline, where women “could be induced to go

on board as the captains’ or officers’ woman during their stay in the winter quarters,” and the

women “went – young and old – the demand was high enough.”

185

Incidents of violence between

whalers European and indigenous were blamed, at least in the American press, on sailors “being

unduly familiar with the native women.”

186

Even when consensual and socially condoned, at least by the Yupik and Inupiat, relations

between indigenous women and European whalers left behind a creeping, quiet violence. On the

North American coast, whaler John Kelly reported that “the white people have introduced syphilis”

among the native population, “a blight that has almost swept some of the coast tribes out of

existence.”

187

On the Asian coast, syphilis arrived with Russian trade along the Kolyma, and was

known to the inland Chukchi by the 1860s, where carriers were regarded as tainted – knowledge that

might have contributed to some communities on the coast avoiding sexual contact with whalers.

188

Other villages were not so fortunate; a Russian doctor reported in the 1880s that “syphilis, expressed

in the most terrible forms,” was common near Anadyr.

189

A few decades later another report found

“among the Eskimos, as among the coastal Chukchi, considerable syphilis is spreading from the

Americans.”

190

Where it did spread, syphilis weakened the young, demented the old, and sickened

the newly born. Nor was it the only disease introduced into the Bering Strait: measles, scarlet fever,

and smallpox crested and broke through the indigenous communities along the Bering Strait from

the 1860s until the turn of the century. Outbreaks originated with Europeans, who carried greater

immunity, and spread at trading fairs and the feasts celebrating successful whale hunts, or in the

182

Burns, A Year with a Whaler, 151

183

Robert Strout, “Secatch of the performance,” GWBWL, Collection 210, Vol. 2, p. 109.

184

For a discussion of wife exchange in North America, see Ernest Burch Jr, Social Life in Northwest Alaska (Fairbanks,

University of Alaska Press, 2006), 114, and, Eskimo Kinsmen: Changing Family Relationships in Northwest Alaska (St. Paul:

West Publishing, 1975), 109. In Chukotka, see Igor Krupnik, Pust’ govoriat nashi stariki: rasskazy aziatskikh eskimosov-iupik,

(Moscow: Institut Naslediia, 2000), 361; and Peter Schweitzer, “Spouse-Exchange in North-Eastern Siberia: On Kinship

and Sexual Relations and Their Transformations, in A. Ginrich, S. Haas, and G. Paleszek, eds. Kinship, Social Change and

Evolution, Wiener Beitrage zur Ethnologie and Anthropologie, Vol. 5 (1989): 17-38.

185

Mikkleson, Conquering the Arctic Ice, 310.

186

“MASSACRED WHALERS: Another Report Regarding the Grampus,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 27, 1891.

Most of the information regarding sex between whalers and native women comes from highly sensationalized newspaper

accounts and, from the 1890s on, some disapproving commentary from missionaries.

187

John W. Kelly, Ethnographic Memoranda Concerning the Eskimos of Arctic Alaska and Siberia, Sheldon Jackson ed.

(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Bureau of Education, 1890), 21. The impact of syphilis in this period is difficult to extrapolate

from the textual data, but in highly infected communities the dementia of tertiary syphilis and the increase in mortality

for infants born to infected mothers was probably quite severe.

188

Waldemar Bogoras, The Chukchee, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 11 (New York, NY:

The American Museum of Natural History, 1904), 41; Kelly, “Ethnographic Memoranda,” 21.

189

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 127, L. 6.

190

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 1401, L. 68.

simple activities of daily life. The results, in the words of one whaler, were “ruined houses and

depopulated villages, a silent reproach to the white man, who came to the country bringing diseases

in his wake.”

191

Even for survivors, infectious diseases burn through bodies. Febrile metabolisms require

more calories. The difference is marginal, but when combined with weeks of frail, recovering

muscles, the epidemics that flared around the Bering Strait rapidly eroded the surplus of food in

afflicted communities. For the peoples of northwest Alaska and northeast Asia, outbreaks struck

seemingly just as this always-uncertain surplus reached an unimaginable ebb. “Twenty years ago

whales were plenty and easily caught,” one captain wrote, “but the whales have been destroyed and

driven north, so that now the natives seldom get a whale.”

192

As the next chapter explores, the

walrus were also hunted aggressively by the Yankee fleet; the caribou and reindeer populations, the

subject of chapter three, were also in decline. The calories accessible to humans had vanished from

the Strait, a great many of them in the 16,000 bowheads turned corset stays and lamp oil by 1885. In

its wake, this departed biomass left devastating famines, their etiology deeply bound with epidemic

disease. Villages weakened by hunger were more susceptible to infection, and communities stricken

by illness less able to deal with increasingly long, challenging hunts with uncertain outcomes. The

impact of starvation was uneven, like the ecology of the Strait, but far more generalized and

profound than the periodic food shortages always common in the region. On the Asian coast in

1880s, most of the inhabitants of Qiwaaq perished, and Saanlek’s residents “in their majority died of

starvation in the 1880s.”

193

In Alaska, the hungry years between 1881 and 1883 killed over half of

the people in Kivilina, and a similar number in Kotzebue.

194

Saint Lawrence Island, historically home

to fifteen hundred or so Yupik, lost possibly a thousand people in 1879; in their wake, the

ethnographer Edward William Nelson found residents “dead in their blankets,” and bodies

“everywhere in the village as well as scattered along in a line toward the graveyard for half a mile

inland.”

195

By 1890, the indigenous population of the Bering Strait coastline had fallen by over

half.

196

The many small nations, founded in part on the bodies of whales, collapsed in their absence.

Communities in both Asia and North America moved and merged.

197

Warfare between the small

nations slid into history as their borders dissolved. Ties of kinship, both genetic and social, went

from being a method of improving living standards and political strength to a matter of basic

191

Ejnar Mikkleson, Conquering the Arctic Ice (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 373.

192

“Shipmaster,” Friend, Honolulu, HI March 1, 1872. Concern about starvation in the arctic was voiced frequently in

the Hawaiian newspapers in these years.

193

Bogoras, The Chukchee, 29.

194

Burch Jr., The Inupiaq Nations, 48-49.

195

Nelson, “The Eskimo About Bering Strait,” 269.

196

Krupnik puts the population decline from 1800-1890 in Chukotka at around fifty percent, while the communities

studied by Burch went from about 5000 people to around 1000 in the same period. Krupnik’s Yupik Transitions, 36-37;

Burch, The Inupiaq Nations, 325.

197

It is not possible here to detail the community-level impacts of the successive famines in this period and how the

survivors recombined into new political entities. Fortunately, Igor Krupnik’s Yupik Transitions provides a granular,

ethnographically based account of this period in Chukotka and nearby islands. Ernest Burch Jr. does the same in The

Inupiaq Nations for a large portion of the North American coastline.

survival.

198

In the resulting social chaos, indigenous whalers and hunters were drawn into new

relationships with Yankee commerce.

In part this was due to the final grasping technological move of industrial whaling: some

crews began overwintering at Point Barrow and eventually Herschel Island in the 1890s, to take full

advantage of the bowhead spring migration. At Point Hope in 1887, a motley assortment of

Americans and Europeans founded a shore-whaling station, which attracted several hundred

displaced Inupiaq who earned at least part of a living by whaling for a wage. Further north, near

Point Barrow, Charles D. Brower took advantage of the Inupiat custom of removing recent

widowers from umiak crews by hiring the boatless men himself.

199

Other indigenous men joined

pelagic crews. “Shipped five Natives for the season,” the William Baylies log noted in 1887. Five years

later, the same ship reported paying a native crew from Indian Point with “the old bow boat with an

old sail and a set of oars,” a popular form of remuneration along the Strait.

200

What went unwritten, although must have been spoken among the Yupik, Inupiat and

Chukchi, was the incongruence of these two groups of whale-killers, converged physically in the

labor of cetacean death and yet with such historically different valuations for a carcass. The

vocabularies of hunting and the rituals of dismemberment must have been both foreign and familiar

to indigenous whalers. The value of a whale was altering, and perhaps altered the values that had

emerged from whaling as a practice. Bowheads were rare, each season seeming less willing to arrive

and die. Native whalers worked alongside whalers from around the world, men who understood

whales to finite and meaningful only in the limited terms of cost per pound of bone. The reward for

killing a whale was no longer in the calories of the body itself, but measured in the abstraction of

barter: so many boxes of tea for a rack of baleen, a few more pounds of flour for a day of labor.

That the Yankee whalers saw this as natural is unsurprising; whales functioned in these transactions

as the same basic commodities they had always been for a sailor, and the native people employed to

kill them appeared to obey the labor theory of value. The ritual importance of whales was apparent

to some onlookers, but what crisis their absence caused among people who believed in the sentence

and deliberate sacrifice of whales remained invisible. Yet, whaling ceremonies, ongoing into the

present day, are evidence that the cosmology of cetacean mind did adapt to a market-run world. It

did not, however, prevent avid participation in that world, which out of necessity and attraction

began to employ, even if peripherally, most of the coastal residents of the Bering Strait.

What the whalers did see was the physical impact of their industry on the indigenous peoples

with whom they traded, slept, and labored. One captain, shipwrecked in Chukotka wrote, “I felt like

a guilty culprit while eating [the natives’] food with them, that I have been taking break out of their

mouths, yet although they know the whaleships are doing this, they still were ready to share.”

201

Yet

for some observers, the end of the whales and the end of the Eskimos were matched halves of a

198

Burch Jr., Eskimo Kinsmen, 203.

199

For a discussion of shore whaling and its impact on Inupiat culture, see Mark S. Cassell, “Inupiat Labor and

Commercial Shore Whaling in Northern Alaska,” The Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Vol. 91 No. 3 (Summer, 2000): 115-123.

200

PRIPL, Nicholson Whaling Log Collection No. 674, Logbook of the William Baylies, 1887, p. 48; Logbook of the

William Baylies, 1892, p. 362. John A. Cook noted at least thirty whaleboats being used on the Chukchi coast by 1900.

John A. Cook, Thar She Blows (Boston: Chapman and Grimes, 1937), 147.

201

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford, MA, April 8 1872.

process that, if not exactly inevitable was certainly irreversible. On a survey of the Alaskan coast,

P.H. Ray wrote that the “American whaling fleet during the last twenty years has nearly exterminated

that valuable animal [the bowhead]. That they are decreasing in numbers is well known among the

whalemen, and the fact that …there were twenty-four whales taken by the natives [in 1852-54],

while only two were taken during our stay [1881-83], one of them a calf, goes to prove that they will

soon be classed among the extinct mammals, and with them will soon pass away many of the people

inhabiting this shore.”

202

Ray was not alone. Even whalers who were sympathetic, and there were

many, saw change as inevitable among “human anachronisms left over from the stone age.”

203

THE COUNTRIES ABOVE

The Bering Strait during the last decades of the nineteenth century was a massive arena of

adaptation: humans to humans, whales to humans, humans to ice, diseases to humans, humans to

disease, humans to whales, and humans to a lack of whales. There was alcohol moving from North

American to Asia and back. People, anachronisms or no, were dying. Disease replaced warfare.

Technology replaced abundance. Nations reformed into communities of survivors. A few whalers

moved permanently north, and more than a few Eskimo took whaling ships south. Baleen whales,

once the largest mass of biological life in the North Pacific, peered into the abyss of extinction. The

Bering Strait, long linked by trade and language, became an amalgamated unit of commerce and

harvest. Yankee whaling ships had dragged together two incongruous but malleable worlds, one run

by market logic and industrial appetites mashing into the Bering Strait’s social and ecological

diversity, and then sailed through the resulting tumult, trading flour and bullets, killing more

bowheads. It was a revolution in everything but name, undertaken by the most unlikely of

revolutionaries. Whalers were unwitting ideologues, hardy planters of imperial flags or missionaries

bent on eternal or even earthly salvation; their motives conformed mostly to the short horizon of a

successful voyage. Utopia was a full cargo.

Revolutions change who has power, and who sets value. In the wake of the Yankee fleet, the

United States and the Russian Empire were worried about both. With a reputation for drunkenness,

womanizing, and lawlessness, even the consummate booster of whalers as imperial agents Jeremiah

Reynolds thought sailors behaved with “wanton cruelty” despite “claiming the application of

civilized,” and called for the U.S. Navy to police their behavior.

204

That Yankee ships were in fact

miniature Babels, their crews nationally and racially diverse, some of them known to hunt whales on

the Sabbath, did not help. Worse, by the late nineteenth century, whalers had lost their fears of

selling alcohol and were even trading in firearms. Whalers were vanguards of American power, but

their perhaps excessive dedication to commerce –selling anything, hunting anytime, and buying the

favors of local women – made their values suspect.

202

Patrick Henry Ray, “Ethnographic Sketch of the Natives of Point Barrow,” Report of the International Polar Expedition to

Point Barrow, Alaska, in Response to the Resolution of the House of Representatives of December 11, 1884. Part III (Washington

D.C.: Government Printing Office 1885), 37-60, xcix

203

Burns, A Year with a Whaler, 174.

204

Jeremiah N. Reynolds, Address, on the Subject of a Surveying and Exploring Expedition (New York: Harper and Brothers,

1836), 67.

It was a judgment the Russian Empire agreed with, particularly since in the north whalers

were, in a sovereign sense, a Russian problem first. When Roys arrived in the Bering Strait, the sale

of Alaska to the United States was almost two decades away, and the Empire, at least in the terms

recognized among other Empires, had control of the North American coastline. In practice, Russian

activities north of Kamchatka in Asia and the Yukon in Alaska were limited on land. At sea, the

tsar’s attempt to drive out American whalers by starting a Russian franchise in the early 1850s

collapsed in a few years, while a small but more successful venture in the 1860s remained well south

of the Bering Strait.

205

The Russian American Company, witness to the fleet’s expansion from their

posts at St. Michaels and Petropavlovsk, demanded that whaling vessels leave their waters, but with

limited firepower requested further instruction from St. Petersburg.

206

By the 1860s, however,

sending the Imperial Navy after American vessels as they sailed quite literally over Russian

sovereignty each season was deemed too expensive, especially given that after seventy years, the

Russian American Company was failing both as a source of Russian subjects or of Russian profit.

The eventual response from St. Petersburg was the sale of Alaska. In the calculus of what to do with

the ailing Russian American Company, foreigners killing whales made Russia look weak, and

contributed to the tsar’s desire to make the Empire’s North American annex a North American

problem.

207

In 1867, however, the problem posed by whalers was really just beginning, for both the

United States and Russia, as the intensification of the industry turfed more sailors to shore, more

trade, and fewer whales. In Asia, the Yankee ships had grown used to landing and trading with the

Chukchi and Yupik without any interference from Russian authorities. The results tested the tsar’s

sovereign claims; although the Chukchi had been essentially independent from the Empire for nearly

a century, it was still Russia, not the United States, who should rightfully function as patron and

trading partner. In 1879, Constantin Pobedonostsev wrote to the future Tsar Alexander III, asking

that he order the Russian Navy to patrol northeastern Siberia. "If we do not send Russian vessels to

those shores,” the councilor wrote, “the non-Russian natives of that coast will altogether forget that

they belong to Russia. Already so many Chukchi speak English.”

208

In 1889, a post was opened at

Anadyr, with the hope of controlling the foreign influence. The vast and rugged coastline, and a lack

of funds so chronic that the post could barely buy dogs, made this a difficult task. Constant

intercourse with Americans undermined the Orthodox Church’s conversion efforts and left the

natives with “a poor consciousness of their Russian citizenship,” while the most valuable ivory and

hides fell “into the hands of those Americans passing by boat, or through their counterparts from

the Chukchi.”

209

The same year, the regional governor of the Far East noted with alarm that “the

Americans especially have crept into the Chukchi’s trust… mostly with their spirits and guns,

205

P. Tikhmenev, The Historical Review of Formation of the Russian-American Company and its Activity up to the Present Time, Part

II, trans. Dimitri Krenov (Seattle, WA: Work Projects Administration, [1863] 1940), 162.

206

For an overview of the Russian, British, and American diplomatic tussles over fishing and furring rights in the

broader North Pacific, see Robert Lloyd Webb, On the Northwest: Commercial Whaling in the Pacific Northwest 1790-

1967 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1980), 86-102.

207

Howard I. Kushner, “‘Hellships:’ Yankee Whaling along the Coasts of Russian-America, 1853-1852,” New England

Quarterly, Vol. 45, No. 1 (March, 1972): 81-95.

208

K.P. Pobedenotsev, Pis’ma Pobedonostseva k Aleksandru III, tom I, (Moscow: Novaia Moskva, 1925), 84.

209

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 20; RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 313, L. 3.

robbing and severely corrupting the Chukchi. In the hands of these foreigners, the Chukchi become

hostile to Russia and thus strengthen the foreign influence.”

210

Whalers syphoned away local power:

of influence over language, possibly religion, and worst, the commercial potential of Chukotka.

For the United States, whalers were not foreigners, but they were still not the right kind of

citizens. In an 1880 report to Congress, G. Otis worried that “through the efforts of unscrupulous

and illicit traders,” the native population was buying guns, “must inevitably lead to serious troubles,

sooner or later… Indian wars have been provoked by similar causes…the whites would go under

unless aided by the military, and in the present state of the country there are no troops for the

defense of Alaska.”

211

Trade from whaling ships was not an enemy without, in the United States, but

armed a potential enemy within. The United States Revenue Cutter Service, established to patrol

Alaska’s waters in 1867, began to regulate the sale of repeating rifles a year later. With only one ship

usually operating north of the Pribilof Islands, the Cutter Service had enough impact on the sale in

guns and ammunition to drive prices upward, but not curtail the trade altogether. In the 1880s,

about $30,000 worth of “arms, ammunition, muslin, flour, at San Francisco prices” were traded in

Alaska for native-caught “furs and whalebones.”

212

The Cutter Service also sought to control the

alcohol trade, an unwelcome infringement from the perspective of the indigenous population, who

responded to news of prohibition with threats of exactly the sort of violence the U.S. government

feared.

213

The Cutter captains and the few missionaries present along the coast by the 1890s also

worried over their inability to sufficiently assist victims of famine. H.R. Thornton, a missionary

teacher at Cape Prince of Wales, noted that the whalers had nearly destroyed the native population’s

ability to survive along coast, causing him to ask “shall the natives be sacrificed for the gain of a few

extra dollars on the part of the whalers?” Even if the “quick witted, quite virtuous” Eskimo

managed to avoid outright starvation, Thornton argued that it was “useless to talk about civilizing

people who are kept so poor as to be compelled to live like savages.”

214

Calvin Leighton Cooper,

upon seeing the devastation on St. Lawrence Island in 1880, wrote that “A more horrible state of

affairs cannot well be imagined…and will continue until some active measures are taken by the

Government to remedy it.”

215

Although the response was perhaps as fast or total as Thornton or

Hooper would have preferred, the government seemed to agree that civilization marches on its

stomach; alleviating the threat of famine inspired the first federally overseen attempt to introduce a

capitalist mode of production on the right hand of the Bering Strait (see chapter three).

The concern over the biological condition of the state, and what it meant for local

communities, was shared by the Russian Empire. “These American ships engaged in whaling do not

210

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 1.

211

G. Otis, “Report of Special-Agent Otis upon the illicit traffic in rum and fire-arms” Executive Document of the Senate of

the United States 2

Sess 46

Cong. 1879-1889 Vol. 4 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1880), 46.

212

John W. Kelly and Ensign Roger Wells Jr., English-Eskimo and Eskimo-English Vocabularies (Washington D.C.:

Government Printing Office, 1890), 26.

213

Calvin Leighton Hooper, Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue Steamer Thomas Corwin in the Arctic Ocean 1881,

(Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884), 23

214

H.R. Thornton to Secretary of the Treasury, January 15 1892; NARA CA RG 26 M-641 Roll 2: Letters Received by

the Revenue Cutter Service January 8 1891 – December 12 1892.

215

C.L. Cooper to the Secretary of the Interior, 1880; NARA CA RG 26, M-641, Roll 1: Letters Received by the

Revenue Cutter Service August 11 1869-September 28 1910.

pay attention, of course, to where borders are drawn in the water, and take from the dead

whales…just baleen, giving the rest to the Chukchi. The whales on our shores are few.”

216

Starvation

was a real concern for the tsar’s local administrators, but their recourse – so far from a major routes

of supply – was often more descriptive than palliative. American schooners, wrote the Governor of

the Far East, “are uncontrolled in their harvest of marine animals in our waters, especially whaling,

ruthlessly destroying these sea creatures so that their numbers decrease with each passing year.”

217

Once able to let Chukotka essentially govern itself, whalers, and the lack of whales, had upended the

Empire’s lack of “significant interest” in the “internal affairs of the Chukchi,” now hosts to

worrisome economic activity and no longer simply “living and ruling by their ancestral customs.”

218

But the tsar was far away, his ships slow, and the need along the coast pressing. By 1903,

when the Governor of the Far East thought the only solution to the famines emerging along the

coast were “foreigners involved in trade, who supply the local population with necessary goods,”

even though they also brought alcohol “detrimental to the health and welfare of the natives.”

219

Bogoras also noted that flour traded from American whalers was “only means of keeping off

famine,” for the coastal peoples deprived of marine mammals.

220

Buying flour from American ships

might be necessary, but it was far from ideal for the Imperial government. “The high administration

of the region sees how skillfully foreigners exploit the rich fisheries of Anadyr,” the territorial

governor wrote, worried that the lack of animals and humans challenged “Russian prestige in the far

north.”

221

Foreign trade had replaced the energy sold out of the Pacific Ocean, and the Russian

Empire struggled to replace it with a lucrative, and sovereign, equivalent. It would take decades of

edicts and attempts, and a new revolution, for the state in Asia to supplant its international

dependence.

Starving populations, immoral commerce, unregulated and untaxed harvests, and the very

obvious lack of a state monopoly on violence, were the unintended byproducts of pelagic whaling.

Neither the United States nor the Russian Empire, however, made any serious attempt to curtail the

industry itself. A few hundred miles further south, both countries were actively policing the harvest

of fur seals in the same years, with the stated aim of creating an industry with long-term viability. Fur

seal breeding was roughly understood and ratios of males to females carefully protected by the early

twentieth century. The knowledge of bowheads and other whale species was perhaps too specific to

their killing to produce a similar program; whalers knew a great deal about their prey, but not

apparently enough to kill only bulls. More unfortunate for the whales was their inherently

international behavior, as organisms that never exist, at least alive, on any piece of national territory.

And whales, their economic importance to the world apparently nullified by the early twentieth

century, were assumed to be a finite and finally disposable resource. As their existence wound down,

however, the void they left in the Bering Strait – a void of palatable energy – undermined the basic

assumptions of what a state was politically, what it should do practically, and its value as an agent of

216

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 313, L. 13.

217

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 313, L. 69.

218

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 1.

219

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 313, L. 69.

220

Bogoras, The Chukchee, 62.

221

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 1.

moral standards and progress. The absence of whales made the absence of sovereignty glaring. What

pushed the United States northwest and the Russian Empire northeast, therefore, were the territorial

and commercial repercussions which created along the biological fault-lines whaling rent in the

indigenous populations about Bering Strait.

DESPITE THE BEST efforts of the United States’ small fleet of Revenue Service cutters and

the valiant attempts of Imperial Russia’s few agents along the Bering Strait, it was not their actions

that eventually diminished the role of whaling and whalers in the North Pacific. Neither state

brought the impulses of the industrial market to heel. Rather, commercial whaling ended in part

because finding what few whales remained was expensive and uncertain, and mostly because whales

were no longer necessary. The discovery of spring steel in 1907 rendered baleen obsolete, giving the

world a manufactured answer to the umbrella rib and corset stay. The ships that remained, as the

next chapter will discuss, stayed to trade for ivory and fur, and killed few of the 3000 or so

bowheads that remained by 1914. Human ingenuity and appetite for energy demanded whales in the

early nineteenth century, hunted them down until even their capacity to reproduce could not save

them, and then when bowheads became actually and acutely finite, invented an alternative.

Commercial whaling made the promises of capitalist development seem very real: for every lack

imposed by, say, the limits of a whale population, engineering eventually filled the gap with

petroleum and steel. While not comforting to whalers or to whales in the short term, the industry

became another footnote in the narrative of progress. In that narrative, bowheads avoided

extinction not because their worth was recognized. They survived because for the world outside the

Strait, they ceased to have value at all.

Before the value of a bowhead whale became neutral – before the market forgot them, for a

time at least – their kind bore the industrial revolution north. Whale energy was the blood meal of

cascading transformations, the properties of their corporeality acting as a gateway to the great

ideological projects the twentieth century. No doubt the United States and the Russian Empire –

and later the Soviet Union – would have made their way north eventually. But whales, their hunters,

and their absence, shaped how and when state came to the Bering Strait, and gave it an initial reason

for being. Commercial whaling was a revolution in three parts.

The first was technological and conceptual: the Yankee whalers brought with them new ways

of killing whales, and new reasons to do so. The Yupik, Inupiat and coastal Chukchi hunted whales

from small boats tied to the shoreline, in order to not die: the political, economic, and spiritual

values of aboriginal whaling all linked back to its central place in keeping people alive. The kit of a

nineteenth century whaling ship could kill whales anywhere, and did so for reasons quite abstracted

from crude survival. While both sorts of whalers knew their prey through the labor of hunting, the

product of this strenuous expertise was hardly equivalent. For an aboriginal whaler, a dead bowhead

meant human life and every accompanying cultural meaning. For pelagic hunters, a whale in essence

was a mobile commodity, one good harpoon strike away from transmutation into currency. In the

decades after 1848, when the first Yankee ship whaled off the Diomede Islands, the essential terms

of what a whale was were open to new interpretations.

The second aspect of the industrial turn in the North Pacific was economic and ideological,

or rather introduced an ideology commensurate with an industrializing economy. Yankee whalers

came to the Arctic to harvest products needed by industry and wanted by consumers just becoming

acquainted with the bounties of industrial production. They were in the arctic because they

participated in the exchange of commodities and labor for value. Many of them also believed that

this sort of exchange – wages for labor, money for commodities – was the proper order of social

life, and a progressive force. The many things whalers found the Yupik, Inupiat and Chukchi to lack,

from industriousness to cleanliness to a proper diet, could be solved with exposure to the market.

For commerce, as many whalers experienced on the rapidly industrializing eastern U.S. seaboard,

expanded the energy that people consumed – food, light, heat, transport – and allowed the purchase

of more abstract byproducts like good china and cotton cloth. Civilized people ate well in warm

houses, wearing fashionable clothes, so spreading commerce spread civilization, which made the

world better by allowing more people more access to commerce. The logic was circular, but the

concept teleological.

Finally, the arrival of commercial whaling was political and ecological. At the most local

level, contact with the industrial market shifted the geography of Yupik, Inupiat and Chukchi power,

as access to new networks of trade, wage labor, and intermarriage altered individual political futures.

Disease and alcohol shrunk and consolidated communities. Regional politics were overlaid with

imperial politics, as the United States and the Russian Empire saw their stakes in the North Pacific

undermined by the presence of market value untethered from a larger project of civilization.

Whalers brought commerce, but they were failing at progress, what with the famines and venereal

disease left in their wake. The unchecked harvest of cetacean energy, and trade with indigenous

peoples that came with, was a threat to Russian Imperial and United States sovereignty. The two

states, in response, tried to discipline the energy flowing from their frontiers – and the behavior of

frontiersmen – with legal regimes and enforced borders. Claiming the mantel of sovereignty and

human advancement, not to mention the basic need to control the disposition of resources, was

fundamentally challenged by the absented calories of whale’s bodies. The United States and Russia

needed their borderlands to be peopled, to not to starve and die. Without whales, however, starving

and dying was hard to avoid, and doing so required that the state find, or at least permit, the

organization of alternative calories along the coasts. In the twentieth century, these alternatives

would expand into elaborate economic development programs.

Formal governance was, therefore, a partial substitute for a radically altered ecology, one that

by 1900 offered residents of the Bering Strait – human and otherwise – a diminished spectrum of

energy options in an environment where that spectrum was never especially broad. The energy of

bowheads was simply removed, by the ton on ships, and with it the potential productivity that

bowheads bring into the ocean as they churn nutrients through the deep waters, and by feeding and

dying. Some sea-floor organisms, their world defined by the carcasses of fallen whales, probably

ceased to exist altogether.

222

Up through the web of photosynthetic life and the species that

consume it, the marine ecosystem of the Bering Strait was less able to use the sun’s energy. It

became less rich. In the decades of cetacean decline, other species moved to reclaim some of energy

222

Roman and McCarthy, “The Whale Pump,” doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0013255

once consumed and redistributed by the great whales, booming the populations some organisms and

depleting others in the see-sawing tensions of adaptation to a new, more unstable post-revolutionary

regime.

223

The revolutions of nineteenth century whaling were profound, but none of them precisely

complete. What finally killed the ancient bowhead that opened this chapter, over two hundred years

after his birth, was the human desire for sustenance –for a whale-fat meal so laden with cultural and

caloric value it sent Inupiat boats at the turn of the millennium onto choppy northern Alaskan

seas.

224

On the surface, nothing about this new hunt for an old whale matched the old hunts for

newborn whales: the boats had motors, the harpoons had explosives, the carcass was dragged home

to freezers and gas stoves.

225

The village had televisions, some of the hunters worked salaried day

jobs. No one would starve, exactly, if the whale lived, just as no one was paid if it died. Yet, in

Alaska as across the Strait, knowing the animal through the labor of killing it and the communion of

eating it had not ceased to have value. Nor did bowheads as a species cease to be. Their numbers are

growing.

223

McCarthy et al., “Whales as Marine Ecosystem Engineers,” 377–385

224

The technique used to date whales, based on chemicals in their eyes, gives an age range for this individual as between

177 and 245 years. For details on whale age data, see John Craighead George, et al. “Age and Growth Estimates of

Bowhead Whales (Balaena mysticetus) via Aspartic Acid Racemization,” Canadian Journal of Zoology, 77 (1999): 571-58, and

Amanda Leigh Haag, “Patented harpoon pins down whale age,” Nature Vol. 488 ( June 19 2007):

doi:10.1038/news070618-6

225

Oldness and newness are not seen as inherently good or bad in Inuit culture, since tradition is not seen as static but as

an endless series of adjustments to a changing, challenging environment. See B. Bodenhorn, “It's traditional to change:

A case study of strategic decision-making,” Cambridge Anthropology, Vol. 22 No. 1 (2001): 24–51.

CHAPTER TWO: THE SHORE

1870-1960

THE WAKING ICE

At the confluence of the Arctic and Pacific oceans, the waters separating North America and Asia

are narrow. Less than sixty miles lie between the headlands of the continents. Twenty thousand

years ago, during the last ice age, so much of the earth’s oceans were locked in glaciers that the

headlands were one land. Each year this history is partly rehearsed in ice. In autumn, the polar cap,

the landless solid mantle of the Arctic Ocean, creeps south. By winter, the ice creates a treacherous

bridge of burgs and slush crushed nearly solid between Alaska and Chukotka.

Ice seems constitutionally resistant to activity, its sluggish molecules both metaphorically and

physically opposed to change. Yet, because sea ice is formed when briny water meets cold, tides, and

wind, it is more structurally complex than freshwater ice. When the temperature drops to 28.6

degrees Fahrenheit, ice crystals begin to form along the ocean’s surface. Wind, and the push of rising

warmer waters rising, mixes the crystals into suspension. If the cold continues, the crystals intertwine

into a greasy film, then thicken into slush. Sometimes ocean swells ball the slush into pads of

crystals. Sometimes the highly elastic young ice rolls over the ocean’s surface like oil slick. Sheets of

ice slide and stick to each other on the waves, condensing into opaque sheets. All of this is the work

of a season. At the edge of the pack, four to six feet of yearling ice can form between October and

May. What survives melting over the following summer becomes bluish; frozen ocean that lives for

two summers becomes part of the pack ice.

226

In the deep pack, where nothing has melted for a

geological epoch, the ice holds a vertical history, the prism surfaces of old water marred by silt, rock,

ash, and bubbles of past atmospheres.

When Paul Tiulana was a child learning to hunt on King Island, an anvil of rock jutting into

the Bering Sea off the Alaska coast, he was taught the phrase “the ice never sleeps; the current never

sleeps” like a mantra.

227

The ice that Inupiat hunters like Tiulana walk is never smooth, and it is

never complete. The pack is cut with snaking dark rivers of exposed ocean and studded with bergs

driven over and under each other by the wind. There are places, even deep in the pack, where the

wind keeps polynyas free of ice through the winter. The landmarks of this seascape require

attention. The geography of the ice does not change in geological time: new forms are the work of a

moment.

Sea ice never sleeps because, as a solid thing caught between liquid and air, it is buffeted

constantly by the energies of wind and current. Its restlessness does important work on a planetary

scale. In forming, thawing, and enduring winds, sea ice contributes to the circulation of the world’s

226

For a complete description of the phases of sea ice formation and the physical properties of crystal structures, see

Hajo Eicken, “From the Microscopic, to the Macroscopic, to the Regional Scale: Growth, Microstructure and Properties

of Sea Ice,” in David N. Thomas and Gerhard S. Dieckmann eds., Sea Ice: An Introduction to its Physics, Chemistry, Biology and

Geology (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 2003), 22-81.

227

Vivian Senungetuk and Paul Tiulana, A Place for Winter: Paul Tiulana’s Story

(Anchorage, AK: Ciri Foundation, 1987),

15.

oceans, making them hospitable to biological life. The surface of the ice refracts sunlight back into

space at the poles and locks some of the solar energy absorbed by the ocean away from the

atmosphere, keeping the earth’s temperatures moderate.

228

While this makes solar energy scarce in

the far north, primary production from sunlight is not impossible. Sea ice is home to colonies of

efficient, hardy algae, which fix what solar gain filters through the upper ocean in their cells. The

undersides of bergs form miniature marine pastures where krill graze even in winter. The summer

melt releases these algae, and the fresh water that pours from diminishing ice troubles the salty

ocean, circulating the sediments from surface ice with the ancient, nutrient-heavy waters of the deep

sea. The resulting churn makes the Bering Straits one of the most productive marine regions in the

world. Massive phytoplankton blooms nourish a cascade of other organisms: miniscule crustaceans,

dozens of species of fish, flocks of sea birds, polar bears, whales from beluga to bowhead, and five

species of large semi-aquatic mammals.

229

These last are the animals that Paul Tiulana learned to hunt as a young man in the decades

between the world wars. The Bering Strait ice is home to three small seals – the spotted, ringed, and

ribbon – and to bearded seals, which can weigh as much as eight hundred pounds.

230

But a large

bearded seal might be less than a quarter the size of a full-grown male Odobenus rosmarus divergens, or

Pacific walrus: a ton and a half of wrinkled, whiskered, tusked bulk. Two hundred thousand or more

animals historically live across the Bering and Chukchi seas. Dozens to hundreds may share a single

ice floe, communicating through twitches of their whiskers and judging their place in the social

hierarchy by the size of their tusks. Walrus ride the southern edge of the pack ice each year, north

toward Wrangell Island in summer and over fifteen hundred miles back though the Straits in

winter.

231

Ice, for these mammals, is what brings the teeming energy of the ocean close to places of

rest and respiration. Throughout their migration, the animals get most of their calories from the

ocean floor, where their nuzzling stirs up nutrients critical to other organisms.

232

Such productive

labor is the byproduct of walrus sucking so many mollusks from the shell that their bodies can be a

third fat.

For the indigenous hunting villages than rimmed the Straits, sea ice brought the energy

reared in the inaccessible open ocean within human reach: transmuted into blubbery mammalian

form, wrapped in thick useful hides. From Cape Prince of Wales in Alaska through the islands of

228

Gerhard S. Dieckmann and Hartmut H. Hellmer, “The Importance of Sea Ice: An Overview,” in in Thomas and

Dieckmann eds., Sea Ice: An Introduction, 1-21.

229

For a discussion ice in the Bering Sea ecosystem and nutrient cycling, see S. Sakshaug, “Primary and Secondary

Production in the Arctic Seas,” in R. Stein and R. Macdonald eds., The Organic Carbon Cycle in the Arctic Ocean (Berlin:

Sperger, 2004), 57-81 and Kevin R. Arrigo, “Primary Production in Sea Ice,” in Thomas and Dieckmann eds., Sea Ice: An

Introduction, 143-183; Alan M. Springer, C. Peter McRoy, and Mikhail V Flint “The Bering Sea Green Belt: Shelf-Edge

Processes and Ecosystem Production” Fisheries Oceanography Vol. 4 No. 3-4 (September 1996): 205-223.

230

For a discussion of these seal species, see John J. Burns, “Harbor Seal and Spotted Seal: Phoca vitulina and P. largha,”

and M.O. Hammill, “Ringed Seal: Pusa hispida,”in William F. Perrin, Bernd Wursig and J.G.M. Thwissen eds., The

Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals, 2

edition (London : Academic Press, 2009), 533-542 and 972-974 .

231

Ribbon seals have larger annual ranges, since they follow the retreating sea ice north in the summer until it become

too thick. See Lloyd Lowry and Peter Boveng, “Ribbon seal Histriophoca fasciata,” in Willaim. F. Perrin, Bernd Wursig,

and J. G. M. Thiewissen, eds. The Encyclopedia of Marine Mammals (London: Academic Press, 2009), 955-958.

232

Francis H. Fay, “Ecology and Biology of the Pacific Walrus, Odobenus Rosmarus Divergens Illiger,” North American Fauna

LXXIV (1982): 171-172; G.C. Ray, J. McCormick-Ray, P. Berg and H.E. Epstein, “Pacific walrus: Benthic Bioturbator

of Beringia,” Journal of Experimental Marine Biology and Ecology No. 330 (2006): 403-419.

King, St. Lawrence, and the Diomedes, and on to Asian villages like Chaplino and Naukan, Yupik,

Inupiat and coastal Chukchi communities relied on walrus. In bountiful years, they exchanged

mammalian fat for reindeer and wood, the energy of the sea carried deep into the tundra by blubber-

fed dog teams. Throughout the region, walrus were so critical to every facet of human existence that

the line between marine and human mammal blurred, spreading the capacity for sentience and

morality across species.

233

Approximations of walrus barks entered human language, in their

onomatopoetic epytonym in Chukchi – rerke – and the Inupiat and Yupik word aivik or aaviq.

Through stories people became walrus and walrus people, and walrus saved humans with gifts of

flesh.

234

In some villages walruses are part of family ancestries.

235

IN ITS SEASONAL north-south respiration, sea ice makes the boundary between land and sea

indistinct. At the Bering Straits, its movement temporarily erases the borders between states of

nature – terrestrial and marine, solid and liquid – and between the states of man, be they imperial,

communist, or capitalist. In the twentieth century, the United States and Russia’s governments

found in their Bering Sea borderland a space of permeable threat and impermanent potential, a

region that could bleed away sovereign revenue and state security, but was also a possible source of

local economic prosperity, even national value. And the main source of value was the walrus. For

bureaucrats, planners, scientists, and hunters – as for the Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi – the walrus

made useful fat, hides, and ivory from an icy shoreline otherwise bereft. The following chapter

traces how the sometimes competing, sometimes complementary projects of establishing

sovereignty, expanding commerce, making citizens, or creating communist revolution used and were

constrained by the biological energies of Beringia’s coast.

At the center of this history of negotiating value are ideologies, and their place in shaping

political intent and action. In the United States, commerce and market rationality were the first,

dominant way of valuing walrus. The market was critiqued by other values over the course of a

century, but remained a driving source of ideas about the present, the future, and normative

relationships with the non-human world. Communism, despite its apparent fixity, also proved open

to other valuations of the walrus. Thus while not collapsing the critical and often ethically forceful

differences experienced in the American and Russian Bering Straits, this chapter shows how

ecological context shaped and compromised both the assumed rationality of freedom based on

market valuation and equality based on collective production. Both ideologies were in practice

capable of diverse interactions with shoreline ecology. The following is a story of reckoning between

the desire for sovereignty, ideological consistency, and the reality of the energy-poor landscape. It is

a history of revolution in both senses of the word: at the level of human cultural and political life, it

was a century of profound change. For the walrus, it was a century in which bouts of nearly ruinous

human intercession eventually revolved back to the herd bellowing and diving from the ice.

233

John Miller and Louise Miller, Walrus (Chicago: Reaktion Books, 2014), 68-70.

234

Waldemar Bogoras, Chukchee Mythology, The Jesup North Pacific Expedition Vol. 8 Part I Memoirs of the American

Museum of Natural History, Franz Boaz ed. (New York: Leiden, 1910), 10.

235

Roger Silook, in William W. Fitzhugh, Julia Hollowell and Aron L. Crowell, eds. Gifts from the Ancestors: Ancient Ivories

of Bering Strait (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 217.

REVOLUTION ON ICE, 1870-1900S

“Begin this day with fresh winds from the S.E. and pleasant weather, all the boats off for walrus,”

wrote the log-keeper of the whale ship Trident, “4 boats returned at ½ past 10 with 36 walrus, hard

work and how getting oil, but it is all that can be done now.”

236

Now was the summer of 1870. The

Bering Strait bowheads were depleted and elusive, battered into north into the ice by ships that had

already killed over twelve thousand animals.

237

Commercial whalers, desperate for oil and drawn ever

deeper into the pack in search of it, had the year before begun seeking alternative fats to fill their

holds. A walrus, skinned and boiled down, could fill between two-thirds and three-quarters of a

barrel: hard work indeed compared the ample blubber of whales, but walrus fat rendered more easily

and yielded a higher price.

238

The tusks were also valuable, used as a cheaper substitute for elephant

ivory. Moreover, walrus could be hunted on the southern edge of the ice in July, when most of the

bowheads had swum too deep into the pack for ships to follow. With the United States oil hungry in

the years bracketing the Civil War, and with the walrus so numerous “they looked like a vast herd of

cattle resting after grazing,” their roaring, puffing, odiferous herds went from passing curiosity to a

new source of profit.

239

Beginning in 1870, when the New Bedford ship Cornelius Howland recorded

having “430 walruses and the ship is…heavy,” hunting on the pack became a routine part of arctic

whaling voyages.

240

The killing initially presented a challenge to the Yankee fleet. Sailors, taking size to indicate

slowness and placidity, initially tried to club the animals to death - only to discover that walruses

“flopped with surprising agility” into the sea when frightened and would fight “a hard battle” when

provoked.

241

Both man and beast seem to have left these early exchanges the wiser. By the early

1870s, ships’ logs describe making special walrusing equipment on the approach to the arctic.

242

Sailors painted their boats white, wore pale camouflage, and approached sleeping herds from

downwind.

243

Such stealth, after the first few encounters, was necessary. As the whaler cum

naturalist Charles Scammon wrote, “like all other marine mammals which have been continuously

pursued, they soon become wary, and when there is cause for them to give warning to their

236

NBWM, Logbook of the Trident (Bark), KWM 192, p. 56.

237

Douglas A. Woodby and Daniel B. Botkin, “Stock Size Prior to Commercial Whaling,” in John J. Burns, J. Jerome

Montague and Cleavland J. Cowles eds. The Bowhead Whale (Lawrence, KS: Society for Marine Mammology, 1993), 392.

238

Harston H. Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead: as told by Captain Harston H. Bodfish and recorded for him by Joseph C. Allen

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 21.

239

Walter Nobel Burns, A Year with a Whaler (New York: Outing Publishing, 1913), 193.

240

PRIPL, Nicholson Whaling Log Collection 181, Cornelius Howland, p. 295.

241

Charles Madsen, Arctic Trader (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company, 1957), 205-206 and Charles M. Scammon, The

Marine Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America (San Francisco: John H. Carmany and Company, 1874), 179.

John Bockstoce argues that whalers’ experience killing sluggish elephant seals in Antarctic and Californian waters lead to

this misapprehension. See Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 1986), 130-131.

242

PRIPL, Nicholson Whaling Log Collection 181, Cornelius Howland, p. 270 and William Fish Williams, “The

Destruction of the Whaling Fleet in the Arctic Ocean 1871,” in Harold Williams, ed. One Whaling Family (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin Co, 1964), 226.

243

Calvin Leighton Hooper, Report of the Cruise of the U.S. Revenue Steamer Corwin in the Arctic Ocean, 1881 (Washington

D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1884), 46. Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead, 21.

neighboring associates by loud roarings, or if asleep, by pecking at them with their tusks.”

244

The

lookout, hunters observed, often bore the scars of battles survived.

245

Fleeing was not the only

reaction. One whaler recalled how the “enraged animals…clustered around [our] boat and charged

her right earnestly, using their heads like so many battering rams…looking down we saw two pairs

of walrus tusks protruding through the bottom.”

246

Female walrus with young were especially

protective, and if cornered would “clasp to her breast the terrified little one, embracing it with her

fore flippers, while receiving mortal wounds.”

247

Walruses responded to human attacks by becoming more wary and more aggressive, but the

bulk of the herd could not flee the southern edge of the pack where the ice united seafloor grazing

and open-air rest. Yet, it was on the ice that walrus were most vulnerable to the whaler’s final

innovation. Within a few years of pursuing walrus for profit, Yankee hunters learned the best killing

was done with Sharps or Henry 45-7 rifles aimed between walrus eye and ear. The crack of gunfire

seems to have sounded enough like fracturing icebergs that the walrus became “so accustomed to

the firing that they [took] no notice of it.”

248

Having discovered this, whalers picked off dozens,

even hundreds, of the animals in a matter of hours, their rifles so hot from constant firing they were

dangled in the sea “on a lanyard to cool.”

249

Whalers did not love the “hard work and how” of the walrus hunt: because of its stink, its

danger, and the hours spent bent double in butchering. Under a summer sun that never set, the pace

of turning walrus corpse into market commodity was “limited only by the physical capacity of the

men, and that was tried to its utmost.”

250

Blubber and skin had to be sliced down to the meat with

long knives and then yanked in squares from the carcass with hooks. Sailors struggled to roll giant

bodies with gaffs, and to chop tusks from dense skulls. Once on the ship, the blubber had to be

skinned and rendered, destined for markets from San Francisco to New York. The gallbladders were

occasionally collected, to be sold for treating silk in San Francisco’s Chinatown.

251

And the ivory

sold even further afield, became carved buttons, handles and other trinkets from England to Japan

and China. Whalers also harvested calories from the carcasses to feed their efforts. The heart, liver,

and pickled tongues were considered “very palatable,” and walrus meat was sometimes ground into

sausage.

252

Other organs and the contents of walrus stomachs were consumed by the indigenous

hunters that ships increasingly hired to help with butchering. But most of the animals’ bulk was left

in bloody mounds for scavengers.

244

Scammon, Marine Mammals, 178- 179. See also

245

Madsen, Arctic Trader, 198.

246

David Wilkinson, Whaling in Many Seas, and Cast Adrift in Siberia: with a Description of the Manners, Customs and Heathen

Ceremonies of Various (Tchuktches) Tribes of North-Eastern Siberia (London: Henry J. Drane, 1906), 94.

247

Scammon, Marine Mammals, 178. Accounts of this behavior are common, starting with Captain Cook. See James

Cook, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean. Undertaken, by the command of His Majesty, for making discoveries in the Northern Hemisphere…

Volume II (London: H. Hughes, 1785), 457; Williams, “The Destruction,” 227, Hooper, Report, 46.

248

Hooper, Report, 46. This fact is noted in Williams, “The Destruction,” 226-227 as well.

249

Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead, 21. In the same passage, Bodfish recalls his captain shooting 250 walrus in a single day.

Williams notes that a good sharpshooter could kill 100 animals without changing position; “The Destruction,” 226.

250

Williams, “The Destruction,” 226.

251

Howard A. Clark, “The Pacific Walrus Fishery,” in George Brown Goode ed. The Fisheries and Fishery Industries of the

United States Vol. 2 Sec. 5 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 313-318, 316.

252

Clark, “The Pacific Walrus Fishery,” 316.

The logic that substituted many extant walrus for a few now absent whales required the

opposite of restraint. A single bowhead might produce 150 barrels of oil, but in their absence two

hundred and fifty walruses accomplished the same. With no baleen to sell, a pound of tusk could

become $1.50 in a good year or fifteen cents when the markets were glutted.

253

In less than two

decades, between 1869 and 1886, the Yankee whaling fleet shot, speared, harpooned, and left

records of killing some 135,000 walruses along the Bering Straits. The conditions of arctic hunting

and walrus behavior probably doubled the number of animals killed.

254

Temperamental weather

meant that seas often “got so ruff [sic]” as one log-keeper noted, that even small boats could “not

get on the ice to skin” the walrus they had killed, and so “had to leave them.”

255

The hot blood of

slaughter sometimes ate away at the pack until “the ice broke,” slopping walrus carcasses into the

ocean.

256

Animals killed or spilled into the water sank. And in June and July, when whaling ships

were otherwise idle in the seas north of Chukotka, the walrus at hand were nursery herds. Cows

suckling their young were easy targets, but took their present and future progeny with them in death.

As one observer noted in the 1880s, “under the present method of shooting, the whole herd of

grown animals is slaughtered, and the little ones remain on the ice hovering around the carcasses of

their mothers until death from starvation silences their moanings.”

257

STARVATION WAS NOT limited to mewling cubs. By 1890, the commercial whaling fleet had

harvested over 14,000 bowheads, ten times that many walrus, and killed scores more in the

process.

258

The absence of industrious mammals meant missing calories: for killer whales, for polar

bears, and for humans. It was a lack quickly felt by the indigenous populations along the Strait. In

1873, a whaling captain reported that people off the U.S. coast were traveling “thirty or forty miles

from land, on the ice, trying to catch walrus to eat, and were living on the carcasses of those the

whalemen had killed.”

259

A few years later, scarcity became famine. On the islands between North

America and Asia there were not enough ugruk and other small pinnipeds to make up for the largest

marine species. In the winter of 1878-1879, mothers on St. Lawrence Island reportedly let their

children freeze rather than endure the misery of hunger.

260

A decade later, the King Islanders caught

only two walruses; reduced to eating their dogs, over two-thirds of the residents died.

261

Starvation,

compounded by disease, was not limited to the islands. In the 1880s, two German naturalists noted

among abandoned huts and graveyards that the “decrease in population…was visible everywhere” in

253

Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 135.

254

John R. Bockstoce and Daniel B. Botkin, “The Harvest of Pacific Walruses by the Pelagic Whaling Industry, 1848-

1914,” Arctic and Alpine Research Vol. 14, No. 3 (August, 1982): 183-188; and Francis Fay, Brendan P. Kelly and John L.

Sease, “Managing the Exploitation of Pacific Walruses: A Tragedy of Delayed Response and Poor Communication,”

Marine Mammal Science Vol. 5 No. 1 (January 1989): 1-16.

255

PRIPL, Nicholson Whaling Log Collection 599, Sea Breeze, p. 77.

256

PRIPL, Nicholson Whaling Log Collection 181, Cornelius Howland, p. 297.

257

Clark, “The Pacific Walrus Fishery,” 315.

258

Bockstoce, “Whales, Ice, and Men,” 347.

259

The Friend, Honolulu, HI, March 1872.

260

Letter to the Editor, Ebenezer Nye, Standard, New Bedford MA, August 2, 1879.

261

Harry DeWindt, Through the Gold Fields of Alaska to Bering Strait (London: Chatto and Windus, 1899), 191.

St. Lawrence Bay.

262

North of the Bering Straits in Alaska, “Walrus hide and pieces of old boat-

covers” became regular foodstuff.

263

By 1890, the indigenous population of the Bering Strait

coastline had fallen by over half.

264

Villages that had once survived on walrus and whale collapsed in

their absence. Communities in both Asia and North America moved and merged, as refugees from

especially afflicted regions fled, sometimes hundreds of miles, to places with more substance and

stability, but also into landscapes of deep strangeness and hostility.

265

The whalers put the etiology of these human disasters in their own, all-too human hands.

While the future of whales – submerged, elusive, and canny – was sometimes debated by

commercial hunters, the absence roaring, odiferous walrus herds was obvious, and obviously due to

“the indiscriminate slaughter which has been the custom” of whalers.

266

Walrus were compared to

the dodo bird.

267

And while walrus qua walrus were of value to the Yankee fleet only as oil and ivory,

extinction had moral implications. “Should I ever come to the Arctic Ocean to cruise again,” wrote

Captain Frederick A. Barker, who survived shipwreck in Chukotka because of indigenous

hospitality, “I will never catch another walrus, for these poor people along the coast have nothing

else to live upon.”

268

Calls for restrained hunting filled the whaler’s New Bedford and Hawaiian

newspapers. “I don’t want or need money bad enough to go for the walrus,” Ebanezer Nye wrote,

adding that he would “like to see a stop put to this business of killing the walrus and so would most

of those engaged in it.”

269

Yet the Yankee fleet did need money. In the last quarter of the nineteenth

century, with the price of whale products volatile and the catch decreasing, voyages came to harbor

with so little profit that crew might earn a single dollar for years of labor.

270

For ships listing toward

profitless voyages, walrus filled gaping holds.

Thus, while some captains gave away unmarketable whale and walrus meat to coastal

villagers, the slaughter continued. The Inupiat, Chukchi, and Yupik, some of whom were paid labor

in the commercial hunts or had scavenged their aftermath, were well aware of who caused their

misery. Tales of the easy marine calories to be had “before white men came to drive away the whales

and walrus,” were told to Inupiat children.

271

These were not the only stories. Yupik and Inupiat

262

Aurel Krause and Arthur Krause, To the Chukchi Peninsula and to the Tlingit Indians 1881/1882: Journals and Letters by

Aurel and Arthur Krause (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press 1993), 58.

263

Patrick Henry Ray, Report of the International Polar Expedition to Point Barrow, Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Government

Printing Office, 1885), 48

264

Krupnik puts the population decline from 1800-1890 in Chukotka at around fifty percent, while the communities

studied by Burch went from about 5000 people to around 1000 in the same period. Igor Krupnik and Michael Chlenov,

Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900-1960 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2013), 36-37;

Ernest Burch Jr., The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations of Northerwestern Alaska (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998), 325.

265

It is not possible here to detail the community-level impacts of the successive famines in this period and how the

survivors recombined into new political entities. Fortunately, Igor Krupnik’s Yupik Transitions provides a granular,

ethnographically based account of this period in Chukotka and nearby islands. Ernest Burch Jr. does the same in The

Inupiaq Eskimo Nations for a large portion of the North American coastline.

266

John Murdoch, “Natural History,” in Patrick Henry Ray, Report of the International Polar Expedition to Point Barrow,

Alaska (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1885), 89-200, 98.

267

Nye, Standard, August 2, 1879.

268

Whalemen’s Shipping List and Merchant’s Transcript, New Bedford, MA, April 8 1872.

269

Nye, Standard, August 2, 1879.

270

“The Poor Whalers: The Sad Plight in Which Many Find Themselves,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco CA,

November 24, 1883. For an overview of the profits of whaling voyages, see Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 348-349.

271

Ray, Report of the International Polar Expedition, 46.

hunters were deeply pragmatic, and their pragmatism included fair dealing in a world humming with

sentience. The commercial hunt’s speed and waste violated rules – necessary rules, historically

proven rules – for killing animals that in the indigenous universe could choose not to die. Among

whalers there were no ceremonies of supplication and thanks – none of what the Yupik called Terre

sek, singing the animals closer to shore with “words about walrus, and the grunt is in the song.”

272

No care in the butchering, with bits of neck and head meat slipped back into the water “to turn into

food near the walrus,” in one shaman’s words.

273

No concern for offending Sedna or Keretkun, the

black-faced, temperamental master of sea animals who ruled the Chukchi coast.

274

Unknowing

whalers killed too well, and not wisely. And so the sea and the things living in it was both depleted

and morally affronted.

THE AGENTS OF the Russian Empire were also affronted, although not as much for the

walrus’s spirit as for what their killing implied about the power of the far-away tsar to govern. By the

1870s, the government had a centuries-old relationship with arctic and subarctic indigenous

societies. From the eleventh century Rus principalities onward, the Empire crept northeastward in

search of sable, martin, ermine, fox, and other fur-bearing species.

275

These animals were wealth on

the paw: foundational to state expansion and a critical source of revenue even after agriculture began

contributing to state coffers.

276

Trapping paws and turning the attached bodies into marketable pelts,

however, required skill, time, and effort. Some of this energy was supplied by promyshlenniks, trappers

and traders who moved east with the fur frontier. But much of the hunting was done by the Khanty,

Nenets, Evenk and other peoples native to the same habitats as the mammals coveted by the courts

of Europe. To make use of this wealth from the north, the Russian Empire did not need to

expropriate land so much as to expropriate labor, and through labor the bodies of animals.

Over the centuries, the tsars and their agents tried various strategies to deal with their

reliance upon indigenous productivity and exploitable species. In the 1500s and 1600s, the Cossacks

and promyshlenniks that fronted the Empire harvested without restraint, moving east when the west

was trapped barren. Sometimes they traded for pelts, but preferred method of compelling

indigenous hunters to pay iasik, or tribute to the tsar, was to kidnap the relations of local leaders and

extract an oath for furs present and future as ransom.

277

Peter the Great sought to baptize native

subjects into a bureaucratic, civilized state and civilize his bureaucracy into better profits. Catherine

the Great tried to insulate tribute payers from the depredations of Russian corruption, alcohol, and

272

APRCA, Dorothea C. Leighton Collection, Folder: Paul Silook p. 72-73.

273

Waldemar Bogoras, “The Eskimo of Siberia,” in Franz Boaz ed. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition Vol. 8 Part III

Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History (New York: Leiden, 1913), 446.

274

S. Ia. Serov, “Guardians and Spirit Masters of Siberia,” Crossroads of Continents: Cultures of Siberia and Alaska, ed. William

Fitzhugh and Aron Crowell (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988), 245. For a general overview of

northern ceremonial practices involving the walrus, see Miller and Miller, Walrus, 61-67.

275

For a complete account of the importance of furs to the early Russian polity, see Janet Martin, Treasure of the Land of

Darkness: the Fur Trade and its Significance for Medieval Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).

276

From 1550-1700, furs were the generally largest export commodity from Russia – the largest export for the Kiev and

Novgorod principalities, and still critical under the more agrarian Muscovy rulers. See Raymond H. Fisher, The Russian

Fur Trade, 1550-1700 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1943), 230-233.

277

For a full description of eastward expansion before Peter the Great, see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the

Small Peoples of the North, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 11-41 and Fisher, The Russian Fur Trade.

disease, and regulate the harvest of dwindling fur animals; all while “not forgetting the interests of

the treasury.”

278

In the nineteenth century, the policy of isolating “alien” subjects from Russians shifted to

making them, in the words of one priest, “Russian, not just in faith, but also in nationality.”

279

In the

late 1800s, ascension to the Russian nation required Orthodox belief, linguistic competency, hygienic

habits, and economic comportment that demonstrated a transition from the stagnancy of alienness

to civilization and progress.

280

And while native labor might be saved by its fundamental alteration,

by the early 1900s the Empire had passed new regulations on fur species, attempting through closed

seasons and hunting bans to save native animals by preservation.

281

The reach of these policies,

whether aimed at man or beast, was irregular and locally inflected, but they represented an ideal:

sovereignty emanated from the Imperial command over corporeal life – human bodies in language,

belief, and employment, animal bodies in their financial utility. The Sovereign territory of the

Russian Empire was a space in which the tsar and his bureaucrats arbitrated the disposition of

enlightenment and commodification.

On the Russian half of the Bering Straits however, neither financial nor civilizational control

was forthcoming. Cossacks founded a fort on the Anadyr River in 1652, and spent bloody hundred

and twenty years attempting to wrest tribute and control from the Chukchi and Yupik before

abandoning the effort in 1771.

282

In the nineteenth century, Russian traders on the Kolyma River did

establish peaceful trade relations with the Chukchi, meeting at the Ostrovnoe fair to barter tea and

tobacco for ivory and furs.

283

To create the appearance that the natives were iasik-paying subjects of

the tsar, Chukchi goods were officially labeled as tribute, traded for Russian gifts – exchanges that

were so “favorable to the Chukchee,” wrote ethnographer Waldemar Jochelson, they were

278

Catherine the Great’s “Instructions to Second Major Shcherbachev of the Semenovskii regiment of the Royal

Guards,” quoted in Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 67.

279

Veniamin, Arkhiepiskop Irkutskii i Nerchinskii, Zhiznennye voprosy pravoslavnoi missii v Sibiri (St. Petersburg: Kotomka,

1885), 7. “Aliens” is an imperfect translation of “inorodtsy” – a word that means both foreign culturally and indigenous

geographically.

280

This is a highly condensed account of nineteenth century Imperial attitudes and policies toward indigenous peoples.

In the late nineteenth century, anti-government populists, clergy, and tsarist officials drew from different intellectual

traditions and practical concerns in their arguments for Russification. For a detailed version, see Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors,

80-129. For a discussion of Orthodox conversion specifically, see Robert Geraci, Window on the East: National and Imperial

identities in Late Tsarist Russia (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001).

281

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 1401, L. 80. For an overview of Imperial hunting laws, see, N.F. Reimers and F.R.

Shtil’mark, Osobo okhraniaemye prirodnye territorii (Moscow: Mysl’, 1978), 24-26. An overview of conservation in Imperial

Russia can be found in Douglas Weiner, Models of Nature: Ecology, Conservation, and Cultural Revolution in the Soviet Union

(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), 7-15. An excellent account of the Far Eastern origins of Russian fears

regarding extinction is Ryan Tucker Jones’ Empire of Extinction: Russians and the North Pacific’s strange beasts of the sea, 1741-

1867 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014).

282

For a detailed account of the Russian-Chukchi wars, which in fact included alliances between the Russians, Yukagir

and Koryak against a coalition of Yupik and Chukchi, see I.S. Vdovin, Ocherki istorii i etnografii Chukchei (Moscow:

Akademiia nauk SSSR, 1965), 106-135 and Bogoraz, The Chukchee, Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural

History, Vol. 11 (New York, NY: The American Museum of Natural History, 1904), 682-697.

283

Much of the fur traded at the Ostrovnoe fair came from Alaska, with the Chukchi acting as middlemen. See John

Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest Among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering Strait Fur Trade

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 92-102.

“humiliating to the Russian Empire.”

284

Religious conversion was similarly problematic. Few Russian

Orthodox missionaries were tenacious enough to work their way northeast from the Kolyma River.

Those who did left little impression. A report from Anadyr in 1898 noted the “utter ignorance

[among the] baptized nomadic aliens of even the basics of religion.”

285

Not paying and not praying made the Chukchi, and by extension the Yupik, officially “aliens

not fully conquered,” a situation tolerable to the Empire long as the aliens were not conquered by

someone else.

286

By the 1870s, however, Russian influence on the Peninsula was troubled by

American trade and aggressive walrus hunting, which threatened the Empire’s tenuous corporeal

and civilizational hold. As one local official reported, the Americans “skillfully exploit the region’s

rich industries and corrupt the Chukchi.”

287

Part of the corruption was national. In the 1880s,

Chukotka’s lone regional administrator Sokol’nikov reported that “Many of the Chukchi speak

English, and along the coast there are many drawings, Bibles, and other books of American

origin.”

288

By the early twentieth century, American missionaries were reportedly teaching along the

coast.

289

The affront was clear. “In this country, considered part of the realm of the Russian crown,

the ten thousand Chukchi inhabitants have almost not heard the name ‘Russia,’” wrote one civil

servant, “The American flag flies on the coast of Chukotka.”

290

And under their flag, the Americans

were making away with the tsar’s organic riches. “On the Bering Sea coast,” the Imperial consul in

San Francisco wrote in 1890, “the destruction of whales is in parallel with the destruction of seals,

walrus, and some other animals, and if action is not taken against this extermination, the seals and

walruses will be drained away as the whales have been.”

291

Alexander Alexeevich Resin, who

surveyed the Chukchi coast in 1884 for the Governor-General of the Far East, estimated that “on

average our shores are visited by thirty-one [American] ships each year, each vessel earning about

39,000 rubles,” from whale and walrus.

292

Neither the bodies of men employed on the ships nor the

corpses of marine creatures they processed and sold were under Russian control. The result, one

observer wrote, was the “complete depletion of the region and the people inhabiting it.”

293

SOME IN THE United States was also concerned about the Yankee fleet, although the worries

of Washington legislators and press commentaries had less to do with offences against the sovereign

bodies of walrus and Yupik than with wrongs done against the cause of progress. Alaska had been

purchased partly for geopolitical reasons – following the Crimean War, Russia felt its overseas

284

Waldemar Jochelson, The Koryak. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, Vol. 10 Parts 1 & 2 (New

York: The American Museum of Natural History, 1913), 802. For more on Chukchi trade, see Vdovin, Ocherki, 252.

285

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 313, L. 3.

286

“Aliens” is an imperfect translation of “inorodtsy” – a word that means both foreign, in a culturally and indigenous

geographically.

287

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 1.

288

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 313, L. 3.

289

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 1401, L. 68.

290

A.P. Sil’nitskii, “Poezdka v Kamchatku i na r. Anadyr,”Zapiski Priamurskogo otedla RGO, t. II v. III (Khabarovsk, 1897):

19.

291

A.E. Olorovskii, “Torgovo-promyshlennye snosheniia primorskoi okrainy Vostochnoi Sibiri s inostrantsami (Po

soobshch. rus. gen. konsula v San-Frantsisko A.E. Olorovskogo)” Pravitel’stvennyi Vestnik, St. Petersburg, No. 255 (1890):

11.

292

A.A. Resin, Ocherki inorodtsev russkago poberezh'ia Tikhago Okeana (St. Petersburg: A.C. Suvorovna, 1888), 68

293

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 1.

colony was threatened by British intrusion from Canada, and both tsar and president preferred to

see the territory sold to the United States rather than be captured by a mutual imperial rival. The sale

also had economic logic, saving the Russian Empire administrative expense while the region’s fish,

fur, and rumored gold would add “greatly to the productive wealth” of the United States.

294

But for

boosters of the purchase, including the treaty’s advocate Secretary of State William H. Seward,

owning the Alaskan frontier was not least a chance to create “the civilization of the United States in

the Northwest.”

295

In the post-Bellum U.S., civilizing the frontier was, in the abstract, a matter of property and

production. The Republican Party that made Alaska part of American believed that capitalism could

create a utopia of individual proprietors – of small farmers and educated merchants whose

combined efforts would fulfill the destiny of an ever-growing, ever-prosperous nation. It was an

ideal inherited from Thomas Jefferson, then mapped westward to the Pacific in the 1862 Homestead

Act, which meted out land expropriated from indigenous peoples by violence and treaty to white

settlers in 160 acre plots.

296

In reality, westward expansion in the latter half of the 19

century was a

contentious mess of speculators, railroad deals, Indian wars, mining booms and land gone bust for

want of rain.

297

But from politicians to pioneers, the ideology of homesteading was also real:

promising that a nation of individual land owners free to vote their conscience and free to make a

profit from their labors would muster liberty and prosperity from sea to shining sea.

Alaska, however, was not subject to the Homestead Act until 1898. Indeed, it had very few

acts at all. The territory was under military jurisdiction for the first seventeen years of U.S.

ownership, where a few forts charged with upholding American navigation and commerce laws, and

preventing the sale of liquor.

298

Even after the Organic Act extended civil government to the

Territory in 1884, law enforcement was limited. So were citizens. Distance and a severe reputation

did not encourage a rush of displaced European peasants and second-generation American land-

seekers. Until the Klondike and Nome gold strikes in the 1890s, the territory had only a few

thousand white residents. What profits Alaska did produce, mostly fur seals harvested on the

Pribilof Islands, were the product of native labor. Alaska’s indigenous groups were less a threat to

the American way of sovereignty than its possible agents. While on the plains, the “Indian is a

competitor of the white man,” in the north he was an “assistant,” bringing the U.S. a similar

294

“Treaty with Russia (To accompany bill H.R. No. 1096)” R. Doc. No. 37, 40

Cong. 2

Sess. (1868), 34. Although

Horace Greeley mocked Alaska relentlessly as “Iceburgia” and the “New National Refrigerator” in the New York Tribune,

opinion about the purchase was generally positive. See Richard E. Welch Jr., “American Public Opinion and the

Purchase of Russian America,” American Slavic and East European Review Vol. 17 (1958): 481-494.

295

Frederick William Seward, The Reminiscences of a Wartime Statesman and Diplomat 1830-1915 (New York: G.P. Putnam’s

Sons, 1916), 359.

296

For a good overview of the Homestead Act and its contradictions in the American West, see Richard White, It’s Your

Misfortune and None of My Own: A New History of the American West (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1993),

140-150. Heather Cox Richardson argues compellingly that the politics of the American frontier grew out of

reconstruction-era debates over the role of the government and the aspirations of the middle class; West from Appomattox:

The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

297

Patricia Nelson Limerick’s The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton,

1987) is a definitive look at the myths and contradictions of the frontier.

298

While early boosters called for civil administration and a clear land policy, early Alaska’s legal affairs were mostly

obscured by the impeachment of President Johnson. See Klaus-M Naske and Herman E. Slotnick, Alaska: A History of

the 49

State 2

Edition (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 65-67.

conclusion as the Russian Empire: with proper “education and Christianization” from missionaries,

natives could attain “admission to the rights of citizenship.”

299

As one report to Congress noted, “If

uncorrupted by ardent spirits, not outraged by ill usage, nor confounded by those sources of Indian

wars which we call treaties…the natives of Alaska will become civilized, prosperous, and useful in

agriculture, commerce, and the fisheries.”

300

As the nineteenth century wore on, however, Alaskan natives were not becoming prosperous

Americans, much as Chukotkan natives were not becoming Orthodox Russians. At fault were

coastlines where “walruses are now nearly never seen,” leaving a starving and – most troubling for

the U.S. – potentially dependent population.

301

News of want and wanton destruction along the

Straits followed dismembered walrus south. In the United States, reports of starvation moved from

whaler’s newspapers to the national press. The New York Times reprinted Ebenezer Nye’s

description of famine, and reported a few years later that “All the Esquimaux bear the imprint of

intense suffering,” because “the Americans have wantonly destroyed the walrus.”

302

The Alta

California ran an account of Bering Strait famine under the headline “Wholesale Murder.”

303

In San

Francisco, a long report in Weekly Bulletin called for the Bering coast to receive “the attention of the

Federal Government, as well as that of the Russian authorities.”

304

In Russia, where the far eastern

famine received less sensational press, reports that “it is unanimously affirmed by the Chukchi that

walrus are becoming rarer and rarer,” filtered upward through the bureaucratic layers of the

Empire.

305

At fault were the “American schooners hunting along the shores,” destroying walrus and

leaving the “Chukchi to suffer a dire need for food.”

306

As Alexander Resin observed, without

protection from the Imperial government the people along the coast “can expect a future of starving

to death.”

307

If deprived of walrus, there would be no natives, and without natives neither Bering

shoreline could hope to become productive. Both countries would be left governing empty ice. On

empty ice there could be no civilization, no progress, no capitalist future or tsarist unity. In this small

corner of their vast countries, the United States and the Russian Empire found themselves

responsible for filling the lacuna the world market had left in the ocean. The question, for both

nations, was how to make human states replace absent nature.

WHEN THE GOVERNMENTS of the Bering Straits went north, less than a decade after the

walrus hunt began and thirty years after the advent of commercial whaling, the waters they patrolled

were in upheaval. The biotic world exists in continual degrees of unbalance. With or without human

299

W. Harris to Secretary of the Interior, January 30 1904, NARA CA RG 48, M-430, Roll 10: Interior Department

Territorial Papers, Letters Received Relating to the District of Alaska January 14-December 23, 1904; “A Bill to establish

schools among the natives of Alaska,” from 1872, quoted in S. Ex. Doc. No. 30, 47

Cong. 1

Sess. (1881), 17.

300

“Treaty with Russia (To accompany bill H.R. No. 1096)” R. Doc. No. 37, 40

Cong. 2

Sess. (1868), 12-13.

301

Resin , Ocherki, 66.

302

“Starvation in the Arctic Seas: The Destruction of the Walrus Involving the Destruction of the Native Population,”

The New York Times, October 6, 1879; “Cruising in a Whaler: Modern Walrus Hunting or Extermination – Fate of the

Esquimaux,” The New York Times, November 16, 1882.

303

“Wholesale Murder,” Daily Alta California, San Francisco CA, October 30 1881.

304

Weekly Bulletin, San Francisco, CA, December 12 1878.

305

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 127, L 17.

306

P. F. Unterberger, Priamurskii krai 1906-1910 g.g. (St. Petersburg: V.F. Kirshbauma, 1912), 281.

307

Resin , Ocherki, 70.

touch, life sways to the stochastic pulses of nutrients and energy. But some pulses go deeper than

others. The commercial marine mammal hunt beat hardest at the species best suited to withstand

the perturbations of temperature or tide.

308

Walrus, like whales, were dependable; their presence

tempered the shocks cold years or cloudy summers dealt other creatures. And their habits made

them, in the general cycling of the icy seascape, more productive than consumptive.

309

With so many

of the Bering Strait’s whales and walrus gone, the remaining organisms beneath the late nineteenth

century ice were recollecting themselves: facing, as life always does, dearth with adaptation. Even the

battered walrus themselves, those able to move deeper into the pack ice, were probably growing in

number in the few decades before the twentieth century began.

310

Yet, the organic diversity of the

ocean had likely shrunk. Sunlight –already scarce –quickened fewer cells.

311

On the coastlines,

human lives were also contracting. As commercial hunting depressed walrus and whales, scarcity

radiated up the coastlines and drove communities anywhere there was food to harvest or to trade.

Extracting profit from walrus bodies left the living domain of the sea-ice to contract around their

absent, energetic tonnage.

The scale at which life had ebbed on the ice was not visible to the U.S. Revenue Service,

when it began annual Bering Sea patrols in 1879, or to the Russian naval vessels that joined two

years later. Even had they known, the early attempts at governance in the Bering Straits had no

biological mandate. The hunt violated no laws, national or international. Even had killing walrus

been illegal, government patrols arrived in the north after the grandiose days of commercial

slaughter had already killed over half the Pacific herd. The brunt of the damage had been done; by

the 1890s, walrus were killed a few here, or half-dozen there, picked off by ships able to inch into

the pack ice. Most of all, nations were a few decades away from protecting species other than their

own citizens. In the United States at least, the diminishment or even extermination of some animals

was a signifier of progress. Alfred Brooks, who worked for the U.S. Geological Survey in Alaska,

wrote that “The disappearance of the fur-bearing and larger game animals from certain regions” was

inevitable, and should not be deplored since “it is but an evidence of the progress of civilization.”

312

Whether evidence of civilization or no, the diminished commercial hunt was due in part to

the diminished walrus herd. It was also the result shifts in the global market. Where there was

initially value in the Arctic’s energy, the demand for marine oil and the nineteenth century waned

together. Enterprising whalers-cum-traders found new profits in the exchange of distant wants for

308

Larger organisms are generally more resistant to annual ecosystem variability and are more able to adjust their feeding

patterns and intake than small, fast-reproducing species - although sustained climate change does cause alterations in

range and population. See Victor Smetacek and Stephen Nicol, “Polar ocean ecosystems in a changing world,” Nature

Vol. 437 (September 15, 2005): 362-368.

309

This may seem counterintuitive, but the quantity of ocean-floor nutrients stirred up by feeding walrus substantially

increases the productivity of the oceans. Clams are actually found in greater abundance in habitual walrus feeding areas.

See M.A Simpkins, L.M. Hiruki-Raring, G. Sheffield, J.M. Grebmeier, and J.L. Bengtson, “Habitat selection by ice-

associated pinnipeds near St. Lawrence Island, Alaska in March 2001,” Polar Biology, Vol. 26 (2003):577–586.

310

Francis Fay et al. “Managing the Exploitation of Pacific Walruses,” 3.

311

Walrus diving and rooting in the ocean floor is especially important for releasing nitrogen into the water column,

where it is in turn used by algae to fix solar energy. John S. Oliver, Peter N. Slattery, Edmund F. O’Connor, and Lloyd F.

Lowry, “Walrus, Odobenus rosmarus Feeding in the Bering Sea: A Benthic Perspective,” Fishery Bulletin Vol. 81 (1983): 501-

512.

312

Alfred Hulse Brooks, Blazing Alaska’s Trails, (Caldwell, ID: Caxton Printer, 1961), 74.

local needs. American, British, Russian, Chinese, and Japanese markets demanded baleen, ivory, and

fur. Sailors wanted sealskin clothing and fresh meat, preferably caribou or reindeer. Where the

industrial revolution had been fed by the Arctic, arctic peoples now leaned on industrial products.

The Yupik, Chukchi, and Inupiat were drawn closer to ships that could replace some of the region’s

lost marine mammal energy with wheat and molasses. By the turn of the century, at least twenty-five

hundred sacks of flour were sold annually on the Chukchi coast alone.

313

In the new regime of

scarcity, the natives “more and more depend on the whalers,” the Krauses wrote, their labor on

ships providing winter food.

314

And it was not just the geography of calories that had become global.

Alcohol, addictive and amnesic in an upended world, was in demand from St. Michaels to Serdze

Kamin. Traders found indigenous buyers for matches, calico, beads, tobacco, tea, tent canvas, and

other manufactured goods. As critical as calories or canvas, however, were technological boons:

guns, wooden whaleboats, bomb-harpoons, metal traps, needles, knives, axes and other tools that

could fill bellies and feed more commodities to American ships. By the 1890s, walrus were hunted as

much by native peoples trading with whaling ships as by the whalers themselves, and it was this

barter between hunters local and imported that fueled the walrus hunt past the easy years of killing

in the 1870s.

315

As manufactured goods and foods from the south transitioned from luxury to necessity, the

geography and seasons of trade shifted. People and their products consolidated near bays with safe

harbor, bundling human energies near the technology and calories brought by the Yankee fleet.

Trade journeys between communities increased, deepening links the interior to the coasts and the

coasts to each other across the Straits.

316

In Alaska, the annual Inupiat trade fair at Sheshalik shifted

to Kotzebue’s deeper harbor. At Port Clarence, journalist Herbert Aldrich witnessed natives from

“Cape Prince of Wales, King’s Island, Norton Sound, and other distant places,” trading furs to

whale ships, while local people sold fish to sailors.

317

After the gold rush, the trade moved to Nome,

where miners bought curios and clothing from as far afield as the Asian coast. In Chukotka, traffic

at the Ostrovnoe fair began to decrease as early as the 1870s, “due to the fact that the Chukchi meet

with American schooners.”

318

A few decades later, Bogoras described how at Cape Dezhnev and

313

Waldemar Bogoras, “Chukchee Mythology” in Franz Boaz ed. The Jesup North Pacific Expedition Vol. 8 Part I Memoirs of

the American Museum of Natural History (New York: Leiden, 1910), 62. A bag of flour weighed forty-four pounds.

314

Krause and Krause, To the Chukchi Peninsula, 55.

315

Ships’ logs indicate that after 1887, whaling vessels never harvested more than 100 animals per year. However, these

logs do not fully account for trading activity, and there are highly insufficient records from the ships out of Nome,

Seattle, and San Francisco involved exclusively in trade. Ivory appears consistently as a major item of trade until the

Russian Revolution, indicating that native market-focused hunting was substantial. See Bockstoce and Botkin, “The

Harvest of Pacific Walruses,” 185.

316

Krupnik and

, Yupik Transitions, 142-145. John Bockstoce argues that cross-strait trade was mostly supplanted by U.S. ships by the

early 20

century; see Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers, 324-360. However, Krupnik and Chlenov report oral history

evidence from both sides of the Straits indicating that at least some skin-boat trade continued. Similar reports appear in

the U.S. national archives; see for example W. Harris to Bureau of Education, April 25, 1904, NARA CA RG 48, M-430,

Roll 10: Interior Department Territorial Papers, Letters Received Relating to the District of Alaska January 14-December

23, 1904. Russian sources also describe trade from Asia to the U.S., see RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D. 206, L. 6.

317

Herbert Aldrich, Arctic Alaska and Siberia, or Eight Months with the Arctic Whalemen (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1889), 74-

75. See also 52

Cong., 1

sess., 1983, H. Misc Doc 340, pt. 7, 137.

318

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 127, L. 10. Chukchi and Yupik generally preferred American goods, which were usually

cheaper and of better quality than those sourced from Russia. The exception was bricks of tea.

Indian Point (Chaplino), “the dog-teams and reindeer-caravans begin to appear one after another,”

in March, to wait for ships.

319

There is no full accounting for the Bering Strait trade, but flour flowed

in by the ton, sugar by the kilo – and walrus out, tusk by tusk.

320

To participate in these rendezvous, indigenous hunters had new and considerable incentives

to kill more walrus than needed for subsistence or local trade, and to add polar bears and arctic fox

to their hunting.

321

Doing so did not preclude continuing the ceremonies that had long governed the

hunt. But in the killing there were now alternative sources of meaning. One way of valuing a walrus

was as a potential ancestor. Another was as a market abstraction. And the abstracting was a regular

part of trade-inflected life. The value of walrus and every other thing was measured in units of red

fox fur: a pound of gunpowder was worth a full fox, a gallon of molasses a skin and a half, a day of

labor was worth half a skin, a silver fox or set of tusks or a rack of baleen worth multiple reds.

Thus the market had taken its thousands of pounds of flesh, but the market also gave. For

the governments of the Straits, the return on invested native labor rendered the national and moral

implications of trade ambiguous. Agents of the U.S. Interior Department recognized that, on the

one hand, “owing to the rapid killing off of the whales and walrus…and the destruction of the fur-

bearing animals” the natives were “on the verge of starvation.”

322

On the other hand, if “the native”

became “useful to the white man by supplying the markets…he has not only assisted the white man

in solving the problem of turning to use of civilization the vast Territory of Alaska, but he has also

solved his own problem,” by transforming into “a self-respecting and industrious citizen.”

323

One

way of supplying the market, as the next chapter will discuss, was reindeer farming. Another, as one

booster wrote, was to make from walrus “a great profit with the help of Eskimo hunters.”

324

In Russia, officials watching from the re-opened Anadyr fort were also worried about their

starving aliens. But assisting the Chukchi and Yupik, and upholding the prestige of Russia, did not

foreclose upon commerce. Rather it required imperial “trading posts and a school… a mission and

building a church, and organizing at least some medical care.”

325

Making substance hunters part of a

market that encouraged reading and speaking English or Russian, and enabled the use of soap,

cooking food, wearing dresses or trousers, and other markers of savagery forgotten, also sat well

with missionaries. Instead of being told by the Chukchi that “when we are hungry… it is the

319

Bogoras, Chukchee, 64.

320

Surviving records do not allow for a full account of the goods that flowed in and out of Bering Straits, but it was

clearly substantial. The small community of Avan, for example, imported 4.5 tons of flour in 1895 alone. See Igor

Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia, trans. Marcia Levenson (Hanover:

University Press of New England, 1993), 57.

321

Reports of native peoples killing walrus for the market begin in the 1880s (see Resin, Ocherki, 69) and extend into the

twentieth century, usually based on finding carcasses with just the head remaining. See “Report of the Revenue Cutter

Bear,” Captain J.G. Ballinger, 1911, NARA MD RG 48 Central Classified Files 1907-1936 File 6-5. The extent of the

hunt cannot be quantified from surviving records, which makes assessing whether or not walrus were killed in excess of

what was used for subsistence impossible to estimate.

322

W.T. Harris to Secretary of the Interior, March 13, 1893, NARA CA RG 48, M-430, Roll 3: Interior Department

Territorial Papers, Letters Received Relating to the District of Alaska December 30 1892-December 30 1896.

323

Sheldon Jackson to W.T. Harris, January 11 1904, NARA CA RG 48, M-430, Roll 10: Interior Department Territorial

Papers, Letters Received Relating to the District of Alaska January 14-December 23, 1904.

324

Conrad Siem to Secretary of the Interior, May 1903, NARA CA RG 48, M-430, Roll 9: Interior Department

Territorial Papers, Letters Received Relating to the District of Alaska January 7 1902-December 15 1903.

325

RGIA DV F. 702, Op.1, Del. 275, L. 24.

Americans who give us flour and salt pork for whalebone and ivory,” profit and loyalty could be

Russian – at least once “Our industry knows the tastes and needs of this frontier and can replace

American goods with those of Russian manufacture.”

326

The Bering Straits had been emptied by

global want, and it was global – or even better, national – industrial excess that could fill the void.

Thus, from the 1880s until after the turn of the century, neither the United States nor the

Russian Empire took explicit issue with the form of the market, as it scraped away at the biological

wealth of the ocean. The assumption that the sea could produce a nationally enriching surplus was

unchallenged. Although aware and concerned by the absence of walrus, governmental focus was on

the market’s content: walrus were sold for the wrong things. From Asia to North America, the most

desired goods on the part of the Yupik, Inupiat and Chukchi were guns and liquor. Ships needing

revenue had overcome their initial reticence to sell both items, in no small part because twelve

dollars’ worth of liquor could in the course of a few stops on the coast appreciate into twelve

hundred dollars’ worth of ivory, whalebone, and fur.

327

Some captains, at least in their memoirs,

seem to have abstained from selling alcohol for moral reasons – but firearms turned a tidy profit,

helped assure future returns, and, as one trader put it, were a signal of “the growing desire to do

things white-man fashion” among the natives.

328

Guns and liquor, however, were not the white-man fashion Russia or the United States

wanted their native peoples to adopt. Both goods challenged the civilizing ideals of modern

sovereignty: alcohol “corrupted” natives before they could progress, and rifles might allow them to

resist progress altogether.

329

On both coasts, officials and missionaries worried about the violence

instigated when rum and guns mixed, and not without cause. Alcohol was linked to murders at Port

Clarence, the Diomedes, Point Hope, and beyond.

330

Thomas Thornton, missionary at Cape Prince

of Wales, was murdered only hours after two barrels of whiskey arrived from Chukotka.

331

In the

United States, were temperance was long associated with moral uprightness and productivity, some

went so far as to blame famine on indigenous intoxication. Consuming liquor, one whaling captain

testified to Congress, caused the “north coast Indians” to “neglect to provide food for winter.”

332

Thus, the scarcity of walrus caused by debased capitalism might be mitigated with temperate

capitalism. Commerce was potentially less the cause of an immiserated Bering Straits than its

solution.

326

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 2, Del. 206, L. 344; RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 1401, L. 1.

327

Nome Nugget, Nome AK, July 5, 1905.

328

Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead, 191.

329

In the United States, laws against arming native people were a consequence of wars in the West. Similarly, Russia

worried about giving the Chukchi firepower given their history of open rebellion.

330

Miner Bruce to Sheldon Jackson, September 25

1892, NARA CA RG 26 M-641 Roll 2: Letters Received by the

Revenue Cutter Service January 8 1891 – December 12 1892; RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D. 206, L. 4.

331

Thornton’s reputation in Wales was far from stellar: his insistence on carrying a pistol and treating the Inupiat as

inferior did not win him favors in the community or with other missionaries. There is also reason to believe that his

murder was partly in revenge for the killing of several Inupiat by a whaling crew sixteen year prior.

332

46th Cong., 2d Sess., 1880, S. Exec Doc 132, 19-20. See also Hooper, Report of the Cruise, 10-11 and John Muir, The

Cruise of the Corwin: Journal of the Arctic Expedition of 1881 in Search of De Long and the Jeanette, ed. William Frederic Bade

(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 24-25. The Russian attitude toward alcohol was less histrionic, although most saw

indigenous consumption as a problem. See RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 127, L. 11.

Sealing the immoral trade out of the Straits was a daunting task. Government patrols found

themselves barred from their own borders by solid sea. On the Asian side of the straits, the

movements of sea ice during the spring thaw favored ships moving from the east westward, so

Russian naval vessels shipping from Vladivostok or Petropavlovsk arrived in Chukotka well after

American traders sold their stock.

333

In Alaska, “The whaling fleet always arrives in the Arctic before

the revenue cutter does,” wrote Point Hope missionary E.J. Knapp, “and in cruising northward

succeeds in keeping the cutter a little outdistanced.”

334

When the Cutter Service did manage to

control trade on the North American coast, whalers sold their whiskey in Chukotka and made native

middlemen rich bartering the barrels back to Alaska.

335

Knowledge of how to distill liquor from

molasses, sugar, or grain spread even more easily, and contributed to eruptions of drunkenness.

336

When government ships did land, they often found their efforts unwelcome. “When I was on the

Chukchi Peninsula,” Nikolai Gondatti wrote of his tour through the region in the late 1890s, “the

Chukchi asked if Russians were friends or enemies, and when I told them ‘friends,’ they shook their

heads and said, ‘why do Russian vessels take from us guns, gunpowder and lead,’ leaving them to go

hungry.

337

At Kotzebue Sound, one Cutter captain reported that the Inupiat “were very bitter against

us” for stopping the flow of whiskey.

338

Despite the barriers erected by ocean ice and human desire, by the early twentieth century

the trade in alcohol had diminished substantially. Russian and American ships became more adroit in

threading through their icy borders, and whaling captains seem to have instituted policies of

temperance among themselves. Of the ten whaling ships that traded at Indian Point in 1901 only

two carried alcohol.

339

The trade in guns, after decades of relative peace, had normalized into a

necessary evil rather than an invitation to insurrection.

340

Missionaries had begun “improving the

conditions” and “encouraging industrious habits” of the natives.

341

What did not abate completely

was hunger. The Yupik, Inupiat, and Chukchi were not dying on the scale they did in the 1880s, but

participation in the northern edge of the industrial market failed to provide even basic security:

sporadically but consistently, communities were reduced to living off blueberries, or dogs, or the

leather from their shoes. The absence of accessible walrus gnawed at empty stomachs and at

sovereigns worried that “the advent of the white man in Alaska has impoverished the native,” who

for years “has been allowed to die for the lack of proper care and food.”

342

333

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D. 229, L. 300; Bogoras, The Chukchee, 62-63. The ice conditions plagued Russian vessels

into the twentieth century.

334

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle WA, September 24, 1905

335

For example, the Nome Nugget, Nome AK, July 5, 1905 contains an account of an Inupiat man who stabbed a relative

while drunk on alcohol purchased from a Chukotka native trading in Nome. E.J. Knapp reported alcohol traded on the

Diomede Islands making its way to the Alaska coast; Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Seattle WA, September 24, 1905.

336

A.A. Allan, Gold, Men and Dogs (New York: G.P Putnam’s Sons, 1931), 118; Nome Nugget, July 8, 1905.

337

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 1401, L. 1

338

Hooper, Report of the Cruise, 23.

339

Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers, 358.

340

Many local officials in the Bering Straits found the prohibition on firearms immoral, since native hunters had become

used to hunting with them. See Resin , Ocherki, 69. Report of the Corwin, Captain C.L. Hooper 1880, NARA CA RG 26

M-641 Roll 1, Letters Received by the Revenue Cutter Service, p. 117.

341

Extract from Report of the Commanding General, Department of the Columbia, April 28, 1903, NARA CA RG 48

M-430 Roll 9, January 7 1902-December 15, 1903.

342

“Plea for the Eskimo,” New York Times, November 5, 1900.

REVOLUTION IN MIND, 1900S-1940S

From 1870 to 1900, commercial hunters nearly destroyed the walrus population of the

North Pacific. The herds were killed for their fat, rendered down and sold for lighting and industrial

purposes in New England, and for their ivory. During this period, political borders mattered little to

the walrus. Living or dying at human hands depended on many things – market prices, the reach of

sea ice, summer weather – but not national space. The same was true for Inupiat, Yupik, and coastal

Chukchi. Devastating famines rolled through coastal communities in the 1880s and 1890s regardless

of political geography. Even by the turn of the century, villages were sporadically but consistently

reduced to living off blueberries, or dogs, or the leather from their shoes.

The absent walrus gnawed at empty stomachs, and at the U.S. and Russian governments.

Throughout most of the nineteenth century, the United States and the Russian Empire hoped that

the reliance of their peripheral peoples on walrus would be replaced by some more civilized, market-

oriented activity. The disappearance of “larger game animals from certain regions” was, as one

geologist in Alaska wrote, “but an evidence of the progress of civilization.”

343

The contribution

walrus made to human life was in profit. The available solution to absent walrus was, logically and

logistically, for commerce to fill the lacuna commerce had made.

By the early twentieth century, the efficacy of this solution was increasingly in doubt.

Creating formal states of man – borders, laws, administration, education, and the creation of

national difference from geological sameness – was a response to the diminished state commerce

made of nature. In finding an alternate way of feeding their borderlands, the choices made by the

governments overseeing the Asian and North American peninsulas diverged. It began to matter if a

walrus’s habitual migrations brought it along the Alaskan shore or into Russian waters. It mattered

even more if hunters lived on the left or right hand of the Straits. The difference arose from how the

two countries came to understand the role of walrus within their respective nations, and their

capacity to act on their beliefs.

In the United States, federal treatment of the walrus in the early twentieth century was an

outgrowth of larger Progressive-era debates over the rightful place of the capitalist market in shaping

society. In Alaska, the debate came to focus on the normative relationship between humans and

large animals. Species like walrus had spent decades valued for what their fragmented and refined

carcasses yielded as commodities. But by the late nineteenth century, some Americans began to

think otherwise. As Henry Fairfield Osborne of the Boone and Crockett Club wrote, the nation’s

“animal fortune,” once “so enormous that it never could be spent,” was becoming a “matter of

history.”

344

Instead of signaling progress, early conservationists warned that the extermination of

large animals cheated America of its unique biological wealth. While “an unthinking man” saw

creatures like walrus as “a matter of hide and meat; to the real nature lover, the true sportsman, the

scientific student… [they are] a subject of intense admiration.”

345

Preserving animals and their

343

Brooks, Blazing Alaska’s Trails, 74.

344

Henry Fairfield Osborn, “Preservation of the Wild Animals of North America,” in George Bird Grinnell ed.,

American Big Game in its Haunts: The Book of the Boone and Crockett Club (New York: Forest and Stream, 1904), 349-373,

356-357.

345

Osborne, “Preservation of the Wild Animals of North America,” 352.

untouched surroundings showed America’s “general intelligence and enlightened love of nature,”

while hunting for the market – not sentiment – was a blot on claims to civilization.

346

In Alaska, wildlife and human life were not linked through abstractions like national

greatness or even national income. They were tied by the intimate act of producing energy for

human consumption. It was a fact recognized by Captain Healy, who patrolled the northwestern

coast for the U.S. Cutter Service. Given the “rigorous climate and rough and almost impenetrable

country…in which nothing as yet is produced from the ground,” Healy argued, the “food supply

must either be found in the flesh of the wild animals and birds of the country or brought from

without.”

347

To eat, people native and otherwise needed either sufficient cash to freight in every

calorie, or enough local food to abdicate from the market altogether. For native peoples, the cash

earned by trade and labor came from the same place as the rest of the food supply – from the bodies

of animals. And, as Healy understood, the Yupik and Inupiat lacked both cash and walrus. The

result was a “great destitution,” one miner near Kotzebue as one miner noted in a 1899 petition to

the Commissioner for Education for relief funds.

348

Local missionaries agreed. “I wish something

could be done,” Ellen Lopp wrote from Cape Prince of Wales, as the hunger “hinders our work.

Think of teaching the lesson about ‘hungry and ye fed me not’ to a Sunday School class, the

members of which hadn’t had half a dozen square meals since the Sunday before.”

349

Many federal officials, however, were ideologically and fiscally opposed to sending aid north.

“The experience of the Government in feeding the Indian tribes of the West,” Sheldon Jackson

wrote in reply to the petitioning miners, recommended against food relief.

350

Jackson’s preferred

solution was reindeer farming, but even hunting was preferable to charity. Congress agreed. If the

Yupik and Inupiat were to survive without the temptations of dependency, they needed calories on

the hoof and flipper. And assuring the presence of hooves and flippers could not be left up to the

market. As Congressman Lacey of Iowa argued, without laws to protect wildlife, “the slaughter of

the game, the subsistence of the Indians in Alaska, [goes] on in an unparalleled manner.”

351

In 1902,

Lacey introduced the Alaska Game Law to Congress, in order to prevent “the ruthless extermination

of the wild animals,” walrus included.

352

The Law was shaped by competing desires. On the one hand it recognized a fiscal and moral

need to maintain indigenous self-sufficiency. On the other, the bill was championed by the

conservationists in the Boone and Crockett Club, who saw in Alaska the last place where “the

346

Osborne, “Preservation of the Wild Animals of North America,” 351.

347

Annual Reports of the Department of the Interior, 1904, 58

Cong., 3d sess. House Doc No. 5, p. 1125

348

W.T. Harris to the Secretary of the Interior, December 11 1899, NARA CA RG 48 M-430 Roll 6, January 5 –

December 24 1899.

349

Kathleen Lopp Smith and Verbeck Smith eds., Ice Window: Letters for a Bering Strait Village 1892-1902 (Fairbanks:

University of Alaska Press, 2001), 215.

350

Sheldon Jackson to W. T. Harris, December 6, 1899, NARA CA RG 48 M-430 Roll 6, January 5 – December 24

1899.

351

Congressional Record – House April 8 1902, 3841

352

Congressional Record – House April 8 1902, 3844. For a history game law in Alaska, see Morgan Sherwood, Big Game

in Alaska: A History of Wildlife and People (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981) and Donald Craig Mitchell, Sold

American: The Story of Alaska Natives and their Land, 1867-1959 (Hanover: University Press of New England, 1997), 150-

192. For a discussion of the Boone and Crockett Club’s activities in Alaska, see Ken Ross Pioneering Conservation in Alaska

(Boulder, CO: University Press of Colorado, 2006), 116-134.

primitive conditions approximating those of the whole country when first settled” could be

maintained.

353

The Club, a group of conservation-minded elites organized by Theodore Roosevelt in

1887, wanted to prevent in Alaska the depredations visited upon bison and other game in the West.

Chief culprit in the destruction was an activity now well integrated into the Bering Strait economy:

market hunting, the killing of animals for meat or trophies to sell. For conservationists, the parallels

with the Great Plains were clear. John Muir compared killing walrus for their ivory to slaughtering

bison for their tongues.

354

Moreover, Boone and Crockett members were inheritors of European

aristocratic hunting ideals, and saw game as rightfully killed for sport mostly, food secondarily, but

employment never. As a result, members of Boone and Crockett took a dim view of indigenous

hunters, who they saw as motivated by an irrational desire to “hunt all day” rather than do “ordinary

labor,” a predilection that made them “a greater enemy to the life of the game than the average

white man.”

355

Thus, although the Alaska Game Law emerged from a crisis in indigenous

subsistence, the rhetoric of the Club blamed native peoples for not getting their calories through

civilized “ordinary labor.” When the Law passed in 1902, it banned the sale of game products in the

territory by native non-citizen and white citizen alike. It also imposed limits and seasons. Hunting

walrus was restricted to the months of September and October. Sale of ivory, skins, or blubber was

illegal. Killing more than two walrus in any given year was prohibited. Traders were fined for buying

parts of any creature classified as game. The value of the walrus was alive, primarily, and to keep

Yupik and Inupiat alive, secondarily, but never as a source of currency.

Enforcement of the Law was hardly complete, given the vast territory wardens had to patrol.

But the intent to cordon animal from man left a mark. Ivory buyers were wary. Skins became

contraband. Even killing the two walrus legally allotted to each native person was often impossible,

when the realities of the law met the realities of the ice. “During the open season,” the trader P.C.

353

Madison Grant, “The Condition of Wild Life in Alaska,” Twelfth Annual Report of the New York Zoological Society (1908):

126. Boone and Crockett were hardly the only conservation organization active in the United States during the

progressive era; the movement had roots going back at least to George Perkin Marsh’s 1864 book Man and Nature.

354

Muir, The Cruise of the Corwin, 142-143. Muri traveled in Alaska extensively, but his more spiritual conception of

wilderness and conservation was less influential at the legislative level than were the sportsmen of the Boone and

Crockett Club. There were parallels, however, between the walrus hunt and bison killing on the Great Plains, although

without the habitat destruction, settler pressure, and proximity to industrial markets; see Andrew C. Isenberg, The

Destruction of the Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Theodore

Binnema, Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plaines, (Toronto: University

of Toronto Press, 2004), chapters 1-2.

355

Madison Grant to Andrew J. Stone, March 11 1902, quoted in James Trefethen, Crusade for Wildlife: Highlights of

Conservation in Progress (Harrisburg PA: Stackpole Co, 1961), 139. Hal K. Rothman argues that Roosevelt and the Boone

and Crocket Club created a moral and ethical language for hunting in America; see Saving the Planet: The American Response

to the Environment in the Twentieth Century (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 30. For a discussion of the aristocratic tradition of

hunting, see Matt Cartmill, A View to Death in the Morning: Hunting and Nature through History (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1993), and more specifically on the Boone and Crockett case, Douglas Brinkley, The Wilderness Warrior:

Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America (New York: HarperCollins, 2009). Conflict between hunter-conservationists

and local populations dependent on animals was a fixture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; see Karl

Jacoby, Crimes Against Nature: Squatters, Poachers, Thieves and the Hidden History of American Conservation (Berkeley: University

of California Press, 2001), and Theodore Catton’s Inhabited Wilderness: Indians, Eskimos, and National Parks in

Alaska (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1997). In these conflicts, indigenous peoples were often seen as

the least able to control their hunting, a racially loaded stance that in some cases listed into eugenics. See Jonathan Spiro,

Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Hanover: University of Vermont Press,

2009).

Rickmers testified during hearings on the impact of the 1902 Act, “when the law allows the walrus

to be taken, they are not present, because the animals follow the ice where they can’t be reached at

that time.” As a result, the natives around Kotzebue ‘have nothing whatever now except salmon” to

eat, and Rickmers was unable to trade bear skins for flour or other provisions “because there is a

penalty of $200 under the game law.”

356

By 1903, newspapers carried stories of more native famine –

this time caused by “the entire suppression of the fur trade… It is shown that their inability this year

to kill black and polar bear, seals, walrus and whales has reduced the natives to a starving

condition.”

357

A senate committee sent to Alaska to investigate the situation in 1903 concluded that

the “provisions [that] prohibit hunting and trapping by aborigines and Natives and the sale of skins

so taken” should be removed.

358

But given the influence of Boone and Crockett – Lacey was a

member – neither the local population nor the senate committee found political traction. When the

Law was rewritten in 1908, it continued to allow indigenous hunters to kill for food and clothing,

but prohibited the sale of ivory.

The Alaska Game Law introduced a new way of understanding consumption and production

to the layers of meaning already at work in the Bering Straits. The ideas about conservation held by

Boone and Crockett members were generally utilitarian: the goal of conservation, as Roosevelt

stated, was to promote “national efficiency, the patriotic duty of insuring the safety and continuance

of the nation.”

359

Efficiency was tightly bound with what the capitalist market demanded.

360

Large

game species, however, were prized in the Boone and Crockett circle for aesthetic, genetic, and

moral reasons that transcended the base values of commerce. It was not an ill-intended ideal: the

shapers of the Game Law saw that demand had unleashed destruction upon the living world of the

Alaska coast, and imagined that the wild edges of capitalism could be rolled back with progressive

legislation. Mostly absent from legal consideration, however, was the long history of Yupik and

Inupiat hunting. The traditional scale of walrus kills had no place in civilized conservation. The fact

that human subsistence in the early twentieth century required hunting for profit was even less

acceptable. Thus the American state, which had come north to regulate the market’s appetite for

walrus in order to assist the survival of its indigenous dependents, spent the young decades of the

twentieth century trying to regulate those dependents away from the market for the survival of the

walrus.

IN THE SHORT term, the contradiction between pragmatic and patrician ideals in the Alaska

Game Law made it less than successful in assuring Yupik and Inupiat subsistence. For many

individuals accustomed to buying their guns and flour with ivory the result was less access to food,

356

Cong., 2d sess., 1904 S. Rept. 282 pt. 2, 149.

357

“Alaska Indians Starving: New Game Laws Prove Disastrous to Natives of the Far North,” New York Times, October

8, 1903.

358

Cong., 2d sess., 1904 S. Rept. 282 pt. 1, 29.

359

Theodore Roosevelt, “Opening Address by the President,” quoted in Carolyn Merchant ed. Major Problems in American

Environmental History (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 321.

360

This is the argument of Samuel Hays, who saw Roosevelt-era conservationism not as running counter to capitalism –

including monopolistic capitalism – but as privileging efficient resource use by whatever means. This generally seems

true in Alaska, although game were clearly an exception. Their utility was in sport and national pride. See Hays,

Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard University

Press, 1959).

not more. It did, however, make the treatment of walrus a way of defining the Bering Strait border.

Under Boone and Crockett’s banner, being a walrus in American waters meant protection from

people. As a result, human life in North America became legally and practically distinct from life in

Asia.

In animal practice, the law did not make more Odobenus rosmarus divergens. Walrus were, and

are, not nationally bounded animals. Their range runs far onto the international ice, and into Russian

seas. After the Game Law, hunters were “confined entirely to Siberian waters,” as trader Charles

Madsen recalled.

361

Madsen was part of the second wave of intensive walrus hunting, spurred in the

early 1900s by demand for leather handbags and carved ivory. In 1909, Madsen took at least 100,000

pounds of walrus hide, hiring native hunters from King Island, Cape Prince of Wales, and Little

Diomede before entering Russian waters.

362

He did not hunt alone: at least four other commercial

ships worked the Russian coast. Nome, the hub of Bering Strait trade, saw two hundred thousand

dollars of fur and ivory come through port from Chukotka in 1911 alone.

363

The United States treated wild walrus like national animals, legislatively incorporated into a

national future. The result, in Chukotka rendered the walrus’s future questionable altogether:

unprotected in Russian waters, the Pacific walrus herd was in decline again by the 1910s.

364

It was

not a fact lost on the Russian Empire. “The head of the Anadyr District reports a situation of

declining walrus harvest,” read a telegram to the Governor of the Far East, “The main reason for

the deterioration of the walrus harvest is the massive predation of walruses along our shores in 1915

by American schooners – schooners harvested two thousand walrus each, taking the tusks, hides and

fat, and throwing the meat to the sea.”

365

Captain Zilov, commander of the Navy ship Yakut,

reported that “the walrus attract many whalers, and the extermination of these animals is so large

that the so-called marine Chukchi, who make their living hunting walruses, complain about the

possibility of starvation soon. This was stated quite definitely by the village headman of Uelen at

Cape Dezhnev, with a request to take whatever measures to protect this important fishery for

them…in two or three years it will be too late.”

366

Too late for the walrus, worried Zilov and others,

might also be too late for Russian sovereignty. “The goal of fighting American culture and predation

in Chukotka territory,” one naval captain wrote from Petrograd, could not be accomplished without

instructions “concerning the whaling and fishing industries.”

367

Zilov, like others in the Far East, recognized Imperial dependency on walrus – dependence

made tenuous by the actions of American ships. Russia was less interested a Bering Strait shoreline

361

Madsen, Arctic Trader , 215.

362

Madsen, Arctic Trader, 188. Walrus hides weigh between 300-400 pounds, so Madsen took between 250-300.

363

William R. Hunt, Arctic Passage (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1975), 267.

364

Estimates from this period are difficult, since most records of Bering Straits trade voyages have been lost. However,

elders interviewed by J.W. Brooks remembered walrus numbers declining until about 1920 and then rebounding. See

Brooks, “The Pacific Walrus and its Importance to the Eskimo Economy,” Transactions of the North American Wildlife

Conference No. 18 (1953): 503-510. Hunting in Russian waters would have been more productive regardless of U.S. laws,

given the location of the nursery herd near Chukotka. See Madsen, Arctic Trader, 188. Russian patrols had their limits

however: Max Gottschalk, a trader working out of Nome and inveterate peddler of alcohol to the Chukchi, managed to

escape the tsar’s price on his head repeatedly.

365

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D. 229, L. 278.

366

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 7, D. 85, L. 141.

367

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 14.

where native people and their ties to the market were banished, a la Boone and Crocket, than in

recreating a recent past in which native people could eat. Russian pragmatism was undermined by

their capacity. Tsar Nicholas II was embattled with Japan in the east and radicals in the west, leaving

little blood or treasure to spare on Chukotka. As a result, one naval commander reported, “The

value of this territory would be the envy of many European powers,” but “the administrative

authority is represented by the district chief and four guards.”

368

Captain Zilov called for more ships

and men willing overwinter on the coast to protect the walrus.

369

But there were no additional ships.

And those in Chukchi waters had little jurisdiction over foreign vessels, their mandate limited to

issuing trading licenses with “no mention of walruses, seals and polar bears.”

370

The result was

starvation. “The coastal Chukchi especially suffer illness by way of hunger, which originates in years

with bad harvest of marine animals,” noted a survey on conditions in the Far East, “the hunger

causes them to eat the meat of dead dogs, the skins of marine animals, [leather] straps, bits of

clothing and even human and animal excrement.”

371

By the eve of the First World War, Russia was beginning to consider that its national interest

in walrus required international legislation.

372

Missionaries and biologists in the United States agreed.

“Undoubtedly,” wrote S. Hall Young, a member of the Board of Home Mission for Alaska, the

killing of the walrus will continue as long as the present market for the products of these animals

continues.”

373

The Deputy Commissioner of Fisheries noted that since walrus “go to sea on the ice

floes, real protection would be accomplished only in an international agreement,” adding that the

Russians were strongly in favor and negotiations with Petersburg were expected.

374

1914 was not an

auspicious year to begin negotiations, however. The Russian Empire was at war. The U.S.

government started buying walrus oil for munitions manufacturing, and walrus hides were used to

polish steel shrapnel cases.

375

International agreements over the fate of animals were secondary to

international disagreements over the fate of men.

As a result, the first conservation efforts on the Russian side of the Straits were instigated

not by the state but by Chukchi and Yupik hunters. By the end of WWI, traders and visitors to the

Chukchi coast reported that “the natives [in Chukotka] are exceedingly hostile to anyone who does

not take their kill…the seal and walrus are their sole guarantee against starvation, and they refuse to

368

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 15.

369

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 7, D. 85, L. 141.

370

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 1401, L. 83; RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 16-17; Madsen, Arctic Trader, 97. The

memoirs of some traders active in Chukotka indicate that the Russian naval vessels and local agents were somewhat

effective at regulating what was traded, but had no legal authority to curtail walrus hunting. See also Olaf Swenson,

Northwest of the World: Forty Years Trading and Hunting in Northern Siberia (New York: Dodd, Mead 1944), 10.

371

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 1401, L.61.

372

RIGA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 275, L. 20. The U.S. and Russia successfully negotiated fur seal protections in the early

twentieth century, but did not manage to create a similar treaty for walrus.

373

S. Hall Young to the New York Zoological Society, January 12 1914, NARA MD RG 22: Wildlife Service Reports

and Related Records 1869-1937 Entry 91. See also: A.W. Evans to Secretary of the Interior, July 30 1913, NARA MD

RG 22: Wildlife Service Reports and Related Records 1869-1937 Entry 91. Boone and Crockett Club member Henry

Osborne, then the president of the New York Zoological Society, took particular interest in the fate of the walrus in this

period.

374

E. Jones Deputy Commissioner of Fisheries to Secretary of Commerce, January 16, 1914, NARA MD RG 22:

Wildlife Service Reports and Related Records 1869-1937 Entry 91.

375

Swenson, Northwest of the World, 95; “Walrus Catch Largest Known,” Los Angeles Times, October 1, 1915.

see anyone wantonly waste what is so vital to their life and prosperity.”

376

Joseph Bernard,

shipwrecked off Chukotka’s coast in 1921, reported that “Tenastze,” the local leader at the Inchoun

walrus beach, had outlawed the use of guns and set times when “All the men went…and killed only

what they needed for the year’s supply.”

377

Shamans taught generations of coastal Chukotkans that

walrus would to refuse to relinquish their bodies in the hunt if badly treated people, and white

traders were guilty of just such transgression.

378

The result of “these sane conservation methods,”

Bernard wrote, was plentiful walrus meat in Inchoun and surrounding villages. Elsewhere on the

coast, traders were threatened for disrespecting offerings to the walrus, and a prohibition against

guns was enforced at the haul-out on Arakamchechen Island.

379

The borders and rules imposed protect walrus in Chukotka were not of the sort recognized

by empires and states, and were restricted to places where walrus hauled out on land. People could

not easily patrol the shifting, inhospitable geography of the ice. But indigenous conservation was still

a political act: an argument for the disposition of power both caloric and moral. It was a politics that

drew from values outside the industrializing world, but was also a reaction to the market that

industry afforded – the trade in guns, ammunition, metal traps, calico cloth, knives, axes, milled

grain and mass-produced matches. More than anything, it was a reaction to ecological revolution: by

the early 1920s, people along the coasts had seen the tenuous equilibrium on the sea ice punctuated

twice, first in the decade of walrus slaughter from 1870 to 1880, and again in the first two decades of

the new century. At Inchoun and Arakamchechen Island wanted a return to the past, with its

200,000 walrus bellowing and breeding on the intra-continental ice.

The hunters at Inchoun were contending with the two ideas born of the industrial revolution

alive in the Bering Straits in 1922. One was a faith in markets to bend raw nature to the service of

human progress. The other was its inverse: the desire to bring the market to heel so as to protect

nature from the consumptive appetite of human advancement. The inevitability of capitalist growth

was a given for both ideals; the question was how much the government should legislate the human

relationship with non-human things, and how much the market could be trusted to do so alone.

Around the edges of these concepts, the ice kept rolling in and rolling back with the sun. Men like

Paul Tiulana went out hunting, watching in the 1920s as, very gradually, young walrus began to fill

the empty ice with new bodies. With commercial demand for ivory in a post-war ebb, the world

revolved toward a new version of an old relationship: each year humans killed a few thousand walrus

along the Bering Straits, and each year the walrus came back.

On the Asian coastline, the gradual resurgence of the walrus population was coincident with

a new human revolution, industrial in form but communist in content. The Russian Revolution

came slowly to Chukotka: in 1917, the Bolsheviks were mostly a rumor spread by newspaper-reading

376

James M. Ashton, Ice-Bound: A Trader’s Adventures in the Siberian Arctic (New York: Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 127.

377

Joseph F. Bernard “Local Walrus Protection in Northwest Siberia,” Journal of Mammalogy Vol. 4 No. 4 (November

1923): 224-227, 226.

378

Bogoras, “Chukchee Mythology,” 8.

379

Swenson, Northwest of the World, 10-11; ChOKM, Tikhon Semushkin Collection, “Predvaritel’nye materialy po

administrativno-upravlencheskoi strukture na Chukotke, sovremennomu sovetskomu stroitel’stvu i perspektivam,” p. 34.

This practice at Inchoun is also mentioned by the Soviets in the 1920s; see GARF F. 3977 Op. 1 D. 811. L. 125. In 1945,

Norman Whittaker, a government teacher on Little Diomede Island, saw a similar practices on Big Diomede, then part

of the Soviet Union. Norman Whittaker to Clifford C. Presnall, January 2 1945, NARA MD RG 22 Entry P-285.

American traders. By 1919, two young communists formed a short-lived Revkom (revolutionary

committee) in Anadyr. Their ideological commitment was more potent than their strategy, however,

and they were overthrown by merchants shortly after announcing the liquidation of all capitalist

property. It was not until 1923 that Red Army Commander M.P. Volskii finally declared all “White

bandits” vanquished.

380

Only a year before Lenin’s death, with war communism mostly given over to

the New Economic Policy in western Russia, Chukotka officially became part “of a new world, a

new life of fraternity, equality, and freedom.”

381

For the communists who made their way to the Bering Straits, late to the revolution was

better than never, especially since no place in the former Empire seemed more in need of

transformation. As G.G. Rudikh, one of the initial Soviets in Cape Dezhnev recalled, “The people

lived in dark, windowless yarangas (tents), which are lit and heated by fat-burning lamps. The usual

food was the meat of seals, walrus, whales – often raw. It was blatantly unsanitary…and [people

were] hungry, especially in winter when the sea is completely closed by ice.”

382

To a well-schooled

Marxist-Leninist, this signaled backwardness. The Yupik and Chukchi lacked material and cultural

accumulation in everything from proper food and clothing to education, temperance, scientific

credulity, and gender equality. As a result, they lived at a stage of primitive survival that came before

feudalism or capitalism, let alone communist utopia. The cause of backwardness, for the early

Bolsheviks, was clear. “Look around,” the president of the Anadyr Revkom told his comrades in

1921, “everywhere we hear that foreign firms ruthlessly exploit and rob the natives – the labor of a

Chukchi is worth a box of biscuits. The Chukchi, as politically backward (nesoznatel’nye) elements do

not understand what they are doing. If only they could eat… otherwise, they provide an opportunity

for the most voracious sharks to gain.”

383

The impoverishing aftereffects of commercial walrusing fit

comfortably into the communist understanding of the world: sharks in capitalist clothing had

wrested control over the basic things of life – calories and the means to produce them – from the

suffering, unconscious, unsanitary natives.

The first revolutionaries in the Bering Straits had a solution. Lenin had already proclaimed

that people like the Yupik and Chukchi, with no direct exposure to industrial capitalism, could skip

historical stages and leap from primitive to communist “If the victorious revolutionary proletariat

engages in systematic propaganda in their midst, and the soviet government assists them through all

possible means.”

384

Propaganda did not mean slogans and posters, but the complete restricting of

native economic life. “The next step,” the 10

Party Congress stated in 1921, “should be economic

organization,” in order to move “the toiling native masses from backward economic forms to a

higher level - from a nomadic lifestyle to agriculture…from artisanal production to industrial-

380

For a full account of the revolution in Chukotka, see N.N. Dikov, Ocherki istorii Chukotki s drevneishikh vremen do

nashikh dnei (Novosibirsk: Nauka, Sib. Otd-nie, 1974), 146-164 and N.A. Zhikharev, Ocherki istorii Severo-Vostoka RSFSR,

1917-1953 (Magadan: Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1961), 37-69. For communist arrival on the coast, see B. I.

Mukhachev, ed. Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov na Chukotke (1919-1923): Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Magadanskoe knizhnoe

izdatel’stvo 1967), 131-132.

381

N.A. Zhikharev, ed. Pervyi revkom Chukotki 1919-1920: Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Magadanskoe knizhnoe

izdatel’stvo 1957), 24.

382

Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov, 133.

383

Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov, 104.

384

V. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii (Moscow: Politizdat, 1958-65), 41: 245-46.

factory, from small-scale farming to planned collective farming.”

385

Transforming the economy from

crude subsistence to collective industry would create a surplus for all. “Collectivization in the

North,” wrote one expert on northern development was necessary, as it was the only way to “fully

increase the productivity of the indigenous economy and its marketability.”

386

Moreover, ushering Russia’s many indigenous peoples onto the socialist path was a national

imperative. Almost one-third of Soviet territory was under-exploited taiga and tundra, its riches

untapped or ill-used by the tsars.

387

And of all places in the north, Chukotka was a limit case for

northern communism: far from Moscow, close to America, totally destitute and sparsely populated.

It was a place even the Bolshevik vanguard found difficult: as One Red Army sailor tasked with

fomenting revolution wrote to his superiors, “you cannot even imagine what the Chukotka

peninsula is like! ...I am not staying here for anything.”

388

Yet some communists did stay. Starting in 1924, their activities were directed by the

Committee of the North, a group of Bolshevik leaders and ethnographers who considered

themselves “not scholars but missionaries, missionaries of the new culture and the new Soviet

state…ready to take to the North the burning fire of their enthusiasm born of the Revolution.”

389

These communist missionaries found indigenous backwardness to be so profound that

“Collectivization in the North should start with the simplest forms –associations for common use of

land, artels (workshops) for communal manufacturing of products - and ascend gradually to higher

forms of the socialization of production.”

390

While capitalism could be bypassed, it would take time

for the Yupik and Chukchi to move up the civilizational ladder toward socialism. In the meantime,

these “small peoples of the north,” like their brethren across Siberia, required careful tutelage in

literacy, hygiene, and socialist economics.

In Chukotka, even this slow program for progress provided difficult. Moving,

communicating, and finding adequate shelter “in the hard climate…where the severe winter lasts

almost the whole year,” slowed even ardent communists.

391

Then there was the problem of calories.

The walrus were slowly returning, but could still not sake the “more or less acute hunger” along the

northern coast.

392

“The reasons for this phenomenon,” wrote S.P. Ivanov in 1926, “are primarily: 1)

intensive hunting [for profit] by the local native population, with nothing and no one regulating it,

and 2) the predation of marine animals by American marauders for entire decades.”

393

The Soviets

also needed to supplant American trade in manufactured goods and the attendant evils of capitalist

commerce. As one Committee member wrote, only with the “proper organization of supply and

385

KPSS v rezoliutsiiakh i resheniiakh s"ezdov, konferentsii I plenumov TsK Vol. 2 1917-1922 (Moscow: Izdat.pol. lit. 1983), 367.

386

RGIA DV F. R-4559, Op. 1, D. 1, L. 117.

387

Waldemar Bogoras, “Ob izuchenii i okhrane okrainnykh narodov,” Zhizn’ natsional’nostei No. 3-4 (1923): 169.

388

Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov, 124.

389

V.G. Bogoras, “Podgotovitel'nye mery k organizatsii malykh narodnostei,” Sovetskaia Aziia No. 3 (1925): 48. Some of

the communist missionaries were quite ardent; Swenson said that he had “never seen such passionate sincerity as some

of the young communists showed,” Northwest of the World, 170.

390

RGIA DV F. R-4559, Op. 1, D. 1, L. 118. For a discussion of the origins, staff, and goals of the committee, see

Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 150-163.

391

Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov, 124

392

RGIA DV F. R-2333, Op. 1, D. 45, L. 9. See also GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 881, L. 85b Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’

sovetov, 133, 168.

393

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 881, L. 126.

other measures,” would the Soviets be able “to keep the border (krai). Otherwise [the native] will

fade away completely and seek the wilderness.”

394

The communist missionaries needed caloric

sovereignty to assure the progress of Soviet civilization.

Such sovereignty was on the horizon. Supply ships from Vladivostok began to supplant

American trading vessels by the late 1920s. For Yupik and coastal Chukchi, access to ammunition,

boats, and other technological necessities now came through the state. The Soviet’s new ability to

control the means of survival was an excellent recruitment tool.

395

Membership in a collective

enterprise gave hunters access to boats, guns, and by 1929, outboard motors. And in the early

collectives, ad-hoc as they were, came new and more explicit motives for increased production.

Soviet marine biologists were optimistic that with proper technological guidance, the future showed

“a picture in which the fat of sea animals flows in a fast, broad wave into the tanks of

[collectives].”

396

Pacific walrus, almost a decade into a respite from aggressive harvesting, were on

notice.

IN ALASKA, THERE was also interest in the profits that walrus could yield. The proper

relationship between the market, the state, indigenous people, white citizens, and animals, was less

clear than among the new collectives on the Russian coast. The doctrine that mapped the Soviet

road to real existing communism had clarity, at least at the level of theory: the future required

maximizing the barrels of oil rolled off the ice. Democratic capitalism spent most of the first half of

the twentieth century wavering toward a different answer to the question of what the walrus might

contribute to civilization.

In some respects, the United States and the Soviet Union understood their northern

borderland in similar terms. Both saw them as challenging environments whose peoples were

woefully unaware of how to eat, dress, bathe, read, and speak properly. The United States, like the

Soviet Union, desired economic reforms, for natives to learn what one Congressional report called

“our ways of labor, so that they may work understandingly in the new fields of industry which are

developing.”

397

The task of educating natives in the middle twentieth century fell to both

missionaries and employees of the Department of Education. Teachers secular and otherwise were

often, like their communist brethren across the Strait, motivated by compassion and a genuine belief

that their prescriptions for soap, thrift, hard work, and information about “real estate or property

rights.”

398

These were the precursors of a better life. The values imposed by conservationists,

therefore, might prevent Yupik and Inupiat from becoming fully American.

Also like the communists, American teachers and government agents worried about

production. Most were aware, as one missionary wrote, that “Eskimo children” needed taught not

394

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1 D. 11, L. 17. A. Bonch-Osmolovskii, who surveyed the Chukotka coast in 1924, went so far as

to argue for an international accord to protect the walrus; see GARF F. 3977, Op. 1 D. 11, L. 19.

395

The manuscript of Mallu (Matlu in Russian), an early Yupik Soviet leader, shows great commitment to the communist

cause. ChOKM, Matlu, Avtobiografiia (Rasskaz Matliu), Coll. N. 5357. I am glossing over the multiple administrative

reforms carried out during the first Soviet decades, and much of the detail of Soviet recruitment among the Yupik,

especially as related to historical clan structures. For details, see Krupnik and Chlenov, Yupik Transitions, 225-242.

396

GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 33, L. 31, 6.

397

G.T. Emmons, “Condition and Needs of the Natives of Alaska,” S. Doc No. 106, 58

Cong. 3d Sess. (1905) 6.

398

F.E. Kleinschmidt, “A Day of Blood,” The Pacific Monthly No. 6 (June 1910): 561-579, 569.

just literacy but “the native ways and mode of living, which of necessity they must know to earn a

livelihood…The natives have their way of living, which experience has taught is best for this

country.”

399

But this “mode of living” also needed to produce a surplus for the market. After 1924,

Alaskan natives were granted the right to vote, but full entry into the American franchise required

participation in the national rites of commerce and ownership.

400

The Inupiat, even those without

any particular ideological commitment to making themselves American, now lived an industrially-

inflected life. Using rifles, ammunition, and motor boats required an income. Income required

producing a profitable surplus. Along the northwestern coastline, the options for Inupiat and Yupik

to make such a living were few. There was reindeer herding, fox farming, sometimes wage labor in

mining towns. And there were walruses.

For whom and for what purpose walruses should rightfully die was, however, still in

question. Since the Game Laws of 1902 and 1908, walrus in Alaska had been legally separated from

commerce. Their normative use was limited to native subsistence. But there was still market

demand, especially for ivory. In the years before Soviet control, the trade in walrus parts avoided

American fines by hunting in Russian waters.

401

But with Bolshevik patrols off the Chukotka coast,

hunting for Alaskan ivory became more attractive. In remote villages, indigenous hunters could

usually kill unobserved and sell raw ivory in the bars and back alleys of Nome, where it tricked out

to the wider world. Ships hunted in international waters. Even the ice worked against the three-mile

limit of national control, allowing hunters to walk the frozen ocean past U.S. jurisdiction and kill for

ivory legally.

402

Where, by whom, and for what purpose a walrus was killed and its ivory or hide

entered the market was difficult to trace or control.

Not all observers were worried about the indigenous harvest. One teacher reported that he

could justify the “killing of large numbers of walrus because they form a large part of the livelihood

of these peoples.”

403

Missionary Benedict Lafortune wrote that “were it not for [the ivory] all the

King Islanders would have to be put on relief. The seals give them their food and fuel, and the

walrus give them their clothes and ammunition and outboard motors etc. etc.”

404

By the 1930s, the

Bureau of Indian Affairs actively cultivated indigenous ivory-carvers and marketed their work as part

of an “industrial education…in the economics of their Arctic life,” a practice that tacitly encouraged

hunting for ivory.

405

399

J.P. Olson, “Teller Orphanage Closed,” Eskimo Land, Missionary Paper of Igloo Alaska, No. 17 (April, 1933): 2

400

In 1915, Alaska natives who had “adopted the habits of a civilized life” could become a citizen – with five white

sponsors and after a judge’s hearing. In 1924 the right to vote was given to all indigenous Alaskans.

401

Some trade in ivory also went on in Alaska during this period, although numbers are lacking. In 1911, for example,

the Cutter Service reported finding walrus killed just for their ivory; see Report of the Bear, 1911, NARA MD RG 48

Central Classified File 1907-1936, File 6-12.

402

Statement of John Buckland October 9, 1914, NARA MD RG 22, Reports and Related Records 1869-1937, Entry 91;

Statement of Ira Rank, October 31, 1928, NARA MD RG 22, Reports and Related Records 1869-1937, Entry 91.

403

C. Sullivan to Claude Hirst, September 17 1936, NARA AK RG 75, Alaska Reindeer Service Administrative

Correspondence 1934-1953.

404

B. Lafortune to Claude Hirst, August 18 1939, NARA AK RG 75, Alaska Reindeer Service Administrative

Correspondence 1934-1953. See also F.A. Zeusler to Claude Hirst, August 19, 1936, NARA AK RG 75, Alaska Reindeer

Service Administrative Correspondence 1934-1953.

405

Joseph Chilberg, George A Diamond, G.L. Lomen and Conrad Freeding to the Secretary of Commerce and Labor,

July 7 1919. NARA MD RG 22 Reports and Related Records 1869-1937 Entry 91.

Agents for the BIA and the Bureau of Biological Survey, however, were concerned that

native hunters were too focused on making tusks into cash, imperiling the biological future of the

walrus and the economic future of northern peoples. Without an accurate census of the herd or the

annual harvest in Alaska, no government agency had a grasp of whether or not the population was

rising or falling. Nor did government agents have particular faith in indigenous prudence when it

came to hunting. In a 1925 article widely circulated among game managers, Joseph Bernard

observed how hunters seldom “bring anything but the ivory tusks ashore. Thus they sacrifice tons of

good meat.”

406

Accounts of headless or tuskless walrus washing up along the coast in the 1920s and

1930s alarmed the Bureau of Biological Survey enough to stop the export of walrus products from

Alaska from 1928-1930. The Yupik of Gambell, on St. Lawrence Island went a step further, passing

an ordinance restricting their kill to the number of animals needed for food and clothing.

407

Both indigenous hunters and government agents were trying to reconcile the tensions of

producing a profitable surplus with northern ecology ill-disposed to produce at a commercial level.

In the interwar years, capitalist demand seemed ready to take more walrus than the species could

supply. Yet the demand for walrus was one of the few things that allowed the Yupik and Inupiat to

participate in the market like their fellow citizens. Selling raw ivory or carvings for profit was a

critical part of rolling back indigenous otherness. In 1941, in an effort to reconcile the local need to

produce with the danger of consuming too much, Congress restricted walrus hunting to indigenous

peoples. Selling raw ivory was illegal, as was killing walrus specifically for their tusks. It was a legal

innovation meant to privilege both particular use and particular users of walrus.

408

Because the

market logic of supply and demand historically asked more than the ocean could give, indigenous

people became the only hunters legally able take. Yupik and Inupiat were made different in order to

participate in the civic and economic sameness of commerce.

BY THE MIDDLE of the twentieth century, access to walrus bodies in America became a

special privilege. In the Soviet Union, walruses were seen as of potential use to all. The border

between the United States and the Soviet Union was still permeable for man and beast, but the line

now defined a different set of relationships between what the icy coastlines produced, the local form

of production, and the national aspirations for both. By the 1930s, the scope of Soviet aspirations

for walrus, and for everything, was on the rise. Subsistence was a satisfactory goal in the 1920s, but

insufficient once Stalin was in power. Soviets needed tangible proof of ideological fealty and

economic progress. Neither Marx nor Lenin offered an especially precise description of what real

existing socialism would look like, but ever-expanding annual production was a quantifiable way to

prove advance on the road to communism. In Chukotka, where production had little agricultural or

industrial potential, walrus were valuable as a rare source of harvestable fat and other raw materials.

But Stalinist walrus needed produce more – in hides, ivory, and blubber – than early communist

walrus, or capitalist walrus. The question was how.

406

Joseph Bernard, “Walrus Protection in Alaska,” Journal of Mammalogy, Vol. 6 No. 2 (May, 1925): 100-102, 100.

407

Francis H. Fay, Pacific Walrus Investigations on St. Lawrence Island, Alaska (Anchorage: Alaska Cooperative Wildlife Unit,

1958), 4. This local conservation ethic was not shared by all North American walrus hunting communities; King Island

and the Diomedes had a reputation for aggressive hunting in this period.

408

“Protection of Walrus in Alaska,” 77

Cong. 1

Sess. H. Report No. 883 (1941), 2.

The Stalinist practice of communist ideology had an answer. Development among the small

people of the north needed to look like development everywhere else, since collectivization and

industrialization were “the basic and decisive element in the creation of the socialist economy, and in

the transformation of the economic modes, as well as in social consciousness and psychology.”

409

Once collectivized, production would increase. Increased production would make people conscious

communists. And Stalin’s Five Year Plans demanded this transformation as soon as possible. There

were no more allowances, as Committee of the North member Anatolii Skachko wrote, for people

“who, because of their extreme backwardness, cannot keep up either economically or culturally with

the breakneck speed of the emerging socialist society.”

410

The Committee of the North had to

abandon their plans for a graduated march toward socialism.

411

Keeping up was mandatory in the

1930s. It was no longer permissible to be extremely backward or less than extremely productive.

It was, however, quite possible to be an enemy. Across the Soviet Union, collectivization

was accompanied by the hunt for any dissenting voice or remnant of capitalism, imagined or

otherwise. Among the reindeer Chukchi, resistance to collectivization was fierce, and the hunt for

class enemies was brutal. But when the early ad-hoc coastal hunting artels were rapidly converted

into more formally administered collective farms (kolkhozy) in the late 1920s, the Soviets found few

class enemies along the coasts. Collective hunting was traditional, especially among the Yupik, as

was sharing the catch. Communist hunting parties retained many features of their pre-Soviet form.

The shift to full state oversight of catch distribution and state-mandated annual hunting targets was

thus not an unbearable intrusion into community life. As a result, there were few class enemies for

Soviets to arrest. A few men and women were charged with practicing shamanism, since the Soviets

were ideologically committed to replacing spiritual belief with communist rationality, and traditional

leaders with party fealty. The charge was used to evict Ekker, an interloping Chukchi man who had

taken control of the walrus haul-out on Arakamchechen Island with his ability to “kill by casting a

spell.”

412

The campaign against him was led by Matlu, a devoted Yupik communist who used the

Soviet rhetoric that “shamans ruined the people” to force Ekker’s removal – an outcome that

simultaneously restored traditional Yupik hunting access and fell in line with Soviet politics. Even

when he was finally evicted, Ekker went peacefully.

413

And except for these campaigns against

shamans, the Chukchi coast transitioned into collectives with little open resistance or violence.

414

the late 1930s, virtually the entire coastline was collectivized.

409

V.N. Uvachan, The Peoples of the North and Their Road to Socialism (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975), 149.

410

Anatolii Skachko, “Problemy severa,” Sovetskii sever No. 1 (1930): 15-37, 33

411

The Committee on the North attempted to temper the pace of industrial change by creating regional ethnic territories

that would offer some degree of protection from rapid development. See Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 269-275. This effort

was mostly subsumed under increasing industrialization pressures lead by the Main Administration of the Northern Sea

Route (GUSMP) and Dal’stroi, the eastern branch of the Gulag, discussed in chapter 4.

412

ChOKM, Tikhon Semushkin Collection, “Predvaritel’nye materialy,” 34.

413

Matlu, Avtobiografiia. Records indicate Ekker lived in Lavrentiya until the late 1930s but it is unclear what happens to

him during the purge years. His children did survive the late 1930s. See Krupnik and Chlenov, Yupik Transitions, 234.

414

The relative peacefulness of collectivization was especially notable among the Yupik, where Krupnik and Chlenov

argue that most Yupik were loyal and fairly involved in Soviet activities in this period; see Yupik Transitions, 230-232. For

a case of open resistance, see Peter Schweitzer and Evgeniy Golovko, “The ‘Priests’ of East Cape: A Religious

Movement on the Chukchi Peninsula during the 1920s and 1930s” Etudes/Inuit/Studies No. 31 Vol. 1-2 (2007): 39-58.

There is considerable nostalgia among Yupik elders for this period, well discussed in Anna Kerttula, Antler on the Sea: The

Yup’ik and Chukchi of the Russian Far East (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2000).

If the Soviets found the coastal indigenous population generally willing to participate in the

new socialist economic form, however, they still needed to make walrus flesh follow. In the 1920s,

collectives harvested less than 1500 walrus per year on average.

415

Local leaders and national

planners alike were underwhelmed. Party meetings in the 1930s spent hours discussing how to

increase, standardize, and make predictable the marine mammal catch. One answer was technology.

A typical report from 1931 noted the need to “streamline and strengthen the fisheries ability to

harvest raw materials…especially with power motors.”

416

Soviet planners worried that walrus hides

and lipids were wasted because of inefficient processing. As one report noted, walruses killed on

land were sometimes not butchered for “many days, which will undoubtedly partially deterred walrus

[from returning] and reduces the quality of the products (hides and meat).”

417

Another party official

was concerned that “60% of sea animals killed -seal, bearded seal, walrus - remain in the sea,

especially in spring and summer,” which wasted useful fat.

418

The loss of pelagic kills was especially

worrisome after the small ships Temp and the Nazhim began hunting walrus at sea in 1934. And even

salvaged hides were often used for decidedly un-communist ends. Walrus tents were not a sign of

progress. Skin boats needed to be supplanted with motorized, metal versions. There was a correct

way to use a walrus, and it was for fat. “From our current moment where the colossal supply of fat

is used totally unproductively,” one report noted walrus lipids could be put to “technological

purposes,” through “an artisanal blubber processing industry. On this path, the population would

receive another item to export, which would give them high profits.”

419

Even walruses were called

upon to lubricate the Stalinist drive to industrialize.

By the late 1930s, communism in numbers was starting to appear. Almost 6000 animals were

harvested in 1937 by brigades hunting from shore, and nearly 2500 more at sea.

420

Communism

appeared in other ways: schools opened along the coastline, filled with students who, as one early

pupil recalled, initially “didn’t understand a word” of Russian but learned to read in old trader’s

cabins with “nothing more than a blackboard.”

421

Party meetings discussed building hospitals and

the need for electricity. Communist ideology replaced hunting rituals, often due to pressure from

indigenous activists who, as one Yupik man recalled, “agitated that we ought to stop observing our

festivals. They had to be tossed out altogether.”

422

Collectives were increasingly successful in “the

hunting of large marine mammals, strengthening the capacity to save fat and sea mammal

415

The records from these years are incomplete, unlike later Soviet walrus tallies. For the complete counts of walrus

harvested, see Igor Krupnik and Ludmila Bogoslovskaia, Ecosystem Variability and Anthropogenic Hunting Pressure in the Bering

Strait Area (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution 1998), 109.

416

RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4, D. 974, L. 128. These collectives also hunted other marine mammal species.

417

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 329, L. 51.

418

GAMO F. P-12, Op. 1, D. 14, L. 8.

419

GARF F. 3799, Op. 1, D. 11, L. 40.

420

Krupnik and Bogoslovskaia, Ecosystem Variability, 109; Francis H. Fay and C. Edward Bowlby, The Harvest of Pacific

Walrus, 1931-1989 (Anchorage, AK: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Technical Report, 1994), 20.

421

V. Veyi, “Razkaz Vyie,” in Nikolai Vakhtin, Iazyk sirennkskikh eskimosov: teksty, grammaticheskie i slovarnye materialy

(Muenchen: Incom Europa, 2000), 16.

422

Andrei Kukilgin interview, in Igor Krupnik, Pust’ govoriat nashi stariki: rasskazy aziatskikh eskimosov-iupik, Zapisi 1977-

1987 g.g. (Moscow: Institut naslediia, 2000), 267. Some of these festivals lived on in truncated, private forms for a few

more decades before mostly dying out, although some remained in altered and scaled-down form. Seek Krupnik and

Chlenov, Yupik Transitions, 256-257.

skins…and training how to hunt, slaughter and process marine mammals, and render fat.”

423

1938, the Soviets harvested over 8000 walruses, an annual catch not seen since the nineteenth

century.

424

With catch numbers matching communist plants, it seemed as if walrus hunters had

escaped their backward cycles of unchanging unpredictability. Communist history was overcoming

natural history.

REVOLUTION IN SPACE, 1940S-1960S

1938 was the highpoint of Soviet walrus hunts. The annual catch fell to about 4500 animals

in 1940, and almost a thousand fewer were killed the following year. The timing of the decline was

inopportune. In 1941, Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. The Red Army needed to march, but their

stomachs were often empty. As the director of the Soviet whaling fleet N.A. Egorov pointed out,

war left an “insufficient supply of fat in the country.”

425

Egorov’s solution was to increase the

marine mammal kill. Walrus could yield useful lipids, if Chukotka’s “artisanal processing method,”

was replaced with centralized rendering facilities able to double the production of useful products.

426

Egorov’s projection was not so easy to realize in practice. In 1942, kolkhozy in Chukotka harvested

less than half the number of walrus planned.

427

Discussions of the low harvest, however, blamed

technology rather than biology. “Our motors,” one report concluded, “are not designed for

continuous operation with a heavy load,” and were exposed to “rain and damp, not to speak of the

storms which happen so frequently in the north-eastern sea.”

428

Yet the harvest went on: never

meeting the dictates of the plan, but always with the expectation that plans could be satisfied. The

value of the walrus was in their potential to feed an army, and to fill plans.

In the United States, the war years also made walrus desirable, although not on the scale or

for the reasons demanded by the fat-starved Soviets. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor and

Japanese landfall in the Aleutian Islands, maritime Alaska became the focus of intensive military

intervention, even as far north as the Bering Straits. Lend-lease planes flew from Nome to Russia.

The military built instillations on St. Lawrence Island. Paul Tiulana was drafted. Three hundred

thousand military personnel came into Alaska over the course of the war. Few had cause to interact

directly with walrus. The U.S. military did not feed its men or lubricate its engines with walrus fat.

But the flux of people into remote villages provided a surging market “for both carved and uncarved

ivory…and thus stimulated the harvest of walruses.”

429

By 1944, agents from the Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) were convinced that Alaskan

natives were killing too many walrus, for ivory and because it “is the propensity of the Eskimo to

shoot at anything he sees.” Although reports from local teachers varied considerably in their

423

RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4 D. 974, L. 87.

424

Fay and Bowlby, The Harvest, 20.

425

GARF F. R-5664, Op. 46, D. 1137, L. 3.

426

GARF F. R-5664, Op. 46, D. 1137, L.15.

427

GAMO F. P-22, Op. 1 D. 122, L. 4, 81.

428

GAMO F. P-22 Op. 1 D. 213, L. 71.

429

John L. Buckley, The Pacific Walrus: A Review of Current Knowledge and Suggested Management Needs (Washington D.C.:

Government Printing Office, 1958), 2. For a discussion of what WWII spending did for Alaska, see Stephen Haycox,

Alaska: An American Colony, (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 257-272.

assessments of indigenous wastefulness, the Bureau of Indian Affairs concurred.

430

The indigenous

hunters, meanwhile, killed according to their ongoing belief that walrus spirits could not be

antagonized by overharvest lest they “return to their own kind to report on how they had been

treated.”

431

Without the Soviet’s meticulous harvest accounting, however, neither the BIA nor the

FWS had accurate tallies of annual kills or the size of the herd. What the agencies did know was that

indigenous independence from the federal dole was ideologically and practically important, and

independence required walrus for food and crafts. Moreover, Japanese landfall in Alaska, and by the

end of the war, mounting tension with Russia, made the presence of American citizens along

Alaska’s coast strategically important.

432

In 1942, the sovereign benefits of the Yupik and Inupiat

were made explicit with the formation of the Alaska Territorial Guard, a reserve unit of

“Eskimo…some of the wilyest [sic] breeds of fighting men known to the north American

continent.”

433

The ATG spent the next five years patrolling the coast with military-issue guns and

ocean-issue foodstuffs.

IN CHUKOTKA, THE possibility of Japanese invasion from the sea also militarized the region.

Lend-lease planes landed in Uel’kal, Provideniya, and Anadyr. In 1941, the military installed heavy

artillery across the bay from the deep-water port at Lavrentiya. Strategically, the best location for the

battery was in the village of Avan, where soldiers “learned to shoot,” as Yuri Pukhlouk recalled.

“But we were taken away from there, so we wouldn’t bother it.”

434

Pukhlouk and his family, like the

other Yupik residents of Avan, were moved to the larger settlement of Ureliki. For the Soviets,

unlike the Americans, concluded that its indigenous residents were more a risk to security than a

vanguard of northern sovereignty. It was a worry that outlasted the war, and hardened the territorial

distinction between Asia and North America. In the early years of Soviet control, the border had

been open enough for a Norwegian Lutheran missionary to proselytize in Chukotka.

435

Even in the

1930s, the border remained essentially open, with the Soviets requiring only perfunctory checks after

1938.

436

As a result, a small but steady current of people came and went across sovereign lines. Then,

in the summer of 1948, seventeen American citizens from Little Diomede set off to visit friends and

relatives on Soviet Big Diomede. Before reaching the island, a Soviet patrol arrested the party and

430

Albert Heinrich to Clifford Presnall, March 20 1945, NARA MD RG 22 Entry P-285. Heinrich noted that while the

Little Diomede hunters he was describing killed more walrus than necessary, they were not like the King Island natives

who hunted specifically for ivory. Presnall had read Bernard’s description of walrus preservation at Ichoun, Chukotka,

and wanted to see if a similar method was used or could be implemented in Alaska. See Kathleen Kimble to Clifford

Presnall, February 5, 1945, NARA MD RG 22 Entry P-285.

431

Margaret Seeganna, quoted in Lawrence Kaplan and Margaret Yocom, Ugiuvangmiut Quliapyuit - King Island Tales:

Eskimo History and Legends from Bering Strait (Fairbanks: Alaska Native Language Center, 1988), 25. Seeganna was born in

1914 and spent her childhood on King Island.

432

A. Day to Office of Indian Affairs, November 30 1944, NARA DC RG 75 Central Classified File 1940-1957.

433

M.R. Maraton, Major U.S. Army to Captain Sterling G. Croell, December 12 1942, NARA DC RG 75, BIA Central

Classified File 1940-1957.

434

Krupnik, Pust’, 499.

435

APRCA, Oscar Brown Papers, Box 1, p. 18-19. This missionary work may have been related to one of the few open

rebellions against Soviet power, described in Schweitzer and Golovko, “The ‘Priests’ of East Cape.”

436

Copies of the permissions filed with the Soviet government can be found in NARA AK RG 75, Mission

Correspondence 1935-1968.

detained them for weeks. The border guards informed the American Yupik that, concurrent with the

Berlin airlift, the Soviets had ended all exchange with the U.S. along the Bering Strait.

437

On paper, the Cold War froze the crossing between Asia and North America for forty years.

On land, foreign – now enemy – territory remained in the minds of both states perilously close.

Rowing from St. Lawrence Island to Russian Chaplino took twenty-four hours, less by motorboat.

In the United States, Alaska was seen as a likely point of Soviet invasion, necessitating that Alaska

become a “bristling bastille and a major launching point in any future push-button war against any

aggressor Nation in the northern hemisphere.”

438

J. Edgar Hoover worried about the loyalty of

Bering Strait residents.

439

In Chukotka, the desire to make the border impermeable probably

contributed to the decision of Chukotkan authorities to close more villages.

440

In 1948, the twenty or

so people living on Big Diomede were relocated to Naukan. A decade later, the population of

Naukan was dispersed to Lavrentiya, Pinakul’, and Nunyamo. The latter two settlements were in

turn closed over the next decades. Coastal populations, with their kinship ties, linguistic forms, local

hunting sites, and traditions, were dispersed among ethnic Russians, Chukchi reindeer herders and,

at bases like Lavrentiya, the multiethnic ship crews. Consolidation and ethnic mixing was not a new

process on the Bering Straits, but under the Soviets the scope and tempo amplified. From 1937 to

1955, the number of inhabited coastal villages in Chukotka dropped from ninety to thirteen.

For Soviet officials and local boosters, village consolidation was presented as a communist

intervention for health and safety. Naukan residents were told they lived in a seismically active

region, while Chaplino’s drinking water was deemed unpotable.

441

Everywhere people were

promised better housing and employment. The less publicized goal was to move coastal Yupik

people, many with family and ethnic ties in the United States, into population centers where local

identity was more easily subsumed by the leveling force of daily Soviet practices. It made the borders

less prone to leak along the lines of shared history and kinship. For the people involved, the physical

process of moving was badly planned and rushed, and new settlements were unfinished and dismal.

Nina Akuken, a Naukan resident, recalled leaving the village “crying the entire way” and not having

time to “go to the graves to bid farewell” to buried ancestors. Upon arriving in Nunyamo, her family

found “unfinished houses. Nothing was plastered, and there was no stove.”

442

At Chaplino, residents

were moved so quickly they left pots of soup still boiling. In their new settlement at Tkachen Bay,

437

See Schweitzer and Golovko, “The ‘Priests’ of East Cape,” 45.

438

Bureau of Reclamation, Report on the Future of Alaska, 1947, NARA MD RG 48 Central Classified File 1937-1953

439

For a discussion of Cold War diplomacy and its aftermath, see Michael Krauss, “Crossroads? A Twentieth-Century

History of Contacts across the Bering Strait,” in Anthropology of the North Pacific Rim, William W. Fitzhugh and Valerie

Chaussonnet eds. (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994), 365-379.

440

Security concerns were not part of the public discussion of village closures, or in archival sources I found. That

security was on the minds of planners seems especially likely given that two villages with the most connections and

historical tie to Alaska were closed – Naukan and Chaplino. Krupnik and Chlenov make a similar observation regarding

the lack of open discussion of security by the state in Yupik Transitions, 271.

441

This is particularly true after 1957, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Soviet Ministers

adopted Decree No. 300, “On Measures for Further Development of the Economy and Culture of the Peoples of the

North,” which focused on increasing the indigenous standard of living, especially housing. Khruschev was also in the

process of reforming collective farming. See Tobias Holzlehner, “Engineering Socialism: A History of Village

Relocations in Chukotka, Russia,” in S.D. Brunn ed. Engineering Earth: The Impacts of Megaengineering Projects, (Dordrecht,

Netherlands: Springer Science + Business Media, 2011), 1957-73.

442

Nina Akuken, quoted in Krupnik and Chlenov Yupik Transitions, 274-275.

“Nothing was right in some way,” Vladimir Tagitutkak recalled, because “I didn’t hunt

anymore…everyone was put into construction.”

443

Moving people far enough from the ice to be

safe, from a sovereign perspective, was detrimental to hunting; without access to marine mammals,

transplanted hunters became unskilled labor in towns like Novo Chaplino and Provideniya. The

promises of real existing socialist housing, schools, hospitals, or the triumphant benefits of working

on a state farm were often not forthcoming.

The disorientation and loss of displacement was not experienced only by Soviet Yupik and

Chukchi. In Alaska, the first half of the twentieth century saw numerous sites used by semi-nomadic

hunters abandoned for the permanent settlements around mission schools and other

infrastructure.

444

King Island, where Paul Tiulana learned to hunt walrus and ugruk on the ice as a

young man, and re-learned after being wounded in the Second World War, was gradually shuttered

in the 1950s. Tuberculosis was endemic on the island and many hunters moved to Nome for

treatment. Other families moved to the mainland so their children could complete high school. The

final blow to the Inupiat settlement came when the BIA closed the King Island school in 1958. Six

years later, with the island essentially abandoned and its former inhabitants living outside Nome, the

BIA described them as “in a period of adjustment and it is quite true it is a painful one,” the people

caught between their “inherent desire of hunting and fishing and the advantages of permanent work

and accessibility to the facilities of public schools, hospitals, stores, and other facilities available at

Nome.”

445

Tiulana recalled the closure of the island with frustration, rejecting in his old age the

contradictions imposed by resettlement and the facilities of Nome: “On the one hand we are told

that we have to go to school to make a living, more income, cash for our pockets to buy better

things for ourselves…We have to learn to compete with Mother Nature, and nobody knows what

Mother Nature is going to do.”

446

MODERN SOCIETY ON the Asian side of the Straits was, in the early 1950s, still trying to win

the competition with the forces of nature. Despite the fact that walrus hunters had continued

difficulty fulfilling their annual plans for pounds of fat and yards of skin, the country was under new

ideological pressure to make socialism a reality. Among the many changes that came following the

death of Stalin in 1953, the Soviet north was the subject of economic and social reforms meant to

cast out the shadow of the Gulag and finally integrate the cold periphery into the Soviet body

politic.

447

Some of this integration was ethnic, as more non-natives moved north and native

northerners were moved into larger towns. And in the towns, integration came from building the

trappings of civilization: the state constructed new houses, schools, medical facilities, post offices,

stores, electrical plants and roads. The rate and results of this construction were often far from the

443

Krupnik, Pust’, 218.

444

See for example Elizabeth Marino, Losing Ground: An Ethnography of Vulnerability and Climate Change in Shishmaref,

Alaska (PhD Dissertation: University of Alaska, Fairbanks, 2012), 138-139.

445

R.E. McLean to Robert Bennett, September 21 1965, NARA AK RG 75 Mission Correspondence 1935-1968. For an

overview of the relocation and its aftermath see Deanna Kingston and Elizabeth Marino, “Twice Removed: King

Islanders’ Experience of ‘Community’ through Two Relocations,” Human Organization Vol. 69 No. 2 (Summer 2010):

119-128.

446

Senungetuk and Tiulana, A Place for Winter, 38-40.

447

See Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors, 337-345 for a discussion of the “thaw” and the far north .

ideal – “of the planned construction for 1954 only four properties have been completed,” one Party

report noted, the issue being the lack of “construction timber.”

448

But gradually walrus-hide yarangas

were replaced with apartment blocks that looked like those in any Soviet town from the Baltic to the

Pacific.

The reforms were above all about making more surplus issue from coast and tundra, the

economic proof of socialist progress. In many ways, the 1950s brought to the far north the industrial

and urbanizing emphasis that Stalinism and WWII had initiated earlier in the south. Small kolkhozy,

where the workers owned the means of production, were merged into to sovkozy, where the state was

ultimate owner. The number of Chuktokan collectives contracted from forty-six to twenty six in the

eight years following Stalin’s death.

449

And with the ukrepnenie (consolidation), production was

expected to increase. The language of the reforms borrowed from industrial factory work, with

awards set for hunters who applied “Stakhanovite work practices by overfilling the annual

production plans.”

450

In this climate, hunting from shore was seen as primitive. During the early

years of Khrushchev’s reforms, state-owned vessels with non-native crews increased pelagic hunting,

sometimes selling back the catch to former walrus hunters now staffing mechanized Chukotkan

marine-mammal processing plants.

451

In the short term, the results followed socialist logic: the 1950s

saw a surge in the number of walrus killed. Over five thousand animals were harvested by ships and

collectives in 1955 alone.

452

While human borders had become firm along the Bering Straits by the 1950s, they were not

meaningful demarcations for walruses. The absences left by Soviet harvests were felt across the

Straits, especially on the Bering Sea islands. But hunting for ivory also remained problematic for

conservationists. Observers in the BIA and FWS worried that Yupik and Inupiat killed too many

walrus and wasted much of the meat.

453

Biologist Francis Fay concluded that the walrus herd could

not survive unrestricted killing.

454

The reason for a declining herd was not a mystery on the

coastlines. As a Yupik man on St. Lawrence Island told the local teacher, “‘It looks like we are

saving the walrus for the Russians,’” an observation the teacher seconded, writing that “with the

killing taking place among the United States and Siberian Eskimos I do not see how the herd can

exist very long.”

455

It was not an inaccurate assessment. The herd has lost probably half its number

by the mid-1950s.

456

448

GAMO F. R-22 Op. 1 D. 659, L. 9. Northern construction was often plagued with problems, from the structural

difficulties of building on permafrost to bad insulation. The degree of continuous disrepair that resulted legitimated, in

the argument of Nicolai Ssorin-Chaikov’s The Social Life of the State in Subarctic Siberia (Stanford: Stanford University Press,

2003).

449

Е.Е. Selitrennik, “Nekotorye voprosy kolkhoznogo stroitel’stva v Chukotskom natsional’nom okruge,” Sovetskaia

etnografiia No. 1 (1965): 13-27, 16.

450

GAMO F. P-12 Op. 1 D. 84, L. 107. Stakhanovites were exceptionally productive workers.

451

See Krupnik and Chlenov, Yupik Transitions, 282-283 for a discussion of how pelagic fishing and relocations were tied

together at Plover Bay.

452

Krupnik and Bogoslovskaia, Ecosystem Variability, 109.

453

Brooks, “The Pacific Walrus and Its Importance to the Eskimo Economy,” 503-511.

454

Clarence J. Rhode to William H. Olsen, February 1956, NARA AK RG 75 Juneau Area Office 1933-1963, File 923.2.

See also Dale Belcher to L.B. Williams, June 4, 1954, NARA AK RG 75 Juneau Area Office 1933-1963, File 937.

455

Albert Reed to General Commissioner for Indian Affairs, August 12 1947, NARA AK RG 75, Juneau Area Office

1933-1963, File 920.

456

Fay, Kelly and Sease, “Managing the Exploitation of Pacific Walruses,” 4.

The United States was rather behind the times when it came to understanding the Pacific

walrus. Annual catch records were not kept until 1959. In the Soviet Union counting dead walrus,

like counting anything else associated with production, was ritualized in annual and Five Year plans.

Moreover, Soviet marine biologists began observing Chukotka’s walrus in the 1930s. Twenty years

later, they were well aware that the population was in decline. Of “33 former coastal concentrations

on the Chukotsk Peninsula,” wrote biologist S.E. Kleinenberg “only 3” remained in 1954.

457

The

result, as the Academy of Sciences reported to the Council of Soviets, was “a significant reduction in

the number of walruses, which has a very painful effect on the situation of the local indigenous

population of the Chukchi and Eskimo, for whom walrus hunting provides necessary food and

household items.”

458

Walruses had, in essence, stopped obeying the promise that socialist production, once

organized in large farms and armed with sophisticated technology, would continue to grow. It was

an uneasy position, ideologically. Marx promised utopia when humans bent the non-human world

completely to serve human needs. Soviet practice conflated increased production with serving

people, whether the products were needed or not.

459

Falling productivity signaled communist retreat.

But so did the threat of actual hunger in remote villages.

Admitting that walruses had their own limits was made thinkable in part by Stalin’s death:

under Khrushchev, prior excess could be ascribed to prior leadership. The thaw in international

communication also helped. Marine biologists were able to meet foreign colleagues. A 1954 meeting

of the International Union for the Protection of Nature proved especially helpful to the walrus, as

Soviet delegates left the meeting convinced that conservation of Arctic species had “high urgency

and not just internal, but international, importance.”

460

It was also a chance to make the U.S.S.R. a

leader in world issues. While socialism might generally mean more production, it could also mean

comparatively smarter production. “Capitalist and colonial countries,” explained a report on

conservation measures, experienced the “profound and irreversible depletion of natural

resources…before they realized the need for conservation. The Soviet Union cannot and should not

repeat this path.”

461

Or, as Kleinenberg pointed out, capitalist countries brought their walrus stocks

to a “catastrophic condition,” while in the U.S.S.R. walrus were “preserved in bigger numbers.”

462

Cold War pride required keeping them that way.

The fate of national minorities along the Chukchi border also required. As early as 1950, the

Sixth District Party Conference discussed the “decisive and radical reconstruction” of Chukotkan

fishing, including a prohibition on harvesting walrus in open water due to the large number of dead

457

S. E. Kleinenberg “Ob okrane morzha,” Priroda No. 7 (July 1957), trans. D.E. Sergeant, Fisheries Research Board of

Canada Translation Series No. 199 (Montreal: Fisheries Research Board, 1959), 5.

458

RGAE F. 544 Op. 1 D. 32, L. 13.

459

See for example Karl Marx, “Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844,” and “Capital, Volume One,” The

Marx -Engels Reader , ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York, 1978), 76, 345.

460

RGAE F. 544, Op. 1 D. 32, L. 1. For more context on international ties and their importance to conservation efforts,

see Douglas Weiner, A Little Corner of Freedom: Russian Nature Protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1999), 261-282.

461

RGAE F. 544 Op. 1 D. 60. L. 3. “Conservation” is an American term – the Soviets generally used “nature

protection.”

462

Kleinenberg, “Ob okrane morzha,” 5.

animals that sank, unused.

463

Chukotka without walrus ran the risk of “losing the cash income from

sea mammal hunting, which is the age-old and main source of livelihood for the Chukchi and

Eskimo collective farmers.”

464

Suddenly producing more was subsumed by the need not to consume

too much. In 1956, at the urging of the Academy of Sciences, the Soviet Ministers of the RSFSR

passed a decree prohibiting industrial pelagic hunting. On land, indigenous kolkhozy could kill walrus

for subsistence purposes, but the “purchase of fat and hide” by other organizations was prohibited,

as was killing nursing females.

465

It took several years for these regulations to make their way from

decree in Moscow to practice in Chukotka, but by the 1960s, only about a thousand walrus were

killed per year, and only by indigenous hunters.

466

THE SLEEPING ICE

In 1972, the U.S. and U.S.S.R. signed the Environmental Protection Agreement, which formalized

joint management of arctic and subarctic regions, and their wildlife. The United States and the

Soviet Union decided the species was necessary for the ongoing habitation of their northern

borderlands. The walrus harvest in both countries was restricted to indigenous peoples. Curtailing

the walrus hunt for the sake of the walrus also meant curtailing indigenous participation in the

national rituals of production and consumption on both sides of the Straits. Within the United

States, with its devotion to productive liberty, not all were free to kill walrus; in the Soviet Union,

where equality was ideologically paramount, not all had equal access to the hunt. The legislation

ended a century of punctuated catastrophes for the walrus: the commercial killing in the 1870s and

1880s, again in the early twentieth century, and followed by twenty years of unrestrained communist

pursuit starting in the 1930s.

The legislation also showed that the value of walrus was determined outside of strict

accordance with capitalist or communist ideals. In the U.S., conservationists, biologists, and

bureaucrats concluded that the free market valued the animals irrationally, as it was unable to

prevent overkill. Their communist counterparts found Marxist technological promises, with the

assumed ability to increase production year after year, a bad match with reality. In both countries,

the value of sovereignty and the realities of ecology reshaped the practice of ideology. The desire to

people the shoreline border meant that communist and capitalist states alike required walrus energy.

Dependence on the walrus required not killing them all for an idea. The appetite of the capitalist

market and the socialist collective – the former sometimes overly demanding, the latter potentially

infinitely so – were abridged to protect the livelihoods of the few people the state could depend

upon to live on the arctic shore. Conservation was, essentially, a program of local energy supply long

before legislation like the Endangered Species Act conferred on the walrus the intrinsic right to

exist, or before indigenous peoples began pushing for recognition of a traditional right to hunt.

463

GAMO F. P-12 Op. 1, D. 89, L.13. This measure also called for a protected zone around Wrangell Island. Open

water hunting did not stop for over a decade.

464

GARF F. A-259, Op. 7, D. 8580, L. 4.

465

Kleinenberg, “Ob okrane morzha,” 5.

466

Krupnik and Bogoslovskaia, Ecosystem Variability, 109.

In the United States, ideas about conservation grew up alongside the practice of commercial

hunting. Capitalism was always open for debate. These debates, about the proper relationship

between the market, the state, and non-human things thrust differing ideas about value into the

discussion of walrus, sovereignty, and indigenous peoples from the beginning. The politics of who

should kill a walrus when and for what purpose had a long history of wariness toward market

solutions. The Soviet Union took longer to arrive at a conservationist program, but communism also

proved able to accommodate ways of valuing walrus beyond their productive potential. There were

essentially no debates about the value of walrus in the 1930s or 1940s, and those that emerged in the

1950s did so within the framework of Cold War competition. But as in the United States, the

discussion of the worth of the species – was it for its energy alone, for its ability to create capitalist

or communist producers, for sovereign preservation, or intrinsic to the species – drew on values

external to market or communal relations. Through these values, the Soviets and the Americans

produced mirrored policies. Capitalists tempered the free market, and communists adopted hunting

regulations influenced in part by old patrician American ideas of conservation. Through it all, the

walrus were a breeding, bellowing, blubbery, if unacknowledged, reminder that the grand promise of

capitalism – a better life through better consumption – and communism’s proffer of freedom

through ever increasing production were severely curtailed by the geographical realities of the north.

In the wake of the 1970s legislative protection, the Pacific walrus took the space given by

governmental concessions and filled it with new bodies. By the late twentieth century, Pacific

walruses birthed their population back to the numbers that likely existed before on onset of

commercial harvesting. Life rears up when and where it can. Walrus in the North Pacific again do

the work of diving and digging and roughing the sea floor into greater productivity. Yet, the history

of change on the ice-floe did not end with the cessation of industrial hunting. Winters are now

warmer. Summers are longer. It is another consequence of the global appetite for energy that

revolutionized human and walrus life over the prior century, an appetite that spent the twentieth

century burning fossil fuels into the arctic atmosphere. The result is a new revolution on the

shoreline. More villages will move or close, not for commerce or politics, but to avoid drowning: the

community of Kivilina, on the Alaskan coast, may be underwater as early as 2025. At Shishmaref,

two hundred feet of coastline has eroded off the edge of the village in the last forty years.

Communities that ceded their adaptive mobility to settled life for the sake of civilization – for

missionaries, schools, hospitals, electric lights, and the other products of modern surplus – now sit

at the sharp point of civilization’s ultimate discontent. The ice that Paul Tiulana said never sleeps

will stop awakening. And as the ice retracts into itself, pulling further north year by year, walruses

flail on crowded, shrinking beaches, their babies crushed or miscarried in stampedes. Many of them

may in the next century never make it to dry land. Having chosen not to kill walrus in blood, our

species may yet kill them with water.

CHAPTER THREE: THE LAND

1890-1970

THE MOVING TUNDRA

At the northern edge of Asia and North America the land rolls inland from the sea, the open plains

snaked by rivers and dotted with ponds, the undulating hills crumpling upward into worn

mountains. Underfoot, the Beringian landscape is a patchwork of peat bogs, fields of ice-filled

hummocks, shrub-covered plateaus, and lichen-furled rock. The sky presses down without the

interruption of forest. There is a tree line with latitude as with altitude, and above it the tundra

summer is only long enough for willows to grow a few hundredths of an inch each year. Even south

of the line, the spruce and birch of the taiga do not soar. The wind blows all things low. Snow can

fall in September and stay until June. Vegetation is buried under drifts that refract most of the sun’s

energy away from hungry leaves. When the snow melts, plants endure weeks too cold for

photosynthesis. Roots fan and scrabble against permafrost. And while cold is a consistent feature of

the northern landscape, years are not consistently cold. Growth must endure the uncertainties of an

early frost or a heavy rain.

467

Beringia is not a place where plants easily make tissue from light. Yet

there are calories fixed in the lichens and moss, in the sedges and grasses that scrabble for purchase

on hillsides, and in the dozens of plants that burst from melting snowbanks already in bloom. These

truncated, tenacious green things are the stuff of life for some of the largest herds of herbivores on

earth. Through these hundreds of thousands of Rangifer tarandus, known in Eurasia as reindeer and in

North America as caribou, the tundra feeds wolves as large as men.

The open tundra is scarred by Rangifer trails, trammeled half a foot deep in places by their

spade-like hooves. They are gangly, long-nosed, and knob-kneed, but also imposing: an adult bull

can weigh four hundred pounds and stands as tall at the shoulder as a short person. As they move,

the tendon in the foot slips over the bone with a click. A moving herd sounds gently percussive.

And everything about the animal is built to move. They swim well and without trepidation. Calves

run within hours of birth, and their mothers eat while walking. Caribou trot with their eyes closed,

apparently asleep. Even their fat is mobile, remaining liquid at low temperatures.

468

Movement is

how reindeer and caribou stay alive. There is not enough arctic vegetation for permanence, and too

many predators for stillness. Their sensory world is tuned to places of good pasture and shelter. In

spring, pregnant cows move from the lichen pastures of the interior toward the sea. They arrive at

467

For a summary of the climatic challenges posed to plants by the arctic climate, see E.C. Pielou, A Naturalist’s Guide to

the Arctic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 86-98.

468

For the evolution of reindeer and caribou, see E. Anderson, “Who's Who in the Pleistocene: a Mammalian Bestiary,”

in Quaternary Extinctions: a Prehistoric Revolution ed. P. S. Martin and R. G. Klein (Tucson: University of Arizona Press,

1984), 5-89, 40–89. For the physiology and adaptations of Rangifer, see Valerius Geist, Deer of the World: Their Evolution,

Behavior, and Ecology (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole Books, 1998), 315-336. For an overview of migration and its

ecological consequences see B. C. Forbes and T. Kumpula, “The Ecological Role and Geography of Reindeer (Rangifer

tarandus) in Northern Eurasia,” Geography Compass No. 3 (2009): 1356–1380. The apparent sleepwalking of caribou is a

personal observation, although one confirmed by experienced hunters.

the coast thin, coats patchy and ragged, and give birth where ocean breezes push away the summer’s

torment of mosquitoes. Bulls and barren cows follow, seeking the open plains where wolves rarely

den and vegetation is thick. In autumn, the vast communal herd splinters, turning their fat-insulated

backs to the howling wind for the march inland.

In their great aggregations, Rangifer spread like the tributaries of a living river. Where the gray

strands pool together they cover the landscape to the point of becoming it. That caribou and tundra

are indistinguishable is more than a visual illusion. In life, as caribou paw and yank at their fodder,

they churn nutrients and dead plants into the earth. As these plants rot, soil temperature rises.

Warmth is a scarce and precious thing in the north, and in its presence seeds germinate and new

shoots unfurl. A grazing herd, if it does not eat foliage to the quick, amplifies the primary

productivity of the tundra’s botanical life.

469

They feed swarms of mosquitoes and flies so massive

the insects can drain half a liter of caribou blood in a day. In death, reindeer muscle feeds bears,

foxes, ravens, eagles, wolverines, and humans. The movement of the great herds brings up living

matter from moss to raptor to wolf pup. The wolf pup grows and drags down a reindeer. Around

the stripped carcass arctic poppies bud. Rangifer migration is the respiration of the tundra, an

oscillation of energy rather than air.

There are periods when the respiration of caribou and reindeer from coast inland and from

inland coastward falters. Across the arctic, herds collapse once or twice each century, with dips and

swells every ten to twenty years. There are many reasons for precipitous decline, but most are linked

to climate.

470

The arctic land retains less solar energy than the sea, and this scarcity amplifies the

influence of variation. Land animals do not carry enough fat in their bodies to wait out lean years

with the patience of a whale. As a result, they are more vulnerable to periodic undulations of warm

and cold, of precipitation and vegetation. Reindeer, as creatures of ice ages, are most prosperous in

the dry winters of colder phases. Light snow makes for easy grazing, fast running, and little disease.

Over the course of a cool decade, the caribou population surges. Migratory territories expand as fat

calves mature and roam. In places, herds eat lichens and shrub to the quick. Fifty to ninety years

later, the climate warms. Winter snow is thick, the surface made into sharp ice by periods of thawing

and freezing. The energy needed to move and eat surpasses the energy many animals reserved in

their fat. Late migration catches herds in river breakup, shunting carcasses to shore with outgoing

ice. In hot summers, caribou refuse to eat, their weakened flanks tormented by especially fierce

469

For the role of reindeer grazing in primary productivity, see J. Olofsson, S. Stark and L. Oksanen, “Reindeer

Influence on Ecosystem Process in the Tundra,” Oikos Vol. 105 No. 2 (May 2004): 386-396; Johan Olofsson, Heidi

Kitti, Pirjo Rautiainen, Sari Stark and Lauri Oksanen, “Effects of Summer Grazing by Reindeer on Composition of

Vegetation, Productivity, and Nitrogen Cycling,” Ecography Vol. 24 No. 1 (February 2001): 13-24; Heidi Kitti, B.C.

Forbes and Jari Oksanen, “Long- and Short-term Effects of Reindeer Grazing on Tundra Wetland Vegetation,” Polar

Biology Vol. 32 No. 2 (February 2009):253-261. Overgrazing can be a serious issue, especially for slow-growing lichen

communities; for a good overview of this literature, see Forbes and Kumpula, “The Ecological Role and Geography of

Reindeer,” 1356–1380.

470

Christian Vibe has written the classic work on arctic population cycles, which he argues have a primary, long period

of 689 years, inset with shorter periods of 116.3 years, these divided into ecological cycles of 11.6 years. While these

numbers may seem forced in their elegance, arctic animal populations do seem to follow these years roughly. See

Christian Vibe, “Arctic Animals in Relation to Climatic Fluctuations,” Meddelelser om Gronland 170 (5), Copenhagen 1967.

Historical sources describe wild reindeer populations following this pattern in the Chukchi region; see Igor Krupnik,

Arctic Adaptations: Native Whalers and Reindeer Herders of Northern Eurasia, trans. Marcia Levenson (Hanover: University

Press of New England, 1993), 145.

insects. Cow’s bodies are stressed beyond the ability to bear calves. Wolves contract around their

prey. Bears feast. Hoof disease spreads.

471

Then the winters cool again. Rangifer and the species that

depend on them do not only migrate through space: their numbers are unfixed in time. There is no

one historical moment when these arctic populations are not either recovering or preparing to falter.

Human beings have followed this migratory breath for thousands of years. During the last

ice age, people tracked herds into southern Europe, were hunters painted charging bulls on the cave

walls of Lascaux.

472

When the ice age glaciers retreated fifteen to twenty thousand years ago, people

followed reindeer back to their origin along the Asian-North American juncture.

473

Around eight

thousand years ago, artists in Chukotka painted themselves hunting reindeer on skis.

474

The Thule

killed caribou alongside whales. Across time and space, Rangifer allowed people to inhabit places

otherwise uninhabitable. Reindeer bodies concentrate the calories of indigestible plants into protein

and fat, and propel that energy deep into the tundra and taiga, hundreds of miles from the lush

productivity of the ocean and coast. Just as critical as calories eaten are calories preserved. In winter,

cold can kill a bare-fleshed person in a matter of hours, and this cold lasts for months. Caribou hides

keep warmth from escaping human control. Any Inupiat hunter or Chukchi sewer knew that the

skins of fall-killed cows were best for parkas. Bull hides with winter hair made mats for sleeping.

Calf skins were soft enough for underwear. The thin hide peeled from bony forelegs was pliable

enough for mittens and boot tops. To stay clothed, a family needed at least a dozen pelts per year,

and more for the leather used in sleds, tents, and the harnesses on their dogs.

475

For their bipedal hunters, reindeer were essential but capricious. Killing them required that

people either expend their own precious energy following the herds, or take the chance of

intercepting the animals during migration. Over several centuries, the desire to keep herds close

provoked a third method. In western and central Siberia, hunters began capturing live reindeer to

bait herds. Over centuries of mutual adaptation, often forced by changes in the climate, people

broke calves to pull sleds. A reciprocal relationship developed. Reindeer that stayed near humans

were protected from wolves, and people who kept reindeer close were protected from starvation.

Hunters learned to select breeding stock. As the practice spread east, reaching Chukotka a few

471

There is considerable literature on the periodic crash-boom cycles of reindeer herds. The paragraph here is drawn

from Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations, 143-147; Anne Gunn, “Voles, Lemmings and Caribou – population cycles revisited?”

Rangifer Special Issue No. 14 (2003):105-111; J. Putkonen and G. Roe, “Rain-on-snow Events Impact Soil Temperatures

and Affect Ungulate Survival,” Geophysical Research Letters Vol. 30, No. 4 (February 2003), DOI: 10.1029/2002GL016326;

and Leonid M. Baskin, “Reindeer Husbandry/Hunting in Russia in the Past, Present and Future,” Polar Research Vol. 19.

No. 1 (2000): 23-29.

472

The environmental scientist Valarius Geist believes that reindeer allowed the late Pleistocene takeover of Homo sapiens

from Neanderthals in Europe; he argues we owe our humanity, literally, to this species. See “Of Reindeer and Man,

Human and Neanderthal,” Rangifer Special Issue no. 14 (2003): 57-63.

473

For the spread of people in the wake of reindeer, see Vladimir Pitul’ko, “Ancient Humans in Eurasian Arctic

Ecosystems: Environmental Dynamics and Changing Subsistence,” World Archeology Vol. 30 No. 3 (1999): 421-436. For

the people of the New World, see Stuart Fiedel, “The Peopling of the New World: Present Evidence, New Theories,

and Future Directions” Journal of Archaeological Research Vol. 8 No. 1 (2000): 39-103 and John F. Hoffecker and Scott

Elias, “Environment and Archeology in Beringia,” Evolutionary Anthropology Vol. 12 (2003): 34-49. The dating of human

habitation in the Bering Straits and in North America is hotly debated by archeologists; current research points toward

multiple migrations into northeast Eurasia and across the Straits. For an excellent summary, see Charles C. Mann, 1491:

New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus (New York: Knopf, 2005).

474

N. Dikov, Naskal’nye zagadki drevnei Chukotki: Petroglify Pegtymelia (Moscow: Nauka, 1971).

475

Ernest Burch Jr., Caribou Herds of Northwest Alaska, 1850-2000 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2012), 148.

hundred years before Europeans, reindeer genes also moved.

476

Human ingenuity combined with the

prerogatives of evolution to make a new subspecies of Rangifer in Eurasia: unlike their wild Alaskan

cousins, they were smaller, lighter in color, and partly domesticated.

477

WHEN EMISSARIES OF the Russian and American governments arrived in Beringia, domestic

Chukchi herds appeared to be a familiar technology. Reindeer were beasts of burden and nutrition,

solving in one gangling creature the vexing Arctic problems of calories and transit. It helped that

reindeer meat was palatable to Europeans and reindeer herding recognizably pastoral. Unlike whales

or walrus, the migratory habits of Rangifer were generally and comfortingly national.

478

The capitalist

market had not coveted domestic herds to the verge of extermination. Most importantly,

domesticated reindeer acted like domesticated animals anywhere: they could be owned, sold or

collectivized, bred for size and butchered for profit. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, missionaries of capitalism, Christianity, and Marxist communism alike saw in the

thousands of ungulate bodies the opportunity to make of the otherwise barren tundra a

recognizable, agrarian, profitable space.

Across Beringia’s long twentieth century, capitalists and communists used domestic reindeer

as the productive base of their revolutions. The two countries were involved in inverted projects: the

Americans sought to transform a generally collectivist people into owners of privately property,

while the Soviets wanted to make Chukchi private property collective. Changing economic form was

critical, for both Americans and Soviets, because doing so would make the Inupiat and Chukchi

participant in the national future.

479

Both states found their indigenous peoples to be outside the

progressive arc of human history. As long as the peoples of the north were confined to bare

subsistence, as long as they produced no surplus, their lives would be ruled by want. For Americans

looking north, history of the progressive capitalist sort was possessed by people who owned the

means of making value. The Inupiat, who had limited private property, owned nothing they could

bequeath to their children or use to guarantee their political liberty. The Soviet Union, meanwhile,

found the Chukchi to be less without time than living in the wrong one. If Marxist history was a

progression from feudalism to capitalism to socialism and onward to utopia, then the Chukchi were

stuck in an immiserated, pre-feudal past.

476

Baskin, “Reindeer Husbandry/Hunting in Russia,” 23-29, and Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations, 166-168.

477

There are also wild populations of reindeer across the Eurasian north. I will refer to wild North American Rangifer as

caribou for the remainder of this chapter, domestic Rangifer as reindeer, and un-domesticated Eurasian populations of

Rangifer as wild reindeer. The domestication of reindeer is not complete – while herds do live and reproduce under

human guidance, they can also return to a wild state quickly. They are, however, an example of what historian Edmund

Russell calls the “evolution revolution,” as human beings have to some extent shaped the genetic trajectory of the

species in ways that have also fundamentally altered human life in the arctic. See Russell, Evolutionary History: Uniting

History and Biology to Understand Life on Earth, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011).

478

This is true of the Western Arctic Caribou Herd in Alaska, and the reindeer herds on the Chukchi Peninsula, which

stay within the United States and Russia, and are the subject of this chapter. There are international Rangifer herds, the

Porcupine Caribou Herd being perhaps the best known for its migration between the Arctic Slope in Alaska and the

central Yukon Territory in Canada.

479

In Chukotka, Chukchi were the main but not exclusive owners of reindeer herds; some other native populations also

had the tradition. In North America, reindeer herding was introduced among the Yupik as well, including herds on St.

Lawrence Island. For the sake of coherence, this chapter deals with the majority ethnicities involved in both projects.

The following chapter traces the attempt to reform the tundra in the image of capitalist or

communist national progress. Reindeer herds were the technology of this state-making. They carried

in their social, edible bodies the potential to make the tundra home to modern ideas about

consumption and production, and fundamentally altered the politics of ownership in Beringia. In

comparing this transformation as it unfolded in the U.S. and Soviet Union, the chapter makes two

primary arguments. First, that despite broad similarities in agenda – to civilize, to increase

production, to raise standards of living and political participation, to bring the tundra under the

rationale of Marxist history or market values – the capitalism in the United States and communism

in the Soviet Union functioned differently at the level of ideology, not just economy. Capitalism

emerges, in the narrative that follows, as an inconsistent practice. What it meant to be capitalist

changed often, making market logic appear less than logical to many Inupiat. Communism was the

opposite, its eschatology inspiring both violent resistance and, eventually, more complete

conversion. The result altered how humans valued reindeer on the two sides of the Bering Straits.

Secondly, and in unpredictable ways, using reindeer to groom the northern landscape put state

ambition under the influence of things beyond human politics and values. Some were as passive as

the climate, others as active as wolves. None were open to complete or lasting control. Capitalists

and communists found they could change what people valued, but their plans to make the tundra

valuable to only people were embedded in the landscape itself, in the wills of other species and in

the workings of time and climate.

THE HUMAN TUNDRA, 1600-1850

In the late summers of the nineteenth century, the Chukchi were on the move. Groups of families,

sometimes only a few, sometimes a dozen or more, wrapped their belongings in hide bundles,

strapped them to sledges, and yoked their lives to reindeer broken in harness. The name Chukchi

meant to be rich in reindeer.

480

This richness was recent. In the decades prior to the seventeenth

century, hunters on the peninsula learned from the Tungus people how to capture reindeer and

breed them as draft animals.

481

Groups of nomadic families kept a few dozen reindeer, which they

scrupulously avoided eating. For several hundred years, wild herds still clothed people, and wild

herds along with the corpus of things hunted and gathered fed people.

Sometimes a herder would suck milk from the udder of a nursing doe, spit it into a bladder,

and share it as a rare delicacy.

482

Drinking reindeer milk was a quiet prelude to a slow transformation

– one that began, like many things in the north, with the climate. The eighteenth century was cool in

the arctic; more does brought their fawns to term and more fawns survived. For the next fifty to

eighty years, the domestic herds grew but the wild reindeer hunt continued. The Chukchi increased

480

Waldemar Bogoraz, The Chukchee. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 11 (New York, NY:

The American Museum of Natural History, 1904), 11.

481

Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations, 161.

482

Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 83.

trade with their coastal neighbors and with Russians along the western edge of the Peninsula.

483

Reindeer hides and meat became the connective tissue between fat on the coast and manufactured

goods traded from inland rivers. Herders learned to breed stock with new precision, tracking the

lineage of does for generations and culling unfit bulls. Then the climate warmed near the turn of the

nineteenth century. Domestic herds collapsed, as did the population of wild reindeer. Driven by a

need for meat and pelage, herders began to kill their stock. The practice continued when cold

weather returned and herds boomed. Reindeer breeders found themselves with a massive, self-

perpetuating surplus.

484

There were enough animals to quadruple the number of people living on the

tundra in four or five generations.

485

The human children of this reindeer revolution grew up notching the ears of domestic

calves, marking them as their family’s property. Owning reindeer gave Chukchi herders the energy to

power bodies and the bodies to power politics. Chukchi nations fielded armies of over a thousand

men. In the eighteenth century, when the Russian Empire attempted to make herders pay tribute,

reindeer-fueled armies repulsed the tsar’s army and sacked the Imperial fort at Anadyr. By the early

nineteenth century, the Chukchi generally used their reindeer wealth for trade rather than war,

remaining unconquered peoples in Imperial law. The disposition of reindeer, like the organization of

land, religion, and justice, remained in Chukchi hands. And the disposition was not equal. There

were poor herders, rich herders, and struggling families who worked for the wealthy.

486

Being rich

came with prestige and political power, the ability to give gifts and further trade partnerships, and to

go to war. But Chukchi wealth was capricious. Fortunes changed when herds were lost in blizzards,

to disease, or to the many beings, not all of them human, who made mischief on the tundra. The

spirit that mastered a herd might turn them wild. A rich man could die at the hands of a destitute or

mistreated hired herder.

487

Yet, while herders knew that mistreatment of their stock violated animal

souls, and observed rites of slaughter, domestic reindeer did not choose at whose hands they would

die, as did wild creatures.

488

483

Russian traders preferred dark colored fawn skins. Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 75-76. For a discussion of the social roots

of the pastoralist shift see I. Gurvich,“Sosedskaia obshchina i proizvodstvennye ob"edineniia malykh narodov Severa,”

in Obshchestvennyi stroi u narodov Severnoi Sibiri I. Gurvich and B. Dolgikh eds. (Moscow: Nauka, 1970), 384-417 and I.S.

Vdovin, “Istoricheskie osobennosti formirovaniia obshchestvennogo razdeleniia truda u narodov Severo-Vostoka

Sibiri,” in Sotsial'naia istoriia narodov Azii (Leningrad: Nauka, 1975), 143-157.

484

This paragraph is a synthesis drawn from Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations, chapters four and five; I.S. Vdovin, Ocherki istorii

i etnografii Chukchei (Leningrad and Moscow: Nauka, 1965), 15-22; and Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 73-90.

485

Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations, 179. Krupnik notes that between the 18

and 19

centuries, reindeer herding completely

transformed the human relationship with the environment, showing the quite radical capacity for change. The

population in 1600 was probably around 2000 people, and reached almost 9000 by the end of the 1800s, when growth

stabilized. Some of the tundra population increase also came from coastal peoples moving to join herders.

486

L. M. Baskin, Severnyi olen’: Upravlenie povedeniem i populiatsiiami olenevodstvo okhota (Moscow: KMK, 2009), 182-188.

Superficially, reindeer operated in Chukotka similarly to domestic animals imported to North America by Europeans, by

creating classes of owners. See, for example, Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Goldseekrs, and the Rush to Colorado

(Lawrence, KA: University Press of Kansas, 1998). Unlike the Comanche in this example, however, domesticating

reindeer generally reduced internecine violence. Moreover, reindeer domestication was a technology of entirely

indigenous origin.

487

Bogoras, The Chukchee, 643. Bogoras also notes that charity was more common among maritime Chukchi than

reindeer herders, although reindeer herding produced fewer outright destitute people.

488

Bogoras, The Chukchee, 89.

Owned reindeer were also, in evolutionary terms, vitally subject to human desires, bred for

docility, strength at harness, fattiness, and coloration.

489

They were not bred for the wiles and

strengths that had, for most of history, made reindeer successful. Humans therefore labored to

compensate for ungulate frailties. The year was organized around caring for herds, from sheltering

cows from wind as they gave birth to separating trampling bulls from calves. Families claimed

pastures according to the season and fodder conditions, but without strict ownership of space.

490

the process, the lives of domestic animals fell out of rhythm with wild herds: mating earlier in the

fall, dropping fawns when the weather was still cold, migrating to match human claims as well as

biological needs. Animals grew shorter and slower. Herds became less attuned to wolves.

491

Dogs

and men listened for the wolves that came with nights of heavy snow. Animals infected with scabies

or hoof rot were killed. Herders gelded young bucks with their teeth, using them for draft animals to

spare pregnant does. Tending the swirling half-wild stock, especially in the rut or in the stampeding

madness brought on by biting flies, was the work of the whole camp. Women spelled their husbands

at watch during the dusky midnights of summer. Children as young as ten knew how to lasso a

calf.

492

And the labor came due. In early autumn, people moved from camp to camp celebrating the

ceremony of slaughter, giving gifts and dancing, racing and gambling, eating bone marrow until

grease rolled off their elbows, the shaman’s drum punctuating the bustle with prayers of

thanksgiving.

493

IN THE LATE summers of the early nineteenth century, Inupiat nations were also on the

move. The revolution of domestication had not broken eastward into North America. Even if

reindeer could have been coxed into open Inupiat boats to cross the Straits, the Chukchi knew the

power of their animate technology. Selling live reindeer was taboo. So from summer fishing camps

and berry-studded hillsides, men and teenage boys fanned out across the tundra to find caribou.

Older hunters taught younger men the local habits of migration, the rivers where caribou crossed

and ridges where winds kept the mosquitoes away. Small groups stalked their prey with bows and

arrows. Some nations built funnel-shaped corrals of stones and brush; the fastest runners, male or

female, drove part of a herd into the narrow point, where animals were snared or speared in their

milling, white-eyed panic.

494

Others killed swimming caribou from kayaks. In some places, the hunt

went on into the winter, when hunters drove scattered caribou into deep snow. A strong man could

run down a cow on snowshoes.

495

489

Bogoraz reported that wild reindeer in Chukotka were uniformly gray, and all other colorations or markings belonged

to domestic or feral animals. The Chukchee, 82.

490

Bogoras, The Chukchee, 75-87, V. Nuvano, “The Historical Experience of Reindeer-Herding in the Chukchi

Peninsula,” in Beringia Days: International Scientific and Practical Conference Papers (Moscow: Sovetsky Sport, 2004), 174.

491

Eigil Reimers, “Wild Reindeer in Norway – population ecology, management, and harvest,” Rangifer Report No. 11

(2006): 39.

492

Vdovin, Ocherki, 15-22 and Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 73-90.

493

For a full description of the slaughter festivals, see Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 372-376.

494

APRCA, Charles V. Lucier Collection, Box 3, Folder: Buckland Ethnographic Notes, 3-4.

495

Descriptions of Inupiat hunting are summarized from virtually the entirety of Ernest Burch Jr.’s masterful The Inupiaq

Eskimo Nations of Northwest Alaska (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1998), which details the local resource use of

individual Inupiat nations, and from personal experience. References to caribou herd migrations come from Burch’s

equally sweeping Caribou Herds of Northwest Alaska, 67-91.

While technology and technique depended on the geography and season, no hunter could

expect success if they did not relate to their prey as fellow-feeling beings. Caribou are social animals.

They based their willingness to die on the social behavior of their human killers. Family harmony,

the Inupiat understood, made hunting fruitful. If a man was lazy and disrespectful to human

persons, caribou saw a cloud of black hanging over him and fled.

496

A boy’s first kill was divided

among the old people to assure future success.

497

Behavior toward caribou persons also mattered. A

caribou could be insulted by the wound of a sloppy hunter.

498

It was bad form to speak ill of the

herds, especially since some caribou were once human.

499

It was polite to cut off the head of a dead

caribou so the soul could return to its herd, and offensive to cook its flesh in the same pot used for

seal.

500

Good hunters knew what caribou valued about the landscape –the best fodder, the slower

rivers, the fewest bears – and what caribou valued in human beings. People behaved accordingly.

As with whales and other marine species, inland Inupiat nations did not live on caribou

alone, and few remained inland exclusively. An autumn spent killing caribou might be married with a

winter eating seals. Depending on the year, place, and patterns of trade, life was made from fish,

arctic hare, ptarmigan, Dall sheep, moose, seals, walrus, whale, berries, bird eggs, greens, roots, the

occasional bear. Catholic consumption and transience was as much a human adaptation as that of

caribou. But hides were needed in villages where most food came from the sea and in communities

where fat from the ocean was rare.

501

In the deeper interior, people ate every ungulate calorie,

storing marrow bones until the lean months of late winter when women would pray, as they boiled

them, for plentiful grease.

502

In other places and years, the hunters killed for hides more than the

inches of pure fat that cover the muscle of a fall bull. Caribou bodies were part of trading

partnerships between the many small, territorially distinct nations of Inupiat Alaska. Between people

like the Akuinigmiut, of the interior, and the Kivallinigmiut, along the coast north of the Seward

Peninsula, hides became gifts, and gifts became alliances across the boundaries of space. Meat

anchored feasts between nations and sometimes across linguistic boundaries. Rangifer herds were

wound into the political world of northwestern Alaska, supporting both warfare and diplomacy.

503

American Beringia before the mid-nineteenth century was home to seven populations of

Rangifer, herds defined by their habitual calving grounds and migrations, some of them half a million

496

APRCA, Charles V. Lucier Collection, Box 3, Folder: Deering Ethnography 3-9.

497

APRCA, Charles V. Lucier Collection, Box 3, Folder: Buckland Ethnographic Notes 3-4.

498

APRCA, Charles V. Lucier Collection, Box 3, Folder: Deering Ethnography 3-9.

499

Edwin S. Hall Jr., The Eskimo Storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975),

78-79; 211.

500

Nicholas J. Gubser, The Nunamiut Eskimos: Hunters of Caribou (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), 200.

501

There is some disagreement in the anthropological literature regarding the degree of interdependence between coastal

and inland hunting societies. Glenn Sheehan argues that the coastal need for hides and the interior need for fat made

them essentially interdependent; see In the Belly of the Whale: Trade and War in Eskimo Society Aurora Monograph Series 6

(Anchorage: Alaska Anthropological Association, 1997), 184. Burch contends that the coast-interior relationship mostly

bettered the material condition of the Inupiat. Having lived for several years with the Gwich’in, a people that historically

ate a great many caribou and no sea mammals, I am inclined to agree with Burch. See Ernest Burch Jr., Alliance and

Conflict: The World System of the Inupiaq Eskimos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 211-212. In either case,

demand for caribou was high and facilitated both contact and conflict between coast and interior.

502

Burch, The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations, 45.

503

For a full discussion of trade relationships, including those between Inupiat and Athapaskan people, see Burch,

Alliance and Conflict, 145-173 and 53-66 for a discussion of warfare.

strong.

504

Yet despite times of abundance, the stories of Inupiat hunters are filled with the warnings

of what could go wrong on a hunt. It could rain, turning the tundra to knee-deep mush. Warm

weather could rot meat, spoil fat, and sour hides. Snow might come early, stay late, or fall too thick.

Human bones snapped. Muscles fatigued. Women and children left at fish camps might be attacked

by other nations.

505

There were valleys inhabited by wild babies, called iraaq, who ate unsuspecting

hunters or tickled them to death. Giant fish lived in some lakes and could swallow kayaks whole.

506

The tundra was open but not empty, inhabited by things of uncertain visibility and menace. Of these

hazards, the nonappearance of the herds was always possible, and terrible. But when they came

caribou were good to eat, good to trade, and good to think. A successful hunt was a thing of joy. So

the hunters went out.

BARREN LAND, ALASKA 1890S-1920S

To European eyes, North American Beringia did not look like a place of joy or thanksgiving, or even

a place of likely habitation. In the eighteenth century, Captain Cook noted that nature had made the

place “extremely barren.”

507

Over a hundred years later, a young whaler described hills “dotted with

blackened skeletons of old ice – an utterly desolate land.”

508

For Americans who staked national

progress to the advance of agriculture, the “impassable deserts of snow, vast tracks of dwarf timbers,

frozen rivers, inaccessible mountain ranges” made Alaska seem “absolutely useless.”

509

Rain might

follow the plow, but there was no plowing permafrost. Yet, when Ella Smith was born into the

Nuataagmiut nation in the early 1880s, her family would not have used such terms for their land.

510

some years, the berry patches were deep, the game fat, the fish plentiful. In other years, the jarring

504

Burch, The Caribou Herds, 119.

505

APRCA, Ernest S. Burch Jr. Papers. USUAFV6-627, Series 5, Box 227, Folder H88-1D-1, p.7. Unlike many

indigenous peoples in North America, keeping captives from these raids was not common, and certainly did not

motivate warfare; see Burch Alliance and Conflict, 67, 110-111.

506

For an overview of the types and behaviors of supernatural beings encountered in northwestern Alaska, see Ernest

Burch Jr., “The Nonempirical Environment of the Artic Alaskan Eskimos,” Southwestern Journal of Anthropology, Vol. 27

No. 2 (Summer 1971): 148-165. Specific examples here taken from APRCA, Charles V. Lucier Collection, Box 3, Folder:

Buckland Ethnographic Notes 3-4 and APRCA, Ernest S. Burch Jr. Papers, USUAFV6-627, Series 5, Box 227, Folder

H88-1B-9, p. 23.

507

John A. Cook and James King, A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean

undertaken by command of His Majesty, for making discoveries in

the Northern Hemisphere : performed under the direction of Captains Cook, Clerke, and Gore : in the years 1776, 1777, 1778, 1779, and

1780 : being a copious, comprehensive, and satisfactory abridgement of the voyage, Vol. 3 (London: Champante and Whitrow, 1793),

34. Cook’s account was not always so grim, and sometimes shows the influence of Romantic conceptions of the natural

world. John Muir also saw great beauty – and great bounty – in the Beringian landscape. See John Muir, “Botanical

Notes,” in Cruise of the Revenue-Steamer Corwin in Alaska and the N.W. Arctic Ocean 1881 (Washington, D.C.: Government

Printing Office, 1893), 47-53.

508

Walter Nobel Burns, A Year with a Whaler (New York: Outing Publishing, 1913), 149.

509

This was Horace Greely’s opinion, which was considerably harsher than most. See the New York Daily Tribune, New

York NY, April 11 1867. However, the lack of agricultural potential was an issue even for Alaska’s boosters; even

Charles Sumner, an advocate for the potential of Alaskan fisheries and furs, noted that the climate was generally too cold

for winter wheat or rye. See, Speech of Hon. Charles Sumner of Massachusetts on the Cession of Russian America to the United States

(Washington, D.C.: Congressional Globe Office, 1867), 33.

510

APRCA, Ernest S. Burch Jr. Papers, USUAFV6-627, Series 3, Box 124, “Western Arctic Herd Sequence,” no page

numbers.

amplitudes that route all biological life in the arctic shifted away from abundance. There were many

rehearsals for lean seasons. But Ella’s parents had come of age when the caribou herds migrated in

strength. Caribou could be killed just for their hides and the best meat, or sold to passing ships

without diminishing the herds.

511

Then, sometime before Ella’s tenth birthday, the caribou stopped coming. Her parents had

already heard rumors of trouble. Some blamed shamanic warfare.

512

Others noted how the caribou

vanished just like the walrus and the whales. Whatever the reason, the hunt failed along Norton

Sound and on the Seward Peninsula, beginning in the late 1860s and 1870s. Over the next decade,

absence crept north.

513

In places, there were so few caribou that essential skins were traded from

Chukotka by the Diomede Islanders.

514

Over the next twenty years, the seven great caribou herds

collapsed into two.

515

And as with the caribou, so too with the people. Inupiat nations were on the

move, across not as hunters now, but as refugees. Famine began along Kotzebue Sound and points

north in 1881. People traveled from one region of harvest failure to the next – and everything was

failing in the 1880s, from fish to whale to caribou. In desperation, formerly distinct nations folded

together. Most of Ella’s people dispersed over hundreds of miles, some reaching the edge of the

Mackenzie River Delta.

516

Two generations later, the children of survivors carried memories of

starving people freezing in their tracks.

517

For American observers, the famines of the late 1800s reinforced the forsakenness of the

tundra. Yet many also laid the cause with something other than latitude. “Formerly,” noted M.A.

511

Christopher Tingook, quoted in APRCA, Ernest S. Burch Jr. Papers, USUAFV6-627, Series 3, Box 124, “Western

Arctic Herd Sequence,” no page numbers. The British expedition to find John Franklin’s lost ships bought caribou in

the 1850s, as did the Western Union Telegraph Expedition in the late 1860s, and the International Polar Year crew in

the 1880s. See John Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers in the Far North: The Contest Among Native and Foreign Nations for the Bering

Strait Fur Trade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 144-146 and Burch, The Caribou Herds, 120-121.

512

Burch, The Inupiaq Eskimo Nations, 47, 374. My informants in the arctic have credited this belief with making Christian

conversion more appealing. Research on how the dynamics of animal populations and ecological stress contribute to

dependency on European goods and ideas has a rich historiography in other locations; see for example Richard White’s

classic The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln:

University of Nebraska Press, 1988); Marsha Weisiger’s Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 2011) and Steven Hackel’s Children of Coyote, Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial

California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).

513

For accounts of the diminishing caribou herds, see William Henry Dall, Alaska and its Resources (Boston: Lee and

Shepard, 1897), 147; Edward W. Nelson, The Eskimo about Bering Strait: Annual Report for 1896-97 Vol. 18, pt. 1

(Washington, D.C.: United States Bureau of American Ethnology, 1899), 118, 229; Johan Jacobsen, Alaskan Voyage

1881-1883: An Expedition to the Northwest Coast of America, from the German Text of Adrian Woldt trans. Erna Gunther

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977), 151; Charles Townsend, “Notes on the natural history and ethnology of

northern Alaska,” in M.A. Healy, Report of the Cruise of the Revenue Marine Steamer ‘Corwin’ in the Arctic Ocean in the year 1885

(Washington , DC.: Government Printing Office, 1887), 87; John Murdoch, Ethnological Results of the Point Barrow

Expedition, (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1988 [1892]), 267-268; Henry Woolfe to Sheldon Jackson,

December 18, 1890, in Sheldon Jackson, The Introduction of Reindeer into Alaska, Preliminary Report of the General Agent of

Education in Alaska to the Commissioner of Education 1890 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), 15; Jackson,

“Destitution Among the Alaska Eskimo: An Interview with Capt. M.A. Healy,” The Introduction of Reindeer… 1890, 10. In

some places, fish and other resources kept people fed, and reindeer skins were traded in from Chukotka. In others, the

simultaneous absence of land and sea mammals was too severe and large scale famines resulted.

514

Tom Lopp to Miner Bruce, May 13, 1893, in Smith and Smith, Ice Window, 58.

515

Herschel Island was established in 1890. For a geographic outline of the late nineteenth century caribou herd collapse,

see Burch, The Caribou Herds, chapters 4 & 5.

516

For a full description of what happened to the Nuataagmiut, see Burch Inupiat Eskimo Nations, 106-109.

517

Burch, The Caribou Herds, 84.

Healy, captain of the Revenue Cutter Bear, “numbers of deer [caribou] made yearly visits. Now it is

rare to find that the natives…have seen or tasted deer meat.”

518

Nature was not so much poor as

robbed. Less clear was the identity of the thief. Paul Niedieck, a sport hunter in the Teddy Roosevelt

mold, described the “wholesale massacre perpetuated by the natives.”

519

Naturalist William Nelson

agreed that “as soon as fire-arms were introduced among the people they began to slaughter deer

with true aboriginal improvidence.”

520

Others observed that the slaughter was not without value,

since caribou were hunted to supply the demands of white men. When whalers began overwintering

in at Herschel Island in the 1890s, sailors needed “tons of venison for food,” in the words of one

captain.

521

Market hunting along the northern coast brought some Inupiat the security of trade with

whites, from flour to rifles. Simon Paneak recalled how in his childhood many “people going up that

way north and east along the coast. Because everybody wanted to be caribou hunters, you know,

because getting rich... That’s why all the Eskimos were moving up that way. The whalers pulled

them up.”

522

As whales and walrus fed the global market, caribou fed that market’s laborers, and the

debt of energy left in the oceans rippled from the sea to the coast and inland. But hungry whalers

and desperate Inupiat hunters did not act alone on the caribou herds. The climate in the last half of

the nineteenth century was warm. Rangifer stocks were failing around the arctic. Herds numbering in

the hundreds of thousands find dozens of ways to die.

523

The caribou of northwestern Alaska were

caught in a perfect storm of human need and inhuman change.

524

518

Jackson, “Destitution Among the Alaska Eskimo,” 10.

519

Paul Niedieck, Cruises in the Bering Sea: being records of further sports and travel, trans. R.A. Ploetz (New York: C. Scribner’s

Sons, 1909), 115. Although caribou were killed in large numbers by native hunters with rifles, I am disinclined to take all

accounts of native “overkill” at face value. Most contemporary white observers do not have a grasp of how many

caribou are required to feed and clothe a family, nor do accounts like Niedieck’s deal with the desperation of the times

or hunting ethics very different than his own.

520

William Edward Nelson and F.W. True, “Mammals of northern Alaska,” in W.E. Nelson, Report Upon Natural History

Collections Made in Alaska Between the Years 1877 and 1881, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Army Signal Service, 1887), 285.

521

Harston H. Bodfish, Chasing the Bowhead: as told by Captain Harston H. Bodfish and Recorded for Him by Joseph C. Allen

(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936), 154.

522

APRCA, Ernest S. Burch Jr. Papers, USUAFV6-627, Series 3, Box 124, “Northeast Coast: Caribou, Informant:

Simon Paneak,” no page numbers.

523

See Krupnik Arctic Adaptations, 144-145, and Bockstoce, Furs and Frontiers, 319-320.

524

The degree to which native hunting caused the caribou decline is not a settled question. Richard Stern et al. argue

against any overhunting. Edward Arobio, Larry Naylor and Wayne Thomas, Eskimos, Reindeer and Land (Fairbanks:

Agricultural Experiment Station, School of Agriculture and Land Resources Management, University of Alaska-

Fairbanks Bulletin 59, 1980), 14 Burch contends that overhunting was the primary cause of the generalized crash,

prompted by the introduction of firearms and trade demand with whalers. John Bockstoce disagrees, contending that

even overwintering whalers at Barrow or Herschel Island would not have such a radical impact on herds of hundreds of

thousands of animals; this debate can be found in Burch, Caribou Herds, 147-150 and in John R. Bockstoce

“Conversations with Tiger: Forty Years of Dialogue…and One Uncompleted Project,” Arctic Anthropology Vol. 49, No. 2

(2012): 196-200. From my reading of the sources, it seems that native desire to participate in trade, made an explicit need

by the late 1800s in many locations by harvest failures and epidemic disease, increased hunting pressure on caribou – a

species already in decline due to usual climatic flux. In this sense, the caribou hunt marries market pressures, indigenous-

white relations, and stochastic populations in a way that echoes bison hunting on the Great Plains, although without the

habitat destruction, settler pressure, and proximity to industrial markets; see Andrew C. Isenberg, The Destruction of the

Bison: An Environmental History, 1750-1920 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000) and Theodore Binnema,

Common and Contested Ground: A Human and Environmental History of the Northwestern Plaines, (Toronto: University of

Toronto Press, 2004), chapters 1-2. Caribou populations also recovered to a large extent, something clearly not true of

bison. Periodic herd decline is not addressed explicitly in the Burch-Bockstoce debate referenced above, but seems to

me a significant factor to the caribou crash of this period. What is irrefutable from both oral histories and written

POLITICALLY, THE MOST influential explanation for Beringia’s biological scarcity came from

Alaska’s first Commissioner of Education, Sheldon Jackson. Jackson came of age as a missionary

among the Choctaw, and arrived in Alaska sharing the general post-bellum commitment to

indigenous assimilation via Christian education and capitalist production.

525

His task as

commissioner, he wrote, was, “not only to teach reading, writing, and arithmetic, but also how to

live better, how to make more money in order to live better, and how to utilize the resources of the

country in order to make more money.”

526

Sailing the northwest coast with Captain Healy on the

Cutter Service Bear in 1890, however, he found the resources of the country mostly gone.

“Commerce wanted more ivory,” Jackson reported to Congress, leaving the walrus nearly extinct.

Whales were “sacrificed” merely “for the fat that encased their bodies,” and rifles drove away the

caribou.

527

An unchecked market in wild things made for a native population too poor to survive in

body, let alone be saved in soul.

Jackson found a solution when the Bear visited the Asian coast. The Chukchi, he observed,

were “good-sized, robust, fleshy, well-fed” and even half-civilized.

528

Their vitality, in Jackson’s

estimation, came from their ownership of domesticated reindeer. In his 1890 report to Congress,

Jackson advocated importing tame stock to Alaska. Whales and walrus had gone the way of the

bison, he noted, and the vast ocean could not be restocked like a trout stream. Caribou were

capricious and implicated in a feral marketplace run by immoral gun and rum traders. But reindeer

domesticated northern commerce. They made capitalism terrestrial and ownership private. Jackson,

like many of his Congressional supporters, understood progress to be a function of production;

hunting and gathering had to give way to an agricultural or industrial existence if the Inupiat were to

advance toward civilization. Reindeer, as the Smithsonian naturalist Charles Townsend wrote,

sources is that the caribou stocks were low, and that debates over the native attitudes towards hunting and the impact of

contact with whites will go on. They certainly have a distinguished historiography, from Calvin Martin’s classic thesis

that Ojibwa participation in trapping was the result of epidemic disease in Keepers of the Game: Indian-Animal Relationships

and the Fur Trade (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), to arguments decrying any indigenous proscriptions

against overconsumption, as with Shepard Krech III’s The Ecological Indian: Myth and History (New York: Norton, 1999)

and the more nuanced volume edited by M. Harkin and D.R. Lewis, Natives Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on

the Ecological Indian (Lincoln NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). Krech inspired many rebuttals, including E. Hunn,

D Johnson, P Russell and T. Thornton, “Huna Tlingit Traditional Environmental Knowledge, Conservation, of a

‘Wilderness’ Park” Cultural Anthropology Vol. 11 (2003): 79-103 and the post-modern critique by Paul Nadasdy, who

argues that conservationism is not an objective standard, and therefore dubious as a yardstick; see Nadasdy,

“Transcending the Debate over the Ecologically Noble Indian: Indigenous Peoples and Environmentalism,” Ethnohistory

Vol. 52 No. 2 (Spring 2005): 291-331.

525

Jackson was appointed under the Bureau of Education, rather than the Office of Indian Affairs, since Alaskan natives

were not seen as dependent on the state in the same way as tribes in the contiguous states; the BIA did not take over

indigenous education in the territory until 1931. Jackson himself was so intent on assisting Alaska that he campaigned

for the Organic Act, which established a civil government and a federal school budget in 1884, and took his post as

Commissioner the following year. For an overview of Jackson’s activities, see Roxanne Willis, Alaska’s Place in the West:

From the Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness (Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 2010), 24-25. For a discussion of

Jackson’s views vis-à-vis the era’s general attitude toward Indian education, see Stephen W. Haycox, “Sheldon Jackson in

Historical Perspective: Alaska Native Schools and Mission Contracts, 1885-1894,” Pacific Historian 26 (1984): 18-28.

526

Sheldon Jackson, “Education in Alaska,” 49 Cong., 1 sess., Sen. Exec. Doc. 85 (1886) 30.

527

Jackson, The Introduction of Reindeer into Alaska….1890, 4-5.

528

Jackson, The Introduction of Reindeer into Alaska… 1890, 7.

“render a wild people pastoral or agricultural,” and “the first step toward their advancement.”

529

Moreover, the Inupiat could own reindeer without extinguishing native title via treaties or land

allotments, and without public assistance, making the animals an alternative to the Dawes Act and

failed Indian policy on the prairies.

530

Moreover, property-owning Inupiat would advance to the

“position of civilized, wealth-producing American citizens.”

531

Since few people anticipated a rush of

whites to Alaska, Inupiat would do a settler’s sovereign work, making the tundra home to the

American narrative of progress through capital accumulation. They solved Alaska’s agrarian

barrenness, and with it its human backwardness.

In the early years of the program, progress on the tundra had an ideal form. Reindeer would

turn hunters into Jeffersonian yeoman herders and thus into Americans, and Americans would

transform the tundra from waste into productive space. In the short term, this required bodies:

missionary bodies, ministered bodies, and reindeer bodies. Their coalescence in Beringia involved

bodies politic. When Jackson initially proposed importing reindeer, Congress declined to fund the

project, leaving Jackson to solicit from church groups. Permission from the tsar to buy the animals

was more forthcoming, but when the Bear arrived in Chukotka, Jackson found the tsar was indeed

very far away. It was the Chukchi who owned the reindeer, and they saw in Jackson’s plan a direct

threat to their trade in reindeer hides across the Straits.

532

It took weeks of negotiation for Jackson to

secure 171 reindeer and hire four Chukchi to instruct the Inupiat in husbandry. When the cargo of

quivering, bruised animals and their handlers landed near Port Clarence in 1892, Jackson discovered

that the Chukchi had sold a disproportionate number of bulls.

533

The hired Chukchi, meanwhile,

came with habits that horrified their employers, from eating warble fly larvae off reindeer backs to

guiding the herd with a pouch of human urine.

534

And the Inupiat near the new Teller Reindeer

529

Charles Townsend, “The Reports of the Committees of the House of Representatives

,” 52

Congress 2

Session

1890-

1891, 12. Townsend and Captain Healy discussed reindeer importation to Alaska in 1885, a discussion that Healy likely

continued with Jackson in 1890.

530

Sheldon Jackson, Annual Report on the Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska

1892

(Washington: Government

Printing Office, 1893), 14. In the critique of residential schools, reservations, and public assistance, Jackson, and

Townsend as well, were clearly influenced by the recently published and highly influential polemic A Century of Dishonor,

by Helen Hunt Jackson, which outlined the consequences of U.S. Indian policy in the west and cited welfare dependence

on reservations as one of the many negative outcomes. For an overview of residential schooling and debates around it,

see David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: American Indians and the Boarding School Experience, 1875-1928 (Lawrence:

University Press of Kansas, 1995).

Conveniently, reindeer were privately owned but herded on common land, thus

avoiding the need to settle land title, which the federal government was disinclined to do. Jackson’s critique of capitalist

excess also fit well with the nascent Progressive movement.

531

Sheldon Jackson, Report of the Commissioner of Education for the Year 1894-95, Vol. 2 (Washington: Government Printing

Office, 1896), 1438.

532

Sheldon Jackson, “Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska with Maps and Illustrations,” 52

Cong.

2d Sess. Senate Doc. 22 (1893), 8. Jackson bought 16 reindeer in 1891 and landed them in the Aleutian Islands as a trial for

the major import in 1892. Bogoras notes that the trade with the Inupiat was mostly handled by white middlemen-

whalers by this point, and the Chukchi feared that their already slipping hold on cross-strait trade would worsen. The

Chukchee, 65. In 1892, however, Miner Bruce reported that virtually all the skins used the Port Clarence – Teller region

were imported from Siberia, caribou being a rare curiosity. “Miner Bruce Report to Sheldon Jackson,” in Sheldon

Jackson, Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska 1894 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1895), 33.

533

“Miner Bruce Report to Sheldon Jackson,” Jackson, Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska 1894, 31. It is

also possible that more bulls than cows died in transit.

534

Sheldon Jackson, Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska 1894, 42, 63.

Station threatened to slaughter the Chukchi herders, as their presence roused memories of past

cross-Strait wars.

535

Despite the atmosphere of barely contained violence, a few missionaries, government

teachers, Inupiat, and Chukchi managed to unite around keeping the miniature herd of domestic

reindeer at Teller Station alive. The goal was held in common, but the value of the animals was not.

Most of the first Inupiat to join the project were sons of umiaq captains from near Cape Prince of

Wales, where the worst of the famine had passed, and traditional concepts of prestige and gift

exchange remained.

536

Promised herds of their own, eventually, the apprentices spent the first winter

learning how to lasso and corral and drive a reindeer sled. In April, they watched the birth of calves,

over sixty of them taking shaky legs. For these young men, owning reindeer had the potential to

bolster networks of trade and patronage without relying on Chukchi suppliers.

537

In an era of

collapsing small nations, reindeer turned the tundra into tradable wealth and with it political power.

For the government teachers and missionaries who began trickling into northwestern Alaska

after 1890, the reindeer were valuable for their ability to transform scattered, impoverished people

and the landscape they inhabited into part of a single, plentiful nation.

538

Educators in Alaska were

not advocates of residential schooling, as it would remove native children from their tundra-specific

economy, but they did seek assimilation.

539

This required introducing soap, teaching English,

535

Sheldon Jackson, Report on Introduction of Domestic Reindeer into Alaska 1894, 58. This threat came from Inupiat from

Cape Price of Wales, a nation known to be particularly hostile to foreigners Chukchi and otherwise.

536

Harrison Thornton, a missionary teacher at Cape Prince of Wales from 1890-1893, described the Inupiat nearby as “a

well-nourished race; though occasionally, when the weather is unfavorable for hunting, food does become scarce…we

have seen these people reduced to severe straits, and actual starvation may take place at any time.” Harrison Thornton,

Among the Eskimos of Wales, Alaska, 1890-1893 ed. Neda Thornton and William Thornton Jr. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins

Press, 1931), 192.

537

There is debate in the anthropological literature regarding the decline in regional herds and the impact on indigenous

residents, especially near the Teller station. Dorothy Jean Ray and Dean Olson both argue that on the Seward Peninsula,

caribou herds did not decline enough to cause major hardship or emigration; see Olson Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen: A Study

of Native Management in Transition (Fairbanks: University of Alaska, Institute of Social Economic and Government

Research, 1969), 20 and Ray, The Eskimos of Bering Strait, 1650-1898 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1975), 112-

113. Although there are areas of the Seward Peninsula where fish and other resources mitigated the herd crash, a lack of

hides was still a serious issue. Burch argues that this led to mass migration; see Burch Caribou Herds, 73-75. Burch’s

careful reading of written sources and extensive oral interviews make his case stronger for the general northwest Alaska

region. However, Olson’s observation that Inupiat men were not always interested in herding speaks to their

considerable adaptability even to famine conditions, to the alternate sources of food and clothing available, and the

substantial adjustments a herding life required, and thus remains helpful in understanding the dynamics at play at the

Teller station. Moreover, it does not seem from contemporary missionary reports that the 1889 or 1890 were famine

years around the station, even if they were for points north, where Burch is more expert.

538

In the first decade of federal education in Alaska, the line between government-hired and missionary teachers was

blurred, with government teachers often married to missionaries and the content of government lessons quite religiously

inflected. Jackson was open to missions of all denominations and divided Alaska into territories overseen by each,

although the majority came from Protestant churches. The King Island mission was a notable and influential exception

in the Bering Strait region, as the long-time priest serving there was Catholic. There was also a Catholic community in

Nome. For a full list of the denominations and their territories, see Arthur Lazell, Alaskan Apostle: The Life Story of Sheldon

Jackson, (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1960), 65.

539

Residential schooling was generally rejected by education officials working in Alaska, in large part because perceived

environmental exceptionalism of the region. See Sheldon Jackson, “Education in Alaska,” 49 Cong., 1 sess., Sen. Exec. Doc.

85 (1886), 30-32; “Report on the Condition of the Indians” 1885, NARA CA RG 48, M-430, Roll 1. A few Inupiat

children were sent to the Carlisle Indian School. Ellen Lopp lamented that they “won’t be satisfied to live like Eskimos

again.” See Ellen Lopp, September 16, 1899, in Smith and Smith, Ice Window, 231.

discouraging polygamy, and imparting the metaphysics of investment, capital, private property, and

Christian salvation. The challenges were considerable. There were few moral examples of commerce,

as the missionaries nearly all found the whalers and traders to be immoral, drunken cheats. Ethics

were difficult to translate. Ellen Lopp, who taught at Cape Prince of Wales, wrote home about her

attempt to convey the wrongness of theft through the parable of Saul, “I might have said he

disobeyed God, but I don’t know any word for disobey. These people don’t use such a word much.

They have no government to obey, or Bible.”

540

That the missionaries taught fealty to new people

and powers did not go unnoticed. At Kotzebue, shamans threatened death to any Inupiaq who fed

the local missionaries.

541

Christianized Inupiat complained of social isolation.

542

Some missionaries

noted that it took epidemic disease to make converts.

543

Others kept tallies of taboos and rites they

saw passing away.

544

Respected whites, like the Lopp family, found themselves hunting as much as

ministering, their children fluent in Inupiaq rather than English. They wondered how to teach

religion and civilization when between denominations and interpretations of Christianity “we don’t

agree among ourselves even” on “what to tell them they should or shouldn’t do.”

545

The reindeer did not require their human minders to agree on their value in order to

multiply. Born onto tundra nearly without caribou, calves flourished on abundant lichen. Even

wolves were rare. In 1897, the number of domesticated Rangifer was over two thousand head. Four

years later, the population had doubled. The growth of the herds seemed to confirm the tundra’s

potential productivity. “The deer have taken kindly to their new home,” the Washington Post

reported, and “the native boys…grow proficient in their management.”

546

Congress granted the

program annual appropriations. Herds spread outward from Teller Station, husbandry now taught to

Inupiat apprentices by Norwegian Saami, invited to Alaska by Jackson and heralded in the national

press as Christian, blue-eyed, and civilized.

547

Thomas Lopp, who was fluent in Inupiaq and well-

respected in Inupiat communities, reported growing enthusiasm for herding.

548

Less clear was precisely how capitalism should look on the tundra, and who made a good

capitalist. The reindeer program had been sold to Congress, and to potential native herders, as an

Inupiat-only industry, a guarantee of subsistence at the least and source of profit at best. When the

discovery of gold at Nome brought 40,000 hungry whites to the Seward Peninsula, the possibility of

profit became real. But profit required ownership. And ownership, in the eyes of Jackson and his

540

Ellen Lopp, April 16, Smith and Smith, Ice Window, 55.

541

Journal of Friends Mission, Entries for March 23 1901, March 24 1901 and Summary of traditions broken in 1900-

1901, California Yearly Meeting of Friends Church Archives, Whittier CA, copy in APRCA, Ernest S. Burch Jr. Papers,

USUAFV6-627, Series 3, Box 74, file “California Yearly Meeting of Friends.” See also T.L. Brevig, Apaurak in Alaska:

Social Pioneering Among the Eskimos, trans and ed. J. Walter Johnshoy (Philadelphia: Dorrance & Co, 1944, 180-181.

542

Tom Lopp, June 1895, Smith and Smith, Ice Window, 109.

543

Brevig, Apaurak in Alaska, 158.

544

Journal of Carrie Samms, October 13 1897, California Yearly Meeting of Friends Church Archives, Whittier CA, copy

in APRCA, Ernest S. Burch Jr. Papers, USUAFV6-627, Series 3, Box 74, file “California Yearly Meeting of Friends.”

545

Ellen Lopp, June 15 1893, Smith and Smith, Ice Window, 64.

546

“Put an End to Famine: Natives of Alaska Supplied with a Substitute for Walrus,” Washington Post, Washington, D.C.,

December 19, 1893. Coverage of the reindeer project in the 1890s and early 1900s in the press fills two folios in the

National Archives; see NARA DC RG 75 Entry 821, showing coverage in all major US cities and smaller towns, helped

by an uptick in public interest in Eskimos and the arctic in the late 1800s. See Wills, Alaska’s Place, 28.

547

“Herders of Reindeer,” Washington Post, Washington D.C., July 1

1894. See also Willis, Alaska’s Place, 31.

548

Tom Lopp to Miner Bruce, May 13, 1893, Smith and Smith, Ice Window, 59.

missionary partners, required civilization. The Inupiat were seen as too childlike and irresponsible to

be given herds without proper education in herding, literacy, and Christian values first. Reindeer

were transferred from federal herds to Inupiat owners only after white teachers deemed each

individual worthy. For Inupiat, this meant years caring for animals they were prohibited from killing,

punished for eating, and chastised for leaving untended in order to fish or hunt, all while living away

from their families.

549

As a result, herds had little obvious political or practical use for young Inupiat

men. And even when a herd passed into Inupiat hands, they did not always stay there. Charlie

Antisarlook, an influential Inupiat trader and shaman, received a herd of his own, only to have the

government request it back in order to aid whalers iced in at Point Barrow.

550

The Saami, meanwhile,

were rapidly accumulating reindeer as part of their government salary. And in 1914, Carl Loman, an

entrepreneur based in Nome, bought 1200 animals from a Saami herder and began developing his

own enterprise. Thus, just as the market for draft and food animals boomed with the gold rush, the

profits passed from miners to Saami, white owners, and missions. Private property functioned

according to the perception of civilization, and civilization tracked onto race. For many Inupiat,

accustomed to seeing in the tundra possibilities other than pastoralism, reindeer were no more

certain than hunting. As a result, nearly fifty percent of the reindeer in Alaska were in non-native

hands a decade after the program began.

551

In the first decades of the twentieth century, with tens of thousands of reindeer spread out

across Alaska, the Bureau of Education was impressed by the potential of the herds.

552

Less

impressive was the lack of indigenous ownership. Instead of making the Inupiat self-sufficient,

missionary education “along material and temporal lines has largely been a series of failures,” wrote

one Superintendent, “making the natives dependent by feeding them.”

553

Implicit in the critique of

missions was their inability to instill a functional understanding of the earthly future. Inupiat pupils

were not trained to understand profit, and religious education had not made Inupiat proprietors.

Without property, Inupiat were still a financial burden and isolated from civic participation. It was

secular management of people and land which would guarantee the prosperity of both.

554

Given this,

549

The exact terms of how the Inupiat would earn their animals changed frequently. At first successful apprentices

would receive ten head after two years. In 1893, the reindeer station began giving each apprentice a few deer per year,

and in 1894 the term of apprenticeship was extended to three years; by 1896, the term had grown to five years with the

possibility, rather than the guarantee, of receiving a starter herd at the end.

550

While Sheldon Jackson reported the drive of reindeer as a success, Charles Brower, who ran the Barrow shore

whaling station, wrote that the whalers had plenty of local food and the reindeer arrived too thin to eat; see Fifty Years

Below Zero: a Lifetime of Adventure in the Far North (New York: Dodd, Mead and Company, 1942), 212-213.

551

Stern, et al., Eskimos Reindeer and Land, 25-26.

552

U.S. Bureau of Education, Report on the Education of the Natives of Alaska and the Reindeer Service 1910-11 (Washington

D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1912), 23; U.S. Bureau of Education, Report on Work of the Bureau of Education for the

Natives of Alaska 1913-1914 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1917), 7.

553

Walter Shields, Report Superintendent N.W. District, June 30 1915, p.10-11, NARA DC RG 75, General

Correspondence 1915-1916, Entry 806.

554

The desire for secular management of both people and environment was part of the general expansion of resource

governance as part of the expansion and consolidation of the state during the first decades of the twentieth century. See

Bruce J. Schulman, “Governing Nature, Nurturing Government: Resource Management and the Development of the

American State, 1900-1912” Journal of Policy History, Vol. 17 No. 4 (October 2005):375-403. Schulman interprets resource

management in this era less as a battle between conservationists and preservationists than as a program of expanding and

consolidating federal control, although the emphasis on efficiency that Samuel P. Hays identified seems alive and well in

the Bureau reversed its earlier position, concluding that ownership was a precursor to civilized

behavior, not its reward. By 1907, the policy of the newly formed U.S. Reindeer Service was to make

herders of as many Inupiat men as possible.

555

The apprenticeship program was abandoned. The

Service arranged annual reindeer fairs, with contests in lassoing, butchering, and sled racing. In the

turmoil of gold rush market booms and busts, epidemics, and changing trade patterns, many Inupiat

found much to recommend owning reindeer. By 1915, two-thirds of the 70,000 reindeer in Alaska

were owned by native herdsmen.

556

The Reindeer service had created yeoman farmers. But reindeer yeomen were not creating

profit. The local market for reindeer meat surged and ebbed with the gold rush: initially, miners were

so desperate they paid thirty cents a pound for meat, or simply stole reindeer off the range.

557

Then

the white population stole away altogether, as mining sites were claimed or proved a bust. And

regardless of the market, there was the practical issue of private ownership in common space. “The

Lapp reindeer herd and the Native herd were mixed last summer,” wrote one teacher, so “it is a hard

task to keep these two herds apart, because the herds are getting too big and the grazing grounds too

small.”

558

Claims to ownership became fraught. The state, through the Reindeer Service, was

officially in charge arbitrating reindeer transactions, but herds traded hands without records.

559

Some

Inupiat, interested in staying near their families and fishing sites, tended not move their herds, and

“Deer that are herded over the same ground after the food is depleted will scatter and it is almost

impossible to bunch them into quiet herds again.”

560

The situation grew worse after the 1918 flu

pandemic killed many herders, leaving their stock to wander the range half-feral.

Into this chaos came a new capitalist model for the tundra. Carl Lomen, an entrepreneur

based in Nome, saw in the milling ill-tended herds a potential fortune from reindeer. In the early

years of the Reindeer Service, Lomen bought animals from Saami and missions. By the early 1920s,

with a herd in the thousands, the Loman Company ran a ranch-like operation where hired Inupiat

minders tending herds that fanned out from central butchering and cold-storage facilities. Lomen

aggressively marketed reindeer products outside Alaska, seeking contracts with elite restaurants, dog-

food companies, and tanneries. Lomen even courted the U.S. Army as a buyer for hides.

561

In the

years leading up to the Depression, almost 6.5 million pounds of reindeer products were sold

outside of Alaska, most by Lomen.

562

Many Inupiat, meanwhile, grew used to selling Lomen their

steers or working for wages. The result was an increasingly turn toward the market and its values for

Alaska; see Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency: The Progressive Conservation Movement, 1890-1920 (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 1959).

555

The Service was run by former Sheldon Jackson employee William Lopp, who came to see Jackson’s policies as

harming the Inupiat. Lopp’s desire for more native ownership also came at a time when federal interest in supporting

religious education was on the wane.

556

U.S. Bureau of Education, Report …1910-11, 23; U.S. Bureau of Education, Report…1913-1914, 7.

557

Sheldon Jackson to W.T. Harris, January 14, 1904, NARA CA RG 48 M-430, Roll 10; Brevig, Apaurak, 287.

558

Unalakleet Teacher Wellman, Annual Report 1922-1923, NARA AK RG 75 Alaska Reindeer Service Historical Files,

File: History-general, 1933-1945.

559

Erik Nylin to Supt. Dupertuis, May 18 1923, in APRCA, Fosma and Sidney Rood Papers, Box 2.

560

Fred Tait to Stpt. Evans, April 1 1921, in APRCA, Fosma and Sidney Rood Papers, Box 2.

561

Willis, Alaska’s Place, 40-41.

562

Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 14.

labor. As one Bureau teacher complained, “the Natives want pay for everything they do and have

everything possible for nothing.”

563

What did not pay, much to the Reindeer Service’s frustration, were small native-owned

reindeer herds. The fine margin of calories on the tundra meant that reindeer birth one fawn per

female per year. The average Inupiat herd of fifty animals did not yield a profitable surplus, once

herders fed themselves and saved breeding stock. The small farmer on the tundra would only ever

be a subsistence farmer. But large herds like Lomen’s were making money. Inspired by this model,

and concerned that Inupiat would be pushed out of owning their own herds, the Reindeer Service

facilitated the creation of joint stock corporations. Individual Inupiat owners pooled their animals

into large herds, and shared the profits.

564

These ventures were usually managed hierarchically, with

Reindeer Service officials at the top and day-to-day management overseen by a chief herder.

Raising reindeer in large herds had support from scientists as well. L.J. Palmer, a senior

biologist at the Bureau of Biological Survey, recommended treating Rangifer like cattle on the western

prairies.

565

In this model, large herds should be let graze freely over the range, rather than herded

closely. Doing so would rationalize the animal’s use of fodder. Basing his analysis on the emerging

concept of carrying capacity, Palmer concluded that open herds were less likely to damage lichens

through overgrazing.

566

Rational allotment of rangeland was also critical. Without control over who

grazed their animals where, some parts of the tundra were over-used and others left fallow. This

limited the number of reindeer the tundra could support. Palmer calculated that with managed

herds, each reindeer required thirty acres of good browse, meaning the tundra could support three

to four million animals.

567

But these future profits did not come from small yeoman farmers.

Instead, science prescribed a different sort of capitalism: one with large farms, a few chief herders,

and many wage laborers.

Rangeland capitalism was the 1920s ideal. In reality, tundra remained a mess of unmarked

herds and conflicting ideas about who should own them and where their value lay. For some

Inupiat, reindeer were valuable sources of food. For others, they were wage work. Seen as one

economic option on a plentiful landscape, many Inupiat were ambivalent.

568

So was the state. On the

one hand, reindeer were propagated and regulated as a specifically indigenous resource – Inupiat

herders were not even allowed to sell female deer to whites, in order to keep stock in native hands.

Reindeer were valued, in this view, for their ability to further assimilation and self-sufficiency. Yet

some federal observers found the Lomen’s marketing efforts compelling. As early as 1914, the

Secretary of the Interior favored a plan allowing white ownership in order to best exploit the

563

W. Johnson to Lopp, April 11, 1917, NARA AK RG 75 Alaska Reindeer Service Historical Files, File: History-

general, 1933-1945.

564

U.S. Bureau of Education, Report …1914-1915, 8.

565

Seymour Hadwen and Lawrence Palmer, Reindeer in Alaska (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1922),

69.

566

Lawrence Palmer, Raising Reindeer in Alaska (Washington D.C.: United States Department of Agriculture

Miscellaneous Publication No. 207, 1934), 23.

567

Hadwin and Palmer, Reindeer in Alaska, 4.

568

Margaret Lantis, “The Reindeer Industry in Alaska,” Arctic Vol. 3 No. 1 (April 1950): 27-44. Olson contends that the

degree of specialization required for herding did not mesh well with the generalist orientation of indigenous economic

production; Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 97.

tundra.

569

For better or worse, men like Lomen were better schooled in the arts of investment and

marketing and might make more of the industry. “A Native cannot see the possibilities of the

reindeer business,” wrote one government teacher, “he has no vision. For him today is sufficient

unto itself.”

570

And someone needed to manage the growing herds. By 1929, 400,000 domestic

reindeer were eating their way across Alaska. The extravagance of their reproduction seemed proof

that civilization was overcoming the paucity of arctic nature. And civilization tied the frontier to the

rest of the country through the market. William Randolph Hearst went so far as to cite reindeer as a

solution to New York’s booming, potentially protein-starved 1920s population.

571

In this view,

reindeer were valuable not as a tool of capitalist pedagogy among the natives but as a commodity for

the nation. That the nation would find a reason to buy this commodity was, as Arctic adventurer

John Burnham observed, “a commonplace statement of the inevitable.”

572

CONTESTED LAND, CHUKOTKA 1900S-1940S

Moving north out of the taiga, with its wind-beaten spruce and low alder, large patches of the tundra

surface appear pale. Here mats of greenish-grey reindeer lichen cling to dry rock and sandy soil, each

minute horn-like branch made from interdependent fungus and algae. Where water is held on the

surface by permafrost, meadows of sedge grass and primrose are broken by mounds of

undecomposed plants, their ancient carbon become the peaty home for shrub birch and

cloudberries. Further north still, bright splays of red and yellow lichen pool on bare stone. Across

these miniature biomes come the Rangifer herds, their bodies composites of more than four hundred

species of shrubs, sedges, grasses, mosses, and lichen. In Chukotka, the reindeer move with their

minders, who rest their animals on good pasture and rest pastures from the damages of grinding

ungulate teeth.

In the 1860s, a Chukchi boy named Ei’heli grew up on the Omolon River, learning to route

the migration of his father’s stock from meadows of fattening grasses in autumn to the beds of

lichen that kept does healthy through winter.

573

Ei’heli came of age in a time of plenty. His father,

Amar’wkurgin, owned two large herds. Ei’heli grew to have five, and almost as many wives. As with

the reindeer, so too with the people. Growing populations shifted ranks and territories. Some

Chukchi became traders, hauling their wares on reindeer sledges from coast inland. Seal hunters

turned to reindeer husbandry. Poor men settled among walrus huts. It was, in the words of one

Chukchi man, a time of peace, when “everybody thinks only of gain, and all tribes and nations

569

“Reindeer to help the meat supply,” Newsprint clipping, June 15 1914, NARA MD RG 48, Central Classified File

1907-1936, file: 6-2/6-4; Lewis Laylin, Sec. of Interior to Hon. James Wickersham, March 12, 1913, NARA AK RG 75 ,

Alaska Reindeer Service Historical Files, File: History-general, 1933-1945.

Interior oversaw the Bureau of Education, which in turn ran the reindeer program in these years.

570

Erik Nylin Annual Report from Wales 1922-1923, in APRCA, Fosma and Sidney Rood Papers, Box 2.

571

William R. Hunt, Arctic Passage: The Turbulent History of the Land and People 1697-1975 (New York: Charles Scribner’s

Sons, 1975), 219.

572

John B. Burnham, The Rim of Mystery: A Hunter’s Wanderings in Unknown Siberian Asia (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons,

1929), 281.

573

Bogoraz spent considerable time with Ei’heli during his sojourns among the Chukchi, see The Chukchee, 73.

100

intermingle.”

574

Some gained a great deal. By the first years of the twentieth century, between five

and ten percent of herders controlled between half and two-thirds of the Peninsula’s domestic

herds.

575

But prosperity was tied to the reindeer, and the reindeer to the tundra, and the tundra to

the fundamental pulse of climate. The twentieth century came in warm. The land was covered by

sleet, pinning reindeer in poor pastureland. Wolf packs grew. Some herders lost half their animals.

576

Ei’heli’s luck turned foul with an outbreak of hoof disease.

The stochastic disposition of the tundra was no mystery to Imperial Russia’s regional

governors and local officials. Herd crashes often meant starvation among the people the tsar was

meant to govern. Rapid reversals in fortune and prestige troubled attempts to anoint hereditary,

tribute-paying chiefs among the Chukchi.

577

And the politics were more than local. Without formal

bonds of loyalty – or a monopoly on violence and commerce – the Russian state watched Chukchi-

controlled furs go to Americans along the coast rather than merchants on the Kolyma. But

Chukotka’s regional administrators had an eye on Alaska for another reason. American schools, one

administrator wrote, produced “consciousness on the part of their natives regarding their need for

culture,” not to mention expanding herds.

578

Education seemed to be making more Americans and

more reindeer. Imperial administrators wanted similar schools for the “mental development” of

herders, to “raise their level of initiative and the transition to a more advanced use of natural goods

[blago],” while “introducing Russian culture.”

579

At the least, Russianized Chukchi might avoid

starvation. At best, they could domesticate an international market, and perhaps even pay taxes.

Charitable and sovereign ends were conveniently aligned, if only the number of reindeer

would stabilize. And stabilizing reindeer herds seemed a more manageable and urgent task than

finding teachers for “the very scattered population of the Peninsula.”

580

In 1897, the Military

Governor of Primorskaia Oblast’ requested 1823 rubles for a veterinarian to study reindeer diseases

in Kamchatka and Chukotka.

581

Over a decade later, the Governor was still arguing for the necessity

of veterinary assistance, since “the industry of reindeer herding, given [the region’s] conditions, has

such serious economic importance.”

582

Finally, in 1911, two vets went north, equipped with “the

physical health permitting them to serve in the far districts” but without medical supplies or the

574

Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 44-45.

575

Baskin, Severnyi olen’, 186-187.

576

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. l682, L. 13; S.A. Buturlina, Otchet upolnomochennago Ministerstva vnutrennykh del’ po

snabzheniiu prodovol'stvem v 1905 godu, Kolymskago i Okhotskago kraia (St. Petersburg: Tipografaia Ministerstva vnutrennikh

del, 1907), 70-72; RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 3, D. 160, L. 28.

577

Amar’wkurgin was anointed the “Highest Chief of all the Chukchi” by Kolyma official Baron Maydell (Maidel’) in the

1860s, see Baron Gerhard Maydell, Reisen und forschungen im Jakutskischen gebiet Ostsibiriens in den jahren 1861-1871 (St.

Petersburg: Buchdruckerei der K. Akademie der wissenschaften, 1893-96). His son inherited this title, at least in the eyes

of the Russians. See Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 73, 706-708.

578

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 3, D. 414, L. 87. N.F. Kallinikov went so far as to advocate a program modeled explicitly

after the U.S. union of missions and herding; RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 682, L. 3-5a.

579

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 3, D. 414, L. 89.

580

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 682, L. 93. As of 1911, only one school not on the coast or at the administrative and

trading hubs of Anadyr and Markovo, where many of the pupils were Cossacks, was in operation.

581

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 3, D. 160, L. 13-14.

582

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 3, D. 160, L. 40.

101

training visit to the Teller Station that Petropavlovsk’s commander suggested.

583

Once in Chukotka,

the young men faced considerable difficulty. The Chukchi did not want to discuss their herds’

condition with outsiders. There were no roads. Even the etiology of hoof disease was unclear. One

report noted that U.S. scientists attributed the illness to bruising from rocky ground, whereas the

Russians believed it was infectious.

584

Four years after the veterinarians’ arrival, the climate warmed

again. Chukotka’s domestic herds lost more than 300,000 animals to disease, wolves, and starvation.

Wild reindeer nearly vanished entirely.

585

FOR THE CHUKCHI, the sudden poverty of the tundra was an expected revolution, and one

that, in the experience of men like Ei’heli, cycled back to cold winters, fat fawns, and new

distributions of reindeer luck. Less expected were the Bolsheviks. The Russian Revolution came to

the tundra first as rumor: skirmishes in Anadyr, unrest along the coast. Then trade faltered. But

neither the Red nor the White armies could move easily on the tundra, and fighting stayed close to

the ocean and rivers.

586

For many Chukchi, 1917 was nearly a decade in the past before they met in

the flesh any emissaries of the new Soviet state. The men and women who finally did come out

among the mountains and lakes, were, according to ethnographer Waldemar Bogoras,

“missionaries…ready to take to north the burning fire of their enthusiasm born of the

Revolution.”

587

Inspired by ideology, lured by the exotic, or pragmatically interested in salaries, many

shared with their American counterparts an impression of the northern landscape, as “a most

depressing sight: bare tundra, black mountains in the distance, not a sign of life.”

588

Also like the

missionaries to the east, their task was to convert barrenness into abundance. Reindeer were critical

to this process. “Judging from the example of Alaska,” a Committee of the North report noted,

“reindeer herding can achieve significant development and deliver an important industry not only

for natives of the north, but to the national economy as a whole.”

589

Such development required the transformation of human life on the tundra. As primitive

sufferers of Tsarist rule and American predation, the Chukchi lagged far behind the historical

trajectory of the revolutionary state. They needed “A NEW LIFE…a new, healthy, cultured

583

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 682, L. 45, 62. The regional governors during the early 20

century were very aware

and interested in what the American reindeer were doing, particularly given the apparently boundless growth of U.S.

herds. See also RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 3, D. 160, L. 33.

584

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 1, D. 682, L. 25. Necrobacillus, a bacterial infection of the hooves, is the most common

disease among reindeer in northeastern Eurasia and is prevalent during hot years when warm, damp conditions allow the

bacteria to breed. Damaged hooves are also more susceptible. See K. Handeland, M. Moye, B. Borgsjo, H. Bondal, K.

Isaksen, and J.S. Agerholm, “Digital Necorbasillosis in Norwegian Wild Tundra Reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus)”

Journal of Comparative Pathology, Vol. 143 No. 1 (July 2010): 29-38.

585

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 3, D. 563, L. 147-148. The local administrator at Anadyr blamed the loss of wild reindeer on

gold prospectors’ overhunting, which will be discussed in Chapter Four. Wild reindeer had to compete, in Chukotka,

with domesticated animals, and their population was already under pressure before the adverse events of the early 20

century. See Krupnik, Arctic Adaptations, 173-175.

586

RGIA DV F. R-2333, Op. 1, D. 120, L. 9, 70.

587

Waldemar Bogoras, “Podgotovitel’nye mery k organizatsii malykh narodnostei,” Sovetskaia Aziia No. 3 (1925): 48.

588

N. Galkin, V zemle polunochnogo solntsa (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931), 36. For a detailed discussion of the motives

and demographics of the early Soviets in the north, see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of the

North, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 150-163.

589

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 225, L. 188.

102

existence in step with peasants and workers throughout this Soviet country.”

590

In part, this entailed

literacy, hygiene, women’s emancipation, medical care, and an end to displays of backwardness like

snacking on lice. But, as good Marxists, social advancement emerged from the economic base. For

the Soviets, this required making all production the result of collective industry. And collective

industry required eliminating the class structure Soviets saw in how reindeer were distributed among

the Chukchi. The tundra had a proletariat of poor herders, and an exploiting class of kulaks. To

achieve liberation from want and equality between all, poor herders needed to pool their animals and

the rich “exploiting” class had to relinquish their stock for the common good. From these new

herds, cooperative artels would advance to collective farms, or kolkhozy, or even fully state-run

sovkhozy. As the Committee for the North’s Karl Luks argued, the result would “put [the Chukchi]

on independent economic footing, giving them the opportunity not only to feed themselves but

constantly improve their lives, to become confederates in the worker’s state.”

591

It was this message that the Soviet ethnographers, cadres, and assorted ministry agents

brought to the tundra in the 1920s. The tundra had its own messages. Physically, the landscape

imposed on every plan. In winter, the only transit was by dog team or draft reindeer. Movement in

the summer was nearly impossible. Insects were a torment. Housing was often in yarangas filled with

horrifying smells and darkness. Injury was frequent, and death possible.

592

Socially, the tundra was

scarcely more inviting. Many Soviets arrived expecting to find primitive communists, not a regime of

uneven ownership.

593

Translators were few, and even when delivered in Chukchi, the Soviet message

was often unwelcome. The Yupik and coastal Chukchi were relatively amenable to grafting Soviet

terminology onto their collective hunting practices. The tundra Chukchi saw few benefits. Lenin’s

promise of national self-determination on the road to socialism was hardly revolutionary, given the

Chukchi’s longstanding de facto independence from the tsars.

594

Moreover, Soviet attempts to learn

about the landscape and attempts at benevolence towards its people were easily misinterpreted. The

590

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 225, L. 5.

591

RGIA DV F. R-2411, Op. 1, D. 66, L. 191. Luks explicitly argues against the dependency that the American

reservation system created.

592

For example, Vladimir Ivanchikov, a disciple of Bogoras, drowned in Chukotka, and Karl Luks was killed in a firearm

accident.

593

This phenomenon occurred across the Soviet Union; see for example, Bruce Grant In the Soviet House of Culture: a

Century of Perestroikas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).

594

Andrei Znamenski argues that the Chukchi established a “middle ground” between American traders and the Russian

Empire; certainly they had carved out a space of unique indigenous sovereignty; see “’A Vague Sense of Belonging to the

Russian Empire:’ The Reindeer Chukchi’s Status in Nineteenth Century Northeastern Siberia” Arctic Anthropology, Vol.

36, No. 1 /2 (1999): 19-36. What the Chukchi did not have, and what the Soviets believed they needed, was national

structure combined with central state economic intervention. Since the Chukchi saw no need for a temporary nation en

route to communism and liked their economic organization, Soviet nationalities policy had little to offer. For a discussion

of Soviet policy that best fits the debates had by Soviet planners in Chukotka, see Yuri Slezkine, “The U.S.S.R. as a

Communal Apartment, or How a Socialist State Promoted Ethnic Particularism,” Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2 (Summer

1994): 414-452. There is a large literature on Soviet nationalities policy, much of which applies more in settled

agricultural regions where the creation of national elites was more successful; see Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action

Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union 1923-1939 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001). Francine Hirsh’s

contention that the Soviet Union did not have clear aims regarding national policy does not fit the Chukchi case

especially well, as the “communal apartment” approach was well established by the time the Soviets took control of the

Peninsula, although her argument that nationalism was not the downfall of the Soviet Union matches the Chukchi case;

Francine Hirsch, Empire of Nations: Ethnographic Knowledge & the Making of the Soviet Union (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

2005).

103

Chukchi took surveys of tundra vegetation to be shamanic curses.

595

They suspected doctors of

killing patients, and a census of reindeer herds of killing their animals.

596

And then there were the reindeer. “The Chukchi took me in and willingly talked about

general, abstract themes and topics that do not affect the fundamental problems of the economy,”

reported one Committee of the North agent of his travels in the interior, “But when issues began to

touch on the deer and reindeer herding, the Chukchi became wary and stopped talking.”

597

Ivan

Druri, who founded the first Chukotka sovkhoz in 1929, recalled that rich herders “treated our

activities with distrust and suspicion. They understood that we wanted to be chauchu, that is, the

owners of herds, and feared us as future competitors. The poor shepherds were still under their total

influence.”

598

Arguments that the Soviets only wanted to “help the Chukchi organize deer farms so

the whole population of Chukotka is prosperous” produced no rush of new communists.

599

Where

reindeer were collectivized, the herds were so small and supplies so short that, as one cadre wrote,

“We bought reindeer. We ate them all... So in reality there are no reindeer collectives.”

600

One report

estimated that less than one percent of Chukotka’s reindeer were held collectively by the early

1930s.

601

THE SOVIETS WANTED for reindeer, but it was not due to the size of the herds wandering

the Chukchi Peninsula. Epizootics waned, the weather waxed colder, and by the end of the 1920s

there were over half a million domestic animals scattered among many owners.

602

But the ideological

climate had turned. The era of graduated change and voluntary participation ended along with the

New Economic Policy in 1928. With Stalin’s first Five Year Plan, collectivization became part of an

open war against the past, the past was defined by class, and class by a lack of collectivization or

affiliation with any belief incommensurate with communism. Mostly the past meant a lack of

progress, and progress meant increasing production. That too required collectives. “Only by

transitioning to the collective economic form,” wrote one dedicated Committee of the North

advocate, “can the complete and comprehensive implementation of all measures for the

development and growth of the economy be ensured.”

603

Backwardness, whether expressed in the

desire to own reindeer or consult shamans or simply carry on life without joining a collective,

suddenly made many Chukchi enemies of the state.

It was with the Five Year Plans and Stalin’s war against backwardness that the Russian

Revolution and the revolutionary state moved from rumor, or perhaps the nuisance of a visiting

communist, to full presence on the tundra. As with most Russian plans on the Peninsula, it also

595

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 88, L. 44.

596

RIGA DV F. R-4315, Op. 1, D. 32, L. 3.

597

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 88, L. 42.

598

I. Druri, “Kak byl sozdan pervyi olenesovkhoz na Chukotke,” Kraevedcheskie zapiski XVI (Magadan, 1989), 9.

599

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 88, L. 42.

600

GAMO F. 91, Op. 1, D. 2, L. 94.

601

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 716, L. 24.

602

Counts of reindeer and the number collectivized very somewhat between sources, and are certainly all estimates given

the difficulty of counting thousands of moving animals. The total of 556,000 domestic head in 1926-1927 given by I.S.

Garusov is about average. See Sotsialisticheskoe pereustroistvo sel’skogo i promyslovogo khoziaistva Chukotki 1917-1952 (Magadan:

Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1981), 81.

603

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 18, L. 113.

104

came a few years late. In 1929, even the administratively central Anadyr raion had only a single

kolkhoz. By 1931, such stagnation was no longer tolerable even in Chukotka. Collectivization had

transformed from a method of procuring grain to an ideological loyalty test and sign of professional

and political competence. Thus Chukotka’s Party leadership wrote “to exert maximum energy

toward the organization…of collective farms” and “resolute struggle against the remnants of the

tribal system.

604

Propaganda increased, with traveling “red tents” sent far into Chukchi land to bring

the Soviet word to nomads. Although some teachers tried to recruit nomadic pupils to come live in

coastal residential schools through what teacher Tikhon Semushkin called “a voluntary

understanding on both sides,” many Chukchi were not persuaded.

605

Parents who kept their children

risked arrest.

606

One cadre reported that his proclamations of equality and reindeer gained traction

among poorer herders, but “Kirol’ – a kulak, owner of a large reindeer herd – told me quite

shamelessly that ‘I will not go to the Soviet authority, and may it not come to me either.’”

607

The authorities did come to him, however, or at least many herders like him. Proof of

individual ideological fealty, and the immediacy of community utopia, was in increased production.

To prove they were good communists and that communism was real, agents of the state needed new

collectives to report and more reindeer in them to count. Given the reticence of the Chukchi to

participate in the Soviet project, the drive to make the future present translated, on the tundra, to

forced collectivization. In the early 1930s, the Soviets began seizing private herds. In response,

Chukchi avoided any sign of the state, from school to hospital. Converted Yupik and a few Chukchi

communists charged them with being kulaks. Herders suspicious of Soviet veterinarians became

shamans. Shamans were detained. Some detainees never returned.

608

One Chukchi woman

remembered passing by a kolkhoz where the chairman “told us to put our yaranga in the village, but

we refused. This man was not good to people who did not understand Russian…I said to the

chairman: ‘I am not going to work for you, you have killed many people. Where are they now?’”

609

604

RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4, D. 974, L. 66.

605

Tikhon Semushkin, Children of the Soviet Arctic, (London: Hutchinson, 1934), 29. This is a fictionalized account of

Semushkin’s work in Chukotka. For a discussion of residential schooling in Chukotka, see Patty Gray, Patty Gray, The

Predicament of Chukotka’s Indigenous Movement (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 110-115; Anna M. Kerttula,

Antler on the Sea: The Yup’ik and Chukchi of the Russian Far East (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000), 14-15; Nikolai

Vakhtin, “Native Peoples of the Russian Far North, in Polar Peoples: Self-Determination and Development (London:

Minority Rights Group, 1994), 29-80, 61.

606

D.I. Raizman, “Shaman byl protiv,” in L.S. Bogoslovskaia, V.S. Krivoshchekov, and I. Krupnik, eds. Tropoiu Bogoraza:

Nauchnye i literaturnye materialy (Moscow: Russian Heritage Institute-GEOS, 2008), 95-101, 95.

607

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 88, L. 43. The response to residential schooling across the Russian north is roughly

comparable to the U.S. experience; see Adams, Education for Extinction.

608

Full accounts of arrests are likely in the Party archive in Magadan, where access to sensitive materials is often

restricted. Vladislav Nuvano’s interviewees describe arrests and disappearances in “Tragediia v selakh Berezovo i Vaegi

1940 i 1949gg,” in L.S. Bogoslovskaia, V.S. Krivoshchekov, and I. Krupnik, eds. Tropoiu Bogoraza: Nauchnye i literaturnye

materialy (Moscow: Russian Heritage Institute-GEOS, 2008), 85-90.

609

Nuvano,“Tragediia,” 88. These interviews stand in contrast to the Soviet version of events, which claim that

Germav’e refused to relinquish his reindeer and was planning to murder the commissioner in charge of collectivization.

See Garusov, Sotsialisticheskoe pereustroistvo sel’skogo, 131. Nuvano, who conducted many oral histories in the Berezovo

region and is a reindeer herder himself, strongly contests this version, arguing that the attack was unprovoked; personal

communication, May 2014.

105

By 1932, resistance to collectivization became openly violent. Chukchi attacked local

activists, Party members, and Soviet personnel.

610

Other Chukchi families fled. At the 1932 Second

Congress of Soviets for the Anadyr District, a poor reindeer herder and delegate “without a cry

stabbed himself through the heart with a Chukchi knife,” an act of political protest and desperation

that was interpreted by local Party leaders as the “provocation of kulaks and shamans.”

611

Such acts did not go unnoticed in Moscow. Control of reindeer country rested on having

reindeer, and reindeer depended upon herders, now inspired to open revolt by “the policy of

restricting the kulaks and Sovietization.”

612

It took several years for Stalin’s 1930 reprimand of local

administrators, whose coercive tactics he blamed on being “dizzy with success” rather than his own

directives, to reach Chukotka.

613

But by 1934, officials softened their approach, allowing private

ownership of up to 600 reindeer among kolkhoz members. Although this diminished the talk of

liquidating kulaks somewhat, the end of the 1930s did not see the end of disputes between Chukchi

and Soviet ways of being. Parents did not want to part with their children. Herders did not want to

part with their reindeer. Men like Karauv’e, from the Chaun tundra, were sentenced to ten years in

prison for practicing shamanism and preventing his children from joining the Komsomol.

614

During the years of the Stalinist purges, such acts spread violence beyond Chukchi camps.

Committed communist missionaries, like the hapless comrade Karpov, found themselves accused of

fraud and “wrecking the work of the traveling culture bases” when Chukchi interest remained low.

615

Others were taken to lethal task for their supposed debauchery, excessive drinking, or the fact they

“led no struggles against the kulaks.”

616

In the late 1930s, the Soviets’ need to form collectives

became as much a question of personal survival as ideological investment. The results spiraled

violence back to the tundra. Yagyrgikai, who lived near the village of Beryozovo, remembered this as

a time when “many died, because we could not live with the life that was imposed on us. From the

start we were crushed by the force of the authorities. They took absolutely everything. The sleds,

even rope and burlap – they took every bundle.” Without sleds and draft deer, many families were

unable to follow their herds to new pastures, and had little choice but to join kolkhozy. Many who

did otherwise were arrested. In 1940, near Beryozovo, three sons of a wanted kulak named Gemav’e

were killed and their camp burned. Yagyrgikai, who survived the violence, remembered digging

through the snow to bury the bodies of children.

617

And as with people, so too with the reindeer. The first wave of collectivization did eventually

increase the number of kolkhozy; by 1940 there were 21 in the Anadyr raion, and some even

610

N.N. Dikov, Istoriia Chukotki s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (Moscow: Mysl’, 1989), 211; Garusov, Sotsialisticheskoe

pereustroistvo sel’skogo, 130-132. The frequency of these attacks was difficult to gauge, as most reports are in Party files that

were open to Soviet scholars (who did not elaborate the extent of the violence) but are currently closed.

611

TsKhSDMO F. 22, Op. 1, D. 2, L. 35.

612

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 90, l 20b. This report clearly identifies social unrest as causing the loss of thousands of

reindeer to resistance and out-migration of Chukchi fleeing collectivized districts.

613

Pravda, February 27 1930.

614

Raizman, “Shaman byl protiv,” 95-96.

615

RGAE F. 9570, Op. 2, D. 3483, L. 17.

616

RGAE F. 9570, Op. 2, D. 3483, L. 14, 15.

617

Z. G. Omrytkheut, “Ekho Berezovskogo vosstaniia: Ochevidtsy o sobytiiakh 1940 i 1949 gg,” in L.S. Bogoslovskaia,

V.S. Krivoshchekov, and I. Krupnik, eds. Tropoiu Bogoraza: Nauchnye i literaturnye materialy (Moscow: Russian Heritage

Institute-GEOS, 2008), 91-93. Similar accounts appear in Nuvano, “Tragediia,” 85-90.

106

functioned beyond paper declarations. But the Chukhokan herds lost over 100,000 animals between

1930 and 1940.

618

The cause was more the revolutionary climate than the atmospheric one. In the

chaos of collectivization, migrations routes were disrupted, stressing pregnant cows. Untended

reindeer went feral, joining their wild kin. In a response that made Chukchi herders act in kind with

agricultural peasants across the country, many simply killed their stock rather than hand it over to

the state.

619

Both the Soviets and the Chukchi saw reindeer as critical to physical existence and social

welfare on the tundra. Beyond this, the two peoples found little congruence. The Soviets promised

the triumph of human history over natural whims, an offer that rang false across the cultural divide

of Chukchi camps. The promise of utopia required that the Chukchi relinquish their hold on the

most consistent and socially rewarding creature on tundra, and relinquish it for an idea. It was a

political demand at its most basic, asserting how the fruits of human labor should be distributed, and

the non-human stuff of the world possessed. In the contest between believers in collective and

private property, and between the veracity of a shaman’s powers or Marx’s prophecies, human

attention was diverted from the landscape. In the breech, other living relationships on the tundra

rearranged themselves. Beds of lichen were eaten to the quick. Other pastures lay untrammeled.

Untended animals mingled with the Peninsula’s small wild herds. And alone on the tundra,

domesticated reindeer, bred for traits other than wariness, fell prey to growing packs of wolves.

620

THE COMPETITION OF WOLVES, ALASKA 1930-1960S

In the tundra spring, wolves begin to den.

621

A wolf pack is made of blood relations, anchored by a

single breeding pair, and it is the task of this collective to rear up a new generation. As they follow

the migrating Rangifer herds, a pack looks for a likely den site, a place to dig their pregnant female a

shelter. They feed the nursing mother, and when month-old pups wobble and blink into the

midsummer daylight, they are fed and taught by their older siblings. Young wolves must master a

sensory world dense with meaning. Part of this world is social. The movements of wolves’ grey-

white bodies, some weighing nearly 150 pounds, are a syntax of posture, expression, voice, and tail

position. Communication between wolves enables them to coordinate pursuit of their prey. Wolves

618

Decade-by-decade averages of Chukotka’s domestic reindeer population taken from Patty Gray, “Chukotkan

Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century,” in David Anderson and Mark Nutall ed., Cultivating Arctic Landscapes:

Knowing and Managing Animals in the Circumpolar North (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 143.

619

Dikov, Istoriia chukotki, 211. Killing reindeer rather than having them requisitioned was common across the Soviet

Union; Andy Bruno’s work shows that nearly all the reindeer lost in these years in Murmansk were killed in response to

collectivization; see “Making Reindeer Soviet: The Appropriation of an Animal on the Kola Peninsula,” in Jane Costlow

and Amy Nelson eds. Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh

Press, 2010), 117-137. For peasant resistance, see Sheila Fitzpatrick, Stalin’s Peasants: Resistance and Survival in the Russian

Village after Collectivization (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) and Lynne Viola, Peasant Rebels under Stalin:

Collectivization and the Culture of Peasant Resistance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

620

Wolves might have been on the increase slightly before the main push of collectivization, given the growing reindeer

herds. In 1928, the Soviets issued a bounty on wolf pelts as a measure to protect the herds. See GAChAO F. R-2, Op. 1,

D. 2, L. 19.

621

Tundra wolves are the same species as wolves that live south of the treeline in the taiga, but migrate after Rangifer

herds rather than staying to large, defined territories. Migrating Rangifer will often encounter both ecotypes if they winter

south of the treeline. See Robert D. Hayes and Donald E. Russell, “Predation Rates by Wolves on the Porcupine

Caribou Herd,” Rangifer Vol. 20, No. 5 (2000): 51-58.

107

need an average of seven and a half pounds of flesh daily; they eat small animals but survive on large

ungulates. On the tundra, this means Rangifer. But even with their ability to trot for most of a day

and sprint at nearly forty miles per hour, wolves do not simply chase their calories. The success of

any hunt turns on the interplay of wind, tundra cover, snow depth, light, agility, strength, age, and

even the mental states of fearful reindeer and feared wolf.

622

In navigating this landscape of attack,

wolves use foresight and planning. A pack that hunts together for several seasons develops

traditions in coordination and use of the landscape. As a species made globally successful by social

adaptation, their place in the landscape is closest to that of humans.

623

Tundra wolves migrate with Rangifer through space, and match their abundance in time.

624

New packs form when herds are plentiful, and contract when prey is scarce. In the early twentieth

century, the wolves of northwestern Alaska retreated with the caribou. Where there had been

perhaps five thousand in 1850, a mere thousand remained in 1900.

625

Some wolves ended up as pelts

trimming the parkas of whalers, or were traded by Inupiat for flour and bullets. Mostly, the packs

could not compete with what the market and the climate did to the mutual sustenance of man and

beast. People from the sea ate the wolves’ calories off the tundra. As a result, domestic reindeer

entered North America at a time when humans were essentially their only consumers.

626

The

absence of wolves gave the landscape the appearance, for the first four decades of the reindeer

program, of a space where humans were singular in their designs. The reindeer, after all, just keep

breeding, reaching nearly 650,000 head in 1930.

627

“Wolves were not there to profit,” off the

reindeer, wrote Reindeer Superintendent Sidney Rood, “although a struggle was sighted every few

years somewhere between Bristol Bay and Barrow.”

628

622

J.S. Brown, J.W. Laundre, and M. Gurung, “The Ecology of Fear: Optimal Foraging, Game Theory, and Trophic

Interactions,” Journal of Mammalogy Vol. 80 No. 2 (May 1999): 385-399.

623

“Tradition” is the word used by wolf biologists L. David Mech and Rolf O. Peterson to describe how wolf packs

learn and adapt to hunting in a particular territory; see “Wolf-Prey Relations,” in L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani ed.,

Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 131-157. For a discussion of wolf

mental processes, see L. David Mech, “Possible use of Foresight, Understanding, and Planning by Wolves Hunting

Muskoxen,” Arctic Vol. 60, No. 2 (2007):145-149. The rest of this paragraph is summarized from L. David Mech and

Luigi Boitani, “Wolf Social Ecology,” in L. David Mech and Luigi Boitani ed., Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 1-34; Fred H. Harrington and Cheryl S. Asa, “Wolf Communication,” in L.

David Mech and Luigi Boitani ed., Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003),

66-103; Todd K. Fuller, L. David Mech, and Jean Fitts Cochrane, “Wolf Population Dynamics,” in L. David Mech and

Luigi Boitani ed., Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 161-192; Marco

Musiani, Jennifer A. Leonard, H. Dean Cluff, C. Cormack Gates, Stefano Mariani, Paul C. Paquet, Carles Vila, and

Robert K. Wayne, “Differentiation of Tundra/Taiga and Boreal Coniferous Forest Wolves: Genetics, Coat Color, and

Association with Migratory Caribou,” Molecular Ecology, Vol. 16, No. 19 (October 2007):4149-4170; and Gary Marvin,

Wolf (London: Reaktion Books, 2012), 11-34.

624

A.T. Bergerud, Stuart N. Luttich, and Lodewijk Camps, The Return of the Caribou to Ungava (Montreal: McGill-Queens

University Press, 2008),10; Layne G. Adams, Robert O. Stephenson, Bruce W. Dale, Robert T. Ahgook, and Dominic J.

Demma, “Population Dynamics and Harvest Characteristics of Wolves in the Central Brooks Range, Alaska,” Wildlife

Monographs, Vol. 170 No. 1 (2008): 1-18. Wolves in the taiga around rivers eat far more moose, a species that does not

migrate.

625

Burch, Caribou Herds of Northwest Alaska, 53.

626

Burch, Caribou Herds of Northwest Alaska, 52-53.

627

Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 14.

628

J. Sidney Rood, “Alaska Reindeer Notes,” APRCA, Fosma and Sidney Rood Papers, Box 1, p. 1.

108

THEN THE WOLVES found the reindeer. In 1925, a few were reported scouting east from

rivers deep in the Brooks Range.

629

A decade later, Northwestern Alaska suffered what the Bureau

of Indian Affairs termed “a conspicuous infestation of wolves, and alarming wolf damage.”

630

female wolf can birth half a dozen pups each year, and when there is plentiful game it takes only two

years for these young to splinter into new packs. Once the wolves found the abundant, docile

reindeer, the packs could double each year.

631

For wolves, reindeer were the best eating in the

territory. For caribou, reindeer distracted their former predators. For reindeer, the wolves were a

torment. The herd near Kotzebue, which had 18,000 animals in 1927, was gone by 1940. At

Kivalina, wolves destroyed thirty-four thousand animals, leaving a herd of only six thousand.

632

For

humans, especially those employed by the Reindeer Service, wolves were variously a menace, a

scourge, a plague, an invasion.

633

Reports described the canine excess with horror, even

photographing and captioning the gore in one case with a “Female ripped open. Unborn fawn partly

ripped out. Fawn’s blood sucked.”

634

Others described the packs as a direct threat to humans. Near

Barrow, “wolf packs totaling over one hundred wolves each are chasing the natives…on one

occasion the natives barely escaped with their lives.”

635

Humans were no longer the primary

consumer of reindeer. They might even be consumed themselves. “Its war,” one government

teacher wrote, “The only question is how is this war to be waged?”

636

The war began with snares, steel traps, and guns. The bounty on dead wolves jumped from

ten to twenty to fifty dollars over a few decades.

637

The Alaska Game Commission hired

professional hunters and trappers. There were dissenters from these policies. Inupiat herders did

629

Mo. Rep. Reindeer Supervisor, May 1925. NARA AK RG 75 Alaska Reindeer Service Historical Files, File: History-

general, 1933-1945. There were scattered reports of wolves in 1909, but concern only mounts after 1925 for most of the

Seward Peninsula and points north.

630

Brief Statement Regarding the Wolf Problem on Reindeer Ranges, May 15 1940, NARA DC RG 75 BIA Central

Classified Files 1940-1957, File: 26167.

631

National Research Council, Wolves, Bears and Their Prey in Alaska (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1997),

49.

632

Sidney Rood, Message to the delegates of the Association of Bering Unit Herds, April 8 1943, NARA AK RG 75

Alaska Reindeer Service Historical Files, File: History-general, 1933-1945.

633

The government teachers, biologists, and administrators undoubtedly had conceptions of wolves’ evil well before

dealing with them in Alaska, from fairy tales on through the long history of killing wolves in the United States. For a

history of the former, see K.S. Robisch, Wolves and the Wolf Myth in American Literature (Reno: University of Nevada Press,

2009), and for the latter, see Bruce Hampton, The Great American Wolf (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 1997).

634

Report from Wainwright, AK, July 9, 1936, NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service Decimal Correspondence, File:

Predators, 1936-1937.

635

Gerald Collins to Sidney Rood, March 24 1937, NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service Decimal Correspondence, File:

Predators, 1936-1937.

636

Noatak Teacher to Mr. Glenn Briggs, January 25, 1937, NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service Decimal

Correspondence, File: Predators, 1936-1937.

637

Wolves had been subject to a bounty in Alaska since 1915, followed shortly by bald and golden eagles, hair seals, and

coyotes. Bears seem to be the only predator that received much sympathy during most of the twentieth century’s first

half. Alaska wolf eradication was part of a larger national campaign against the animals. For an overview of U.S. Canis

lupus policy and its links to perceptions of wolves as immoral, see Jon T. Coleman Vicious: Wolves and Men in America

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) and in the collection of historical documents in Rick McIntyre, ed. War

Against the Wolf: America’s Campaign to Exterminate the Wolf (Stillwater, MN: Voyageur Press). Barry Lopez, in his classic

study Of Wolves and Men calls the scale of wolf eradication, which killed over a million wolves on the Great Plains alone,

an American pogrom; his analysis of the dynamics between humans and wild canines remains one of the best (New

York: Simon & Schuster, 1995).

109

not, generally, share the European dread of Canis lupis. Having been raised on stories of wolves

nurturing children rather than eating them, packs were sometimes hunted and sometimes human,

but never irrational.

638

Their presence was no more capricious or malevolent than Washington’s

endless changes to reindeer policy. Daniel Karumn, a native herder, saw wolves as a problem not

because of their profligate behavior but because there were too many reindeer. Because the

overabundant herds “were starving, all [the wolves] would eat from the reindeer was the tongue,

because it makes them fat, you know.”

639

Some whites blamed the decline in reindeer numbers on

lax native husbandry and overgrazing. And a few scientists were beginning see predators like wolves

as doing necessary work in an ecosystem. Olaus Murie, a biologist at the Bureau for Biological

Survey, argued for “a certain balance between predatory species and game,” as early as 1929 and

counseled against predator control.

640

But the majority in the government saw balance as the

product of human management, good management as maximizing those things the market could

value, and the right to hunt as a human franchise. As reindeer were the northern land’s “sole means

of turning the vast tundras [sic] to productive use,” they required protection.

641

Wolves ripped

potential profits from the northern landscape. They interrupted progress.

WOLVES VALUED REINDEER because reindeer enabled wolves’ biological will to the future.

Despite campaigns to protect them, the value of reindeer for humans was far less clear. The market

the Lomen Company managed to create outside of Alaska survived high transportation costs and

attacks from beef lobbyists through the 1920s, only the vanish during the Great Depression. Inside

Alaska, reindeer outbred human consumption and tundra production. Inupiat herders found the

market to be as feckless as wolves, if not more so. And uncertain profit in the future required

specialized labor and attention, leaving reindeer herders little time for other subsistence activities.

642

Moreover, claiming ownership was difficult. The sheer size of the reindeer population, which

stayed at over half a million even as the wolves began their worrying, confused the range. Nor were

rights to ownership settled. The Lomens, still convinced that reindeer would become profitable,

lobbied against native ownership privileges, casting indigenous herders as unfit and the government

as meddling in the market. Inupiat owners accused the Lomens of stealing reindeer and cheating on

wages.

643

Advocates for both pled their cases to a series of Department of the Interior committees

638

Hall Jr., The Eskimo Storyteller, 167-168; 296-298.

639

Dan Karmun, University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program, Project Jukebox, Tape H2000-102-05, Section 4.

Reports that only reindeer tongues were eaten appear in federal reports as well; see for example NARA AK RG 75,

Telegram Hollingsworth to Area Director Juneau, January 12, 1951, Alaska Reindeer Service Decimal Correspondence,

File: Reindeer by-products, misc. 1951.

640

Olaus Murie, “Memorandum for Mr. Remington,” quoted in Ken Ross, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska, (Boulder:

University of Colorado Press, 2006), 287. Olaus’ half-brother, Adolph Murie, was also critical of predator control

following his studies of wolves in Denali National Park in the 1930s. See Adolph Murie, The Wolves of Mt. McKinley,

Fauna Series No. 5 (Washington, D.C.: National Park Service, 1944). The National Park Service did halt predator control

in Alaskan parks in 1935, spurring debate over the role of predators in national parks; killing resumed in 1948.

641

F.A.O. Medd, “Reindeer Herding and Management,” November 17, 1941, NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service

Decimal Correspondence, File: Reindeer Misc. Herds 1949.

642

See Olson, Alaskan Reindeer Herdsmen, 87-97.

643

Reindeer Committee Report of 1931, quoted in Department of Justice, United States v. Lomen & Co., April 17 1931,

NARA DC RG 75 Central Classified File 1907-1939. See also Willis, Alaska’s Place, 42-45.

110

tasked with investigating the reindeer situation in the 1930s.

644

The first of these committees saw the

future of the industry in white ownership and called for strict range regulations and a roundup of the

ownerless, foraging herds.

645

Implicitly, these recommendations argued that the market would

eventually find a reason to value reindeer. The problem lay in the contortions of badly enforced and

managed property. Capitalism on the tundra meant that it was possible to both have too many

reindeer and pay hunters to kill the wolves that ate them.

It was the New Deal, and its indigenous variant overseen by John Collier, Roosevelt’s

Indian Affairs commissioner, that finally settled the issue of ownership. Both Inupiat herders and

the Reindeer Service vocally opposed the Interior reports favorable to the Lomen Company. Collier

agreed. In the contiguous United States, Collier promoted cultural pluralism, tribal self-government

and traditional economies through the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. The Act did not extend

to Alaska, but in his examination of the reindeer issue, Collier applied many of its principles.

Herding, he concluded erroneously, was a traditional part of Inupiat existence, one to which whites

had no claim.

646

After considerable political wrangling, the 1937 Reindeer Act transferred control of

the project to the Office of Indian Affairs, bought out the Loman enterprise, and made non-native

reindeer ownership illegal, in order to “establish and maintain for the said natives of Alaska a self-

sustaining economy.”

647

Collier ended the political debate over how reindeer ownership and labor

could be distributed on the Alaskan landscape.

The United States government had first created a tradition in the name of assimilation, and

then had to protect it in the name of cultural preservation. This invented tradition was already

oriented toward the market. As herds were rounded up and counted, the newly invigorated Reindeer

Service set about perfecting that orientation. Capitalism on the tundra, like New Deal capitalism

across the country, would combine private property with government oversight.

648

Although many

644

For a blow-by-blow of the reindeer legislation, see Stern et aL. Eskimos, Reindeer and Land, 30-37.

645

Survey of the Alaska Reindeer Service 1931-1933, NARA AK RG 75 Alaska Reindeer Service Historical Files, File:

Reports – Special Survey of the Alaska Reindeer Service 1933.

646

For an overview of the Indian New Deal and Collier’s attitudes, see Jon S. Blackman, Oklahoma’s Indian New Deal

(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013), 54-77. The classic account of Collier’s term as commissioner of Indian

affairs is Graham D. Taylor, The New Deal and American Indian Tribalism: The Administration of the Indian Reorganization Act,

1934–45 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980. Alaska’s indigenous New Deal policies were in some ways close

to Oklahoma’s, as neither had reservations. However, Alaska lacked a history of land allotments. Herold Ickes, the

Secretary of the Interior under Roosevelt, wanted to settle land title and establish native reservation in Alaska, a policy

not supported by Inupiat on the Seward Peninsula concerned about hunting, fishing, and mineral rights, as will be

discussed in Chapter Four. For a discussion of the New Deal in Alaska and the Alaska Reorganization Act, the less-

sweeping cousin of the Indian New Deal, see Kenneth R. Philip, “The New Deal and Alaskan Natives, 936-1945,” in An

Alaskan Anthology: Interpreting the Past, ed. Stephen W. Haycox and Mary Childer Mangusso (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 1996), 267-286.

647

Cong., 1

. Sess., June 15

and 22

1937 (Washington, D.C: Government Printing Office, 1937), 2. See also,

Therese Dillingham, “Playing Reindeer Games: Native Alaskans and the Federal Trust Doctrine,” Boston College

Environmental Affairs Law Review Vol. 26 No. 3 (1999): 649-685, 650. Such federal intervention was not taken lightly by

Lomen or by many white Alaskans, who carried the tradition of frontier dependence on federal money while rejecting

outside interference to a new extreme.

648

Here I see Collier’s policies and the actions of the reindeer service as in line with the general expansion of the

“environmental management state,” as Adam Rome terms it, which grew nation-wide during the Depression, from dam

building to dust-storm prevention. See Adam Rome, “What Really Matters in History: Environmental Perspectives in

Modern America,” Environmental History Vol. 7 No. 2 (April 2002): 303-318, especially 304-305. See also Paul Sutter’s

111

herds were still cooperatives or owned by the government, private ownership was the ideal, since

“individual enterprisers and their herder-partners” would keep “vigilant custody of such breeding

stock as they can manage.”

649

Running large numbers of animals on the open range became less

desirable than small, closely tended herds, the attention of their native owners motivated by the

“fear of losing money.” Since herds were owned individually, they would be efficient; the market

would determine “the rewards which herders are able to obtain from herd crops: supply and

demand.”

650

Even wolves could be combatted through the vigilance of private ownership.

651

assist, the government divided the range into territorial units. The Bureau of Biological Survey and

the Forest Service began researching plant distribution and lichen growth. Veterinarians and

entomologists studied treatments for hoof disease, warble flies, and mosquitoes. With this state-

supplied expertise, the laws of economics and biology would produce social self-sufficiency, and

“give [native] owners freedom to do what they ought with regard to the rights of others.”

652

Yeoman

farming was again the proper form of capitalism on the tundra.

But the tundra had other plans. By 1940, the number of domestic reindeer in Alaska

dropped to under a quarter million.

653

The number of wolves only seemed to increase.

654

So did the

need to bring the tundra into the national fold of productive space, at least rhetorically. After Pearl

Harbor and Japanese landfall in the Aleutian Islands, the military started eating reindeer, wearing

reindeer, and stuffing life-vests with reindeer hair. In wartime, sovereignty meant control over things

not just human. And in this context, wolves became an “ancient enemy” fighting on the wrong side

of a new war.

655

“In carrying forward this program,” one federal report noted, predator control

made certain that the “Nation’s food supply is safeguarded.”

656

The pace of wolf extermination

increased; like the roads, airstrips, and increased population that the Second World War brought

north, militarized wolf killing did not end with Japanese surrender. In the late 1940s and into the

1950s, the Fish and Wildlife Service hunted wolves from airplanes and laced pieces of blubber with

discussion of the environmental management state in “The World With US: The State of American Environmental

History,” Journal of American History Vol. 100 No. 1 (June 2013): 94-119.

649

J.S. Rood, Narrative re: Alaska Reindeer Herds for Calendar Year 1942, with Supplementary Data, (Nome: U.S. Bureau of

Indian Affairs Alaska, 1943), 151.

650

J.S. Rood, Narrative, 151

651

Circular Letter to Eskimo Reindeer Owners, March 15 1937, NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service Decimal

Correspondence, File: Predators, 1936-1937.

652

Rood, Narrative, 151.

653

Olson, Alaska Reindeer Herdsmen, 14-15.

654

Estimating the wolf population after the onset of predator control programs is, as Burch points out, difficult, since

reindeer and caribou population sizes are no longer a proxy for the number of wolves; Caribou Herds of Northwestern

Alaska, 53. Reindeer Service personnel and game hunters continued to report predation well into the 1940s, so at least

the perception of a problem remained.

655

Russell Annabel, “Reindeer Round-Up,” NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service Decimal Correspondence, File: General

Correspondence 1901-1945. For discussions of reindeer use in military clothing, see NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service

Decimal Correspondence, File: Information: Fur Clothing, Arctic [1944-1945]. It is not clear from available records how

much reindeer was actually consumed by the military, although Russell Annabel does describe a local quartermaster

ordering tons of meat, and there was a good market for reindeer meat at Nome. For an overview of the militarization of

Alaska during the war, see Stephen Haycox, Alaska: An American Colony (Seattle, University of Washington Press, 2002),

257-264.

656

Press Release, Fish and Wildlife Service, December 1 1941, NARA MD RG 126, Central Classified File 1907-1951.

112

strychnine. One reindeer superintendent wanted to use machine guns.

657

Killing wolves for the

bounty became another way to make profits from the tundra. Near Anaktuvuk Pass, wolf hunting

was a major source of Inupiat income. Men learned to hunt pups in their dens and lured adults by

howling.

658

Hundreds of wolves died each year. Between 1927 and 1958, Alaska gave out about $1.5

million for dead wolves and coyotes.

659

And yet reindeer kept disappearing – gone feral or eaten by

wolves. There were never more than 50,000 domestic animals during the 1950s.

660

The objective of wolf killing, like the reindeer program, was both local and grandiose. After

WWII, the Reindeer Service no longer believed reindeer would feed the world, or even the army.

The government concluded that the market for tundra products was primarily within Alaska.

661

Wolf

eradication, veterinary care, and surveys of tundra growth were ways of providing food for the

growing population within the territory, from military and mining cities to remote villages. The

state’s management of the tundra also ideally removed it, and the humans living on it, from

competition with wolves. Once freed of these pests, reindeer would provide stable, enriching

employment for a minority otherwise costly to the state, and make that minority part of the national

culture through their productive labor and participation in the market economy. The value of

reindeer was, therefore, partly in giving propose to people whose lives seemed to lack it, making

them part of a common human trajectory toward liberty and prosperity. It was taken on faith that

the market would also find value in reindeer. It was only rational, given that the otherwise barren

tundra could provide thousands of pounds of meat and hides in perpetuity. Thus, although

capitalism had tried many variations on the tundra – from small farmer, wage worker,

entrepreneurial cooperative member and back to farmer –each variation was seen by its advocates as

part of the nation’s unified, progressive future. The grandiosity was in making the tundra part of this

universal history. The landscape would be cleared of all but human desires, and all human desires

valued: property and prosperity linked to the good of all through production for the market.

THE PRODUCTION OF SOCIALISM, CHUKOTKA 1945-1960S

The work of a wolf is killing in the service of making more wolves. In bringing down a caribou calf

or reindeer bull, wolves thin herds of a few sets of grinding ungulate teeth, allowing a few patches of

lichen or knots of willow to survive another year. A pack is one check in a system never quite in

balance.

662

The Chukchi, watching how wolves ate their property, saw predation as the work of evil

657

Sidney Rood to Major Dale Gaffney, January 21 1941, NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service Decimal Correspondence,

File: Predators, 1940-1941.

658

Gubser, The Nunamiut Eskimos, 266-267.

659

Ross, Pioneering Conservation in Alaska, 298-299; Donald McKnight, The History of Predator Control in Alaska (Juneau:

Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 1970), 3, 6-8. 2000 wolves were killed by Fish and Wildlife agents. These

numbers cover the entire state, not just the northwestern region of Alaska.

660

Stern et al., Eskimos, Reindeer and Land, 48.

661

C.H. Rouse, C.R. Mountjoy, and D.M. Belcher, Reindeer Survey – 1948 (Juneau: Alaska Native Service, 1948), quoted in

Stern et al., Eskimos, Reindeer, and Land, 44-45.

662

The relationship between wolves and ecosystem regulation remains contentious, with some scientists asserting their

primacy in limiting populations and altering the behavior of grazing animals in ways that reshape and make more diverse

the entire trophic web, and others calling for a more nuanced view of ecosystem relationships in which wolves play a

113

beings that lived as killer whales in summer oceans and ate herds in wolf-shape on the winter

tundra.

663

It was a rare moment of agreement between Chukchi and Soviet. Wolves that “scatter the

northern herds into the hills,” were from the earliest days of Soviet presence a problem rivaling

foreign alcohol imports.

664

The Soviets were appalled, however, by how the Chukchi dealt with the

packs. “The fight against the major reindeer predator – the wolf – is actually non-existent,” one

surveyor wrote in the 1930s. “The Chukchi believe that as the primary resident of the tundra is

entitled to its share of the herds.”

665

As wolf populations surged in the early 1930s, predator control

became another entry in a growing Soviet list of alterations to the tundra.

Killing wolves before they killed livestock was an old Russian practice grafted onto a new

landscape.

666

Less familiar were the reindeer. The Soviets took as a given that production could be

increased with proper reforms. But while ideology mandated collective herds, beyond this basic

economic form Marx and Lenin had little to say about husbandry. In the late 1920s and 1930s, while

Stalin was accelerating history with Five Year Plans, early collectivizers were back in hot smelly tents,

getting the “advice and help of the local experienced herders.”

667

From these “regular first-hand

observations in the nomad camps,” as Ivan Druri put it, local and federal specialists began

assembling an understanding of reindeer production.

668

Across the north, teams of biologists

conducted surveys “to determine the pasture requirements of the reindeer during various seasons,

the grazing technique, the size and the composition of the teams of the herdsmen and the state of

significant but partial role in the management of energy flows and biodiversity. Most of these studies have been done

with timber wolf populations, the most famous in Yellowstone National Park, not with tundra populations where the

arctic climate makes population flux in terrestrial species more stochastic. For an overview of wolf ecology and the

question of their role as apex predators, see Emma Marris, “Rethinking Predators: Legend of the Wolf,” Nature Vol. 507

(March 13 2014): 158-160. For a classic discussion of how wolves may increase biodiversity, see William J. Ripple and

Robert L. Beschta, “Restoring Yellowstone’s Aspen with Wolves,” Biological Conservation Vol. 138 No. 3-4 (September

2007): 514-519.

663

Bogoraz, The Chukchee, 323.

664

B. I. Mukhachev, ed. Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov na Chukotke (1919-1923): Sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Magadanskoe

knizhnoe izdatel’stvo 1967), 64-65. The Soviets called both “predators,” although rum was generally considered more

the evil spirit than wolves.

665

GARF F. A-301, Op. 18, D. 88, L. 86. The report notes that only after repeated attacks would Chukchi attempt to

hunt down wolves, and this was rarely successful. Wolf extermination had a long history in Russia, and wolf aggression

toward humans was apparently more common in Russia than in North America, where the animals were primarily hated

as destroyers of wildlife. The historical literature on this, however, is quite thin, and waiting for comparative work

between Russian and North American cases. In English, Will N. Graves rather idiosyncratic Wolves in Russia: Anxiety

Through the Ages gives good evidence that wolf-on-human violence was far more common in Russia than in North

America (Calgary: Detselig, 2007). Russian wolf biologist M.P. Pavlov also argues that the desire to exterminate wolves

goes back at least until the mid-19

century in Russia, and that the animals were greatly feared; Volk (Moscow:

Agropomizdat, 1990), 9-10. There was dissent to the view of wolf beastliness in the 19

century. See Ian M. Helfant,

“That Savage Gaze: The Contested Portrayal of Wolves in Nineteenth-century Russia,” in Jane Costlow and Amy

Nelson eds. Other Animals: Beyond the Human in Russian Culture and History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press,

2010), 63-76.

666

Wolf elimination programs, usually employing specially hired hunters or sportsmen from hunting clubs, were

common throughout European Russia during the nineteenth century. The damage done by wolves to livestock was

extensive, and the number of hunters seems to have rarely been particularly damaging to the wolf populations. See

Graves Wolves in Russia, 20-31; Pavlov, Volk¸100-101.

667

Druri, “Kak byl sozdan pervyi olenesovkhoz na Chukotke,” 7. Leonid M. Baskin argues that Soviet scientists across

the north were dependent on local knowledge as they developed reindeer science; “Reindeer Husbandry/Hunting in

Russia,” 25.

668

Druri, “Kak byl sozdan pervyi olenesovkhoz na Chukotke,” 7.

114

the zoo-veterinary services.”

669

Chukotka was studied from coastline to mountaintop in the late

1930s. Amid the upheavals of collectivization, bureaucrats and biologists noticed that rich Chukchi,

while despicable on an ideological level, had mastered the production of surplus. They sought out

the few remaining wild herds to deliberately interbreed their domestic does with wild bulls “to

improve the qualities of their reindeer.”

670

Owners ran herds with a carefully managed high ratio of

females to males, as this assured a surfeit for human use. Even when employing these ratios, only

large herds offered an economically significant surplus.

671

And a surplus, preferably one that

increased year by year, was the Soviet aspiration. Increased production was – on the tundra as on the

shore – a rare and clear measure of progress toward an otherwise opaque utopia. Socialist reindeer

were maximally productive reindeer, and maximally productive reindeer ran in herds of many

hundreds and optimally thousands.

It was the Second World War that made Chukotakn reindeer socialist. The need to increase

food production became an existential compulsion with the Nazi invasion. Chukotka was too

remote to appreciably supply the Red Army in Europe, although over twelve thousand reindeer and

thousands of leather goods were exported during the war.

672

But with no calorie to spare for food or

transport, the war made Chukotka and its growing non-native populace self-sufficient, at least in

protein. Beef, pork, and sausage, imported by the hundreds of tons in 1939, were replaced by

reindeer when kolkhozy began meeting “the needs of the region’s population” in the early 1940s.

673

The surplus came from the increasingly large collectivized herds. One typical report noted that the

“kolkhoz ‘Forward’ had 355 reindeer on January 1, 1941 and by January 1 1945 had 9216 head of

socialized reindeer,” showing how “every year the kolkhoz overfills the plan for the development of

the reindeer industry.”

674

Reindeer fed mining and construction laborers, as the dueling industrial

organizations of northeastern Russia, Glavsevmorput (the Main Administration of the Northern Sea

Route) and Dal’stroi (the Main Administration for Construction in the Far North), both established

large herds.

675

Chukotka’s newspaper saw the growing farms as a sign of patriotism, as each

“fervently strives to achieve new successes in the construction of kolkhozy and thus prove again their

support of our war.” Some farms even helped sponsor a tank convoy through the donation of

669

P.S. Zhigunov, ed. Reindeer Husbandry, trans. Israel Program for Scientific Translations, (Springfield, VA: U.S.

Department of Commerce, 1968), 177.

670

F. Ia. Gul’chak, Reindeer Breeding, trans. Canadian Wildlife Service (Ottawa: Department of the Secretary of State,

Bureau for Translations, 1967), 25.

671

L. M. Baskin, Severnyi olen’: upravlenie povedeniem i populiatsiiami olenevodstvo okhota (Moskva: Tovarishchestvo nauchnykh

izdanii, 2009), and I. Druri, Olenevodstvo (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo selkhoz literatury, zhurnalov i plakatov, 1963), 39.

672

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 369, L. 3.

673

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 369, L. 3. Decentralized provisioning happened across the Soviet Union during the war,

especially for protein sources. Central state organizations remained critical in rationing bread and sugar. See Wendy Z.

Goldman, “Not by Bread Alone: Food, Workers, and the State,” in Wendy Z. Goldman and Donald Filtzer eds. Hunger

and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union during World War II (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2015), 44-97.

674

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 369, L. 10. According to this report, the number of collectivized reindeer quadrupled

during the war through a combination of breeding, purchases, and taxation.

675

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 369, L. 3; Dikov, Ocherki istorii chukotki, 253. The relationship between Galvsevmorput

and Dal’stroi in Chukotka, and their development activities, will be discussed more in chapter 4.

115

reindeer and rubles.

676

But kolkhozy herds were also built on wartime taxes, paid in live reindeer from

private herds, and military requisitioning.

677

For many Chukchi, the Second World War was fought on the home front. War

requisitioning provoked resistance among herders not yet convinced that kolkhozy had much to

offer. “Poor people live on the farm, where the government collects all the profit,” the herder

Lyatylkot stated, “but I am master of myself. Under the reign of the Chukchi life is better.”

678

The

NKVD disagreed, and answered such statements with arrests for “anti-Soviet agitation.”

679

In 1944,

during a procurement drive for the Red Army, Chukchi herder “Trunko categorically refused to help

our country,” a local NKVD commander reported, and later led a group to steal reindeer from

collective herd. The commandant recommended using an airplane to “seize Trunko’s

counterrevolutionary terrorist group” and “liquidate it” from the tundra.

680

Sovereignty on the Soviet

landscape required both ideological conformity and biological control. It was control that even the

Stalinist 1930s had not driven into every corner of the Peninsula. The landscape and the mobile

adaptations of both nomads and reindeer worked against the managerial hold of the state.

Yet transience was a better strategy for Rangifer’s survival biologically than for the Chukchi

politically. “On the 21

of March 1951,” recalled senior security officer B.M. Andronov, the regional

Party secretary “decided that the time had come to establish Soviet administration on the whole

territory of Chukotka. After all, we were the only area in the country that still sheltered kulaks.”

681

These “kulaks,” living on the northwestern tundra, still failed to see the allure of a Soviet future that

required relinquishing both their children and their reindeer to the state. Near the river Amguem,

Notanvat committed suicide rather than join a kokholz. His son, Rul’tyl’kut, became an active

communist, but was drowned by one of his father’s herders, who had sworn never to let Notanvut’s

children convert to the way of the collectives.

682

It was a last, desperate spasm. By the late 1950s, the

security services had routed the last openly practicing shamans. The Chukchi herds were mostly

socialist in form. Whether their herders were socialist in content was harder to parse. A few, like the

Chukchi novelist Yuri Rytkheu, were learning to plot themselves into the role of the indigenous

communist intellectual. Quite a few more became Party members.

683

And most of the postwar

676

Sovetskaia Chukotka February 5

1944.

677

Dikov, Ocherki istorii chukotki, 253; GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 369, L. 1.

678

GAMO F. P-22, Op. 1, D. 180, L. 1

679

NKVD is the acronym for the People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs, one of the many names for the internal

security services best known by its final, Cold War era acronym, the KGB. Some of the arrested collective farm workers

and suspected agitators were formally rehabilitated in 1991; their records are summarized in D.I. Raizman, “Shaman byl

protiv,” 95-96. Most arrests carried a ten year sentence.

680

GAMO F. P-22, Op. 1, D. 180, L. 2.

681

B.M. Andronov, “Kollektivizatsiia po-Chukotski” in L.S. Bogoslovskaia, V.S. Krivoshchekov, and I. Krupnik, eds.

Tropoiu Bogoraza: Nauchnye i literaturnye materialy (Moscow: Russian Heritage Institute-GEOS, 2008), 102-126, 103.

Andronov was a senior security officer in the MGB (another iteration of the internal police), who had a sincere

commitment to collectivization based on these recollections, which were written in the 1980s. Andronov assisted in

collectivizing the remaining private herds on the Osinovskaia, Mukhomornenskaia, Amguemskaia, and Kanchalanskaia

tundras. There was also violence in the south; see Omrytkheut, “Ekho Berezovskogo vosstaniia,” 94; and Nuvano

“Tragediia,” 87.

682

Andronov, “Kollektivizatsiia,” 106. Andronov hints that Rul’tyl’kut was also an informant for the security services.

683

Party membership by Chukchi stayed under 20% of the Chukotka’s total Party participation even in the 1950s, when

it was at 17.7%. See Gray, The Predicament, 97.

116

generation learned about dialectical materialism, or at least how to read, in Russian. Regardless of

their commitment to the Marxist-Leninist promise for the future, the will of herders to own private

property had passed from the tundra. In their place, nearly a hundred collective farms and over

400,000 reindeer were scattered across the socialist landscape.

ONCE COLLECTIVIZED, REINDEER had no excuse but to be fruitful and multiply. The tundra

was, after all, now under the direct management of expert scientists, men with advanced training

from Leningrad’s Institute of Polar Agriculture and Livestock and ready, as Rangifer specialist P.S.

Zhigunov wrote, to bring northward “a new Soviet socialist culture and have an immediately

beneficial impact on the development…of reindeer herding.”

684

Their interventions mapped the

tundra according to the life and death of a reindeer, from pasture to meat processing. Tundra plants

were studied for “methods of massively improving pastures and enriching them with the maximum

number of feed plants…and cultivating methods of rational use.”

685

Ivan Druri published a manual

on reindeer management, stressing how collectivization allowed, “the reindeer pastures of each

kolkhoz and sovkhoz” to be “divided and allotted to brigades in accordance with the head count of

reindeer. As a result of this work, the necessary conditions exist for organizing the correct use of

range land with a calculated reserve for regenerating range fodder.”

686

With each farm assigned a

territory, and each territory partitioned according to which “seasonal utilization” offered the best

reindeer nutrition, and each parcel then rotated periodically to avoid overgrazing, reindeer scientists

planned a standard tundra.

687

The reindeer in these spaces were vaccinated, examined for disease,

dusted with DDT, given shade in summer and wind breaks in winter, and bred selectively for size

and temperament.

688

Wild crossbreeding was no longer encouraged, and Chukotka’s few wild herds

avoided.

689

Researchers detailed the various products reindeer could supply - “meat, fat, lungs, heart,

kidneys, blood, milk, tanned and raw hides, wool, sinew, and horn” – and the best butchery methods

for their efficient reclamation.

690

And because communists were no more tolerant of canine

competition than Alaskan capitalists, wolf experts outlined the best methods for exterminating packs

grown larger during the bullet rationing of the war years.

691

Biologists like V. Ryabov studied the

behavior of wolves, “the true scourge of the reindeer,” in order to better hunt packs on the

tundra.

692

Despite a detailed knowledge of wolf breeding, predation, and sensory abilities, the

vastness of the landscape and lupine intelligence limited the effectiveness of traps, guns, or poison,

684

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 682, L. 25.

685

RGAE F. 8390, Op. 1, D. 2385, L. 36.

686

Druri, Olenevodstvo (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo selkhoz literatury, zhurnalov i plakatov, 1963), 39. See also GARF F. A-310,

Op. 18, D. 682, L. 209-210.

687

Zhigunov, Reindeer Husbandry, 187.

688

A series of large guides to reindeer management were published starting in the late 1930s and through the 1980s; see

for example Zhigunov, Reindeer Husbandry; Gul’chak, Reindeer Breeding; Druri, Olenevodstvo; E.K. Borozdin and V.A.

Zabrodin, Severnoe olenevodstvo (Moscow: Kolos, 1979). See also RGAE F. 8390, Op. 1, Del, 2385, L. 35-39. These

manuals detail every aspect of the industry, from the rational use of rangeland to the chemical properties of reindeer

milk to treating hides. Druri, after his youth in Chukotka, spent his life researching reindeer across the Soviet Union.

689

David Klein, “Conflicts between Domestic Reindeer and their Wild Counterparts: A Review of Eurasian and North

American Experience,” Arctic Vol. 33, No. 4 (December, 1980): 739-756, 755.

690

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 682, L. 48.

691

Graves, Wolves in Russia, 58-59.

692

V.V. Riabov, Istreblenie volkov (Moscow: Fizkul’tura i sport, 1957), 40.

117

since “the wolves adapt to it and become more cautious.”

693

By the 1950s, the state sponsored every

available “technical means in the fight against wolves," from snowmobiles to helicopters.

694

The goal

became “total extermination,” which as one zoologist wrote, was “the best method of eliminating

the losses that these predators inflict.”

695

The purpose of these interventions was the creation of more reindeer, since reindeer made

the tundra useful for humans, and humans, at least socialist ones, “regenerated life on the cold land

and conquered the dead wastes.”

696

More reindeer were a sign of the arrival of real existing socialism.

“Collectivization” in reindeer scientist F. Ia. Gul’chak’s words, “put before reindeer breeding higher

requirements” and made quantity “the basis of correct organization.”

697

It was important, therefore,

to know the maximum number of reindeer that each collective’s allotted territory could produce.

Most Soviet scientists were interested in finding the tundra’s carrying capacity, a fixed maximum

number of reindeer that could be determined, as in the U.S., from surveys of plant types and grazing

habits. But a few biologists saw the socialist future not as existing in a set number of reindeer, but in

the absence of all productive constraint. V. Ustinov, a specialist in the Magadan land-use office, saw

set carrying capacity as an “incorrect opinion of certain managers,” and argued that herd size could

continue to grow infinitely with “new forms of organizing the reindeer herd.”

698

Unlike the United

States, where overabundance lowered prices, there could never be too many socialist reindeer.

Whether or not the modern arctic could be measured in fixed number of reindeer or in an

ever-expanding bounty of meat and hides, it was the consensus among reindeer experts that there

was still work to be done. The struggle during collectivization killed so many reindeer that

Chukotka’s herds were just returning, in the 1950s, to their pre-revolutionary size. But that political

struggle was over. Now wolves were under attack. There were so few wild reindeer that planners

paid them no mind. A new reindeer, bred for the maximum quantity of meat now grazed on a

pasture organized for maximum growth, in order to give the “northern reindeer industry a large role

in our [Soviet] future.”

699

OVERSEEING THE NEW reindeer was a new type of herder working for a new type of

collective. As the managerial control of the state increased, local supervisors began a campaign of

ukreplenie, or consolidation. The Peninsula’s many dispersed farms were merged, grazing territories

redrawn, and herds transferred to maximize efficiency. Socialist form also changed. Kolkhozy, where

members set production quotas and technically owned their herds as common property, were

transformed into sovkhozy, a collective enterprise in which the Ministry of Agriculture set production

quotas and property was owned by the state. By 1960, the number of collectives had dropped by

693

V.M. Sdobnikov, “Bor’ba s khishchnikamiin,” P.S. Zhigunov ed. Severnoe olenevodstvo (Moscow: Ogiz-Sel’hozgiz, 1948),

361.

694

Riabov, Istreblenie volkov, 5. From 1945 to 1957, the between forty and fifty thousand wolves were killed each year in

the Soviet Union. Only in 1965 did the number drop below twenty thousand, as extermination efforts began catching up

with the packs. Graves, Wolves in Russia, 59.

695

Zhigunov, Reindeer Husbandry, 324.

696

Tikhon Semushkin, Alitet Goes to the Hills (Moscow: Foreign Language Publishing House, 1952), 12.

697

Gul’chak, Reindeer Breeding, 191.

698

V. Ustinov, Olenevodstvo na Chukotke (Magadan: Magadanskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1956), 18.

699

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 682, L. 28.

118

half, and only six percent of domestic reindeer remained private property.

700

Most herds and herders

now worked on sovkhozy, an agricultural unit that, according to the head of the Scientific Research

Institute of Arctic Agriculture F. Gul’chak, “insured the uninterrupted growth of reindeer

breeding.”

701

Success was signaled by how well the farms filled, or over-filled, their annual

production plans. As the deputy of the sovkhoz “Anyuiskiy” testified, “In 1961, our farm was created

from two kolkhozy. If the kolkhozy did not fulfill the plans, well in the first year our sovkhoz met the

plan across all sectors,” adding that everyone “lives better, and are better supplied.”

702

Labor on a sovkhoz was still mostly Chukchi, but Chukchi were no longer experts. Having

created a corpus of specialized knowledge and practice, reindeer scientists argued that “the last and

decisive priority in developing reindeer herding is the task of training and re-training herders”

through “compulsory apprenticeship in reindeer herding brigades…and through the organization of

special seminars and courses.”

703

Husbandry now required formal education and formal education

was found in towns, not on the tundra. Families moved to villages around the Peninsula, with Yupik

and Russian neighbors. Herders lived in the concrete apartment blocks of regional towns between

shifts on the tundra. Some women no longer went onto the land at all, their skinning, tanning, and

sewing labor done to benefit the sovkhoz plans rather than family needs. Those who did go out, as

members of herding brigades, kept camp for of four or five trained men and an apprentice, who

worked day-long shifts monitoring deer, assessing pastures, treating diseases and hunting predators.

At night they slept in huts dragged behind the herds by tractors, and reported their activities to the

central sovkhoz manager by radio.

704

Reindeer work had become like factory work: run in shifts and

following production quotas “based on the projected plan of economic development” in Moscow.

705

Like Soviet factory work anywhere, there were problems with procurement, with drinking, with

illiteracy. Party membership remained low. Promised tractors took years to arrive. Even acquiring

seal hides from collectives on the coast was difficult.

706

But the correct socialist form was in place, a

way of organizing reindeer for the good of the Soviet Union and for the creation of “first-rank

workers of the tundra, people of a new type, who unflinchingly and every year achieve high indices

in the field of reindeer breeding.”

707

And the people of a new type were presiding over growing

herds. There was often no demand for the new reindeer; the success of kolkhozy was driven less by

700

Gray, “Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century,” 143. Gray points out that Chukotka was an

experimental region for the move from kolkhoz to sovkhoz – not only was the first sovkhoz established in 1929, but all

the kolkhozy had been consolidated by 1980, while in the southern Soviet Union the farm types remained mixed until

the collapse of the Soviet Union.

701

Gul’chak Reindeer Breeding, 32. Caroline Humphry argues that sovkhozy were seen as a more advanced mode of socialist

production that kolkhozy; see Marx Went Away – But Karl Stayed Behind (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998),

93. Chukotka was one of the few regions where collective farms all became state farms; there were no kolkhozy left on

the Peninsula by the 1980s. See Gray, “Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century,” 143.

702

GAChAO F. R-20, Op. 1, D. 43, L. 6.

703

GARF F. A-310, Op. 18, D. 682, L. 30.

704

Zhigunov, Reindeer Husbandry, 82; V. Kozlov, “Khoziaistvo idet v goru,” in 30 let Chukoskogo natsional’nogo okruga

(Magadan: Magadanskoe Knizhnoe Izdatel’stvo, 1960), 65-69.

705

Zhigunov, Reindeer Husbandry, 87.

706

GAChAO F. R-2, Op. 1, D. 38, L. 88-90.

707

Gul’chak, Reindeer Breeding, 259-260.

119

profit than by increasing production. State subsidies paid any shortfall.

708

If socialist progress was

measured by plans filled and over-filled, then the growing herds substantiated utopia growing

tantalizingly close.

THE MANAGED TUNDRA

Across the long twentieth century, the state of change anticipated by most environmental managers,

both capitalist and communist, was change for the better. Reindeer were the enabling object through

which the United States and the Soviet Union managed Beringian space and people, making the

landscape and its inhabitants part of a common future. This future was subject to a clear set of

natural laws. In the United States, the tundra was disciplined by the value the market gave reindeer

and by the land’s carrying capacity. The number of reindeer had a set maximum biologically and a

changing maximum economically. In the Soviet Union, where ideology supplied demand even when

demand was amply supplied, socialist organization of herds would achieve – or perhaps even best –

the tundra’s maximum sustainable yield. Once carrying capacity or market saturation or maximum

production was reached, reindeer would breed and be consumed in changeless balance. To make the

tundra part of capitalist or communist progress, it had to become a space outside of history.

Reindeer would simply reproduce to fill those eaten every year, and the vegetation would grow up to

replenish grazed stubble. In order to make the tundra modern human management had to make it

timeless.

The form of human management had broadly similar consequences on both sides of the

Bering Straits. For the region’s indigenous populations, there were no small nations in 1970 as there

had been in 1850, no more wars between shamans or against empires. On the land, government

interventions attempted to remove the state of nature and replace it with pure social will. The results

– the veterinary care, wolf eradication, pasture management and the rest – created more reindeer.

These reindeer in turn helped fundamentally alter Beringian social and economic life. The nature of

the transformations foregrounds differences between the ideological practices of the United States

and the Soviet Union.

Much of the difference rested with the changeable form of capitalism itself. From its earliest

days in Chukotka onward, the Soviet Union saw communism has having a specific, collective form.

In Alaska, ideas about how individuals, animals, land, states, and markets shifted by the decade. For

the Inupiat, owning reindeer started as a prize for conforming to the missionary vision of

civilization. Then ownership became the precondition of civilization. In both cases, religious and

secular teachers saw the benefits of property as self-explanatory. They shared a conviction that

private property would aid assimilation, that assimilation would increase useful production, and that

production would eventually be valued by the market. The issue of value was, for much of the

twentieth century, a statement of faith; reindeer were what the tundra produced, and therefore the

rational market would assign some value to its consumption.

708

Baskin, ““Reindeer Husbandry/Hunting in Russia,” 27; Igor Krupnik, “Reindeer Pastoralism in Modern Siberia:

Research and Survival during the Time of the Crash,” Polar Research Vol. 19 No. 1 (2000): 49-56.

120

For the Inupiat, the uneven demand for the herds implied otherwise: in some years the price

of reindeer was high, in other years far lower than the profits from furs, bounties, or wage work.

Moreover, the vision of what it meant to be a capitalist – a yeoman farmer, a cooperative owner, a

wage-earning herder – was as capricious as market valuation. As capitalism went through these

iterations, many Inupiat found sources of income, sustenance, and value aside from herding. As a

result, government managers found the Inupiat conversion to producing for the market frustratingly

incomplete. “When natives work for live reindeer they create an illusion they have interest in stock-

raising,” wrote one reindeer specialist, “This is only an illusion. Their interest is in dead reindeer, not

live ones…[and in] the possibility of ‘easier street.’”

709

“Easier street” meant anything other than the

delayed and uncertain gratification of herding. Inupiat lived in a world shaped by market demands;

in 1960, even a wild caribou died by ammunition purchased in English for hard sovereign currency.

But they retained considerable choice about how to engage with that market.

Across the straits, the Soviets left the Chukchi few alternatives as they reformed private

property into collective farming. The assurance of Marxist-Leninist thought had a clear trajectory,

from the early 1920s through the violent years of collectivization and into the postwar period of

consolidation: private property needed to become collectivized, and collectives needed to advance

from artel to kolkhoz to sovkoz. Many Chukchi rejected the Soviet vision, but not because it was

inconsistent. Collectives were the way of the future, the future would make more reindeer, and more

reindeer were the result of collectivized agriculture. Moreover, the Soviet Union, which measured

success in production rather than profit, was untroubled by market valuation. In the United States,

there could be too many reindeer, both economically and ecologically. Every collective reindeer had

value. Some Soviets doubted ecological limits; everyone saw economic success in filling – or better,

over-filling – ever-increasing annual plans. As a result, the Soviets were willing to subsidize reindeer

farms so long as they made more reindeer. The result was considerably more effective at building

committed communists than were the unsteady policies in the U.S. Especially after WWII, with the

open violence of collectivization in the past, Soviet reindeer herding came with a steady, state-

subsidized salary and the prestige of socialist participation –values for which many Chukchi are now

nostalgic.

710

In the 1960s, both systems seemed to be working on their respective terms. In the Soviet

Union, there was no more open political resistance or bloody reindeer massacres. Production was

up. In the United States, a market for reindeer meat and the profits from sales of antlers and hides

slowly expanded in the 1970s.

711

The market or the state made demands. The land supplied reindeer.

The land had nothing else to do, with wolves exterminated, diseases treated, migration corralled, and

grazing regulated. Rangifer had been effectively isolated in a space perfect for creating more Rangifer.

And on both continents, domestic herds were growing. The scale was modest in Alaska, where

reindeer populations increased from a low of 25,000 in the mid-1950s to 40,000 a decade later –

growth that roughly matched demand. In Chukotka, the increase was more dramatic. There were

709

Sidney Rood to A.C. Cooley, August 27, 1943, NARA AK RG 75 Reindeer Service Decimal Correspondence, File:

General Correspondence 1901-1945.

710

Gray, “Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century,” 149; Grant, In the Soviet House, chapter 6.

711

Stern, et al., Eskimos, Reindeer and Land¸ 64-68.

121

almost 600,000 reindeer on the tundra by 1970, finally surpassing the herds the Soviets found in the

early 1920s.

712

The upward line of growth seemed to affirm market rationality or Marxist promise.

BY THE 1970S, both the United States and the Soviet Union had revolutionized a great many

lives. But American and Soviet successes, which seemed ample, were also tied to more than human

actions. At first this was invisible. Efforts to privatize or collectivize the Beringian landscape began

when wild Rangifer numbers were low, their herds reduced by the stress of warm years and

aggravated by hunting and herding. Domestic herds grew as the climate turned toward cool winters.

As wolves, diseases, and range problems were eradicated, the climate lent both states the illusion of

control.

The illusion was troubled, initially, by the paradoxical successes of communist and capitalist

husbandry. By the 1960s, wild reindeer herds were expanding. Grazing regulation concentrated

domestic herds in specific places leaving patches of newly lush pasture open.

713

Humans killed off

the threat of wolves. More wild calves were born, and more lived. The new wild herds, moving in

the grooves of their old trails, worried the edges of the postwar environmental management state.

Domestic reindeer joined their wild cousins to find better fodder. Some turned feral with a gust of

wind: reindeer followed northerly summer breezes away from clouds of insects and into passing

caribou herds, never to return.

714

Caribou grazed through reindeer country, picking the most

nutritious plants.

715

Soviet reindeer scientist V.N. Andreev referred to the wild herds as “weeds” and

called for their “complete removal from the range of domestic reindeer.”

716

In the United States, one

Inupiat herder recalled how “the caribou came in just like mosquitoes and took over everything.”

717

Their wildness overran mapped pastures and separated herds. The total number of Beringian Rangifer

grew in the 1970s and 1980s, but their domestic element shrank. Chukotka lost over 100,000 animals

in a decade.

718

Undomesticated reindeer also brought wolves. The packs followed wild herds outward from

deep valleys, and stayed to eat the docile domestic prey. But the nuisance of the exploding Rangifer

population also changed the human valuation of wolves. By the late 1960s and 1970s, U.S. ecologists

began to see Canis lupis as critical to regulating ungulate populations. The Alaskan Department of

Fish and Game significantly curtailed the wolf-control program in 1960.

719

Bob Stephenson, who

712

Gray, “Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century,” 143.

713

David R. Klein and Vladimir Kuzyakin, “Distribution and Status of Wild Reindeer in the Soviet Union,” Journal of

Wildlife Management Vol. 46, No. 3 (July 1982): 728-733; David R Klein, “Conflicts between Domestic Reindeer and their

Wild Counterparts: A Review of Eurasian and North American Experience,” Arctic Vol. 33 No. 4 (December 1980):

739-756.

714

Clifford Weyiouanna, University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program, Project Jukebox, Tape H2000-102-22,

Section 6. See also Tom Gray, University of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program, Project Jukebox Tape H2000-102-

17, Section 11.

715

Klein, “Conflicts between Domestic Reindeer and their Wild Counterparts,”747.

716

V.N. Andreev, Dikii severnyi olen’ v SSSR (Moscow: Sovetskaia Rossiia, 1975), 71.

717

Tom Gray, Tape H2000-102-17, Section 11.

718

Gray, “Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century,” 150; Burch Caribou Herds of Northwestern Alaska,

120-121.

719

In Alaska, culling was highly politicized. When Alaska became a state in 1959, the new Alaska Department of Fish

and Game reduced culling under the influence of wildlife ecologists. In the late 1960s, hunters petitioned for access to

wolves again. Bounty numbers fluctuated into the 1970s, when controversy over wolf hunting included national

122

worked in the Brooks Range, credited much of his understanding of wolf individuality and

intelligence to Inupiat guides.

720

Russian biologist K. P. Filonov began to see wolves as vital to

managing balanced ungulate herds in nature preserves.

721

By the 1970s, predator control was a major

source of debate among Russian ecologists as well.

722

In both countries, Farley Mowat’s Never Cry

Wolf, a tale of human-canine relationships helped humanize packs and dehumanize hunters, while

popularizing the image of wild nature as balanced and pure.

723

The role of wolves in creating natural

equilibrium – and the very existence of such equilibrium – remained under debate. But wolves began

to have value alive. Although hunts and bounties did not disappear, especially in reindeer country,

eradication campaigns in Russia and America were no longer anointed with scientific consensus or

practical consistency. Nature might provide more balance than the invisible hand of the market or

Marxist arc of history.

724

Then in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the northern climate entered a warm phase. Rangifer

herds across the arctic went into decline.

725

The dwindling herds did not end state sovereignty or roll

back fundamental alterations in the relationships between people, animals, and the northern

landscape. In Chukotka, Soviet-style herding brigades outlived the Soviet Union. In Alaska, a few

Inupiat remained herders despite herd declines and an ever-changing market. But the broad

environmental groups like Friends of the Earth and Defenders of Wildlife. National debates about Alaska predator

control, especially the use of poison and aircraft, went on into the 1980s. See Ken Ross, Environmental Conflict in Alaska,

(Boulder: University of Colorado Press, 2000), 49-75. The debate about wolves was part of a national movement in the

United States toward thinking about the environment. The causes for this turn were diverse and have produced a diverse

historiography, with which chapter 5 will engage more fully.

720

Mike Link and Kate Crowley, Following the Pack: The World of Wolf Research (Stillwater MN: Voyageur Press, 1994), 62-

63.

721

K. P. Filonov, Dinamika chislennosti kopytnykh zhivotnykh i zapovednost.’ Okhotovedenie. (Moscow: TsNIL Glavokhota

RSFSR and Lesnaia promyshlennost’, 1977), 1–232, 88-89. Filonov’s work was also a rebuttal against Stalin-era,

Lysenko-inflected policies of introducing exotic species into Russia’s network of game preserves. See Douglas Wiener, A

Little Corner of Freedom: Russian nature protection from Stalin to Gorbachev (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 381.

722

Wiener, A Little Corner of Freedom, 374-397. Debates over wolf culling were a constant presence in the U.S.S.R. during

the 1970s; see for example O. Gusev, “Protiv idealizatsii prirody,” Okhota i okhotnich’e khoziaistvo ¸ Vol. 11 (1978): 25-27;

S.S. Shvarts, Dialog o prirode (Sverdlovsk: Sredne-ural’skoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1977); A. Borodin, “Usilit’ bor’bu s

volkami,” Okhota i okhotnich’e khoziaistvo Vol. 7 (1979): 4-5; G.S. Priklonskii, “Rezko sokratit’ chislennost’” Okhota i

okhotnich’e khoziaistvo Vol. 8 (1978): 6; A.S. Rykovskii, “Volk – vrag seroznyi,” Okhota i okhotnich’e khoziaistvo Vol. 7

(1978):8-9; Y. Rysnov, “Ne boites’ polnost'iu unichtozhit’ volkov,” Okhota i okhotnich’e khoziaistvo Vol. 9 (1978):10; and

V. Khramova, “Bor’ba s volkami v viatskikh lesakh,” Okhota i okhotnich’e khoziaistvo Vol. 12 (1974): 44.

723

Work on wolf control in the Soviet period requires further investigation, but it appears that the publication of Farley

Mowat’s essentially fictional Never Cry Wolf in Russian in the 1970s led to a temporary reduction in wolf control

programs followed by a boom in the wolf population, contributing to larger debates about the role of humans in nature;

see Graves, Wolves in Russia, 59. This put Russian responses on par with those in North America, where Mowat’s 1963

book was embraced by the public, along with works like Lois Crisler’s Arctic Wild; see Marvin, Wolf, 144-146. The idea of

wild nature as existing in pure ecological balance became part of the popular imagination just as ecologists themselves

were beginning to see ecological systems as far more contingent, changeable, and off-kilter, both in the U.S. and the

Soviet Union, and igniting a debate over that continues into the present.

724

Wolves continued to be killed and bounties were assessed in both countries, although policies varied from year to

year. See McKnight, The History of Predator Control, 8; Ross, Environmental Conflict, 49-77. In Russia debates over control

measures did not generally include reindeer-raising parts of the tundra, where control measures remained strict. See D.I.

Bibikov, Volk: Proiskhozhdenie, sistematika, morfologiia, ekologiia (Moscow: Akademia nauk, 1985), 562-571.

725

Gray, “Chukotkan Reindeer Husbandry in the Twentieth Century,” 143; Jim Dau, “Managing Reindeer and Wildlife

on Alaska’s Seward Peninsula,” Polar Research Vol. 19 No. 1 (2000): 75-82; C. Healy ed. Caribou Management Report of

Survey-Inventory Activities 1 July 1998-30 June 2000, (Juneau: Alaska Department of Fish and Game Project 3.0, 2001). The

crash in Russia was exacerbated by a lack of state support for reindeer herders following the Soviet collapse.

123

aspiration of communists and capitalists to make the tundra a space predictable and progressive,

make it a space ruled by Marxist or capitalist rationale, met on the tundra a climate agnostic to such

designs. Sometimes the numbers of Rangifer simply crash, regardless of human will. Over the long

twentieth century, neither nation could make the space produce only according to human plans and

in human time.

Thus the history of the twentieth century tundra is partly one of human revolutions, and

partly one of the things that escape human minders. The land and its living things are always

changing, on different time scales and at different levels of adaptation.

726

Human endeavors were

changed by using reindeer, and changed reindeer by using them. Small wars were fought over the

disposition of their flesh. Yet the wolves and the wild returned, as did long, slow trends of climate.

In the arctic, there is no complete exit from the state of nature into historical progress through

technological adaptation, because there is no hard line between history and ecology.

726

Some ecologists see the local contexts in the arctic as so variable they are nearly impossible to document accurately.

See Atle Mysterud, “The Concept of Overgrazing and its Role in the Management of Large Herbivores,” Wildlife Biology

Vol. 12 No. 2 (2006): 129-141.

124

CHAPTER FOUR: THE UNDERGROUND

1900-1980

THE UNQUIET EARTH

In winter, the rivers and little creeks that loop down from the Beringian hills lie quiet. Some are

frozen to their pebbly beds. Larger courses hold sluggish liquid deep under the ice. As the sun

returns, brilliant blue overflow seeps downstream. Then in spring the streams roar. Ice sheets crack

and give into the churn of meltwater, grinding away the winter’s burden. The act of freezing heaves

boulders up through the earth. Subzero winters expand water caught in tiny stony fissures, slowly

exploding granite, schist, quartz. Thawing water calves glaciers, worries stone, rolls gravel, and

scrapes bedrock into sand. By midsummer, rivers in spate erode their banks, opening walls of

permafrost to the sun. Soil and pebbles sluice away. The annual pulse of freezing and thawing,

raining and running downriver, constantly reshapes the landscape. Lakes form, only to have their

water stolen by a stream’s current. Creeks eat into the tundra, deepening their bows until they loop

nearly into circles. A large river can move through a kilometer of land in a decade.

727

Miles

downstream, the runoff spills into the sea milky green with sediment.

As water reshapes the land it exposes a layered past. Mammoth tusks and the half-foot long

incisors of extinct, giant beavers crumble from muddy riverbanks. Glacial valleys chart on their sides

a history in pre-human stone: volcanic rock from the Jurassic, granite forged in the Cretaceous,

Precambrian slate. Some of the land is made from long-dead living things and some from fired and

compressed stone.

728

In places, deep time muddled the strata, mixing fossils with volcanic shards,

respiring outcroppings of coal. Water cuts through the jumble, exposing where the working of the

earth has run the Beringian hills through with metal: lead, silver, tin, zinc, copper, and gold.

It was this last element that began the search for underground wealth along the Bering

Straits. The value of gold is not in its utility: it contains no calories to feed bodies or warm hearths.

It is too scarce, heavy, and pliable to use for shelter or tools. Many people have died seeking it but

no person will die in its absence. The meaning and power of gold on the human mind comes from

its inertia. The arrangement of its electrons precludes corrosion or tarnish. Meat rots, wood decays,

and iron rusts, but gold cannot be destroyed any more than it can become something else. It does

not change over time. Being imperishable and rare is the physical canvas on which human societies

have painted the element’s value, as a physical manifestation of light, longevity, beauty, royalty,

eternity. These values were not universal; the Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi found little use for the

metal. But Egyptians mined it, the Shang dynasty sought it, Pliney the Elder wrote about it,

Columbus bore Europe to the New World on rumors of its presence. By the turn of the twentieth

727

For further descriptions of freeze-thaw cycles and how they shape the arctic landscape, see E.C. Pielou, A Naturalist’s

Guide to the Arctic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 47-61.

728

General information on metal deposits can be found in R.W. Boyle, Gold: History and Genesis of Deposits (New York:

Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1987). For the Seward Peninsula in particular, see C.L Sainsbury, Geology, Ore Deposits and

Mineral Potential of the Seward Peninsula, (Alaska: U.S. Bureau of Mines Open-File Report 73-75, 1975), and in Chukotka,

see A.V. Volkov and A.A. Sidorov, Unikal’nyi zolotorudnyi raion Chukotki (Magadan: DVO RAN 2001).

125

century, gold inspired rushes of people to California, to the Lena River, and to the Klondike. For

them the element’s worth was clear. Gold was currency. It emerged from the ground already a

monetary abstraction, valuable for its alchemic ability to become any other thing. The challenge, in

Beringia, was location. Over millions of years, the rolling kiln of time shot quartz and granite

through with metal and then pushed stone and ore up through cracks in the earth’s crust. A rich tin

lode might sit under half a mountain, its edge barely scoured into the open by river water. Nuggets

and flakes of gold dispersed in arctic streams. Traces as fine as dust fanned out across the Beringian

landscape, and the landscape hid deposits under hard rock.

Gathering dust or mining ore required energy. Placer mines, where ores lie near the surface,

needed it to turn over gravels and sift out gold. Lode mines, where metal lies concentrated in deep

underground veins, needed power to blast away stone and tunnel far below the surface. From the

beginning of the Nome gold rush in 1898 until the completion of a nuclear power plant in Chukotka

in 1973, the calories to remake Beringia were rarely local. From human labor to fossil fuels, mining

reversed the outflow of whale blubber, walrus fat, and reindeer meat.

THE CHAPTER THAT follows chronicles this influx of energy. It is in part a story of

congruence between America and Russia. Capitalists, both Imperial and American, valued gold, and

capitalists and communists valued gold and tin. In pursuit of this value, people on both sides of the

Bering Straits overcame the inert earth. The physical properties of gold, like tin and other elements

housed deep in the Beringian substrate, made its harvest quite different than the harvest of value

from a whale, or a seal, or a reindeer. Immobile, insensate, and often subterranean, metals have no

drive to eat or breed. Gold never outruns the miner’s pan. Metal deposits have little sensitivity to

climate. They are fixed and finite in space and over time: elements cannot reproduce. And unlike

whale or a seal or a reindeer, which became money only when labor transmuted their bodies into oil

or hide or meat for sale, gold held value no matter its form, and was in demand whether women

wore corsets or not.

729

Tin, because of its diverse and ubiquitous industrial applications, was in

demand even before military uses made it critical. With hand tools and muscle power or industrial

tools and fossil fuel power they remade hills and rivers, peeling open the land to satisfy human

desire. The day-to-day techniques of this labor were often similar, and capitalist and communist

industry proved similarly suited to overcoming the static challenge of geology. The results left similar

marks on the reformed earth: piles of tailings, dammed rivers, rerouted streams. A landscape

changed not in the unquiet of deep time but in the rapid turbulence of dynamite and bulldozers.

From this congruence in capacity came divergence in practice. At its most ideal, American

prospectors went north to find a capitalist promised land, a place where money sprang from the

earth. At its most extreme, the Soviet Union sent prisoners north to repent their communist sins in

forced service to the motherland. Rarely did laborers on either side of the straits reach their

ideological exemplar. While it transformed the tundra and its underground into a space defined by

commodities and private property, capitalism failed to make most miners rich. Over the twentieth

century, that failure changed from a source of political disillusionment and contestation to a thing

729

For a general cultural history of gold, see Peter L. Bernstein, The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession (New York:

John Wily & Sons, 2004).

126

forgotten in the mythology of the gold rush frontier, an argument for the pliability of the capitalist

ideal. In the Soviet case, mining in Chukotka listed from the brutal negation of utopia in a prison

camp to adventure as a modern, prosperous geologist. Mostly, what follows is a narrative of

historical irony, of how labor in the name of capitalist liberty made inequality so obvious it left

people feeling less free, and how labor in the name of communist salvation never quite achieved a

society filled with classless, redeemed peers but had the potential to either imprison or liberate.

COMING FROM THE SEA, 1890S-1915

In December 1897, Jafet Lindeberg boarded a ship in Alta, Norway, bound for Alaska. Lindeberg

had a U.S. government contract to tend the five hundred reindeer snorting and trampling in the

vessel’s hold. He knew nothing about reindeer. Nor did he care to: word of the 1896 discovery of

gold in the Canadian north had reached Norwegian newspapers. At the confluence of the Yukon

and Klondike Rivers, men could become millionaires in an afternoon. Reindeer were Lindeberg’s

ticket to becoming a prospector. Seven months later, Lindeberg found himself stranded at Saint

Michael. The old Russian post, built where the Yukon River meets the Bering Sea, was swarming

with miners headed for Dawson City. Sternwheeler boats came and went, belching steam and so

crowded that passengers could take no baggage on the nearly two thousand mile voyage upriver.

While waiting for passage, Lindeberg heard rumors of gold on the Seward Peninsula, just to the

north.

730

Abandoning his Klondike plan, Lindeberg joined forces with two Swedes, and set off

northwest along the coast of Norton Sound. In September, with snow already spitting from the

wintering sky, the three men headed inland on a watercourse Lindeberg described as so “very

crooked as it wandered over the tundra to the beach, we named it ‘Snake River.’” Even at the mouth

there was trace gold. After a day slogging upstream, they found deposits in the Snake’s tributaries so

easily accessible they made “wages by the most primitive mining methods – panning, rocking and

sluicing.”

731

In October, the prospectors packed nearly two thousand dollars’ worth of gold out of

the Snake River in shotgun shells. It was the first strike of the Nome rush.

730

APRCA, Hazel Lindberg Collection, Box 3, Series 1, Folder 52: Jafet Lindeberg, p. 7. Lindeberg heard these rumors

from A.N Kittilsen, a doctor employed by the Reindeer Service at Port Clarence. Kittilsen was not boasting – he was

part of a prospecting group that found a small deposit on the Niukluk River a few months before. The Niukluk strike

was the first on the Seward Peninsula, formally discovered in April of 1897. Rumor of gold in the region dated back to

the Western Union Telegraph Expedition’s presence in the region in 1866-1867, when Daniel Libby found evidence of

gold. Libby only acted on his knowledge after the Klondike strike. In 1897, Libby joined with several Seward Peninsula

missionaries and on the advice of John Dexter, a whaler who operated a small silver mine in the Omilak Mountains,

began prospected at Melsing Creek. The Libby party found gold and convened the first miner’s council on the Seward

Peninsula, an event that included Kittilsen. See Terrence Cole, Nome: City of the Golden Beaches, (Anchorage: Alaska

Geographic Society, 1984), 11-24.

731

APRCA, Hazel Lindberg Collection, Box 3, Series 1, Folder 52: Jafet Lindeberg, p. 7-8. See also APRCA, June

Metcalfe Northwest Alaska Collection, Box 1, Series 1, Folder 6: Jafet Lindeberg, transcript of interview with Henry

Carlisle. Lindblom had likely been to the Snake River before; he was a deserter from a whaling ship and had taken refuge

with an Inupiat family fishing in the region. Later he claimed to have been the first person to find gold at Nome; Nome

Nugget January 1, 1900.

127

News of gold broke a wave of human energy over the Seward Peninsula. Despite their

attempts at secrecy, rumors of the Scandinavians’ discovery trickled out among the Klondike

hopefuls at Saint Michaels and shipped south on steamers bound for Seattle and San Francisco. In

the spring of 1899, as the sea ice receded, people flooded in. First were destitute miners from the

Yukon and a failed expedition to the Kobuk River. In June, hundreds of people in San Francisco

sought passage north. A month later, the Washington Post reported fabulous wealth flowing from the

“newly-discovered gold fields of Cape Nome,” where “colors [gold] were found at most

everywhere…Four men shoveling eight days took out $95,000.”

732

The news brought men from

Washington, California, Nevada, and Canada, and from as far as Scandinavia, Germany, and Britain.

By trade, some were farmers, more were fishermen and laborers, and many were experienced

miners. Joseph Grinnell was an aspiring zoologist. Edwin Sherzer was a railroad clerk. Others were

merchants, lawyers, professors, and doctors. Ninety percent of the rushers were men.

733

What they had in common was the ocean. Getting to Nome required none of the glacial

climbs that faced miners flowing into the Klondike or the jolting overland wagons that drew rushes

to the mines in Colorado and California.

734

Through the energies of coal and wind, steam barks and

tri-mast sailing ships collapsed the labor of movement into a matter of weeks and the price of a

ticket. Three thousand migrants arrived in 1899. A year later, encouraged by reports of gold in the

sands on Nome’s beach, eighteen thousand or more people arrived on the Seward Peninsula.

Despite the comparative ease of travel, most loathed the food, tight quarters, grinding ice, and

nausea of life on the ocean. Even when the “sea is calm,” prospector William Woleben wrote “the

swell is not very pleasant. Guess I will be more or less miserable ‘till land is reached.”

735

Land was not just the cure to seasickness. It was, in the words of one expectant miner, a

“great Eldorado of golden promise where auriferous sands lay waiting to pan, pick and shovel,

which would make us all rich, if not millionaires.”

736

That gold could make millionaires was the

product of economic and political forces originating far from Beringia. At the end of the nineteenth

century, most of Europe had adopted the gold standard. With gold equivalent to money and all

money tied to the quantity of mined gold, demand for the metal increased. In the United States,

debates about the social utility of money and the proper form of capitalism were anchored by gold.

William Jennings Bryan, the populist Democratic candidate for the presidency in 1896, argued that

732

“Seven Hundred, Sail for Cape Nome Fields,” San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco CA, June 11 1899; “Rush to New

Gold Field: Rich Deposits of Black Ore in the Cape Nome District, Washington Post, Washington D.C., July 15 1899.

733

For a complete breakdown of the demographics of the rushers, see James H. Ducker, “Gold Rushers North: A

Census Study of the Yukon and Alaska Gold Rushes, 1896-1900,” in Stephen Haycox, Mary Childers Mangusso eds. An

Alaskan Anthology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 206-221.

734

For environmental histories of other metal rushes see Kathryn Morse, The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of

the Gold Rush (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2003); Elliott West, The Contested Plains: Indians, Gold-Seekers & the

Rush to Colorado (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1998); Thomas Andrews, Killing for Coal: America’s Deadliest Labor

War, (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008); Andrew C. Isenberg, Mining California: An Ecological History (New

York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Samuel Truett, Fugitive Landscapes: The Forgotten History of the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands (New

Haven: Yale University Press, 2006); and Chad Montrie, To Save the Land and People: A History of Opposition to Surface Coal

Mining in America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For a historiographical overview of mining, see

Katherine G. Morrissey, “Rich Crevices of Inquiry: Mining and Environmental History,” in Companion to American

Environmental History, ed. Douglas Sackman, (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), 394–409.

735

APRCA, William J. Woleben Papers, Transcript of Diary 1900, p. 1.

736

M. Clark, Roadhouse Tales, or Nome in 1900 (Girard, Kan: Appeal Publishing Co., 1902), 14.

128

labor made value. Money could be made from anything and should expand in quantity alongside the

growing production of America’s working masses. Republican William McKinley contended that

innate worth, not labor, should underwrite money. Since gold was incorruptible and rare – its supply

limited by nature and natural economic laws that drove men to mine only in times of high demand –

it was ideal for currency.

737

McKinley won the election. By 1900, when most miners landed on the

Seward Peninsula, the United States had joined Europe on the gold standard. Element and legal

tender were officially identical.

In fin-de-siècle Republican rhetoric, the gold standard was the guarantor of a stable society

and flourishing economy. New gold discoveries, made just as the U.S. joined the standard, seemed

to prove that God and nature were on the side of gold-bugs. And growth did surge in the United

States, fueled by international migration and trade. Yet by limiting the supply of money, the gold

standard favored established capital over those in financial straits. This was not lost on the

prospectors going north. In Nome, “A man at least has a ‘chance,’” wrote one miner, “and there is

no chance for a poor man back in the states.”

738

A good claim offered what labor in the tumultuous,

monopoly-driven, industrializing American 1890s did not: wealth-producing property and escape

from what prospector Edwin Sherzer called “the life of a common slave in a Railroad office…where

there is no hopes of anything in the way of salary.”

739

Other migrants, like the comparatively well-off

Grinnell, found northern conditions liberating, for “the freedom of camp life and that feeling of rest

after a day’s work” in a “land without visible limit; a land where we are not crowded.”

740

The frontier

had barely closed in the continental United States, but it remained open in Alaska where, as one

miner enthused, “a man’s chances are great, where there is freedom and life and ‘something doing.’”

741

Gold could liberate because it was unmoored from the usual originators of capitalist value.

Its worth per ounce did not reflect the energy expended in collection; it was possible to make a

year’s wages in a good afternoon. Once in hand, an ounce always equaled $20.67. It did not require

refinement to act in the market. Most critically, Alaskan gold was unowned capital. Nome and the

surrounding creeks and rivers were on federal land, uncomplicated by individual ownership or

government concern with indigenous title. Under the General Mining Law of 1872, a citizen or

737

I am influenced here by Morse’s discussion of gold’s value during the 1896 election; see Morse, The Nature of Gold, 16-

29. For an overview of the gold standard in international economic policy, see Catherine R. Schenk, “The Global Gold

Market and the International Monetary System,” in Sandra Bott ed. The Global Gold Market and the International Monetary

System from the Late 19

Century to the Present: Actors, Networks, Power (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2013), 17-38. The

motivations for the gold standard are debated; Barry J. Eichengreen and Marc Flandreau in The Gold Standard in Theory

and History, (New York: Routledge, 1997) argue that it was a classically liberal endorsement of free trade, while Steven

Bryan argues in The Gold Standard at the Turn of the Twentieth Century: Rising Powers, Global Money, and the Age of Empire (New

York: Columbia University Press, 2010) that it was an element of economic nationalism.

738

Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 95.

739

Edwin B. Sherzer, Nome Gold: Two Years of the Last Great Gold Rush in American History, 1900-1902, ed. Kenneth Kutz

(Darien, CT: Gold Fever Pub, 1991), 27. See also Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 95.

740

Joseph Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, ed. Elizabeth Grinnell, (Elgin Ill: David C. Cook Publishing Co., 1901), 90,

13. Grinnell went on to become a zoologist and the first director of the Museum of Vertebrate Zoology at the University

of California, Berkeley. That freedom from civilizational burdens, not just financial constraints, might be a dividend of

mining was an aspect of in other gold rushes; see Paula Mitchell Marks, Precious Dust: The American Gold Rush Era, 1848-

1900 (New York: William Morrow, 1994), 372-373 and Morse, The Nature of Gold¸117-125. As Morse points out, the

pursuit of masculine work was part of a fin-de-siècle reaction to the perception that industrial wage labor was

emasculating.

741

Nome Daily Gold Digger, Nome AK, June 28 1907. Emphasis in the original.

129

person declaring their interest in becoming a citizen could claim plots 1320 feet long by 660 feet

wide containing a “valuable deposit” of minerals.

742

Fortunes required no more than finding twenty

gold-laced acres, staking a claim, registering it with the local mining district, and getting to work. For

many prospectors disenchanted by industrial “wage slavery,” mining offered to redeem capitalism by

making them instant capitalists.

743

In the first summer of the rush, it looked as if the land on the Seward Peninsula might

comply. Miners landing in the churning Bering Sea surf discovered gold in the sand at the mouth of

the Snake River. Making money on the beach required little more than a shovel and a primitive

rocker to agitate grit away from nuggets and trap flakes in a cloth lining, or in a liquid mercury

amalgam. Prospectors averaged twenty to a hundred dollars in gold each day from these sandy

claims, pulling over two million dollars in gold off the beach in 1899. Some ended the season with

small fortunes.

744

The beach claims made the promise of the gold rush real. One prospector wrote

home that thanks to rocking the sand, he and his brother were “fast becoming private property

owners. Our cabin is the best on the beach.”

745

A year later, five or six times as many prospectors disembarked at Nome on the promise of

the golden beaches, only to discover sand churned clean of gold. In 1900, beach miners produced

only $350,000, and spent millions on equipment, food, and shelter.

746

Come north for easy money,

the horde of prospectors were left to hurl their energies at the creek beds, tundra ponds, and hilly

uplands of the interior. Here, on the worn hills of the old Beringian earth, simply moving was

difficult. “You put one foot on a hummock,” one miner described, “only to have it slid off into the

water and muck over the top of your hip boot. You pull that leg out and hit another hummock with

the other foot, which does the same.”

747

Journeys of only a few miles left men’s feet shredded by

blisters and soaked from slipping on sodden ground. In the summer, the sun was hot, causing “a

copious perspiration,” Grinnell noted, accompanied by the “low, depressing, measly wine of the

mosquito…there are millions!”

748

Once prospectors found their claim, they had to build shelter, find

water, and manage chores from cooking to laundry. Many prospectors found this labor, even its

742

For an overview of the mining law, see Carl Mayer, “The 1872 Mining Law: Historical Origins of the Discovery

Rule,” University of Chicago Law Review Vol. 53, No. 2 (Spring 1986): 624-653.

743

Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 95. Politically, many of the gold rushers espoused views along the populist spectrum, believing

that individual enterprise deserved, at the least, some government protection from large corporations. Although not all

were of the middle-class background generally emphasized in recent historiography, gold rushers shared a sense of

idealism. See Charles Postel, The Populist Vision (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Robert Johnston, The Radical

Middle Class: Populist Democracy and the Question of Capitalism in Progressive Era Portland, Oregon (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 2003). For a discussion of how frontier, individualist rhetoric came to exist simultaneously with faith in

governmental regulation, see Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil

War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

744

“At least $400,000,” Nome News¸ October 9, 1899.

745

Jeff Kunkle, ed., Alaska Gold: Life on the New Frontier, 1989-1906. Letters and Photographs of the McDaniel Brothers (San

Francisco: California Historical Society, 1997), 87. The brothers went on to pay off their family’s ranch in San Jose with

money from the Nome goldfields.

746

Alfred A. Brooks, U.S. Geological Survey, A Reconnaissance of the Cape Nome and Adjacent Gold Fields of the Seward

Peninsula, Alaska in 1900 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1901), 152.

747

Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 12.

748

Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, 12.

130

domestic variants, pleasant. Sherzer wrote to his fiancé of his excitement at mastering sourdough,

but admitted he was still confounded by gingerbread.

749

By contrast, Sherzer found search for gold “the hardest kind of work imaginable.”

750

Most

prospectors had only hand tools to use in churning through the creeks, sands, and soil thickened

with permafrost. Working streams with a pan required bending over in icy water for hours at a time,

shaking silty gravel for a sign of colors. And subterranean deposits required turning the earth inside

out. Grinnell recalled digging through dirt “thawed barely through its covering of moss, seldom

more than six inches. The rest of the way the frozen ground was as hard as rock and had to be

chipped off bit by bit… We broke the points off the pick every day. A strata of pure ice a foot thick

was encountered, but most of the way we worked through a sort of frozen muck or packed mass of

unrotted vegetation.”

751

To free possible gold from the icy mess, prospectors built fires to thaw the

permafrost, “unleashing smells like barnyard filth.”

752

But the tundra gave little to burn. Men spent

their days harvesting willows, scavenging for driftwood and scrap, or packing coal from the coast.

Then thawed ground had to be washed to separate gold from soil. The water that tormented men as

they walked was often absent from the places it was needed “to sluice,” as Woleben observed, so

miners “had to have their water hauled to them by the barrel.”

753

Warm water poured into test pits

caused the permafrost to melt, caving in excavated mine shafts. “It is needless to say,” Arthur Olsen

wrote in his diary, “I have a soreness and lameness after work.”

754

Extracting the interior of the earth was energy intensive. Men needed to feed their bodies,

warm their shelters, and fuel the pits they burned into the permafrost. Like the miners themselves,

much of this energy was shipped north to the mouth of the Snake River. It was a terrible place to

build. There was little timber and no coal. Grain and hay, like the horses and cattle they fed, were

imported. The basic industrial commodities anticipated by even the poorest miner were

manufactured thousands of miles distant. All supplies came to Nome by sea during the short ice-free

season. But the town had no natural harbor, so every bucket, board, nail, musical instrument, can of

peaches, bar of soap, chicken, pig, and human was loaded from ship to barge and from barge to

shore and from shore to town or camp. “Imagine,” Sherzer wrote his fiancé, “a long stretch of

sandy beach, piled high & in confusion with freight of all descriptions & tents men unloading barges

& working for dear life all the time, then a main street...crowded with people & teams pushing,

joshing & shoving, then you have a pretty good description of Nome.”

755

Hotels, restaurants, dry-

goods stores, a post office, a newspaper, banks, law offices and medical practices lined a few

boardwalk streets. Wyatt Earp opened a saloon, one of dozens. The Golden Gate Store attracted

customers with a circulating library. But while the sea allowed Nome to erupt from the muddy beach

749

See Sherzer, Nome Gold, 52-53; see also APRCA, William J. Woleben Papers, Transcript of Diary 1900, p. 4 and

Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, 96. The gender dynamics in Nome were not dissimilar to those in other gold rush

towns, where men did women’s work and women occupied an ambiguous social space. See Susan Lee Johnson, Roaring

Camp: The Social World of the California Gold Rush, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), chapters 2 and 3.

750

Sherzer, Nome Gold, 37.

751

Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, 80.

752

Grinnell, Gold Hunting in Alaska, 80.

753

APRCA, William J. Woleben Papers, Transcript of Diary 1900, p. 11.

754

APRCA, June Metcalfe Northwest Alaska Collection, Box 1, Series 1, Folder 17: Arthur Olsen Diary, 1906-1907, p.

31.

755

Sherzer, Nome Gold, 25.

131

improbably fast, it did not prevent everything from being improbably expensive. Bolstered by the

energy and effort of transit, prices in Nome were two to five times those in Seattle.

756

Some men could pay. Lindeberg’s rich claims made $200,000 in a single summer.

757

But

geology was fickle. For every mine with paying dirt, hundreds of men labored over empty pits.

Among miners who spent their last dollar coming north in June 1900, absent gold dashed more than

hopes. By October, the earth would be too cold to mine, the sea too icy to sail, and sustaining

calories potentially too scarce to contemplate. The Revenue Cutter Service reported that there were

thousands “desirous to get away now but have not the funds to procure a passage South.”

758

But the

energy to flee or survive winter required currency. Stranded between the scarcity of the metal they

sought and the scarcity of the supplies necessary to seek it, desperate men turned Nome into a town

where “even in the unceasing daylight there were many petty-larceny thefts.”

759

Woodpiles shrank.

Coal vanished. So did hovels, pans, potatoes, and canned peaches. Men lost their gold to gambling

halls, to safe deposit boxes blasted by dynamite, or to the stupor of drugged liquor.

760

Woleben saw

a man killed over a “lot dispute,” left “lying in the middle of the street in a pool of blood.”

761

The most common crime in Nome was not the theft of gold nuggets but of land titles.

Private property, that dream of the wage-slave turned prospector, was in reality constantly disputed.

Miners deceived, misidentified, tricked, miscalculated, and manipulated their claims to land. A single

mining site was often staked three or four times by successive claimants, some of whom never saw

the land in person. “People staked by power of attorney; staked by agency; staked for the relatives

and for their friends,” Edwin Harrison wrote.

762

Mining companies sold shares based on claims that

existed nowhere on earth. The resulting snarl of legal paperwork covered the tundra in competing

titles. Put end to end, the land claimed in 1899 alone stretched the length of Illinois.

763

Particularly

vulnerable were the claims of naturalized citizens like Lindeberg. Under the perhaps willfully

mistaken impression that foreign birth precluded obtaining land title, American miners tried to jump

“every claim whose location bore a name in ending in ‘son,’ ‘berg’ or had three consonants in a

row.”

764

Trying to steal titles from a handful of lucky men born abroad was one way to master the

vagrancies of geography.

756

Edwards S. Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula: History, Description, Biographies (Seattle: Metropolitan Press, 1905),

58.

757

APRCA, June Metcalfe Northwest Alaska Collection, Box 1, Series 1, Folder 6: Jafet Lindeberg, transcript of

interview with Henry Carlisle, p. 112.

758

Captain of the Steamer Perry to the Secretary of the Treasury, June 28 1900, NARA AK RG 26 M-641, Roll 8. See

also Lieutenant Jarvis to the Secretary of the Treasury, September 5 1899, NARA AK RG 26 M-641, Roll 8.

759

Harrison, Nome and Seward Peninsula, 58.

760

“Chloroformed and Robbed of $1300,” Nome Chronicle, November 17, 1900; “Knock Out Drop Was Employed,”

Nome Chronicle, September 29 1900; “Stole Muther’s Safe,” Nome Gold Digger, November 1, 1899. Nome’s court files are

housed in the National Archives and Record Administration branch in Anchorage, but are incomplete due to fire

damage.

761

APRCA, William J. Woleben Papers, Transcript of Diary 1900, p. 7. Nome’s rate of violent crime was no greater than

in American cities at the time; see Cole, City of the Golden Beaches, 74. About seven murders were recorded in the first two

years of the gold rush, when well over twenty thousand people were in Nome; see “An Official List of Nome’s Dead,”

Nome Weekly News, October 6 1900 and “A Year’s Crimes,” Nome Nugget, September 13, 1901.

762

Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 53.

763

Samuel C. Dunham, The Yukon and Nome Gold Regions, U.S. Department of Labor Bulletin Vol. 5 No. 29 (July 1900),

845.

764

Rex Beach, “The Looting of Alaska,” Appleton’s Booklovers’ Magazine, January-May 1906, 7.

132

IT WAS THROUGH this raw competition over bits of earth that miners called the state into

being. For the federal government, gold appeared to be the first resource that could establish a

permanent settler population to northwestern Alaska. Whaling, sealing, and walrus hunting were

seasonal and transient. Reindeer farming was for natives. The fur trade required only a few whites to

negotiate with indigenous trappers. Gold was different, what Alaskan veteran Daniel Libby, “but a

beginning of the great and continuous flow [of wealth] that will follow for generations to come.”

765

But the uneasy status of private property was not in the interest of making mining a profitable

industry. “There is nothing that frightens capital more easily than uncertainty of titles,” Harrison

wrote. “Many mine owners would not attempt the development of their properties, fearing that if

they found rich pay an adverse claimant would tie up their claims and burden them with law

suits.”

766

Furthering the industry meant resolving ownership. In 1900, Congress seated the Second

Judicial Division of Alaska in Nome. Its first judge, Arthur N. Noyes, used the bench to seize claims

for his cronies.

767

Even after his replacement, pulling wealth from the tundra remained as much

lawyer’s work as done with pick and pan. Mines were claimed for blackmail. Claims were worked by

the wrong people, as in the case of “John Doe, who…entered upon, worked, and mined the certain

placer mining claim…on Gold Run,” in 1901.

768

Or, still snared in court, claims were not worked at

all. In 1903, twenty thousand mining sites were on file. Only five hundred saw active labor.

769

For the prospectors who expected Alaska to furnish property and wealth, paying lawyers to

make their labors legal was an affront. Private property was not a matter of finding and improving

mining land, but of having the ability to use the courts. The implications were not lost on rushers.

“The future development and prospecting in Alaska at the mercy of Lawyers, Doctors, judges, at

present,” a group of miners wrote to Theodore Roosevelt in 1901, noting that “for intent” a man

“can not today prospect any more.”

770

As no capital in Nome proved truly free, some prospectors

gave up on the value of mining altogether. Driven to find the money to supply themselves for an

Alaska winter or leave, they tried to find profit in anything but gold. One man claimed rights to the

fish in the Snake River. Others sold bucks of fresh water, scarce between the Nome’s salty sea and

frozen tundra, for $.25 per bucket.

771

Many scoured the beaches for driftwood, valuable as winter set

765

APRCA, Memoirs and Reminiscences Collection, Box 3, Folder 53: Manuscript by Daniel Libby, p. 1.

766

Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 69.

767

Assisted by Alexander McKenzie, the Republican National Committeeman from North Dakota, Noyes granted

injunctions on some of the richest mines in the region, including Lindeberg’s, under the pretense of reviewing the

legality of alien claims. While he stalled the owners in court, Noyes gave receivership to McKenzie, who worked six

hundred thousand dollars in gold from the disputed land. Noyes never served jail time for his blatantly illegal actions,

while McKenzie was sentenced to a year’s imprisonment in Oakland, California. He was pardoned after less than four

months by President McKinley. For a complete account of Noyes and McKenzie’s conspiracy, see Cole, City of the Golden

Beaches, 79-90 and Rex Beach’s classic fiction version of the affair, The Spoilers (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1906).

768

Case 102, NARA AK RG 21 M-1969 Roll 4: Criminal Case Files of the U.S. District Court for the District and

Territory of Alaska, Second Division (Nome), 1900-1955.

769

“Conditions in Alaska,” 176.

770

Ed Wilson to President Theodore Roosevelt, October 4 1901, NARA MD RG 126, Office of Territories Classified

Files 1907-1951, File 9-120. The letter was co-singed by almost fifty miners.

771

Sherzer, Nome Gold, 45; Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 36. Some blamed criminal activity in Nome on how easy the beach was

to access from Seattle and San Francisco; these upper-class observers saw destitute miners as an intrinsically criminal

element rather than poor. See for example Lanier McKee in The Land of Nome: A Narrative Sketch of the Rush to Our Bering

Sea Gold-Fields, the Country, Its Mines and Its People, and the History of a Great Conspiracy 1900-1901 (New York: Grafton Press,

1902), 32.

133

in. Prospectors with hunting skills sold game meat. One man provided ptarmigan to a Nome store

for $.64 each, selling more than two thousand in the winter of 1900-1901.

772

The ptarmigan entrepreneur bought his birds from Inupiat hunters, who he paid a quarter

per animal. Supplying miners with energy pulled the indigenous population of the Seward Peninsula

into the edges of the wage economy. Only a few indigenous people participated directly in mining,

either by staking claims or hiring on as labor.

773

Instead, the Inupiat and Yupik relationship with the

horde of whites turned on making the energies of the landscape accessible to miners unskilled in

arctic subsistence. The region’s Inupiat were still recovering from the productive crises of the 1880s,

when caribou herds declined precipitously and the energy exported by commercial whale and walrus

hunters amplified the virulence of the diseases they imported.

774

The survivors of widespread famine

and epidemics made a living off fish, small game, sea mammals, reindeer, and trade. The wave of

outsiders looking for gold amplified the latter. For Inupiat reindeer herders, miners provided a

market for meat and draft animals, although whites sometimes shot native stock without paying. For

indigenous trappers and sewers, prospectors needed fur-lined boots and parkas, although they

sometimes cheated on prices. Many of the thousands of whites passing through Nome bought ivory

carved by native artists. Theodore Kingeekuk remembered people on St. Lawrence Island spending

their winters making goods to trade.

775

Carved figures and sealskin boots became illegal alcohol and

ammunition, or necessary flour and sugar.

776

In these exchanges, white and native values were often incommensurate. In the indigenous

reckoning, a sled dog, $100, and a bottle of whiskey were all of comparable worth. And they spent

hours among the detritus left by miners on the beach, finding value among the trash. Such behaviors

772

Clark, Roadhouse Tales, 89.

773

Charlie Antisarlook owned a substantial reindeer herd and “a number of mining claims, some of which are said to be

promising,” at the time of his death in 1900; see Nome Daily News, Nome AK, August 2, 1900. Antisarlook had

developed long-term relationships with the Cutter Service and local missionaries. There are other scattered mentions of

native people owning claims; see “Conditions in Alaska”, 107, 203, although the status of indigenous people as

dependents of the state rather than citizens made claiming land difficult. Ejnar Mikkelsen mentions native people

working for wages at a mine in Candle in 1909; Conquering the Arctic Ice (London: William Heinemann, 1909), 377. See

also Harry De Windt, Through the Gold Fields of Alaska to Bering Straits (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1898), 32-33. It is

possible, although impossible to corroborate, that Mary Antisarlook (Charlie’s wife) first showed Lindeberg gold on the

Snake River tributary Anvil Creek. See Charles Forselles, Count of Alaska: A Stirring Saga of the Great Alaskan Gold Rush: A

Biography (Anchorage, AK: Alaskakrafts, 1993), 13.

774

The caribou population on the Seward Peninsula was still almost nonexistent in 1899-1900, as multiple miners

reported a lack of large game even in the earliest days of the rush. See for example McKee, The Land of Nome, 98; Clark,

Roadhouse Tales 155.

775

Anders Apassingok, Willis Walunga, Raymond Oozevaseuk and Edward Tennant eds. Sivuqam Nangaghnegha

Siivanllemta Ungipaqellghat, Lore of St. Lawrence Island, Echoes of our Eskimo Elders, Volume 2: Savoonga (Unalakleet: Bering

Strait School District, 1987), 15.

776

Hunting success during this period varied greatly by the year and location. At Cape Prince of Wales, on the tip of the

Seward Peninsula, the local missionaries reported a good harvest in 1901, in contrast to the previous year, when the local

Inupiat traded boots and curios for flour “which helped them over the times when food was scarcest,” in Kathleen Lopp

Smith and Verbeck Smith ed., Ice Window: Letters from a Bering Strait Village, 1892-1902 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska

Press, 2001), 311. The literature on how trade, along with epidemic disease and other factors, played a role in increasing

indigenous dependency spans Richard White’s classic The Roots of Dependency: Subsistence, Environment and Social Change

among the Choctaws, Pawnees, and Navajos (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988) to Marsha Weisiger’s insightful

Dreaming of Sheep in Navajo Country (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011) and Steven Hackel’s Children of Coyote,

Missionaries of St. Francis: Indian-Spanish Relations in Colonial California, 1769-1850 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina

Press, 2005).

134

baffled miners, and contributed to their judging indigenous cultures and individuals with a mix of

curiously, repulsion, and admiration.

777

But the actions of the miners were equally curious to the

Inupiat and Yupik, who organized their lives without substantial private property or the abstraction

of currency.

778

Why would men risk dying of exposure and hunger, their firewood gone to burning

holes in the ground, their bodily energies given to digging? And why build anything at the Snake

River, a place beaten by storms and bad for walrus hunting? Then there was life in the town. The

prospectors modeled in their brawls both legal and physical a vision of commerce with little social

grace to cover over raw transaction. Everything from alcohol and sex to food and shelter was a

commodity. Currency was necessary for the most basic needs. The essence of boom-town capitalism

was the exchange of money for existence. And those without money, the “men in desperate straits,”

stole, not just from each other but from native camps.

779

Prospectors across the Seward Peninsula

imposed their starving needs on Inupiat stores of fish and fuel, often without asking.

780

And jumping

claims or stealing from indigenous caches was not the only form of larceny on the Seward Peninsula.

In later years, Inupiat elders recalled knowing that at its core, the miners’ struggle over bits of the

earth constituted the laborious theft of native land.

781

THE SHARED BONES of the Beringian earth are easily visible along the Seward and Chukchi

Peninsulas. The rivers have a similar curve, the mountains a similar roll. The tundra’s spongy soil

stretches across the Asia-North America divide. That common features on the surface signaled a

common underground was not lost on either Russians or Americans. Years before formal geological

surveys, Imperial functionaries noted how “geological structure of the Chukchi and Seward

Peninsulas are exactly the same” and thus promised gold deposits.

782

Yet, as mining engineer Dmitrii

V. Ivanov warned, Chukotka’s possible riches might never fill Russian coffers.

783

The Empire had

777

L.H. French, Nome Nuggets: Some of the Experiences of a Party of Gold Seekers in Northwestern Alaska in 1900 (New York:

Montross, Clarke and Emmons, 1901), 63. See also Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 29. Different ideas of value

did not preclude Inupiat and Yupik traders from driving a hard bargain, however; in situations when white and native

ideas of value were commensurate, European traders complained about the sophistication of the haggling. See

Mikkelsen, Conquering the Arctic Ice, 38, 374.

778

For a discussion of traditional property ideas in this region, see Linda Ellanna and George Sherrod. From Hunters to

Herders: the Transformation of Earth, Society, and Heaven Among the Inupiat of Beringia (Anchorage: U.S. Department of the

Interior, National Park Service, 2004), 123-125.

779

Sherzer, Nome Gold, 38.

780

Many miners comment on the generosity of the indigenous population, or mistook caches of food left at specific

wintering sites as free for the taking. See “Conditions in Alaska” 58

Cong., 2d sess., 1904 Senate Report. 282 pt. 2, p. 159,

Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 31.

781

A particularly powerful example is Jacob Ahwinona, an Inupiaq elder from the Nome region, discussion of his

grandfather’s horror at white greed over a metal his people had known existed for years. See Project Jukebox, University

of Alaska Fairbanks Oral History Program, Nome Communities of Memory Project, Interview 2007-03-03.

782

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D.324, L. 23. The 1914 report notes American scientists’ discussion of Chukotka’s likely

gold-bearing geology. See also K. I. Bogdanovich, Ocherki Chukotskogo poluostrova (St. Petersburg: A.S. Suvorin, 1901), vii-

viii.

783

Anonymous pamphlet, Zabytaia okraina (St. Petersburg: A.S. Suvorin, 1902): 60-61. Thomas Owen identifies, correctly

I think, Ivanov as the author of the pamphlet. See Owen, “Chukchi Gold: American Enterprise and Russian

Xenophobia in the Northeastern Siberia Company,” Pacific Historical Review, Vol. 77, No. 1 (February 2008):49-85, 58. I

am less in agreement with Owen’s diagnosis of xenophobia on the part of Ivanov and Russians in general. While

Ivanov’s language was strident, he described real and ongoing transgressions of national borders by foreigners generally

intent on economic extraction, prone to trade illegal alcohol with Chukotka’s indigenous peoples, and otherwise of

135

spent the better part of fifty years watching Americans hunt, barter, and steal away the region’s

animal wealth. Chukchi and Yupik traders along the coast spoke English better than Russian. As

another engineer noted, Imperial “influence in the territory has been perfectly eradicated by the

Americans.”

784

If the government did not act, any gold on the Peninsula might meet a similar fate.

To assert the Russianness of Chukotka and its elements, the Imperial government gave

Vladimir M. Vonliarliarskii, a retired colonel with some mining experience in the Urals, a five-year

concession to prospect Chukchi deposits.

785

Granting limited exploration rights was the norm for

gold production in the Russian Empire, where minerals were not valued as unowned capital waiting

for individual discovery. Gold, like any mined metal, was legally regulated as wealth for the Empire.

Beginning in the 1820s, Imperial statues regulated prospecting, extracting, transporting, and

measuring gold, and their minutia were enforced by a network of state officials. In the early 1840s,

when rich Siberian discoveries made Russia the dominant gold producer in the world, only nobles or

merchants were allowed to prospect or mine.

786

Thereafter, the licensing of mining concessions

favored large, monopolistic enterprises, their actions overseen by government mining engineers.

Mining helped the entrepreneurial nobility fund factories, railroads, and investments abroad. Their

interests on the ground were guarded, by the 1870s, by a special police force tasked with preserving

“social order and safety” at mining sites. Gold still escaped around the edges of regulation, and the

industry was often low on both order and safety.

787

But in ideal form, the value of mineral wealth

was in its ability to enrich the elite and through them the empire. When Russia adopted the gold

standard in 1897, every gram of gold was bound for the federal treasury. The element would not

save capitalism by making poor men rich, but save tsars by making rich capitalists in service to the

state.

For Chukotka to make the state rich, Vonliarliarskii had to find the promised gold. His

endeavors faced the same challenges that confronted prospectors in northwestern Alaska: blizzards

in May, icy seas in June, clouds of mosquitoes in July, and a landscape that defied movement.

Moreover, the problems of energy were far more acute. Chukotka had no golden beach to lure

thousands of laborers. Without human bodies to supply, there was no demand for vessels filled with

food and coal. Vonliarliarskii had to sponsor his own gold rush. But no one knew where to begin.

Expertise, like energy, was expensive. As a result, Vonliarlairskii wrote that “finding gold on the

Chukchi Peninsula requires large amounts of capital. Therefore it is necessary to turn to foreign

dubious influence. It is clear in the Russian archives that problems with Americans go back to the arrival of whaling

ships, putting Ivanov’s pamphlet in a long tradition of advocating what, if the tables were turned, would be seen as basic

national interest. At the very least, xenophobia is a change that could be leveled at parties from both countries.

784

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D.285, L. 10.

785

For the text of the concession, see V. Vonliarliarskii, Chukotskii poluostrov: ekspeditsiia V. M. Vonliarliarskogo i otkrytie

novogo zolotonosnogo raiona bliz ust’ia r. Anadyria, 1900–1912 gg. (St. Petersburg: K. I. Lingard,1913), 21-26. For a brief

biography of Vonliarlairskii and his connections with promoters of Russian power in the Far East – against the wishes of

Minister of Finance Sergei Iu. Witte, see Owen, “Chukchi Gold,” 54-55.

786

This did not stop khishchniki (a word that can variously mean predators, invaders, or crafty, dishonest people) from

prospecting outside of the law; indeed some of the richest finds in the notorious Lena gold fields came from illegal

discoveries. See Michael Melancon, The Lena Goldfields: Massacre and the Crisis of the Late Tsarist State (College Station, TX;

Texas A&M University Press, 2006), 19.

787

For an overview of Tsarist mining law, see Melancon, The Lena Goldfields, 28-32, 40-46.

136

investors with connections to…foreign engineers.”

788

To spread the financial burden, Vonliarlairskii

formed the Northwest Siberian Company and sold shares of its single asset, the Chukotka

concession. The majority of shares and local management of the Company went to John Rosene, a

Norwegian immigrant experienced in shipping goods from Seattle to the Seward Peninsula.

789

1902, the task of securing national gold in Chukotka was overseen by the only Russian company

both majority owned and managed by an American living in the United States.

The Imperial dependence on American labor, experience, investments, and supplies was a

problem from the beginning. The first prospectors, a mix of Russians, Americans, and Chinese

miners, reached Chukotka in the summer of 1900. Two Chukchi guides led the party up the Olen’

River, where Russian geologist Karol Bogdanovich reported “discovering signs of gold in almost

every pan.”

790

The Americans dismissed the find as mere traces. It was a sign of larger

disagreements. The Americans believed the Russians planned to abandon them, and demanded they

be taken to Nome.

791

Bogdanovich thought the Americans were after quick personal fortunes,

wanting to go “where gold can be scooped with shovels.”

792

Relations were no better in 1901 and

1902, when Company geologist Dmitrii Ivanov earned a reputation for incompetence and

drunkenness in Nome.

793

By 1905, geologist Ivan Korzukhin lamented the dependence on labor

from Alaska, as the “two nations, Russian and American, get along terribly with each other.”

794

Underlying the quarrels was more than the discomforts of prospecting. American miners

recruited in Nome and Russian geologists had very different ideas about ownership, capital, and the

state. Prospecting in the United States was a path to personal fortune; individual miners owned what

gold they discovered and the land that held it. Prospecting in Russia was a way to enrich both

investors and the Empire, yielding, as Korzukhin argued, “Strategic results that will have great moral

and economic value.”

795

Part of Russia’s moral power was in tempering the free-market ethos that

inspired “international predators” to plunder the North Pacific’s gold, fish, and sea mammal

wealth.

796

Korzukhin’s argument drew on a long and varied Russian tradition of critiquing the

788

Vonliarliarskii, Chukotskii poluostrov, 14.

789

Owen’s “Chukchi Gold” had a description of Rosene and Vonliarlairskii’s legal partnership, 60-65. The Company was

financed by investors from London and Chicago, in addition to Rosene’s buy-in.

790

Bogdanovich, Ocherki Chukotskogo poluostrova, 19.

791

This is from a second-hand and highly colorful account of the “cloven footed” Russians, published by Jane

Woodworth Bruner, “The Czar’s Concessionaires: The East Siberian Syndicate of London; A History of Russian

Treachery and Brutality,” Overland Monthly, Vol. 44 (1904): 411–422, 414-415.

792

Bogdanovich, Ocherki Chukotskogo poluostrova, 34. He was also appalled that some of the American passengers

appeared to be Jewish or Masons. The Americans got their way in this case, and were taken to Nome.

793

For treatment of workers, see the account by Northwestern Siberian Company employee W.B. Jones, Argonauts of

Siberia: A Diary of a Prospector (Philadelphia: Dorrance and Co., 1927), 70-71; for Ivanov’s lack of ability, see Russian

geologist Ivan A. Korzukhin, Chukotskii poluostrov, (St. Petersburg: Yakor’ , 1907), 3-4. John Rosene observed both; see

Lucile McDonald, “John Rosene’s Alaska Activities, Part I,” The Sea Chest: Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical

Society, Vol. 10 (March 1977): 107–121, 114. McDonald’s articles contain large verbatim quotes from Rosene’s now-lost

memoir.

794

Korzukhin, Chukotskii poluostrov, 3.

795

Ivan Korzukhin, Chto nam delat’ s Chukotskim poluostrovom? (St. Petersburg: A.S. Suvorin, 1909), 27-28. Korzukhin

places mining Chukchi gold at the center of regaining Russian influence, and argued that it would help project Russian

power against “plunders” across the world, including the British sealing vessels that plagued both the U.S. and Imperial

Russia.

796

Korzukhin, Chto nam delat’, 28.

137

excesses and immoralities of unfettered capitalism.

797

In Chukotka, these debates were not

theoretical. The terms of Vonliarlairskii’s concession meant that the Northeast Siberian Company

did not have alienable rights. Subdividing Imperial land or gold claims was prohibited. As a result,

Rosene could not offer his employees mining titles, or even a contractual split of gold finds. With no

chance of earning property or fortune, prospectors in Nome were disinclined to hire on with the

Company. And experienced Russian labor was scarce in the Far East. Out of desperation, Rosene

began recruiting American miners with the illegal promise of a stake in Chukotkan gold.

798

In 1906, on the Volch’ia River near Anadyr, Northeastern Siberian Company miners finally

found creeks where “gold showed up all over and could be picked up by the handful.”

799

Rosene

used dust from the strike, named the “Discovery,” to attract more Alaskan miners. But word of the

find reached St. Petersburg before Rosene’s notification, making the government suspicious.

Reports in Imperial newspapers of Company mistreatment of the Chukchi and illegal liquor sales

compounded official’s doubts.

800

Worse, an article in the Russian Geological Society proceedings

made public the Company’s tactic of staking American prospectors on Imperial land.

801

Even the

Company’s local engineer worried about “the danger of an influx of predators from the U.S. to the

[Anadyr] mines, who will make off with gold.”

802

In the aftermath of defeat in the Russo-Japanese

war, wanting to lose no more land or treasure, the Imperial government made foreign investment in

Chukotka illegal and declined to renew the Company’s concession in 1909.

803

The end of the Northeaster Siberian Company’s tenure did not see an end to Chukotkan

gold-hunting. The Ministry of Trade and Industry “expressed the wish for the earliest possible

involvement of private enterprise on in the Chukchi Peninsula,” and issued several concessions

including to Vonliarlairskii’s son, Alexander.

804

Ideally, the gold discovered by Rosene’s prospectors

would now be worked by a few consolidated companies, perhaps even powered by local coal

deposits. But “rumors about the unusual richness of the…Volch’ia River area are widespread in

797

Anti-capitalist thinking had a long pre-revolutionary tradition in Russia on both the left and the right. Thomas Owen

associates this with Russian xenophobia and resentment, along with geographical and institutional factors; see Russian

Corporate Capitalism from Peter the Great to Perestroika, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995). Other scholars take the

intellectual content of anti-capitalism, both on the left and the right, more seriously. The comprehensive guide is Andrzej

Walicki, A History of Russian Thought from the Enlightenment to Marxism, trans. Hilda Andrews-Rusiecka (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1979).

798

Olaf Swenson, Northwest of the World: Forty Years Trading and Hunting in Northern Siberia (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1944),

8, 13.

799

Lucile McDonald, “John Rosene’s Alaska Activities, Part II,” The Sea Chest: Journal of the Puget Sound Maritime Historical

Society, Vol. 10 (June 1977): 131–141, 138. See also RGIA DV F. 1370 Op. 1 D.4, L. 119.

800

McDonald, “John Rosene’s Alaska Activities, Part II,” 138; Swenson, Northwest of the World, 17-18. N.S. Kovalenko, a

Russian employed at the Discovery site, later reported that the Americans were happy with their lack of oversight and

smuggled gold to Nome; ChF TFGI. “Opisaniya Chukotsko-Anadyrskogo Kraia,” manuscript of N.S. Kovalenko, no

page numbers.

801

Konstantin N. Tul’chinskii, “Iz puteshestviia k Beringovomu prolivu,” Izvestiia Imperatorskogo Russkogo geografi cheskogo

obshchestva 42, vypusk 2–3 (1906): 521–579; his report is analyzed at length in RGIA DV F. 1370, Op. 1, D.4, L. 131-144.

Korzukhin argued that the Company was far better than the alternative of many American prospectors flooding the

territory; see Chukotskii poluostrov, 14–15.

802

RGIA DV F. 1370 Op. 1 D.4, L. 121.

803

Leaving the Northeastern Siberian Company was a major financial setback from Rosene, but he recovered. See

Owen, “Chukchi Gold,” 81.

804

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D.324, L 8.

138

Russia and in North America as well,” the regional mining inspector reported in 1913.

805

Ships from

Vladivostok brought a few dozen hopefuls north each year. Some were peasants, hired to work at

the small salmon cannery in Anadyr, only to sneak to the Discovery site. Others came explicitly to

prospect. A few were Americans. By 1914, there was a ragged camp of a hundred-odd miners in the

Volch’ia hills. Their desires were probably close to those of Beringian miners across the Straits: gold

was currency for people with little other access to capital.

806

“As I learned from talking personally

with the gold diggers,” the inspector wrote, “in most cases they have neither the material resources

nor sufficient knowledge of mining. They compensate with their love for the cause, their great

energy and a remarkable ability to endure the most severe deprivation.”

807

The deprivations of life outside Anadyr included a distinct lack of legality. Only registered

Russian employees of concessionaries could mine, and most of the men disembarking at Anadyr and

tramping up the river wanted for both currency and contracts. Their illegal labor required the

Russian Empire to police its far northeastern underground. Patrols of “at least eight men” were

dispatched periodically to roust miners from the Discovery site.

808

In 1910, three peasants were

arrested for working illegally.

809

A larger group was captured, escaped, and arrested again in 1911.

810

The misbehavior was not all on the part of illegal miners. Half a dozen peasants and two Americans

were tried in Anadyr for “predatory” mining, but the magistrate concluded that the fault lay with

Alexander Vonliarliarskii, who exaggerated the geographical scope of his claims. Vonliarliarskii was

also reported to federal authorities for hiring foreigners, but apparently continued to mine.

811

Jafet

Lindeberg’s Pioneer Mining Company, apparently unaware of the prohibition against foreign

mining, had ten thousand dollars in gold seized by Russian authorities.

812

But most of the infractions

came from individuals, like “Simbirsk peasant Ivan Khrisanfov Marin,” who “was found with gold,”

and carrying “a notebook market with the daily production.”

813

Once in Chukotka, with no money

and no work other than the labor they were legally prohibited from undertaking, the peasant miners

rapidly became a desperate burden. Some brewed alcohol to trade with the Chukchi for food. By

805

RGIA DV F. 1005, Op. 1, D.220, L. 7.

806

Most of the workers coming to Chukotka in the early 20

century are recorded as members of the peasant estate, or

soslovie. A few were from the raznochintsy (literally, people of various ranks). There is little other information about their

origins, other than the occasional note as to town of birth; the majority came from the Far East. Previous experience in

mining seems low, although many were fishermen. Some were literate. Most were destitute, having no more money than

afforded passage to Chukotka. They all appear to be men. None left a first-hand account that I could find, so any

imputing of motive is speculative. For the larger context of the Imperial estate system, see Elise Wirtschafter, The

Structure of Society: Imperial Russia’s “People of Various Ranks,” (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1994), and

Gregory Freeze, “The Soslovie (Estate) Paradigm and Russian Social History, The American Historical Review, Vol. 91, No. 1

(February 1986): 11-36.

807

RGIA DV F. 1008, Op. 1, D.16, L. 31.

808

RGIA DV F. 1008, Op. 1, D.16, L. 117.

809

RGIA DV F. 1008, Op. 1, D.16, L. 41.

810

RGIA DV F. 1008, Op. 1, D.16, L. 27-28. Precise numbers of arrests and trails are hard to find, as some of the

Chukotka records have burned.

811

RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D.324, L. 34-36. See also RGIA DV F. 702, Op. 2, D.285, L. 9-15.

812

For the American perspective, which saw the gold seizure as illegal confiscation by corrupt officials, see Preston

Jones, Empire’s Edge: American Society in Nome, Alaska 1898-1934 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2007), 87.

Ruthmary McDowell remembered her father’s friends organizing a party to prospect in Chukotka sometime between

1906 and 1913 only to be exiled; APRCA, Ruthmary McDowell Papers, Box 1, Folder 42, page 1.

813

RGIA DV F. 1008, Op. 1, D.16, L. 117.

139

1915, the head of the Anadyr post reported to the regional governor that “preventing the complete

plunder of the mines will require a permanent armed guard of five persons.”

814

Russian officials and subjects alike spent the waning years of the Empire pouring their

energies into protecting or subverting the property designation of gold in Chukotka. But little came

of their efforts. Geography and geology agitated against both. Every summer, new gold seekers

came by sea. Local police and officials found “traversing the difficult terrain and harsh climatic

conditions,” extremely taxing. Hills and snow made their approach to the mines tedious, allowing

illegal workers to hide in the hills.

815

As a result, gold leaked out Anadyr’s port. One group of

Khishchniki [predators] showed ten pounds of gold around a steamship as they sailed south.

816

Another man tried to rustle nuggets out in sacks of coal.

817

The state did not reach far enough over

or under the tundra to regulate ownership. But these miners, despite their craft in evading the law

and persistence in digging, worked limited deposits. The Peninsula held its real wealth deep in the

interior. The few gold discoveries of the early twentieth century, mined ostensibly for the wealth of

tsar and country, instead ate through the energies of government officials and money in government

coffers: it was expensive to police the mines, and even more expensive to send destitute miners

south, away from the killing cold of winter.

818

Gold was valuable, yet its worth was dispersed

through the hills and valleys, courts and jails, peasants and nobility on the Imperial Peninsula.

SHAPING THE LAND, 1900-1930S

The workers in Chukotka’s mines, despite their tenuous legal position and lack of expertise, still

dramatically reshaped the landscape. “The seekers have dug many test pits,” reported the head of the

Anadyr post, “complete with sluicing gates. The pits are properly lined in stone, and the total length

of the works is three versts, at the depth of two fathoms.”

819

Chukotka was a smaller-scale version of

the terrestrial alterations roughing the Seward Peninsula. Washing gold away from the embrace of

sediment required water, and making water liquid often required fire. Fire consumed the hard-won

energies locked in trees and brush. Hillsides trampled and stripped of their protective timber eroded

in muddy rivulets. Rerouted streams dug at the roots of old mountains. Gaping holes dotted valley

floors, interspersed with mounds of displaced earth. But hand-dug pits and sluicing canals could not

fully exploit Beringia’s wealth. Gold deposits were often richest far underground, where the metal’s

weight caught against stony berms, or was widely diffused in gravel. Harvesting such deposits took

more than human labor. Breaking down geology required water, water in the north required heat,

814

RGIA DV F. 1005, Op. 1, D.220, L. 84. Some local officials were clearly sympathetic with the efforts and goals of the

miners, and recommended that the Peninsula be made more open to exploration by individuals. See RIGA DV F. 1008,

Op. 1, D.16, L. 31.

815

RGIA DV F. 1005, Op. 1, D.220, L. 114.

816

RGIA DV F. 1005, Op. 1, D.220, L. 8, 7. It is worth noting, again in contradiction to Thomas Owen’s diagnosis of

Russian xenophobia, that the word khishchniki is used to describe illegal Russian and American mining efforts alike, in

Chukotka and other mining regions.

817

RGIA DV F. 1008, Op. 1, D.16, L. 117.

818

RGIA DV F. 1005, Op. 1, D.220, 117-118.

819

RGIA DV F. 1005, Op. 1, D.220, L. 84. A verst is about two-thirds of a mile.

140

heat required energy, and energy fueled the equipment that forced liquid water back into the ground:

hydraulic dredges, motorized diggers, steam pumps, pressure hoses.

Bits of such technology began populating the creeks and streams around Nome only a few

years after the strike. L.H. French brought a dredge to the Nome beach in 1900. In 1903, a massive

dredge called the Wisconsin was built on Dry Creek, where it multiplied the scale and mechanized

the labor of panning. A chain-line of toothed buckets scooped gold-bearing soil and gravel at the

front, dumped it into sluice boxes in the shed-like middle, where hoses blasted metal clear and

deposited tailings out the back.

820

The Wisconsin broke itself on the frozen ground, but more

dredges followed. So did other equipment. On Anvil Creek, miners blasted gold from quartz with

pressurized hoses, a process that allowed them to work even frozen gravels. Miners thawed ground

by driving pipes carrying steaming water into the soil, using so much fuel that people in Nome

worried about a coal famine. Steam shovels dug away at Lindeberg’s claims. Water pipes and small

railroads snaked between mines.

821

transformed the Seward landscape far more than raw human exertion. Miners dug deep

underground. Dredges sat in ponds of their own making, the water supplied by massive ditches,

powering hoses that plowed away hillsides in rivers of gold-studded muck. Roads and short local

rails lines impeded creeks, severing upstream currents from the ocean. Whole streambeds

disappeared amid the detritus, the heaps of rubble, broken flumes, and weeping canals. Open-cut

placer operations chewed through three quarters of a million cubic yards of gravel in a year.

822

Disturbed and channeled earth slid toward the sea with every thaw and rainstorm, clogging rivers.

Fish pummeled by sediments failed to spawn. Silt clouded the sun, starving algae. Biological

productivity plummeted.

823

In places where mining was intense, waters that once teemed bore no

life at all.

Miners in the early twentieth century did not worry much over these transformations. Most

people saw in the placers and pumps increased productivity, not dead water. Even John Muir, who

820

Leonard Smith, “History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” manuscript in APRCA, Reed Family Collection,

Subseries 3, Box 14, no page numbers.

821

Arthur Collier et al. “The Gold Placers of Seward Peninsula” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 328

(Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1908), 140-281; Alfred Brooks, “Mineral Resources of Alaska,” United

States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 642 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1916), 24 ; Leonard Smith,

“History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” manuscript in APRCA, Reed Family Collection, Subseries 3, Box 14, no

page numbers; Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula, 171-175.

822

J.B. Mertie, Jr. “Placer Mining on Seward Peninsula,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 662, (Washingtion

D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1917): 451-458, 455.

823

For discussions of the impact of placer mining on river and stream ecosystems, see Erwin E. Van Nieuwenhuyse and

Jacqueline D. LaPerriere, “Effects of Placer Gold Mining on Primary Production in Subarctic Streams of Alaska,” Journal

of the American Water Resources Council, Vol.22 No. 1 (February 1986):91-99; A.M Miller and R.J. Piorkowski,

“Macroinvertebrate Assemblages in Streams of Interior Alaska Following Alluvial Gold Mining,” River Research and

Applications, Vol. 20 No. 6 (November 2004):719-731; James B. Reynolds, Rodney C. Simmons, and Alan R. Burkholder,

“Effects of Placer Mining Discharge on Health and Food of Arctic Grayling,” Journal of the American Water Resources

Association, Vol. 25 No. 3 (June 1989): 625-635; and David M. Bjerklie and Jacqueline D. LaPerriere, “Gold-Mining

Effects on Stream Hydrology and Water Quality,, Circle Quadrangle, Alaska,” Journal of the American Water Resources

Association, Vol. 21 No. 2 (April 1985): 235-242.

141

visited the northwest coast early in the rush and described prospectors as “a nest of ants…stirred up

with a stick,” was relatively untroubled by mining. Alaska was so huge and cold, Muir believed, the

“the miner’s pick will not be followed by the plough” with its ruinous settlers.

824

But prospectors did

notice how the advent of industrial mining brought the expiration of a certain vision of capitalism.

Steam shovels and ditches rendered more currency from the earth: nearly five million dollars were

mined in 1905, and over seven million the next year.

825

But industrial mining did not just make

money. One of the first dredges in Nome cost $90,000.

826

A network of canals and a pumping plant

that forced “water to the summit of Anvil Mountain, [cost] not less than a third of a million dollars,

probably more.”

827

Such investments were not the work of lucky, laboring individuals, or even

lawyers. Successful prospecting, French wrote, “requires some capital and unlimited nerve and

determination.”

828

And mining deep veins or gravel mounds necessitated economies of scale. “It is

generally expected that the success of Nome as a dredging field,” one observer noted, came from

“working the field as a consolidated enterprise, permitting lower costs of operation in all

departments.”

829

Mining in the United States was beginning to resemble the ideal in Imperial Russia:

large, consolidated enterprises using coal power to re-arrange the world for coin.

Alaskan geology first started the rush, by baring gold in a few choice creeks and seeding

flakes in sand. And geology ended the rush by hiding most of the wealth in hard, frozen, diffuse

places. As a result, few men could get rich on less than the complete reformation of the earth. By

1916, only twelve hundred miners worked the Seward Peninsula, less than a tenth of the peak

population. They labored on land already claimed, the claims consolidated into the holdings of a few

dozen mining companies, and the companies’ deeds no longer snarled in litigation, “the faults of the

government having been rectified.”

830

And the state did more than the capitalist duty of

administering private property rights. The Geological Survey made annual research trips to the

Seward Peninsula, assessing the potential of unmined creeks and tundra “to meet the wants of the

824

S. Hall Young, Alaska Days with John Muir, (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1915), 210-211; John Muir, Our

National Parks (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, [1902] 1981), 12. Although Muir disliked the day-to-day

workings of miners, he believed that the roads they built would increase tourism to Alaska, thereby making people more

appreciative of the region’s beauty and more likely to protect the most important locations.

825

Mertie, Jr. “Placer Mining on Seward Peninsula,” 456.

826

Leonard Smith, “History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” manuscript in APRCA Reed Family Collection,

Subseries 3, Box 14, no page numbers.

827

Harrison, Nome and the Seward Peninsula¸173.

828

French, Nome Nuggets, 96.

829

Leonard Smith, “History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” manuscript in APRCA, Reed Family Collection,

Subseries 3, Box 14, no page numbers. The trend toward corporate mergers was a national one that has received

extensive treatment, both condemning and advocating it, outside of the Alaskan context. See Richard White, Railroaded:

The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America, (W.W. Norton & Company, 2011); Charles Perrow, Organizing

America: Wealth, Power, and the Origins of Corporate Capitalism, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); William G.

Roy, Socializing Capital: The Rise of the Large Industrial Corporation in America (Princeton: Princeton University Press); and

Olivier Zunz, Making America Corporate, 1870-1920, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990). In critiquing without

preventing this trend, many in Nome were in line with Progressive ideas of the early twentieth century; for a synthetic

overview of a complicated moment, see Steven Diner, A Very Different Age: Americans of the Progressive Era (New York:

Hill and Wang, 1998).

830

Alfred H. Brooks, “The Development of the Mining Industry,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 328 (1909):

10-39, 39.

142

miner and prospector.”

831

In their reports, U.S.G.S. scientists generally endorsed the consolidated

capitalism forming around Alaskan mineral extraction, noting that established firms had the

technology to work difficult ground, and produced a steady quantity of gold at low cost. Industrial

mining was, at least for government surveyors, an answer to boom and bust cycles and unruly

hordes. Rather, it promoted “prosperity by assuring employment to a certain number of men

throughout the year.”

832

Wage work was exactly the sort of prosperity most prospectors had rushed north to avoid.

Mining corporations offered little more than a cold, remote variant of early twentieth century

industrial employment. Arthur Olsen, employed by the Wild Goose Mining Company, described a

typical day of hauling lumber in the morning, before “I was told to take a mattock and grub sod off

the tundra for a dam. A mile walk to meals gives one no rest at all.” The following day, Olsen

“shoveled gravel till the dam broke, and all rushed out of danger,” then worked a night shift where

he “Struck a piece of hard shoveling and got fired at midnight.”

833

The tenuous and tedious work

paid – $7.50 for fifteen hours – but breakfast at a hotel in Nome cost a dollar, a ride inland to the

diggings $1.50. And the mining was dangerous. Men died: from drowning, crushing, or falling. A

man setting charges in advance of a dredge on Ophir Creek died in a premature explosion. Most

injuries were not fatal, but men regularly froze fingers, broke bones, and tore their flesh.

834

The labor

and risk made a few investors and claim owners very wealthy. The Pioneer Mining Company alone

paid out more than two million dollars in cash dividends between 1902 and 1912.

That neither the means of production nor profits rested with laborers was not lost on those

doing the bleeding and sweating. Workers in Nome joined mining towns in the west and industrial

centers in the east in articulating a different vision of production and profit in the early 1900s. The

Nome branch of the World Federation of Miners led strikes and elected five “Nome Labor Party”

candidates to the city council in 1906.

835

Their goals were not initially radical. “I believe in the

democracy of Andrew Jackson,” one Local member stated, as “this country should be governed by

the producing classes” not corporate greed that stole from town coffers.

836

But by 1912, with

Eugene Debs vying for the presidency, some miners wanted more than reform. The platform of the

Socialist Party of America spoke to the rage of dashed prospects: for property untainted by

corporate control, for worker’s security in wages and conditions, for frontier freedoms and a

831

Alfred Brooks, “Preface,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 328 (1909): 7-8, 7.

832

Brooks, “The Development of the Mining Industry,” 31 (quote), 39; Theodore Chapin “Placer Mining on Seward

Peninsula,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 592 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1914): 385-

396, 385.

833

APRCA, June Metcalfe Northwest Alaska Collection, Box 1, Series 1, Folder 17: Arthur Olsen Diary, 1906-1907, p.

10-13.

834

Report of the Mine Inspector for the Territory of Alaska to the Secretary of the Interior for the Fiscal Year Ended June 30, 1914

(Washington: Government Printing Office, 1914), 10-12. The inspector put the rate of death in the mines at 3.125 per

1000, a rate lower than in many other mining industries, especially hard rock coal.

835

The World Federation of Miners was an official syndicate of the International Workers of the World, the most radical

of the unions active in the United States in this period. For strikes, see Jones, Empire’s Edge, 58, 72-74, 82.

836

“Labor Ticket Will Be in the Field,” The Nome Tri-Weekly Nugget, March 8, 1906; “Radical Change is Wanted By

People,” The Nome Tri-Weekly Nugget, March 20 1906; Nome Tri-Weekly Nugget, April 4, 1906; and Nome Nugget November

5, 1908. As Joseph Sullivan points out, the early union politics in Nome focused mostly on rooting out municipal

corruption; “Sourdough Radicalism: Labor and Socialism in Alaska, 1905-1920,” in Stephen Haycox and Mary Childers

Mangusso eds. An Alaska Anthology (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996), 222-237.

143

functioning democracy.

837

Kazis Krauczunas, who ran as a socialist candidate in Alaska’s 1912

territorial election, advocated not just the general Party aims of unions and collectivism.

838

wanted to salvage prospecting, by restricting consolidated claims owned by distant corporations, and

improve upon it by making some mineral resources a public good. Geology, no matter how

stubborn, needed to work for the people.

The Socialist Party’s electoral victories stayed local in Alaska. But alongside the corporate

capitalism that owned Alaskan earth and paid laboring wages, the Seward Peninsula underground

was briefly the site of an alternative vision for valuing human energies and the minerals they

unearthed. In the minds of dedicated socialists, what made the United States distinctively free was

the common man’s ownership of frontier means of production. Alaska needed to be saved from

deviant, corporate capitalism to keep it American. Otherwise, as the Party’s 1914 preamble stated,

“Alaska, the last of the great American frontiers, the home of the pioneer, is rapidly becoming a

thing of the past. The dreams of the lonely prospector are giving way to the ugly realities of wage

slavery and job hunting. The nightmare of Capitalism already haunts the workers of Alaska.”

839

CAPITALISM ALSO HAUNTED Chukotka. It took six years for the Red Army to wrest control

of the Peninsula from “White gangs and foreign predators and plundering armies.”

840

Even then, the

border leaked. In 1923, S. Sukhovii reported that of the one hundred poods of gold mined in

Chukotka, seventy percent was taken to Alaska.

841

Established traders were suspect, as were new

communists. A local Party member complained that the poorly paid district policemen “suffered

from ‘gold fever,’” and with such covetous individuals acting as representatives “of Sovietization in

our periphery,” he warned, “we will not go far.”

842

837

The historiography on socialism in the United States is long and large, although not particularly vibrant in recent

years. Generally it is focused on why American socialists were an exception – i.e., why the party failed to achieve

sustained political presence. Iris Kipnis blamed factionalism within the party and a lack of militancy; The American Socialist

Movement, 1897-1912, (New York: Columbia University Press, 1952). David Shannon argued that the Socialist Party

aimed its organizing efforts at a proletariat that did not exist in the United States; The Socialist Party of America, (New

York: The Macmillan Company, 1955). Much about Alaskan socialists tracks with James Weinstein’s work, in that

socialist organizers remained active into WWI, although anti-sedition arrests and harassment seem to have a larger role

in the Territory than Weinstein credits; The Decline of Socialism in America, 1912-1925, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University

Press, 1967). Brian Lloyd argued that U.S. socialists were not sufficiently ideological in Left Out: Pragmatism,

Exceptionalism, and the Poverty of American Marxism, 1890-1922, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). The

most recent works on socialism in the U.S. are generally synthetic, situating it as part of general left movements; see

Michael Kazin, American Dreamers: How the Left Changed a Nation (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2011).

838

For a thorough discussion of the elections of socialist officials in Alaska, see Sullivan, “Sourdough Radicalism,” 225-

228. As Sullivan notes, miner’s support of socialist causes put them in the company of other mine laborers in the U.S.

West, who contributed considerable enthusiasm to the socialist cause between1910-1920. See also Andrews, Killing for

Coal and Mark T. Wyman, Hard Rock Epic: Western Miners and the Industrial Revolution, 1860-1910, (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1979).

839

“Preamble and Platform, Socialist Party of Alaska, 1914,” quoted in Sullivan, “Sourdough Radicalism,” 224.

840

RGIA DV F. R-2336, Op. 1, D.17, L. 11.

841

S. Sukhovii, “Kamchatskie bogatstva i ovladenie imi gosudarstvom,” Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’ Dal’nego Vostoka No. 1

(1923), 15-17. This number is impossible to verify, and is more an indication of Soviet worries about gold trafficking

than an indication of actual quantities. A pood is just over 36 pounds.

842

RGIA DV F. R-2350, Op. 1, D.26, L. 23. Such private mining activity appears to have been common in the Far East

and in other locations was a cause for open hostility toward the state; see A.I.Shirokov, Gosudarstvennaia politika na Severo-

Vostoke Rossii v 1920-1950-kh gg.: Opyt i uroki istorii (Tomsk: Izd-vo Tom., 2009), 97. In this period, the state gave

144

Mining for personal profit was a crime against communist ideals, and against a state with a

pressing need for gold. Russian manufacturing had never been robust. Following years of civil war, it

was in shambles. Agricultural production, a foundational Imperial export, could not even reliably

feed Soviet citizens.

843

Bolsheviks fought for a post-currency future, one that could transcend the

alienating fetish of money. The present, however, was hungry: for grain, for coal, and for technology

to transform the penury of peasant labor into industrial abundance. Europe had energy for sale, and

European capitalists were eager for gold, having recommitted to the gold standard in hopes that it

would bring fin-de-siècle prosperity to a post-war world. By 1922, the Soviets had spent most of the

Imperial bullion reserves on military supplies, medicine, food, and machinery.

844

But the country still

lagged in industrialization. Without a modern economy, there could be no communism, and no

military able to resist capitalist hostilities.

845

Creating “the economic dictatorship of the proletariat as

well as its political dictatorship,” Stalin told the Politburo in 1927, required the “temporary

concessions” of foreign economic exchange.

846

Chukotka, with its reindeer and walrus, had little to

contribute to the international market. But it did have gold, the “center of gravity for [the region’s]

economic life.”

847

It was a center of gravity still well hidden. Despite the communist certainty of “colossal

mineral wealth,” Imperial Russia left incomplete maps and even more incomplete geological surveys

of the Peninsula.

848

When S. Sukhovii noted in 1923 that 81.02% of Chukotka’s mining resources

had yet to be explored, his precision was a fiction.

849

The problem for the Soviets, as for the Tsars,

was people. “A precondition for the development of mining in this border region,” M. Krivitsyn

wrote from Anadyr, “is undoubtedly colonization by the laboring element.”

850

Chukotka had fewer

than twenty thousand residents until the end of the 1930s. Most were Yupik and Chukchi, generally

concessions to local prospectors, but all gold had to be turned over to the state; see RGIA DV F. R-2333, Op. 1, D.256,

L.1-2.

843

Industrial production was about 13% of pre-revolution levels, and agricultural output about a third. L.V.

Sapogovskaia, “Zoloto v politke Rossii (1917-1921),” Voprosy istorii Vol. 6 (June 2004): 31-47. Grain accounted for 50%

of Russia’s pre-Revolutionary exports; see Oscar Sanchez-Sivony, Red Globalization: The Political Economy of the Soviet Cold

War from Stalin to Khrushchev (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 30-31.

844

RGAE, F. 2324, Op. 16, D.43, L. 74. The Soviet Union also pegged its currency to gold in this period. I am glossing

over the considerable complexity in Soviet debates about foreign trade and currency uses, which prior to the Great

Depression generally sought economic integration with the world market; for a full discussion see Sanchez-Sivony, Red

Globalization, 33-37; Alec Nove, An Economic History of the U.S.S.R. (London: Penguin Books, 1989), 147-153; R.A.

Belousov, Ekonomicheskaia istoriia Rossii XX vek, vol. 2 (Moscow: Izdat, 2000), 371 – 377.

845

The literature on the “war scare” in the early Soviet Union is large, and generally divides between the cynical view that

Stalin used an overblown threat of war to attack Trotsky; see David R. Stone, Hammer & Rifle: The Militarization of the

Soviet Union, 1926-1933. The other view argues the panic was real and widespread; see for example, David

Brandenberger, Propaganda State in Crisis: Soviet Ideology, Indoctrination, and Terror under Stalin, 1927-1941 (New Haven: Yale

University Press, 2012).

846

Stalin’s statement is translated in full in Michal Reiman’s The Birth of Stalinism: The U.S.S.R. on the Eve of the “Second

Revolution,” (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 128-133.

847

I. L. Iamzin and V. P. Voshchinin, Uchenie o kolonizatsii i pereseleniiakh (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1926), 222.

848

RGIA DV F. R-2333, Op. 1, D.128, L. 375.

849

S. Sukhovii, “Kamchatskie bogatstva i ovladenie imi gosudarstvom,” Ekonomicheskaia zhizn’ Dal’nego Vostoka No. 1

(1923), 15-17.

850

RGIA DV F. R-2333, Op. 1, D.128, L. 376.

145

even less interested in mining than in joining kolkhozy.

851

Bringing human labor north required non-

human fuel, for transport and for their landed survival. And for most the 1920s, the Soviets could

move little energy north. Basic sovereignty was a challenge. Where it had the competence, the state

extracted the energy in fish, sea mammals, and reindeer. In 1924, the president of Anadyr’s

Revolutionary Committee recommended inviting foreigners to prospect for gold since “their

capitalist appetite will make them throw their money here,” and the government could use the

resulting knowledge for itself.

852

Two small geological expeditions, mounted in 1926 and 1928, failed

to locate significant deposits, or improve Soviet knowledge of their far northeast.

853

In 1930, the

ethnographer A.I. Kaltan reported that “the whole interior of Chukotka remains terra incognita.”

854

The advent of Stalin’s Five Year Plans ended toleration for such arctic backwardness.

Latitude was no barrier to the grand project of forging imminent utopia from raw elements.

Marxism was the future, the future required industry, and industry meant subduing nature.

855

And

nowhere had more nature than the far north: buried in ice, forgotten by the sun. It was a place, as

polar explorer Otto Schmidt wrote, where “Nature subordinates herself to man when he knows how

to arm himself for a fight and when he does not come out alone, but in a large group supported by

the warm love of millions of citizens.”

856

Industrial infrastructure, from power plants to ice breaking

ships to oil rigs, was the armor of modernity in the north. Laboring in them, Soviet men and women

redeemed themselves through the heroics of production.

857

But Chukotka, as one official lamented,

had “no industry - the main engine of culture.”

858

And there were few opportunities to industrialize:

851

For population statistics, see Niobe Thompson, Settlers on the Edge: Identity and Modernization on Russia’s Arctic Frontier

(Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2008), 4-5.

852

RGIA DV F.R-2333, Op. 1, D.76, L. 69.

853

V.T. Pereladov, “Otkrytie pervoi promyshlennoi rossypi zolota na Chukotke,” in Tropoiu Bogoraza: Nauchnye i

literaturnye materialy, L.S. Bogoslovskaia, V.S. Krivoshchekov, and I. Krupnik eds. (Moscow: Institut Naslediia GEOS,

2008), 279-283, 283. The 1928 expedition was headed by the Kamchatka Joint-Stock Company, one of the proliferating

small agencies that managed arctic development prior to the 1930s.

854

A.I. Kaltan, “Otchet po obsledovaniiu Chukotskogo poluostrova 1930/1931 g.” in Tropoiu Bogoraza: Nauchnye i

literaturnye materialy, L.S. Bogoslovskaia, V.S. Krivoshchekov, and I. Krupnik eds. (Moscow: Institut Naslediia GEOS,

2008), 284-330, 295, 330.

855

The first Five Year Plan left more of a mark on the European arctic; the major push for industry hit Chukotka with

the Second Five Year Plan, beginning in 1932. That Stalin’s Cultural Revolution included an explicit theme of war

against nature has been discussed by several historians; see Paul R. Josephson, The Conquest of the Russian Arctic

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014); Sari Autio-Sarasmo, ed., Understanding Russian Nature: Representations,

Values and Concepts (Helsinki: Aleksanteri Papers 4/2005); John McCannon, Red Arctic: Polar Exploration and the Myth of the

North in the Soviet Union 1932-1939 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Bernd Stevens Richter, “Nature Mastered

by Man: Ideology and Water in the Soviet Union,” Environment and History Vol. 3 No. 1 (1997): 69-96. As McCannon

and others emphasize, the antagonism toward nature was not omnipresent or unchanging during the Stalinist period; see

William Husband, “‘Correcting Nature’s Mistakes’: Transforming the Environment and Soviet Children’s Literature,

1928-1941,” Environmental History Vol. 11 No. 2 (April 2006): 300-318; and Mark Bassin, “The Greening of Utopia:

Nature, Social Vision, and Landscape Art in Stalinist Russia,” in James Cracraft and Daniel Rowland, eds., Architectures of

Russian Identity: 1500 to Present (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 150-171.

856

Lazar’ Brontman, On the Top of the World: The Soviet Expedition to the North Pole, 1937, edited and with a forward by O.J.

Schmidt (London: Victor Gollancz, 1938), xi-xiii.

857

The historiography on the role of labor in socialist construction – and self-construction – in this period is substantial.

For a sampling of works that deal with the Promethean and transformative aspects of labor, see Stephen Kotkin,

Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995); Jochen Hellbeck, Revolution on

My Mind: Writing a Diary under Stalin (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006); and Lewis Siegelbaum,

Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR 1935-1941 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

858

RGAE F. 9570, Op. 2, D.3483, L. 6.

146

sea mammal collectives and reindeer camps could be collectivized and use a few motors, but they

were not spaces of Promethean transformation.

Mining was a rare exception. It provided both the site and the means of industrialization.

Instead “of the old form of extraction by muscle power, where the pick and shovel played the main

role,” mining was “mechanized with the latest equipment” that yielded “ever greater increases in

production.”

859

Once wrested from the earth, gold could buy equipment from abroad. And if

Chukotka was a region “born of the five-year plan,” as Pravda wrote, its first midwife was the Main

Administration of the Northern Sea Route (GUSMP or Glavsevmorput).

860

From 1932 until 1938, the

agency managed a network of ports, mines, refineries and industrial towns across the Soviet

Arctic.

861

In Chukotka, it hauled over a thousand people to the Bering Straits, mechanized the

blubber refinery at Plover Bay, ran electrical lines, managed the Anadyr fish cannery, and planned

roads, schools, and hospitals. When the GUSMP ship Cheliuskin froze in the Chukchi Sea, the

feverish publicity surrounding the crew’s survival efforts elevated the Peninsula into a place of grand

socialist hero-making.

862

For the new imports, much of life on the GUSMP frontier did not seem particularly heroic.

The demands on the agency to simultaneously explore and develop the arctic lead to hasty and

badly-supplied missions. Glavsevmorput workers lived in damp, dim huts, “so cold the water freezes in

the winter.” Northern veterans complained about inexperienced newcomers.

863

“We must strain and

spend a great deal of energy to work in these difficult material conditions,” one GUSMP official

stated, “and our equipment is miserable.”

864

But Glavsevmorput had the financing and power to bring

geological teams to the Peninsula. Their surveys during the mid-1930s located new gold on the

Bol’shoi, Malyi Aniui, and Amguema Rivers.

865

But for the next several decades, these lodes proved

far less important than another element discovered by Northern Sea Route geologists. From the

Arctic Sea coast down through the tundra, Chukchi land was laced with a metal important not just

for region, “but for the whole Soviet Union in terms of increasing the country’s defenses, ensuring

the successes of world labor, and raising the economic and cultural level of northern peoples.”

866

The element was tin.

859

RGAE F. 8152, Op. 1, D.300, L. 10. This report covers the general state of gold mining in the Soviet Union in 1932,

not Chukotka in particular.

860

Pravda, January 13, 1934. GUSMP leadership was involved in shaping the Second Five Year Plan, signaling the

importance of arctic development in this period.

861

For a full history of GUSMP and its relationship with Stalinist ideas of the arctic, see McCannon, The Red Arctic.

862

For a detailed account of the Cheliuskin and the mythologizing that followed, see McCannon, The Red Arctic, 61-70,

119-127.

863

RGAE F. 9570, Op. 2, D.3483, L. 4, 15.

864

RGAE F. 9570, Op. 2, D.3483, L. 59.

865

Volkov and Sidorov, Unikal’nye zolotorudnye raion Chukotki, 7.

866

Speech from the Chaun region, quoted in N.N. Dikov, Istoriia Chukotki s drevneishikh vremen do nashikh dnei (Moscow:

Mysl’, 1989), 199.

147

THE ELEMENT OF CRISIS, 1917-1950S

The processes that fortified Beringian ground with gold took inhuman spans of time and seismic

pools of energy. Quaking, molten eons also threaded the stones of the Seward and Chukchi

Peninsulas with tin. Like gold, it appeared where water dug away the earth or was locked in granite

masses. Unlike gold, desirable for its unmixed worth, tin was desired as an alloy. The element is

malleable and resistant to corrosion, and in the forge lends its liquidity and luster to baser metals.

Combined with copper it makes bronze, and made the technologies of the Bronze Age five

thousand years ago. The surface of tin has little friction and retains oil. With this property, it bore

the industrial revolution forward; tin-laced metals made the ball bearings vital to machinery powered

by steam or internal combustion engines. Tin cans fed armies and armies of urbanized laborers.

867

Alaska, the metal laced the equipment that pulled gold from the earth and preserved the peaches

miners ate in their cabins. Tin was a conduit for the energy consumed by people and produced by

machines. By the early twentieth century the metal was pedestrian, found in a thousand small parts

of a manufactured day. It was not a stand-in for currency, but a constituent part of what currency

bought. Its industrial ubiquity made it critical, and industrial necessity made it valuable.

When the first tin mining operations began near Nome in the early twentieth century, the

social value both of the metal and the labor expended in its extraction was, as in the case of gold,

still open to interpretation. Miners at the Lost River tin deposit would have met with socialist ideas

when they visited Nome, where in 1917 local party members discussed forming their own Soviet.

868

But the socialist vision for Alaska was waning. Suspicions about Party loyalties initiated during the

First World War hardened in Nome as Soviets expelled American traders from Chukotka.

869

Socialism seemed suspiciously close to communism and communists were seizing property and

forestalling commerce not so far from the Seward Peninsula, leaving some afraid of the “Bolsheviks

coming over to clean house.”

870

By the 1920s, capitalism was the recognized basis of proper civic

867

For an overview of the uses and capacities of tin, see Mats Ingulstad, Espen Storli and Andrew Perchard, “The Path

of Civilization is Paved with Tin Cans,” in Mats Ingulstad, Espen Storli and Andrew Perchard, Tin and Global Capitalism,

1850-1900: A History of the “Devil’s Metal (New York: Routledge, 2014), 1-21 and Ernest Hedges, Tin and its Alloys

(London: Royal Society of Chemistry, 1985).

868

Harvey O'Connor, Revolution in Seattle (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1964), 103. O’Connor reports rumors that a

few Nome residents tried to cross the Straits to join the revolution. Lieutenant John Creighton, who was sent to

investigate happenings in the Russian Far East for the State Department in 1922, reported that Walter Ahrns, man from

Germany traveling on an American passport, had joined the Soviets in Anadyr. Creighton’s reports are reproduced at

length in James Thomas Gay, “Some Observations of Eastern Siberia, 1922,” The Slavonic and East European Review Vol.

54, No. 2 (April 1976): 248-261, 251.

869

The socialists in Alaska were also on the wrong side of WWI in popular opinion; coverage in the Daily Nome Industrial

Worker, for example, makes capitalism out as worse than conflict, as position hardly supported by the general public;

December 13, 1915. By 1918, all the socialists activists in Alaska had either left the state or been jailed for sedition. This

puts the experience of the Socialist Party in Alaska on par with socialists around the United States. The authoritative, if

now rather dated, overview of historian’s thinking on the failure of U.S. socialism is Eric Foner, “Why is there no

Socialism in the United States?” History Workshop No. 17 (Spring 1984): 59-80. Also see John Laslett and Seymour Lipset,

eds., Failure of a Dream: Essays in the History of American Socialism (Garden City, NY: Anchor Press, 1974); Erik Olssen,

“The Case of the Socialist Party that Failed, or Further Reflections on an American Dream,” Labor History No. 29 (Fall

1988): 416-449.

870

UAA, Wilson W. Brine Papers, Box 1, File: letters 1923, Letter of June 29, 1923. See also Nome Nugget, June 19, 1920.

Coverage of the Bolsheviks in the Nome newspaper in 1918-1921 is generally negative.

148

order in Alaska. And capitalism was booming. Gold again backed the world’s currencies, and it

flooded into Wall Street banks as Berlin, Paris, and London serviced substantial war debts.

871

Nome

added to the deluge: between 1923 and 1929, Seward gold mines produced at least a million dollars a

year.

872

And with the Wall Street Journal concerned about a postwar “tin famine,” the Seward

Peninsula was poised to supply global demands if it could evidence “a large increase in

production.”

873

Increasing the production of tin and gold depended on geological presence and

technological capacity. By 1920, geologists and miners knew there was tin on the Seward Peninsula,

and estimated that well over five hundred million dollars in gold remained in Alaska.

874

But the easy

ores were gone. Losing gold from the ground with steam ate through too much wood and coal; the

cost of energy outpaced the element’s worth. But in 1923, the town of Nome turned out to witness

the launch of new “scientifically devised ways and wholehearted means” of dredging placer

deposits.

875

The means was a cold water thawing method. Instead of warming ground with steam,

narrow steel pipes pumped unheated river water into gold-bearing earth, raising the temperature just

enough to melt permafrost. Men drove hundreds of pipe “points” in gridded rows, making industrial

fields of metal rods linked by water hoses, each slowly rendering the earth pliable. Dredges could

then claw tons of soil through their bellies, processing six thousand cubic yards of gravel in a day.

Such irrigation let miners dig out entire river valleys and work waste piles left twenty years before by

men with hand tools. For the next thirty-plus years, cold-water mining reaped a harvest of diffused

gold.

876

Seward Peninsula tin deposits often suffered the opposite problem: lodes were concentrated

in bedrock.

877

Mining deep veins required drilling and blasting shafts into solid stone, supporting

tunnels with timber, then hauling ore and scrap to the surface. The technology for hard-rock

operations had existed at least since the Comstock strike in California, from blasting and digging, to

871

Some of the bullion came from Russia, in exchange for British grain or German locomotives. For an excellent

discussion of the post-WWI flow of capital to New York, and its role in destabilizing the global economy, see Liaquat

Ahmed, Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World (New York: Penguin Books, 2009).

872

Jones, Empire’s Edge, 95.

873

“Threatened Tin Famine,” Wall Street Journal, June 2, 1917; Alfred Brooks, “Future of Alaska Mining,” United States

Geological Survey Bulletin No. 714 (1921), 5-58, 38. For an overview of U.S. tin mining policy, see Mats Ingulstad, “Banging

the Tin Drum: The United States and the Quest for Strategic Self-Sufficiency in Tin, 1840-1945,” in Mats Ingulstad,

Espen Storli and Andrew Perchard, Tin and Global Capitalism, 1850-1900: A History of the “Devil’s Metal (New York:

Routledge, 2014), 89-122.

874

Alfred Brooks, et al. “Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1914,” United States

Geological Survey Bulletin No. 622, (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1915), 86, 373; Alfred Brooks, et al.

“Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1919,” (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing

Office, 1921), 10.

875

“All Nome Attends Yuba Launching,” Nome Nugget, June 2, 1923.

876

Descriptions of cold water mining taken from the photo series in APRCA, Janet Virginia Lee Papers, Box 4:

Photographs. Lee was hired to photograph mining operations in the 1940s, and has extensive records of the cold water

process. See also Leonard Smith, “History of Dredges in Nome Placer Fields,” manuscript in APRCA, Reed Family

Collection, Subseries 3, Box 14, no page numbers. For a general history of placer mining in Alaska during this period,

see Clark Spence, The Northern Gold Fleet: Twentieth-Century Gold Dredging in Alaska (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press,

1996).

877

Some tin was also mined by placer methods; see Brooks, et al. “Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of

Investigations in 1914,” 67-68 and Alfred Brooks, et al., “Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of

Investigations in 1920,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 722 (1922), 180.

149

tunneling and supporting mine-shafts with square-set timbers.

878

Miners began importing these

techniques to the low, bare mountains along the Lost River, eighty miles from Nome, in 1913. A

vein of tin ran far back into a hillside covered in “Sharp, frost-cracked rubble…which look as if

some giant crusher had been at work.” It was a dangerous place to work, as frost and wind rolled

tons of debris down the mountains, so “except when frozen, many portions of the hillsides are

continually on the move.”

879

But despite the barrenness – they valley was so empty of life one miner

noted that not even mosquitoes frequented it – men bored and blasted passageways hundreds of

feed into the rock, hauled ore to the surface, and reduced metal a small processing plant. The lode

produced almost one hundred and fifty tons of tin in 1913.

880

The problem with tin mining, as with

gold, was the expense of energy. “The region is barren of timber,” one U.S.G.S. geologist wrote, “so

that all fuel, lumber, and mine timbers must be shipped.”

881

The cost of importing equipment and

petrol meant that in 1920, the two thousand feet of tunnels at Lost River were mostly blasted by

nitroglycerine and then dug out by hand. With investment and deeper mineshafts, the geologist

Fredrick Fearing anticipated finding “oreshoots of considerable size” thus providing domestic

supply of a metal “sorely needed during the critical days of war.”

882

Cold-water mining and tunneling were not immune to the pressures and vagaries of the

landscapes they retooled. Tunnels collapsed. Mine shafts filled with water and froze. Placer mining

suffered in droughts, for “without rain… there can be no work.”

883

Too much rain or snowmelt

burst dams. The technology itself turned on its users. One miner accidentally ignited sticks of

blasting gelatin at Lost River, blowing out his eye and tearing “the flesh from thigh to ankle.”

884

Men

lost limbs to giant dredge gears and buckets. All methods required importing energy, be it coal,

diesel, or human labor. Winter froze ground, men, and machines alike.

Yet, despite the mud, the ice, the hard work, the danger of cave-ins, and the possibility of no

profit after great expenditure, mining innovations made the subterranean world increasingly subject

to human purposes. Gold and tin, as nearly static things, were acquiescing to human ingenuity and

inhuman energy across the Seward Peninsula. Geology was inverted or softened, tunneled or

exploded into gravel. Technology radically reduced the time needed to extract metal from the

ground and, in bearing it to the surface, radically increased the time necessary to alter the earth.

878

Robert Chester III, “Consequences of the Comstock: The Remaking of Working Environments on America’s Largest

Silver Strike, 1859-1880,” unpublished manuscript in author’s possession, 2014. See also, Ronald M. James, The Roar and

the Silence: A History of Virginia City and the Comstock Lode, (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998).

879

Frederick C. Fearing, “Alaska Tin Deposits,” Engineering and Mining Journal Vol. 110 (1920):154-158, 154.

880

Alfred Brooks, et al. “Mineral resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1914,” 373.

881

Alfred Brooks, et al. “Mineral resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of Investigations in 1914,” 88.

882

Fearing, “Alaska Tin Deposits,” 158, 154.

883

Charlotte Cameron, A Cheechako in Alaska and Yukon (London: T Fisher Unwin, 1920), 264. Rainfall is often

discussed as a problem by U.S.G.S. geologists; see for example Alfred Brooks et al. “Mineral Resources of Alaska,

Report on Progress of Investigations in 1913,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 592 (Washington D.C.:

Government Printing Office, 1914), 385; Alfred Brooks et al., “Mineral Resources of Alaska, Report on Progress of

Investigations in 1916,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 662, (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office,

1918), 451. The problem of water is discussed at length in the papers of mining engineer Irving Mckenny; see APRCA,

Reed Family Papers, Series: Irving Mckenny, Subseries: Land and Mineral Survey Records, Box 11, File: Correspondence

– B.D. Stewart, 1929-1938 and Box 13, File: Seward Peninsula – General.

884

Fearing, “Alaska Tin Deposits,” 155. More dangers of lode mining, this time for gold, are described in Oscar Brown’s

account, APRCA, Oscar Brown Papers, Box 1, p. 40-41.

150

Landforms that took an epoch to arise could through the power of diesel engines and dynamite fall

into constituent parts in a mere summer.

In the hope that applying blasting caps and gasoline generators to stone would yield tin

profits, A. MacIntosh bought rights to the Lost River lode in 1928. But mastery over earth did not

mean mastery over the market. MacIntosh’s company was bankrupt within a year. So was the

country. The influx of gold to U.S. banks, which helped buoy the U.S. stock market to double in

1927 and again in 1928, collapsed.

885

A year later, banks were scrambling for currency. The meaning

of money came unmoored: it no longer assessed a day’s work, since by 1933 a quarter of the country

had no employment. It no longer adequately measured the labor invested in a bushel of corn or a

ton of ore. With no wages to spend there was no demand for goods to buy, and therefore no reason

to sell. Capitalism was in full crisis. On the Seward Peninsula, gold production was “markedly

falling” by 1930, and the “disuses and obliteration of trails and roads, the closing down of stores and

roadhouses and the lack of conveyances of every kind,” made only “very good ground” pay.

886

Tin

production at Lost River was shuttered completely. Then in 1933, President Franklin Roosevelt

nearly doubled the price of gold. Newspapers across the United States carried news of a “business

boom in gold mining” in Alaska.

887

In 1935, a year with good rain, the Seward Peninsula dredges

produced well over two million dollars in gold. Some of the profits went to men like Oscar Brown,

who worked near Nome “so I and my wife Ella…could pay our expenses.” Brown worked a lode

mine eighty-five feet underground, where “we had to use a compass in order to be sure that we were

going in the right direction with our tunnels.”

888

Brown earned enough in a summer to buy groceries for a year. Yet most of the profits made

during the Depression’s miniature gold boom went to established companies. Hammon

Consolidated Gold Fields, Nome’s largest mining conglomerate, made enough in 1935 for “a partial

repayment of the many millions of dollars which 14,900 stockholders provided to make consolidated

operations possible.”

889

That mining was seasonal and dangerous wage-work did not appear in

reports about Alaskan mining, which instead described independent men with pans “earning above

$5 a day shoveling and washing.”

890

The office of the Secretary of the Interior filled with letters of

men and women wanting “to go prospecting in Alaska” as “there are no jobs to be gotten.”

891

Alaska becomes a promised land, a space of still-possible opportunity. As the Assistant to Secretary

of the Interior wrote, there were more than ten square miles per person in Alaska, where minerals

and other resources left the territory “a rather sizeable balance in trade. Naturally such a condition

885

For the gold standard during the Depression, see Schenk, “The Global Gold Market and the International Monetary

System,” 22-23. The authoritative history of the Great Depression drawn upon here is David Kennedy’s Freedom from

Fear: The American People in Depression and War 1929-1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001).

886

APRCA, Reed Family Papers, Series: Irving Mckenny, Subseries: Land and Mineral Survey Records, Box 13, File:

Seward Peninsula – General, “Report on Conditions on the Seward Peninsula in 1929,” no page numbers.

887

“Alaska Missed by Depression” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles CA, December 14, 1933. See also “Boom Sighted for

Alaska,” Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles, CA, October 8, 1936.

888

APRCA, Oscar Brown Papers, Box 1, p. 39-40.

889

Nome Daily Nugget, December 1, 1936.

890

“Alaska Reviving Placer Mining,” The Washington Post, Washington, D.C., December 14, 1930.

891

J.A. Nadeau to Roosevelt, May 29, 1935, NARA MD RG 126 Central Classified File 1907-1951, File: 9-1-16. Many of

the letters in the 1930s reference an article by Rex Beach in Cosmopolitan magazine and subsequent newspaper coverage

that endorsed mining in Alaska as an antidote to Depression unemployment.

151

indicates a rather enviable state of well-being and possibilities for commercial and industrial

expansion.”

892

Alaska was massive and rich, a place to absorb excess labor and make absent dollars.

Individual prospectors, once in charge of “liberating and controlling the great natural resources of

Alaska,” one enthusiast wrote, would make “a brilliant future.”

893

It was a view supported by

President Roosevelt, who advocated that Americans turn away from the industrial work that had so

failed them and return to the land. “individual independence shall be achieved,” wrote one back-to-

the land advocate, “by millions of men and women, walking in the sunshine without fear of

want.”

894

Capitalism in crisis reverted to a nineteenth century vision of freedom through labor and

property. Such visions did not match reality under the Seward Peninsula ground, where men

worked for dangerous and uncertain wages. It was massive, corporately-owned equipment that

mastered geology. But in the depths of the Depression, that same earth became in the imaginations

of the desperate a space of frontier salvation from the market.

AS THE 1930S drew to a close in Chukotka, rhetoric about underground labor also listed

toward salvation: not by individual self-sufficiency, but by collective deliverance from capitalist

oppression through the reeducation of human elements criminal in their practice or politics. Such

redemption, for many Soviet citizens, was not a choice. It was an ideological mandate staged and

managed by the vast system of prisons, mental hospitals, and camps known as the Gulag.

895

Within

the Gulag, reeducation meant learning to labor like a Soviet, laboring like a Soviet meant feats of

industrial production for the national economy, and production meant reforming fallen individuals

into viable parts of the communist whole.

896

892

Harry Slattery to Mr. Bachelder, August 5 1936, NARA MD RG 48 Central Classified File 1907-1936, File: 9-1-4

General.

893

Letter to Harold Ickes, January 25 1934, NARA MD RG 48 Central Classified File 1907-1936, File 1-270, Alaska

General 1933.

894

Henry Anderson, “The Little Landers’ Land Colonies: A Unique Agricultural Experiment in California,” Agricultural

History Vol. 5 (1931): 142. For more on the back-to-the land aspect of the Depression, see David Shi, The Simple Life:

Plain Living and High Thinking in American Culture (New York: Oxford University press, 1985), 215-247, and Roxanne

Willis, Alaska’s Place in the West: From the Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas,

2010), 48-70.

895

The term Gulag comes from the acronym for the Main Administration of Camps (GULAG), the administrative body

under the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (the NKVD, the 1934 secret police successor to the Cheka and the

OGPU, better known in the west by their postwar acronym, the KGB) that managed most Soviet penal institutions

between 1930 until 1960. Following the publication of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, the acronym came to

stand for Soviet camps and the penal system in general, and I am using it in that sense here. The camp system included

multiple administrative and territorial bodies.

896

Steven Barnes makes the explicit the rhetoric of socialist redemption in the camps, and is generally sensitive to the

need to marry political, moral, and ideological explanations for the Gulag system; see Death and Redemption: The Gulag and

the Shaping of Soviet Society, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 57-68. He shares this orientation with Oleg

Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag: From Collectivization to the Great Terror, trans. Vadim A Staklo, ed. David Nordlander

(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004) and Lynne Viola, The Unknown Gulag: The Lost World of Stalin’s Special Settlements

(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007). Jeffery Hardy argues that the theme of re-education and through it social

redemption present in Soviet criminology was part of larger global trends in criminal science at the time; see

“Khrushchev’s Gulag: The Evolution of Punishment in the Post-Stalin Soviet Union, 1953-1964,” PhD Diss.

(Princeton, 2011), 9; it is an idea that goes back to Michel Foucault; Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan

Sheridan (New York: Pantheon Books, 1977). The use of convict labor or exile to Siberia, with or without redemptive

promise, was certainly a Russian tradition inherited from the Imperial period; see Bruce F. Adams, The Politics of

152

In the far northeast of the Soviet Union, the process was overseen by Dal’stroi, the

shorthand title of Main Administration for Construction in the Far North.

897

Beginning in the gold-

rich tributaries of the Kolyma River near Magadan, Dal’stroi grew to manage the largest territory in

the Gulag system, an expanse the size of Western Europe set between the Arctic and Pacific

Oceans. Along the Kolyma, redemptive labor required freeing non-human elements from the earth.

The justification for the camps was ideological reformation, but the product was economic.

898

“Mobilizing our gold resources,” one Soviet mining engineer wrote in 1931, “is absolutely necessary

and timely,” as the state needed money and the “present crisis in capitalism” was reducing the

world’s supply.

899

Gold was currency for the Kremlin, and currency was potential proof of

communist ascendency over a troubled capitalist world. Tin made high-Stalinist factories run.

Together, the metals were the industrial center of the northeastern Gulag, the space where

theoretical ideological reformation met practical economic imperative.

Soviet gold needed a Soviet gold rush. The forced journey underground in the Soviet Union,

like the voluntary one in Alaska, began at sea. In 1931, the Central Committee of the Communist

Party ordered the transfer of several icebreaking ships to Dal’stroi. The ships would deliver a human

wave, not of prospectors but of prisoners. In the same years that the Northern Sea Route began

searching for metals in Chukotka, the Dal’stroi fleet began hauling convicts north from Vladivostok

to Magadan. Many had already come thousands of miles by train across Russia, only to be crammed

Punishment: Prison Reform in Russia, 1863-1917 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois Press, 1996) and Abby M. Schrader, Languages of

the Lash: Corporal Punishment and Identity in Imperial Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002). I follow

Barnes’s approach more than works that downplay the complicating role of Soviet ideology and emphasize pure political

repression. For examples of these, see Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1990); Galina M. Ivanova, Labor Camp Socialism: The Gulag in the Soviet Totalitarian System, trans. Carol Flath

(Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 2000); Ivanova, Istoriia GULAGa, 1918-1958: sotsial’no-ekonomicheskii ipolitico-pravovoi aspekty

(Moscow: Nauka, 2006); and Anne Applebaum, Gulag: A History (New York: Doubleday, 2003). For examples of

voluntary, non- Gulag self-reformation, see Hellbeck, Revolution on my Mind and Igal Halfin, From Darkness to Light: Class,

Consciousness, and Salvation in Revolutionary Russia (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

897

Dal’stroi was the largest entity in the Gulag system. The name is associated with various titles, including the “Far

Eastern Construction Administration or the “Far Eastern Construction Trust;” see David Nordlander, “Capital of the

Gulag: Magadan in the Early Stalin Era, 1929-1941,’ PhD Diss. (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1997), 86.

Dal’stroi was conceived as administratively separate from the regional Gulag, the Northeastern Corrective Labor Camp

system, or Sevvostlag. However, forced labor provided by Sevvostlag provided most of Dal’stroi’s manpower from the

beginning. In 1937, as part of administrative reorganization associated with the purges, Dal’stroi officially became part of

the Gulag, reporting directly to the NKVD. For sake of simplicity, I call the complex of camps Dal’stroi throughout.

898

Cold War-era exposes of forced labor often used the argument that forced labor was essential to rapid

industrialization as a critique of the Soviet system; see for example, David J. Dallin and Boris I. Nikolaevsky, Forced Labor

in Soviet Russia (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1947); Stanislaw Swianiewicz, Forced Labour and Economic

Development: An Inquiry into the Experience of Soviet Industrialization (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Applebaum e

in Gulag, xxxviii. Edwin Bacon ties the Gulag to rapid industrialization with more nuance, putting it in the context of war

pressures; see The Gulag at War: Stalin’s Forced Labor System in the Light of the Archives (London: Macmillan, 1994). Recent

historians have taken seriously the possibility of an economic, not just political or ideological, motive to the camps in

term of actual material output; see Paul Gregory and Valery Lazarev, eds. The Economics of Forced Labor: The Soviet Gulag.

(Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 2003). The authors in this edition conclude that economic motives were

sometimes at play in some of the sprawling network of camps, but that the forced labor system was highly inefficient

overall. Pertinent for this case is David Nordlander’s assertion in The Economics of Forced Labor that gold from the

Dal’stroi camps near Magadan, including some in Chukotka, provided useful infusions of gold into the Soviet economy;

see “Magadan and the Economic History of Dalstori in the 1930s,” 105-125.

899

GAMO F. R-23, Op. 1, D.1, L. 168. For context on the Russian economy during the depression years, see Sanchez-

Sibony, Red Globalization, 43-56.

153

into the “immense, cavernous, murky hold” of a transport ship, where “from the floor to the ceiling,

as in a gigantic poultry farm [people] were cooped up in open cages, five of them in each nine-foot-

square space.”

900

Food and water were scarce, sea-sickness and theft common, “a hell where people

fought with one another for a drink.”

901

If the Cheliuskin conjured images of the socialist hero

emerging victorious from arctic trials, transit to the Kolyma birthed its Gulag double. By the 1940s,

tales of twelve thousand prisoners freezing or starving or cannibalizing each other on the transport

Dzhurma, ice-bound in the waters just north of Chukotka, slid into Soviet rumors.

902

From such ships, Dal’stroi hurled tens of thousands of bodies at ice-locked creeks and frost-

covered hills along the Sea of Okhotsk.

903

Peasants charged as kulaks, factory workers charged as

wreckers, and every sort of person charged for thinking, seeming to think, or acting against the state

during the Purges became miners in places too wind-swept and barren to support more than

lichen.

904

There was no timber for shelter or fuel for warmth. In some high stony places where men

and women dug for gold there not even water. And “hunger,” as one camp survivor wrote,

“haunted me. And not just me. People were dying.”

905

The camps were often fatal, rife with

accident, disease, starvation, exposure, or execution.

906

But for Dal’stroi, an accident of the earth

made prison labor appear successful. Placer gold was rich on the Kolyma ground. Its harvest

required some skill but mostly effort: a rush, even if manned by captives. Production grew and grew

again, from just over five hundred kilos of pure element in 1932 to ten times that much in 1937.

907

900

Michael Solomon, Magadan (New York: Vertex, 1971), 85.

901

Elinor Lipper, Eleven Years in Soviet Prison Camps (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1951), 287.

902

Tales of the Dzhurma were common enough by the late 1940s to enter into historian’s accounts, although the authors

note the stories could not be substantiated; see Dallin and Nicolaevsky, Forced Labor in Soviet Russia, 127-129. McCannon

also notes the case, citing Dallin and Nicolaevsky, in Red Arctic, 65. By tracing vessel ownership records, Martin Bollinger

claims that the Dzhurma could not have been in the Arctic Ocean in 1934 because Dal’stroi did not yet own the vessel;

see Stalin’s Slave Ships: Kolyma, the Gulag Fleet, and the Role of the West (Westport CT: Praeger, 2003), 65-74. In some ways

the veracity of the case is less interesting than its durability; in 2014, friends in Chukotka told me of the ship, which they

said lead to Gulag overseers going mad from the psychological strain of witnessing cannibalism. Other prison vessels did

sink; see Bollinger, Stalin’s Slave Ships, 55-64.

903

Nearly a million people passed through the Kolyma mines and construction sites between 1932 and the wave of camp

closures following Stalin’s death in 1953. Numbers of prisoners in the Dal’stroi camps, like accounting for the Gulag as a

whole, vary between historians and have been radically downsized from the millions estimated during the Soviet period;

for these, see Robert Conquest, Kolyma: The Arctic Death Camps (New York: Viking. 1978). While Gulag administers

counted many things in many ways, information regarding prisoner intake is inconsistent even with the archives open.

Numbers for the Dal’stroi camps are estimates from Shirokov, Gosudarstvennaia politika, 203-204, 326; I.D. Batsaev and

A.G. Kozlov, Dal’stroi i Sevvostlag OGPU-NKVD CCCR v tsifrakh I dokumentakh Vol. 1 (Magadan: RAN DVO, 2002), 6,

15; V.G. Zeliak, Piat’ metallov Dal'stroia: Istoriia gornodobyvaiushchei promyshlennosti Severo-Vostoka v 30-kh – 50-kh gg. XX v.

(Magadan: Ministerstvo obrazovaniia i nauki RF, 2004), 293; and Nordlander, “Capitol of the Gulag,” 312-313.

904

Having visited Gulag sites near Magadan in 2014, I find it hard to overstate the ruggedness of the terrain – sites high

in the hills, without access to water, fuel, shelter, or food. They are places a survivalist would shun for good reason.

905

V.D. Plotnikov, Kolyma-Kolymushka, (Magadan: MAOBTI, 2001), 52.

906

Accounting for death in the Kolyma camps is more difficult even than numbers of prisoners; for a discussion of the

archival difficulty see Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, 320-323. Mortality rates fluctuated a great deal, as pre-1937

conditions were not unbearable and often included enough food, while later years, especially during the Purges and

WWII, were particularly brutal. Batsaev and Kozlov estimate around 130,000 people died in the Kolyma camps before

1951; Dal’stroi i Sevvostlag Vol. 1, 6. This total does not include those killed during mass executions of political prisoners.

Ten thousand or more of this latter category were likely shot in 1937-1939; see Khlevniuk, 170-171.

907

I.D. Batsaev, Ocherki istorii magadanskoi oblasti nachalo 20kh - seredina 60kh gg XX, (Magadan: RAN DVO, 2007), 59.

Shirokov, Gosudarstvennaia politika, 450-453.

154

“Never, in the most feverish years of the capitalist gold rush…of Alaska,” wrote one Dal’stroi

manager, “did a territory give as much gold as was produced this year in the Kolyma.”

908

As rumors of Dzhurma horrors and reports of Kolyma triumphs filtered west, the Gulag

spread north. The Northern Sea Route, which managed Chukotka’s industry in the early 1930s,

struggled to meet the ambitious plans it helped create. Labor was a problem.

909

The Purges of the

late 1930s were unkind to GUSMP geologists. But Dal’stroi, with its vast if untrained labor force

continued to make its territory yield metal.

910

In 1939, Moscow gave the Gulag control of

Chukotka’s newly discovered tin mines and potential gold. There was also new urgency to tin

extraction. As the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact soured, the element became a “necessary metal” for

victory in the coming existential conflict.

911

What stood between the state and material for its war

planes and army kits was the human element Dal’stroi seemed so adept at mobilizing: the labor to

peel away stubborn arctic earth. In 1941, Gulag transports began sailing north up the Pacific coast,

past Magadan, through the Bering Straits, “the bare rocky coast of Chukotka on the left,” as inmate

Valerii Iankovskii later recalled, and “to the right, in the haze, the distant shore of Alaska.”

912

Iankovskii was bound for Pevek. The port on Chukotka’s Arctic coast, a place of “black

rocks pressed by the wind, with valleys of snow up to five meters deep,” launched convicts toward

the interior.

913

A few thousand others were assigned to build a harbor and road to tungsten mines

near Egvekinot.

914

Camps in both regions were modeled after those in the Kolyma. In them,

gouging through the tundra for tin put Dal’stroi plans up against the common Beringian problems

of geology and climate. “Wood and construction material in general are absent,” one Dal’stroi report

noted in 1941. “Building materials are sand, clay, gravel, and stone.”

915

Shipments of mining

equipment could land only in the short summer. Dredges, excavators, trucks, and anything else with

a motor froze during the winters. There was often no water to wash ore, or the water was frozen

until July. Warming it required electricity, but electricity needed either hydropower, which

functioned only with warmth and water, or coal, which came by expensive transport.

916

Qualified

mining engineers were difficult to find, especially after many where executed in the Purges. When

technology failed, as it often did, plans for mechanized labor reverted to hand tools. “On the hills

908

Quoted in Alexandr Kozlov, “Pervyi director,” Politicheskaia agitatsiia Nos. 17-18 (September 1988): 27-32.

909

McCannon argues that GUSMP was overtaxed by the government in the late 1930s, and unable to make its goals, lost

ground to Dal’stroi; Red Arctic 6-7. Sergei Lar’kov and Fedor Romanenko argue that it was Dal’stroi’s unlimited labor

force that gave them in the upper hand; “Vragi naroda” za poliarnym krugom (Moscow: Paulson, 2010), 110.

910

Accounts of Chukotka-based geologists sentenced to death or imprisonment are in Lar’kov and Romanenko, “Vragi

naroda,” 21-162. Many of the trained men and women already in the Kolyma camps met similar fates, but Dal’stroi

compensated by increasing their pool of convicts and managed to maintain gold production, although the rate of

increase went down; see Batsaev, Ocherki istorii magadanskoi oblasti, 64. For a discussion of the Kolyma camps during the

Purges, when conditions deteriorated markedly, see Shirokov, Gosudarstvennaia politika, 190-200.

911

Chaunskii Raisovet, 11 January 1942, in A.I. Krushanov, ed. Sovety severo-vostoka SSSR (1941-1961 gg.): sbornik

dokumentov i materialov, chast’ 2, (Magadan: Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel'stvo, 1982), 55-56. For more on the beginning

of mining in Chukotka, see Shirokov, Gosudarstvennaia politika, 243; Zeliak, Piat’ metallov, 81.

912

V. Iu. Iankovskii, Dolgoe vozvrashchenie: Avtobiograficheskaia povest’ (Iaroslavl’ : Verkhne-Volzh. kn. izd-vo, 1991), 55.

Iankovskii served as a Japanese and Korean translator during WWII, and was arrested for “helping the international

bourgeoisie” in 1946.

913

MSA, F. 1, Op. 2, D.2701: Petr Lisov Papers, L. 47.

914

GARF F. 9414, Op. 1d, D.197, L. 2 and GARF F. 9414, Op. 1d, D.161, L. 4.

915

GAMO F. R-23, Op. 1, D.1145, L. 45.

916

GAMO F. R-23, Op. 1, D.1145, L. 45, 48; GARF F. 9401, Op. 2, D.235, L. 243.

155

are open-pit mines,” Iankovskii wrote, where “all work by pick, shovel, wheelbarrow…loading

[stone] and rolling by it hand on narrow rickety tracks.” He also dug pits. “The first hole I dug three

and a half meters deep in ten days. The deeper it is the warmer it seems, but is more difficult to

throw out the blasted mix of rock: half falls back on your head and in yours eyes.”

917

The problems with fuel, with transport, with water, and the labor with shovels in pits would

have been familiar to many an Alaskan miner hazarding the common risks of inverting the earth.

But the conditions surrounding the Gulag workers were not commensurate. Men like Iankovskii

came to Chukotka as literal wage slaves, paid a pittance or nothing at all for work they could neither

decline nor flee.

918

Some inmates, especially those with technical skills, were insulated from

demanding physical labor. Ivan Tvardovskii, a trained sculptor, was assigned to make metal casts in

the Gulag foundry, where the work was interesting, safe, and his fellow laborers generally kind.

919

Alexandr Eremin, wrote that “the work was hard, exhausting, but very interesting and exciting” and

gave him a chance to “observe life.”

920

But what kept most prisoners working was not the hope of

property or the promise of a wage. It was not even the promise of fulfilling necessary work for the

motherland. It was barbed wire and men with guns. Contests over bodily rights, not property rights,

framed the experience of the Dal’stroi mines.

A prisoner could in this bodily contest submit, rebel, or escape. None guaranteed survival.

To submit meant, for the rank-and-file prisoner, living a hovel or canvas tent or barracks through

winters that hit sixty degrees below zero, where posters on the wall “reminded us,” one inmate

recalled, “of Stalin’s famous words: ‘Work is a matter of honor, a matter of glory, a matter of valor

and heroism.’”

921

Prisoners made boots from old tires and insulated their clothes with anything they

could find. Work days lasted ten or twelve hours, and through the night. As they shoveled, prisoners

thought constantly about calories. Rations were often tied to performance; the fuller the

wheelbarrow, the fuller the porridge bowl. “Food in the camps – what, 600, 700, 800 grams of

bread?” wrote Iankovskii, “It is a constant burning question: will I ever eat my fill of black bread

before I die?”

922

Wild geese, caught flightless and molting, became currency.

923

“Seal, white and

brown bear, hare, reindeer,” Petr Lisov wrote, “were delicacies.”

924

Malnutrition compounded

rampant disease: scurvy ate at prisoner’s gums, typhus burned through their sleep, and dysentery

wrecked empty stomachs. Men became “frighteningly strange: thin necks, protruding ribs and

shoulder blades, and especially elbows and knees, like billiard balls.”

925

Even the disrupted earth

killed. During WWII, Chukotka’s mines expanded to include deep bauxite excavations, gold

917

Iankovskii, Dolgoe vozvrashchenie, 57, 59.

918

Wage payments came late in the Gulag system; see Hardy, “Khrushchev’s Gulag,” 202.

919

I. T. Tvardovskii, Rodina i chuzhbina : Kniga zhizni (Smolensk : Posokh : Rusich, 1996), 265-266.

920

MSA, F. 2, Op. 1, D.263: Alexandr Eremin Papers, l. 56. Eremin was arrested in 1942 while in Artillery Cadet School

for requesting a literate and battle-trained commanding officer; he served in Chukotka from 1946-1950.

921

I.I. Pavlov, Poteriannye pokoleniia (Moscow: SPb., 2005), 86.

922

Iankovskii, Dolgoe vozvrashchenie, 56.

923

MSA, F. 2, Op. 1, D.263: Alexandr Eremin Papers, L.61.

924

MSA, F. 1, Op. 2, D.2701: Petr Lisov Papers, L. 33. Malnutrition in the camps varied by location and time; after 1953,

food rations were increased along with general sanitary measures and living conditions. See Hardy, “Khrushchev’s

Gulag,” 103-104.

925

Iankovskii, Dolgoe vozvrashchenie, 64.

156

dredging, and, by 1950, а uranium mine not far from Pevek.

926

Prisoners feared lung damage from

the silica they blasted loose in veins of tin deep underground or radiation in the uranium mines.

927

Deaths from accident and silicosis were frequent enough Dal’stroi declared war on them in 1953.

928

In the same years, camp officials were routinely chastised for their “negligent attitude toward the use

of prisoners,” which resulted in unmet plans.

929

Such remonstrations did not immediately improve

convict lives. “Many have found eternal rest,” wrote Ivan Tvardovskii, in a mass grave where

“deceased prisoners were dumped as a bulldozer dug a trench in advance, like dead animals. It is

impossible to say how many died from the inhumane living conditions. But in that first year in

Chukotka, of twelve hundred prisoners a little more than seven hundred survived.”

930

Some of the dead were likely killed in the revolts that ran through Gulag camps. Lisov saw

five men killed an eighteen men wounded shortly after arriving in camp.

931

An uprising in Pevek

ended with dozens dead and halted tin production for months.

932

Guards warned off revolt through

brutality. A slip from work formation might earn a beating. More drastic insurrections ended with

execution. Iankovskii witnessed guards “drench still-living men with water from a hose for as long as

they moved…squirming under the jets until they became stumps sitting in the snow.”

933

Some of the

brutality was internal. Political prisoners and violent criminals often bunked together, and gangs of

the latter often sized rations and wages from less hardened newcomers. In the Egvekinot camp, a

Moscow inquest found “the prisoners are in two hostile groups, the so-called C and B. Each of

these groups tries to subdue and influence the prisoners by extorting those who work in good faith

for their earnings…in this struggle they torment, torture and even murder each other.”

934

Such living

conditions made escape a common fantasy. Alaska was tantalizingly close. Camps and transit ships

filled with rumors of prisoners sizing planes or crossing the ice floe.

935

But, as Iankovskii wrote,

“here in the Arctic Circle, it’s hopeless. Huge expanses of bare tundra in every direction…the

926

Zeliak, Piat’ metallov, 213-214.

927

V.F. Grebenkin, “Raduga vo mgle,” Petlia : Vospominaniia, ocherki, dokumenty ed. Iu. M. Beledin (Volgograd, 1992), 242;

John Lerner, Proshchai, Rossiia! : Memuary “amerikanskogo shpiona” trans. I. Dashinskogo (Kfar Habad: Yad HaChamisha

Press, 2006), 334-335.

928

GAMO F. R-23, Op. 1, D.5501, Ll. 19-22.

929

GAMO F. R-23, Op. 1, D.5507, L. 1.

930

Tvardovskii, Rodina i chuzhbina, 265. Accounting for death in the Kolyma camps is more difficult even than numbers

of prisoners; for a discussion of the archival difficulty see Khlevniuk, The History of the Gulag, 320-323. Mortality rates

fluctuated a great deal, as pre-1937 conditions were not unbearable and often included enough food, while later years,

especially during the Purges and WWII, were particularly brutal. Batsaev and Kozlov estimate around 130,000 people

died in the Kolyma camps before 1951; Dal’stroi i Sevvostlag Vol. 1, 6. This total does not include those killed during mass

executions of political prisoners. Ten thousand or more of this latter category were likely shot in 1937-1939; see

Khlevniuk, 170-171. I have found no precise numbers for deaths in the Chukotka camps, which were established after

the worst years in the Kolyma.

931

MSA, F. 1, Op. 2, D.2701: Petr Lisov Papers, l. 35.

932

GAMO F. R-23, Op. 1, D.5210, Ll. 12-13.

933

Iankovskii, Dolgoe vozvrashchenie, 66.

934

GARF F. 8131, Op. 37, D.4477, L. 9.

935

MSA, F. 2, Op. 1, D.263: Alexandr Eremin Papers, l. 50; Dalan (V.S. Iakovlev) Zhizn’ i sud’ba moia : Roman-esse

(Iakutsk : Bichik , 2003), 158; A.A. Zorokhovich, “Imet’ silu pomnit’: Rasskazy tekh, kto proshel ad repressii,” Moskva

rabochii (1991):199 – 219, 210. I have found no accounts of escapees reaching Alaska.

157

inevitable footprints in the snow. And Chukchi hunters. They receive an award for wounded

fugitives.”

936

How the Chukchi thought about the camps remained a mystery to those inside, as did any

Chukchi opinions on the furious digging, the groaning equipment ripping over the landscape, the

piled bodies. The Chukchi fed prisoners, indirectly, from their reindeer collectives. Once, outside

Egvekinot, two Chukchi families sheltered a trio of escaped prisoners, only to be murdered by

guests fearful of disclosure to the police.

937

The mines were yet another revolution on the tundra,

arriving amid the last gasps of Chukchi resistance against collectivization. For the Chukchi, socialism

had become the only option commensurate with physical survival. Inside the camps, physical

survival was what communism threatened to eliminate. The revolutionary promise of erasing

capitalist alienation between worker and the means of production was foreclosed by prisoner’s

essential alienation from the means to do much at all. The communist promise of equality crumpled

amid extreme and enforced penury, where the inequity between guard and prisoner was a daily

reality. Socialism in the camps meant, as Lisov wrote, “cold, hunger, abuse, humiliation and beatings,

working in mines…10-12 hours at a time,” a list that did not include any sense of redemption.

938

Even Eremin noted that after two years of “tearing slopes from the mountains and pouring soil into

the sea” the Egvekinot harbor did not expand.

939

Across the Dal’stroi camps, the fragile energies of

tens of thousands burned down to nothing in cold valleys. Deliverance, for those who survived, was

in exit.

HAT THE SURVIVORS did reform was the earth. Against the immobile, insensate problem of

ripping metal from the ground, the exhausted bodies of Soviet citizens produced tin: just over three

thousand tons in 1941, growing to nearly four thousand tons in 1943 and close to six by 1952. In

some years, the Pevek tin mines were the most productive in the country, yielding half Russia’s

domestic supply.

940

And Dal’stroi gave the Cold War nearly 170 tons of uranium. The worth of gold,

tin, and uranium led the Soviet Union to import energy other than human bodies as well; labor was

multiplied over time by fossil fuels. Producing a ton of tin ore in 1945 took seventy-one tons of coal,

and over three hundred tons by 1953.

941

The bulldozers and hydraulic washers, the dredges and

blasting caps, the wheelbarrows and picks, left behind a landscape transformed. The hills and planes

near Pevek erupted in boils of mine tailings, piles of broken equipment, and radioactive slag.

Streams choked with refuse guttered the passage of fish spawn. In the cold, nothing rotted: stockade

fences, tin cans, strands of barbed wire, engine parts, concrete blocks, sunk slowly into the tundra,

but did not vanish. Mines flared from the bare, rocky uplands or the flat tundra plains. The earth left

behind looked as if it had been locked in a war with its deep interior, covered in open trench-gashes

936

Iankovskii, Dolgoe vozvrashchenie, 65.

937

MSA, F. 2, Op. 1, D.263: Alexandr Eremin Papers, l. 50.

938

MSA, F. 1, Op. 2, D.2701: Petr Lisov Papers, l. 35.

939

MSA, F. 2, Op. 1, D.263: Alexandr Eremin Papers, l. 51.

940

John Thoburn, “Increasing Developing Countries’ Gains from Tin Mining,” in Tin and Global Capitalism, 1850-1900:

A History of the “Devil’s Metal (New York: Routledge, 2014), 221-239, 225.

941

Production and coal consumption numbers are from Zeliak, Piat’ metallov, 291, 295. Dal’stroi’s tin output was at its

max in 1952. Most years produced about four thousand tons, a very small portion of global output but significant within

the U.S.S.R.

158

and festering pit-wounds. The labor that scarred part of a Soviet generation left Soviet lands scarred

for generations to come.

THE MEANING OF THE UNDERGROUND, 1940S-1970S

During the Second World War, most of the “food, clothing, machinery, equipment, and tools in the

Kolyma” were, as one prisoner remembered, “American. The most comfortable shovels were

American.”

942

The supplies were flown from Nome to the Russian Far East as part of the Lend-

Lease program. And while American shovels helped transform the Russian underground, the war

also transformed American mining. Labor was scarce, as defense employment pulled workers from

gold mines. Coal and petrol was difficult to procure and transport. In 1942, the War Production

Board declared gold mining a nonessential industry.

943

Other metals had better wartime luck. Federal

geologists searched the Seward Peninsula for uranium.

944

Tin “is a highly strategic mineral” and the

“successful development of the Alaskan tin deposits should be of importance to the national

economy and security.”

945

But tin faced the same problematic market, short on fuel and people.

946

The Lost River mine closed in 1941. When it reopened in 1948, its new owner, the United States Tin

Corporation, was funded by the Defense Minerals Exploration Administration. Mining in Alaska

was no longer the business of lone prospectors or even corporations. Against the challenges of

distance, climate, lack of water, and no power, some minerals could only be freed from the earth

with federal dollars.

Even with government investment, mining rested on labor. At Lost River, tin mining

operations recruited Inupiat from nearby settlements for the mines, a source of income most treated

like any other subsistence employment: one to take or leave.

947

But the government, and Alaska’s

growing number of statehood advocates, wanted more settlement in the territory. The reasons were

partly strategic. “Undeveloped Alaska presents a very serious military liability,” one brief stated.

“Under present conditions it is very easy for an Asiatic power to land expeditionary forces.”

948

And

strategy was decidedly economic, as “a general and comprehensive development of Alaska’s mineral

potential is an essential ingredient to a sound, stable, and expanding economy.”

949

Moreover,

942

Pavlov, Poteriannye pokoleniia, 91.

943

Philip Smith, “Mineral Industry of Alaska in 1941 and 1942,” United States Geological Survey Bulletin No 943-A (1944),7.

944

P.L. Killeen and R.J. Ordway, “Radioactivity Investigations at Ear Mountain, Seward Peninsula Alaska, 1945,” United

States Geological Survey Bulletin No. 1024-C (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955).

945

“Supporting Materials for Alaska Development Administration Legislation,” page 9, NARA MD RG 126 Office of

Territories Classified Files 1907-1951, File: 9-1-60.

946

John Reed, “Mineral Investigations of the Geological Survey in Alaska 1943 and 1944,” United States Geological Survey

Bulletin No. 947-A (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1946), 2. An effort to start tin production at Lost

River was also complicated by the Japanese attack in the Aleutian Islands, which diverted military attention from the

mines, where there were wartime plans for development.

947

Barbara Jean Hawn, “The Historical Geography of Tin Mining, Seward Peninsula, Alaska,” M.S. Thesis (Oregon State

College, 1956), 30-32.

948

“Alaska and National Defense,” 1942, page 24, NARA MD RG 126 Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907-1951,

File: 9-1-60.

949

“Supporting Materials for Alaska Development Administration Legislation,” page 8, NARA MD RG 126 Office of

Territories Classified Files 1907-1951, File: 9-1-60.

159

Alaska’s emptiness offered veterans a place to remake themselves, “on the land where they can

renew their spirit and forget about the turmoil of conflict.”

950

Settling in the north was actively

promoted among returning servicemen. And one of the major attractions of Alaska life was mining.

An Armed Services circular promoted “Alaska’s earth,” filled with “unmeasured deposits of tin, coal,

mercury, antimony, copper, lead, iron, nickel, magnesium, manganese, and platinum…postwar

prospecting will be made easier by new military maps.”

951

But whether working a mine, a fish weir,

or a timber lot, the government promoted Alaska as a place where the “pioneer spirit that so

characterized the early settlement of this country still persists.”

952

In practice, the Seward Peninsula was not a promised land for frontier employment. Gold

mining emerged from wartime sanction with little demand, and “working capitals for the small

operator” had vanished, while the high costs of “repairs, equipment, and labor” remained.

953

The

utility of pegging currency to gold was also increasingly doubted in a postwar, dollar-rich world. The

only profitable gold operations were large, technologically sophisticated, and owned particularly

good earth. At Lost River, dropping tin prices and the end of federal assistance shuttered the mine

in 1955. Alaskan industrial development was moving away from the Seward Peninsula: toward other

mines, but mostly northward to the fossil fuel discoveries at Prudhoe Bay. The new boomtowns of

the forty-ninth state grew around oil rigs and along the ports that shipped crude out of the state.

954

was not prospector’s labor. Oil development required huge investments, both private and federal,

not individual guile. Petroleum projects made Alaska, by the 1970s, again an exporter of energy: no

longer from the flesh of whales and walrus but from the pooled, fossilized remains of creatures last

alive in a vanished world.

Without oil or safe harbor for tankers, Nome dwindled to a few thousand residents. The

business of the northwestern coast was no longer in so much in gold itself as in the history of

finding it. Nome was the county seat of gold rush mythology, an American simulacrum for the

better-known Klondike. Nome dog mushers were memorialized in books with titles like Scotty Allan:

King of the Dog Team Drivers or Wolf Dogs of the North. Rex Beach’s fictional account of corruption and

intrigue among the gold fields, The Spoilers, became a movie in 1930, 1942 – when it starred Marlene

Dietrich and John Wayne – and in 1955. Such books and films joined a growing literature on the

romance of the north, a frontier genre established by Jack London, given an environmentalist gloss

by John Muir and Robert Marshall, turned into a western by Louis L’amour, and used to advance

American exceptionalism by James Oliver Curwood.

955

Prospecting, Curwood wrote, “had its lure,

950

“Our Last Frontiers: How Veterans and Others Can Share Them,” Department of the Interior Pamphlet, NARA MD

RG 126 Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907-1951, File: 9-1-22.

951

“Alaska: Our Northern Outpost,” Armed Forces Talk Vol. 218, page 7, NARA MD RG 126 Office of Territories

Classified Files, 1907-1951, File: 9-1-22.

952

“Our Last Frontiers: How Veterans and Others Can Share Them,” Department of the Interior Pamphlet, NARA MD

RG 126 Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907-1951, File: 9-1-22.

953

“Northwestern Alaska: A Report on the Economic Opportunities of the Second Judicial Division, 1949,” page 2,

NARA MD RG 126, Office of Territories Classified Files, 1907-1951, File 9-1-60.

954

For a history of oil development in Alaska, see Peter Coates, The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology,

Conservation, and the Frontier (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1993).

955

For an excellent discussion of these literary figures, one I drawn on heavily here, see Susan Kollin, Nature’s State:

Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). For the 19

century roots of

160

its romance, its thrill,” a product of work in “immeasurable spaces into which civilization had not

yet come with its clangs and its clamor.”

956

On the page and on the screen, Alaska was the final place

where individual Americans could still labor for themselves. As Alaskan statehood advocate Robert

Atwood testified, “The expansion of American development is in the existence of an area of free

land,” like the frontier “men have proven they can conquer…in the far north.”

957

It was an image

that redeemed capitalism by sublimating the profit motive to surviving in the wilderness. That such

wilderness was worth visiting became the cornerstone of Alaska’s booming postwar tourist trade.

That it was worth protecting anchored environmental movements in the state.

958

That Alaska had

never been wilderness to its indigenous inhabitants was generally ignored. So was a history in which

capitalism featured as many lawyers and corporations as homesteaders and prospectors. Alaska as

America’s last frontier was a romance that sold well. The past had a currency of its own.

THE CURRENCY THE Soviet Union desired of Chukotka was still monetary. The means of

access changed, however, with the death of Stalin. As part of Khrushchev’s broad reforms, Dal’stroi

camps on the Peninsula were disbanded in 1957.

959

Rending tin and gold from the earth was no

longer the labor of convicts. Instead, Khrushchev spoke of а north reformed by Socialist

technology, where a new generation of workers lived in insulated domes.

960

As Chukotka had more

sinking Gulag stockades than futuristic houses, the state lured people north the promise of socialism

made material. By 1960, workers in the Soviet far north received substantial benefits in pay and

vacation time. One geologist recalled how the high pay and frequent bonuses given in Chukotka

meant “I was making about five hundred a month. To put that into perspective, I could eat a big

lunch with three courses at the central cafeteria in Egvekinot for under a ruble.”

961

More than the

salary, however, was the issue of supply. In the latter half of the twentieth century, northern Soviet

regions were often better stocked than agricultural or urban areas. There were no queues for coats or

shoes, and little difficulty purchasing perfumes or expensive alcohol. With Chukotkan workers

“identifying new deposits of gold, tin, coal, and building materials…for the development of the

country’s productive forces,” Moscow worked to increase supplies of eggs, milk, potatoes, and fresh

Alaska’s frontier image, see Robert Campbell, In Darkest Alaska: Travel and Empire along the Inside Passage (Philadelphia:

University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007).

956

Robert Curwood, The Alaskan: A Novel of the North (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1922) 42, 12.

957

“Alaska Statehood Hearings,” House of Representatives, 83

Cong. 1

sess. (April 1953), 80-86. Atwood’s invocations

of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis are striking and sometimes almost verbatim.

958

As the geographical setting for most of the postwar debates happened far from northwestern coast and interior I

focus on, so I am glossing over the considerable debates among Alaskans and others about how their territory should be

used and understood. For histories that treat this in depth, see Coates, The Trans-Atlantic Pipeline and Willis, Alaska’s Place

in the West. Stephen Haycox argues explicitly that non-indigenous people have only ever really come to Alaska for jobs,

not for subsistence or homesteading, and these jobs were generally funded and managed outside of the state; see Alaska:

An American Colony (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). During this same period, indigenous Alaskans were

involved in settling land claims. Alaska achieved statehood without addressing native title, which was finally settled in

1971 in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, which gave Alaska native populations title to 44 million acres of

historically used land and $962.5 million paid to twelve distinct native corporations to invest in their communities. More

on this will be discussed in chapter five.

959

Dikov, Istoriia Chukotki, 291

960

Soviet News, February 12, 1962.

961

Quoted in Thompson, Settlers on the Edge, 47.

161

vegetables.

962

People could even buy single-family apartments.

963

With vacations, diminished state

supervision, and the personal space afforded by the tundra, was “a kind of spiritual oasis, an

untainted paradise.”

964

From produce to privacy, people in Chukotka were rich in things impossible

to find elsewhere in their classless country. Labor in the name of Arctic communism meant a life of

plenty.

The value of metals and mining, for a new generation of Soviets, emerged from the

extremity of location. For the state, spending rubles on northern settlement had raw Cold War

strategic value: Chukotka, like Alaska, hosted military installations and personnel. But rapid northern

development was also a way of proving socialist competence. Voluntary labor flooded the arctic, at

last, with real existing modernity. “In every village there is a club, a library, a cinema,” one report

noted, and the Peninsula had over three hundred new apartments.

965

Electrical plants began lighting

homes and mines.

966

“The development of industry and transport in the far north,” one researcher

noted, “has produced rapid population growth in previously empty territories.”

967

Chukotka’s

population surged from less than forty thousand people to more than eighty between the 1950s and

the 1970s, mostly with newcomers.

968

The flurry of construction came with its own problems. Three

hundred houses were not enough. Schools lacked plumbing. Roads buckled as the permafrost

heaved in spring. Appropriations for 1963 geological surveys were deemed “highly insufficient for

identifying new sites.”

969

But there were houses, schools, roads, and geologists.

Geologists and the investments that settled them in Chukotka yielded metal. Bulldozers by

the hundreds, electrical washers, drills, and a host of other mining equipment were installed around

the Peninsula between the late 1950s and early 1970s. As a result, as party official A Riabov

reported, gold production in the region in 1961 was up over the past seven years, and “we have

overcome the standstill in the tin mining industry.”

970

The “Komsomolskii” mine, the first major

industrial gold operation in Chukotka, bloomed to a town of three thousand people, including а

“hero of socialist work” operating the region’s second dredge. By the early 1970s, Chukotka

produced 900 tons of gold, and had over-fulfilled the eighth Five Year Plan for tin, tungsten and

962

GARF F. A-259, Op. 42, D.8339, L. 50, 10.

963

Thompson, Settlers on the Edge, 46-50. Thompson argues that the postwar state essentially managed access to goods as

a way of incentivizing settlement in areas otherwise undesirable, like the far north, while creating consumer scarcity in

major urban areas. Other discussions of incentives for living in the north include A.I Ivanov, L’goty dlya rabotnikov severa

(Moscow: Yuridicheskaya Literature, 1991) and L.N. Popov-Cherkasov, L’goty i preimushchestva roabochim i sluzhshashim

(Moscow: Yuridicheskaya Literature, 1981).

964

Ukrainian mining engineer, quoted in Thompson, Settlers on the Edge, 64. Thompson emphasizes how much personal

time Chukotkans had to pursue their own hobbies and social activities outside state observation, something that matches

my discussions with immigrants to the region.

965

GARF F. A-259, Op. 42, D.8340, L. 7, 14.

966

Dikov, Istoriia Chukotki, 295. Dikov notes that even small kolkhozy used diesel generators by the early 1960s.

967

RGAE F. 8390, Op. 1, D.2790, L. 13.

968

Thompson, Settlers on the Edge, 4-5.

969

GARF F. 1-259, Op. 42, D.8340, L. 38.

970

Sovetskaia Chukotka, January 27, 1961.

162

mercury.

971

Mine operators were congratulated not just for tons of ore, but for “safety measures”

that “decrease the number of accidents.”

972

No longer forced to work twelve-hour shifts without food and at constant risk of bodily

harm, Soviet settlers in Chukotka began to see some romance in the territory. They were helped, by

the late 1960s and 1970s, by literary and cinematic precedents. As in Alaska, the Klondike was one:

Jack London had enjoyed a wide readership in translation since before the Revolution. He was

joined by newer, explicitly Soviet post-war arctic heroes. Works by Tikhon Semushkin, Vladimir

Arsen’ev and Chukchi author Yuri Rytkheu transformed the far north into a purifying space. Not

only did it offer the potential to enrich the motherland through discovery and exploration, the north

was, as Rytkheu argued, inhabited by peoples for whom “ideas of social equality” and “work as the

genuine measure of all things real and human,” was also the “foundational philosophy of the

Eskimo-Chukchi…never formulated but practiced for centuries.”

973

Communism was the authentic

cultural form of the tundra, and the tundra made better communists by stripping them of effete

distractions through romantic labor

974

In Oleg Kuvaev’s Territoriia, a fictionalized account of gold

exploration in Chukotka, the hero goes about finding gold with old, London-esque panning tools,

but with an eye to a properly mechanized future. He scorns people whose lives, distant from the

labor and landscape of the tundra were “empty of anything but carpets, television, and their account

books.”

975

But the tundra was also empty of the past, and its political experiments with redemption

and purity. The discovery of significant gold deposits near Bilibino, made in reality by Dal’stroi

geologists in 1949 and mined by prisoners, is transplanted in fiction to a Gulag-free late 1950s. And

rather than a place of potential collective redemption, the tundra was one of individual fulfillment,

where “everything else is just an accompanying phenomenon.”

976

Geological heroism was the official version of the north, appearing not just in fiction but in

biographies and memoirs.

977

It was also a redemptive vision of late socialism, one where

mechanized, modern adventure in the timeless wilderness proved individual competence and state

971

Dikov, Istoriia Chukotki, 336-339; A.A. Siderov, “Zoloto Chukotkii,” (1999), unpublished manuscript in this author’s

possession.

972

GAChAO, F. R-130, Op. 1, D.54, L. 18. This file contains multiple detailed accident reports and measures to

decrease mining injuries and fatalities.

973

Yuri Rytkheu, Sovremennye legendy (Leningrad: Sovetskii pisatel’, 1980), 213. See aslo Semushkin, Chukotka (Moscow:

Gosudarstvennoie Iz-dat, 1950); Rytkheu, A Dream in Polar Fog trans. I. Yazhbin (New York: Archipelago Books, 2005).

For a discussion of Rytkheu and other indigenous authors, see Yuri Slezkine, Arctic Mirrors: Russia and the Small Peoples of

the North (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994) 352-370.

974

For a discussion of the use of non-urban spaces, see Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (Bloomington:

University of Indiana Press, 1981), 228-231.

975

Oleg Kuvaev, Territoriia (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo AST [1974] 2016), 57. The novel went through multiple printings and

also became a film.

976

Oleg Kuvaev, The Territory: a Novel (Moscow: Progress, 1982), 8. This quote is from the official English translation of

Territoriia, which was published in Russian both in magazine and book form in the 1970s. For a discussion of the

versions of Kuvaev’s novel, see V.V. Ivanov, Kuvaevskaia romanistika: Romany O. Kuvaeva “Territoriia’ i “Pravila begstva’:

Istoriia sozdaniia, dukhovnoe i khudozhestvennoe svoeobrazie. (Magadan: Kordis, 2001). Thompson discusses the importance of

Kuvaev for his informants; see Settlers on the Edge, 68-70.

977

See for example G.G. Volkov, Bilibina: Dokum. Povest’ o pervoi Kolymskoi ekspeditsii 1928—1929 gg. (Magadan: Kn. izd-

vo, 1978) and Volkov, Zolotaia Kolyma: Povest’ khudozhnik M.Cherkasov (Magadan. Knizhnoe izd., 1984); E.K. Ustiev, U

istokov zolotoi reki. (Moscow: Mysl’, 1977). Memoirs of geologists working in the far northeast also proliferated; see, for

example, G. B. Zhilinskii, Sledy na zemle, (Magadan, Magadanskoe kn. izdatel'stvo, 1975) and N.I. Chemodanov, V dvukh

shagakh ot Severnogo poliusa. Zapiski geologa. (Magadan: Magadanskoe kn. izdatel'stvo 1968).

163

prowess simultaneously. For the geologist-hero, the needs of the Soviet state and the individual are

so inseparable as to pass without comment. There was no Brezhnev-era stagnation in Territoriia, or

for many actual geologists in Chukotka. Politics was erased by hardiness in service to a state that did

seem to provide as promised. All the while, real people and fictional stories lived on top of the

physical remnants of samizdat narratives, the draft pieces of the Gulag Archipelago that passed hand to

hand through the literary and political underground.

On the physical underground, geologists and other Soviet labor transformed the earth. Tin

and gold mining on a modern, industrial scale increased damages waged in earlier, hand-dug eras. As

in Alaska, washing tons of Beringian earth away from gold often required using cyanide or mercury,

which pooled and trickled into streams and rivers. Rending the deep ground and exposing it to air

and water released sulfuric acid. The surface of the disturbed earth went toxic, and the toxins went

mobile: leaching into water, drunk up by animals or absorbed through porous skin. Heavy metals

dragged birds lifeless from the sky. On the ground, they cleaved to the fat of fish and reindeer, then

to the stomachs of people.

978

The underground so many bent their bodies to expose had become

flesh. And in Chukotka, flesh was supplanted by other forms of energy, beyond coal and petrol. In

1973, a nuclear power plant went online in Bilibino, a mining town not far from the old Pevek

camps. The flow of energy out of Beringia, begun with whales and continuing through walrus

blubber and reindeer meat reversed, finally and potently. State power created electrical power, a

great store of manmade energy that processes earth into the present day. In Bilibino, the reactor

makes radioactive waste that will take a geological epoch to decay. After a century of unmaking

geology, humans are making their own.

THE VALUED EARTH

In the pursuit of metal, valued for currency or for practicality, both the United States and Russia’s

peoples and governments reformed their subterranean north. It was a challenge different from other

Beringian projects, those of the sea, the shore, and the tundra surface. Metals were inert. Geology

changes in time scales too long to interfere much with human plans. A mine is not ruled by short

tempo of biological change – the time necessary for a whale to adapt to her hunter, or a reindeer to

feel the agonies of a warm winter. The arctic landscape that hid valued elements was difficult but

978

Soviet records of environmental impacts in Chukotka are not forthcoming, but gold and tin mining have predictable

impact on the land and water nearby. In addition to the hydrological impacts discussed previously, see the following for

discussion of pollutants from mining: Lorne E. Doig, Stephanie T. Schiffer, and Tarsten Liber, “Reconstructing the

Ecological Impacts of Eight Decades of Mining, Metallurgical, and Municipal Activities on a Small Boreal Lake in

Northern Canada,” Integrated Environmental Assessment and Management Vol. 11 No. 3 (July 2015):490-501; D.R. Neuman,

P.J. Brown, S.R. Jennings, Metals Associated with Acid Rock Drainage and Their Effect on Fish Health and Ecosystems, in Acid

Mine Drainage, Rock Drainage, and Acid Sulfate Soils: Causes, Assessment, Prediction, Prevention, and Remediation (Hoboken NJ:

John Wiley & Sons, 2014) and K. Kidd, M. Clayden, and T. Jardine, Bioaccumulation and Biomagnification of Mercury through

Food Webs, in Environmental Chemistry and Toxicology of Mercury (Hoboken NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2011); R. Eisler “Arsenic

Hazards to Humans, Plants, and Animals from Gold Mining,” Review of Environmental Contamination and Toxicology Vol. 180

(2004): 133-165; D.B. Donato, O. Nichols, H. Possingham, M. Moore, P.F. Ricci, and B.N. Noller, “A Critical Review of

the Effects of Gold Cyanide-Bearing Tailing Solutions on Wildlife,” Environment International Vol. 33 No. 7 (October

2007):974-984; and R. Eisler, “Mercury Hazards from Gold Mining to Humans, Plants, and Animals,” Review of

Environmental Contamination and Toxicology Vol. 181 (2004): 139-198.

164

singular: there are only so many ways to take apart a hillside or scrape up a riverbed. As a result,

miners had much to learn when they came north. But generally they only had to learn it once, in

principle, and then learn how to apply more energy, more mechanized force, to the separation of

element from surrounding strata. Capitalists and capitalists had far more power to do with the earth

as they pleased. The results left similar marks on mountains, hills, rivers, and streams.

The geography of energy also made mining distinct from other sources of Beringian value:

gold and tin contained no calories, but required power in massive quantity. The process of shuttling

energy to the north first employed human bodies, then various derivatives of steam or fossils, and

finally, in Chukotka, the force of fused atoms. Energy was not the source of value but its cost. It was

a rare space were industrial tools made human plans real in the Beringian arctic. And perhaps

because there was so little impediment to human plans, the management of that energy saw the

plans of the United States and the Soviet Union at their most radical divergence. The American gold

rush brought desperate people north on the hope of capitalist redemption through property. The

Soviet gold rush made people desperate by bringing them north to make property for the state.

Capitalist mining was supposed to make individuals rich, freeing them from the wage slavery of

corporate employment. It mostly made employees. For a brief moment in twentieth century, it made

those employees consider their collective future as labor over the worth of individual property.

Communist mining was often the inverse, and not just because it made actual wage slaves of people

on the road to theoretical socialist salvation. While undertaken in the name of collective equality, it

was in practice and image often a far more personal endeavor. The Gulag was meant to save the

individual; the geologist-hero enacted or lived individual triumphs over nature. Both did so for a

motherland far distant from the realities of the tundra. If Alaska’s goldfields failed to redeem

capitalism by denying individual property to the majority of laborers, then Chukotka’s tin fields had

an ambiguous relationship with the commune by equating labor in the name of the collective with

personal, captive salvation or personal, liberated adventure.

The divergence left a trace in how mining’s past – that rare place of possible technological

prowess – is remembered and valued. Mentioning a visit to Magadan or the Kolyma does not solicit

simple images of the romantic north with contemporary Russians. The story of arctic gold is

ambiguous, half one of national industrial feats and triumphant geologists, half of brutal unfree labor

done in the name of the very state that denied its prisoners food and shelter. It remains a mostly

buried but uncomfortable testament to the ends to which powerful ideas drive nations. The

ambiguities are not just a thing of the past. In 1991, the Soviet Union crumbled around its golden

underground. The mines lived on. Chukotka is now Russia’s second-largest gold producing region.

Most of the deposits are partly owned and managed by international companies. Chukotka’s mining,

as one geologist titled his autobiography, is a trajectory “from Soviet Dal’stroi to criminal

capitalism.”

979

It is a sober look at a twentieth century that saw unspeakably rapid transformation, in

both human and geological terms, done in the name of a future that never came.

In Alaska, a mention of Nome, or the Klondike with which it is often conflated, and people

recall a past that never existed. What enables this difference is partly geological, as the Nome fields

payed out less by the end of the twentieth century. A few large mines remain on the Seward

979

А.А. Siderov, Ot Dal’stroia SSSR do kriminal’nogo kapitalizma (Magadan: DVO RAN, 2006).

165

Peninsula, but gold has been supplanted by oil as a source of national wealth and debates about it its

value to people and costs to the land. Left behind, the U.S. gold rush is entwined in a self-image of

successful capitalism, its excesses forgotten. Alaska’s gold is not so much a tangible resource as a

container for ideas of wilderness resourcefulness. Prospecting is a thing done on a muscular, nation-

defining, useful last frontier, where men are men and money comes out of the ground. That Jafet

Lindeberg initiated the industrial development that still scars the creeks and hillsides of the Seward

Peninsula is lost beneath narratives of prospecting as freedom from all that industry produced. It is a

myth readily available on television. The Discovery Channel reality programs “Bering Sea Gold” and

“Gold Rush” offer highly edited glimpses of modern Lindebergs at work: toiling over their

equipment, fighting over property, sometimes emerging with nuggets the size of a finger. Amid all

physical signs to the contrary, Alaskan mining has become in symbol a capitalist dreamscape, an

image of riches torn from a land too vast and too cold to ever be truly changed.

166

CHAPTER FIVE: THE OCEAN

1920-1990

COMPOSING A WORLD

Along the eastern coast of the Pacific, the sea floor is marked in places with shallow oval

depressions, arrayed in half circles like the absent petals of a massive flower. The creatures that lived

here – the worms and mollusks stuck in the mud, the miniscule crustaceans with their fronds of

antennae, the open-palmed anemones, the schools of fish and pulpy squids that floated above –

were scooped up into the balloon mouth of a passing gray whale, Eschrichtius robustus.

980

These

indentations track up the coast in the wake the animal’s migration, from winters in Baja to summers

north of the Bering Strait. The body of a gray whale is composed during an annual passage that runs

over seven thousand miles.

The bodies made on this voyage are slow-moving, stocky, at most fifty feet in length and

forty tons in weight, each triangular head mottled with barnacles; each pleated throat stopped with

yellowed baleen; each tail humped with a ridge of knuckles instead of a dorsal fin. Their transit loops

over and under that of other cetacean species. In the arctic summers, grays swim in the same waters

as bowheads and right whales. Along the Pacific coast, they keep close to the shore, sharing coves

and bays with minke whales. Rarely, as they move south, grays might see a fin or sei whale, animals

that prefer the yawning depths to inland shallows. As they travel, gray calves are in danger from

flashing black and white pods of orcas. In the wider North Pacific, the quiet grays swim through the

reverberating song of humpbacks. When they enter lower latitudes, blue whales flap a lazy flipper

off in the deep. They swim through the territories of sperm whales, the females caring for each

other’s young and teaching them the syntax of their clan Whales have their habitual routes, their

discrete populations; they do not socialize across species. But the overlapping arcs of whale

migration link the ecosystems of the Beaufort and Chukchi Seas with the Bering Sea, the Bering Sea

with the North Pacific basin, and on outward into the ocean as a whole.

Among these whales, the grays have the longest migration and the greatest attachment to the

coastline. But they are not alone in their bond with the North Pacific. The waters between the

Aleutian Islands and the Arctic Ocean are filled with cetaceans. They come to eat. Fin whales fast

through winters, then gorge on krill and squid in northern summers. Humpbacks teach their babies

to blow nets of bubbles and gulp the small fish trapped in the rising silver curtain. Minkes school in

groups of up to four hundred to feast on anchovies and crustaceans, attended by million-strong

flocks of feeding sea birds. Male sperm whales spend their lives in the north, growing huge and

leaving only to breed. Blue whales bulk enough blubber from sub-arctic waters to become the largest

980

For gray whale feeding behaviors see Mary Nerini, “A Review of Gray Whale Feeding Ecology,” in Mary Lou Jones,

Steven L. Swartz, and Stephen Leatherwood eds. The Gray Whale: Eschrichtius robustus (Orlando, FL: Academic Press,

1984), 423-450. For a general overview of the species and their migratory patterns, see Mary Lou Jones and Steven L.

Swartz, “Gray Whale: Eschrichtius robustus” in William F. Perrin, Bernd Wursig and J.G.M. Thewissen eds., Encyclopedia of

Marine Mammals (London: Academic, 2009), 503-511.

167

animals in the earth’s history.

981

Whales are a culmination: of sunlight and ancient nutrients,

transformed by photosynthesis into algae, algae into teeming banks of wispy swimming things and

rooted muddy things, their bodies borne upward in degrees of biological complexity through acts of

consumption.

982

The world whales consume is not stable. Biological productivity is the admixture of solar

energy, fertile sediments, and the organisms capable of joining the two through the act of living. Life

makes physics into biology, fixing carbon into a stock of energy. Nothing in this reaction is stable

from day to day, or year to year, or across decades, centuries, and millennia. In warm years, there is

more algae and more small things ready to eat them; the floating biome expands with fish and birds

and their caloric decedents. The growing and shrinking ice pack determines the churn of ocean

water, which influences the movement of sediments, sediments that are also blown and buffeted by

wind, wind that is directed by global shifts in atmospheric pressure. Even the moon has its role, by

calling the tides.

983

These grand shifts ebb and pulse, as do waves or El Nino events. Or they shock

and fade, like the shadowing plume of a volcanic eruption. Because they are large, omnivorous, and

migratory, cetaceans adapt to these changes, their behavior smoothing the discordant edges.

984

And

they are their own force. Gray whales alone re-suspend more nutrient-dense silt with their eating

than does the Yukon River with its thousand miles. Without whales, energy moves differently and

less plentifully through marine species and space.

985

The work of composing cetacean bodies

changes the composition of the sea. It makes the ocean more alive.

981

For fin whale behavior and feeding, see T.A. Jefferson, M.A. Webber, and R.L. Pitman eds., Marine Mammals of the

World, A Comprehensive Guide to their Identification (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2008), 47-50, and pages 59-65 for minke whales.

For blue whale behaviors and feeding, see P.K. Yochem and S. Leatherwood. “Blue Whale Balaenoptera

musculus (Linnaeus, 1758)” in S.H. Ridgway and R. Harrison eds., Handbook of Marine Mammals, Vol. 3: The Sirenians and

Baleen Whales (Academic Press, London, 1985), 193-240. For humpbacks, including a discussion of the cultural nature of

feeding adaptations, see Hal Whitehead and Luke Rendell, The Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins, (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2015), 92-95. Unlike the gray whale, which is now extinct in the Atlantic and has no Antarctic

population, many of these whale species are found throughout the world’s oceans.

982

For an overview of the Bering Sea ecosystem, see Committee on the Bering Sea Ecosystem, National Research

Council, The Bering Sea Ecosystem (Washington D.C.: National Academy Press, 1996), 28-60. The Bering Sea as a whole is

rated as having moderately high productivity, but contains “hot spots” which are especially rich in biological life.

983

To say that this is a simplification of extremely complex dynamics, dynamics that are only partly understood, would

be an understatement. The basics are drawn from Bering Sea Ecosystem 28-60; and Phyllis J. Stabeno, George L. Hunt, Jr.,

Jeffrey M. Napp, and James D. Schumacher, “Physical Forcing of Ecosystem Dynamics on the Bering Sea Shelf,” in

Allan R. Robinson and Kenneth Brink eds., The Sea: Volume 14B: The Global Coastal Ocean (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2006), 1177-1212. Discussions of benthic verses pelagic productivity and what this means for biological

composition are from Bodil A. Bluhm and Rolf Gradinger, “Regional Variability in Food Availability for Arctic Marine

Mammals,” Ecological Applications Vol. 18. Issue sp2 (March 2008):S77-S96; J.J. Walsh and C.P. McRoy, “Ecosystem

Analysis in the Southeastern Bering Sea,” Continental Shelf Research Vol. 5 (1986): 259-288; N.C. Stenseth, A. Mysterud, G.

Ottersen, J.W. Hurrell, K.-S. Chan, and M. Lima, “Ecological Effects of Climate Fluctuations,” Science Vol. 297 (2002):

1292-1296.

984

For a discussion of how whales increase the stability of ecosystem function, see Spencer Apollonio, Hierarchical

Perspectives on Marine Complexes: Searching for Systems in the Gulf of Maine (New York, Columbia University Press, 2002),

especially 160-185.

985

For Yukon River / gray whale comparison see K.R. Johnson and C.H. Nelson, “Side-scan Sonar Assessment of Gray

Whale Feeding in the Bering Sea,” Science Vol. 225 (1984):1150-1152. For the work of whales in marine environments

and increased biological productivity, see Joe Roman, James A Estes, Lyne Morissette, Craig Smith, Daniel Costa, James

McCarthy, JB Nation, Stephen Nicol, Andrew Pershing, and Victor Smetacek “Whales as Marine Ecosystem

Engineers,” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment Vol 12 No. 7 (September 2014): 377–385; P. Kareiva, C. Yuan-Farrell,

and C. O’Connor, “Whales are Big and it Matters,” in J.A. Estes, D.P. DeMaster and D.F. Doak et al. eds. Whales,

168

PEOPLE CAN ALSO alter the composition of the ocean, in fishing it or running farm

sediments into it or leaving it alone. Another way is by hunting whales. Aboriginal whalers altered

the density of gray whale herds for centuries. In the nineteenth century, capitalist whalers reshaped

the Bering Sea by killing cetaceans, mostly bowheads but also right whales and grays whales, to

satiate market demands. In the twentieth century, communist whalers reshaped the Bering Sea by

killing whales, of most every species, to satiate a vision of the future without markets at all.

The chapter that follows is about this twentieth century hunt. It begins, as the Soviets did,

with gray whales off Chukotka. Hunting bowhead with old Yankee harpoons was an answer to the

problem of regional starvation on the far krai [edge] of the new socialist state. But the regional

solution became a national preoccupation, so the narrative expands as the Soviets did, into the wider

North Pacific where industrial factory fleets killed of humpback whales, killer whales, right whales,

sperm whales, fin whales, sei whales, blue whales, bowhead whales, and any other species that swam

within range. The question is why whale: after the 1940s, there was little food need and even less

demand from any Soviet industry. The answer is found in the comradery and productive splendor of

factory ships, where whales temporarily made the ideal Soviet harvest. On factory ships feats of

labor and engineering could seemingly outmaneuver biology. It was the communist variant of the

capitalist hunt. In the nineteenth century, Yankees used whales to make short-term salaries and with

the hope of long-term alternatives to cetacean energy. In the twentieth century, socialists used up

whales to prove the viability of long-term socialist promise in short term results.

While the Soviet Union made living socialists with dead whales, the United States began

seeing only live whales as valuable. Along the Pacific coast and in international conference rooms,

cetaceans transformed over the course of the twentieth century from utilitarian commodity to a

symbol of pure nature, and pure nature became the potential moral measure of humanity. Whales

were a moral reflecting pool, their living bodies a way of proving national enlightenment.

Environmental groups requested a full ban on whaling. Indigenous whalers asserted their hunting

rights over those of animals. Thus by the end of the 1970s, the North Pacific was nearly emptied of

whales. But it was filled with conflicting ideas about how the remaining whales should be valued: as

a contributor to the socialist endeavor, or as a guide to a romantic environmentalist reformation, or

as the basis of native villages and tradition. The latter form of value begins long before capitalist

whalers, environmental protesters, or communist harpooners tried their visions of cetacean worth

and outlasted at least some of them; so the chapter begins with indigenous whaling practice and

ends with indigenous whaling politics. In-between, it shows how the logic of twentieth-century

communism proved no better able to discipline its obsession with marine energy than nineteenth

century capitalism. As with all the chapters before, the pages that follow show how universal

enlightenment – through markets or Marx or ideas of natural harmony – are always challenged in a

world never quite of human making.

Whaling and Ocean Ecosystems (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 379-387; and D.A. Croll, R. Kudela,

and B.R. Tershy, “Ecosystem impacts of the decline of large whales in the North Pacific” in Whales, Whaling 202-214.

169

THIEVES AT SEA, 1900-1920S

Whales, at least some kinds, appear in their behavior to value each other: as comrades in the hunt, as

protectors in the open seas, as singers.

986

Different species bring different value to the oceans they

cultivate with their habitation. And they are valued by humans. In the Bering Strait, people’s esteem

of cetaceans leaves an ancient trace in homes made from the bones of whales that died in a previous

millennium. In Alaska and in Chukotka, most subterranean dwellings were beamed by bowhead jaws

and ribs. Cetacean value in the arctic was, and is, not even across species. Yupik, Inupiat, and

Chukchi hunters rarely came close to humpback, fin, and sei whales. Sperm and blue whales prefer

deep waters. Gray whales were an occasional prize, killed in summertime moments of opportunity.

For most communities, it was bowheads that anchored economic and cultural life. The preference

likely had migratory and caloric origins. Grays visit Alaska less predictably than bowheads. In

Chukotka, where they come with more consistency, their smaller bodies are gone in a matter of

weeks, unlike bowheads that last as one Yupik hunter described, “for the whole winter until

summer.”

987

Gray whales are also fierce.

988

So the docile, fat, predictable bowheads died. Over time,

the flavor of their blubber was valued, in most communities, over the flesh of the gray whale, and

bowhead hunts took on greater transcendent significance.

989

There were exceptions. On Chukotka’s Mechigmen Bay, the skulls, ribs, mandibles, and

vertebra of gray whales bore up ancient ceilings and filled long-dead human bellies.

990

The same was

true south along the coast, on Arakamchechen Island, and north in the village of Uelen. In these

places, along the inlets and under the cliffs where grays came to feed, hunters separated nursing

calves from their mothers. Ran’awa, a Chukchi hunter from Mechigmen Bay, explained how the

whales “come when the ice melts, and almost at once we start to hunt…we approach them in

absolute silence, [the calf] usually close to its mother. We come from the left side, in order to

harpoon with the right hand… we throw the harpoon anywhere,” because the calf “is small he

cannot escape the pykh-pykh [the harpoon cord] into the water.”

991

986

Hal Whitehead and Luke Randall discuss various aspects of cetacean culture, from sharing food and xenophobic

reactions to their songs in a way that makes a persuasive case for some whale species having culture – and with it values

for particular behaviors, types of songs, etc. See The Cultural Lives esp. chapters 9-11.

987

Petr Nutatagin, in Igor Krupnik ed. Pust' govoriat nashi stariki: rasskazy aziatskikh eskimosov-iupik, (Moscow: Institut

Naslediia, 2000), 166.

988

For accounts of gray whale ferocity, see Krupnik, Pust’, 159, 168, 174-175, and Charles M. Scammon, The Marine

Mammals of the North-Western Coast of North America (San Francisco: John H. Carmany and Company, 1874), 29. The

whales have a similar reputation in Alaska. See Willman M. Marquette and Howard W. Braham, “Gray Whale

Distribution and Catch by Alaskan Eskimos: A Replacement for the Bowhead Whale?” Arctic Vol. 35 No. 3 (September

1982):386-394, 392.

989

Igor Krupnik, “The Bowhead vs. the Gray Whale in Chukotkan Aboriginal Whaling,” Arctic Vol. 40, No. 1 (March

1987): 16-32.

990

Data on ancient whaling is from Igor Krupnik, “Gray Whales and the Aborigines of the Pacific Northwest: The

History of Aboriginal Whaling,” in Mary Lou Jones, Steven L. Swartz, and Stephen Leatherwood eds. The Gray Whale:

Eschrichtius robustus (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), 107-109.

991

Ran’awa, in Krupnik ed. Pust’, 175. See also, GAPK F. 633, Op. 4, D. 85, L. 38-39; Scammon, The Marine Mammals,

30-32 and N.O. Kallinikov, Nash krainyi severo-vsotok (Saint Petersburg: Tipografiia Morskogo Ministerstva, 1912), 138-

139. The villages that historically hunted gray whales in Chukotka were ethnically Chukchi, rather than Yupik.

170

It was a tradition that survived even when few gray whales remained. Then it spread, out of

necessity. In the 1840s, commercial whalers discovered grays in Baja lagoons and inlets north along

the California coast. They feared the animals, and called them “devil fish” and “hard heads” for their

tempers, but slaughtered them anyway.

992

So did whalers in the arctic. Gray whales became part of

the great caloric exodus from the northern ocean. By 1910s, market hunting had liquidated roughly

three quarters of Beringia’s walrus, two-thirds of the bowhead population, and turned between

quarter and a third of the gray whales into oil.

993

The industry had also killed itself out of business.

Most Arctic whalers retired in the early twentieth century, the cost of hunting a rare live whale

greater than the value of a dead one. What ships remained made their profits from trading furs, not

killing whales.

994

But cetaceans breed slowly, leaving a long echoing absence in the seas. For coastal peoples,

the absence of marine mammals in general began to make any whale in particular valuable.

995

many communities, whales were the physical manifestation of plenty, a caloric necessity in local

economies. In the early decades of the twentieth century, despite their dislike of the meat’s taste, the

villages of Avan, Naukan, and Ungazik began killing grays, lest famine come to “carry off the

surplus” population.

996

IT WAS THIS world – a world where the surplus, human and otherwise, had been carried off

by commerce – which the communist revolution inherited in 1923. It is also where the Soviets

began to whale. The Bolsheviks came to exile the past, with its drudgery, its backwardness, and its

992

Scammon, The Marine Mammals, 24. Scammon also describes boats charged frequently by “enraged” mother whales;

29. This observation is shared by Ran’awa, in Krupnik ed. Pust', 174-175.

993

For the kill of California grays, see Serge Dedina, Saving the Gray Whale: People, Politics, and Conservation in Baja California

(Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2000), 21. Some of the animals killed in the North Pacific also came from the

so-called Korean stock of gray whales, especially those harvested in the Sea of Okhotsk. For an overview of the

California and Korean hunt’s locations, terminology, and duration, see David A. Henderson, “Nineteenth Century Gray

Whaling: Grounds, Catches and Kills, Practices and Depletion of Whale Population,” in Mary Lou Jones, Steven L.

Swartz, and Stephen Leatherwood eds. The Gray Whale: Eschrichtius robustus (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), 159-

186. For bowhead and walrus kills, see John Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men: The History of Whaling in the Western Arctic

Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986), 346-347.

994

The market for baleen also collapsed in 1908, with the invention of spring-steel and changes in fashion. See

Bockstoce, Whales, Ice, and Men, 336-337. Bockstoce reports that the last bowhead was killed commercially in 1921.

Soviet official reported two bowheads killed by the Northern Pacific Sea Products Company in 1923, although the

source of his information is unclear; GAPK F.633, Op. 4, D. 84, L. 35. The gray whale fishery was also far past its boom

years, although a few were still caught in California and along the U.S. side of the Northern Pacific; see Henderson,

“Nineteenth Century Gray Whaling,” 176.

995

The timing and geography of the gray migration along the Alaska coast made them a rare substitute for bowheads in

North America, grays did come to Chukotka. These estimates are highly approximate, as gray whale hunting tallies by

Inupiat and Yupik hunters are difficult to compile. Gray whales were not part of the oral record like bowheads, and

written records of whale catches in the period are rare. After 1925, only a few gray whales per year were landed in

Alaska. See Marquette and Braham, “Gray Whale Distribution and Catch by Alaskan Eskimos?” 388-392.

996

Waldemar Bogoras, The Chukchee. Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. 11 (New York, NY:

The American Museum of Natural History, 1904), 733. For more on the change to gray whale hunting, see Krupnik,

“The Bowhead vs. the Gray Whale,” 23-25. The dislike of gray whale meat was especially acute at Sereniki, according to

later oral history accounts. See Lyudmila Bogoslovskaya, “The Bowhead Whale off Chukotka: Integration of Scientific

and Traditional Knowledge,” in Allen P. McCartney ed. Indigenous Ways to the Present: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic

(Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute Press, 2003), 209-254, 246-247.

171

misery. They came to substantiate their vision of the future, “by uniting and involving the masses in

socialist construction, aiming for the realization of socialism through the dictatorship of the

proletariat.”

997

And they came expecting to find primitive communists subjected the villainies of the

present, to capitalism that “ruthlessly fleeces and exploits.”

998

In Chukotka the ruthlessness appeared

extreme. There was exploitation, and then there was starvation so routine that, as N. Galkin

observed in 1925, “you do not hear a single word of complaint…if it happens, [the natives] just keep

silent and die.”

999

G. Rudykh was eager to “help people escape their poverty and lack of culture.”

What he found were men and women eating their walrus-hide tents. The revolution was secondary

to “allocating food to the starving population.”

1000

Socialist organizers formed a “worker’s front for

the salvation of the region from famine and economic ruin.”

1001

Nearly every telegram sent south

contained a plea for calories.

1002

While this suffering was terrible, it was also ideologically explicable. The weather might be

bad, supplies of ammunition might be low, but the real culprit was the “industrial-capitalist slaughter

of whales” and other coastal creatures.

1003

And the slaughter had ensnared the Chukchi and Yupik.

“The Americans, having destroyed the creatures along their coasts,” one Committee of the North

report stated, now visited Asia “with inflated prices on highly desirable products, thereby forcing the

natives to intensify and increase the number of animals killed.”

1004

The escalation required new

means of production – boats, harpoons, rifles, ammunition – which the Americans sold on credit,

leaving the robbed in debt to their robbers. Whether or not the robbed saw themselves as such was

beside the point. I. Krivitsyn summarized the Soviet view of the indigenous condition as “Forced

dependence on the kulak merchants, who were vitally interested in the natives being benighted,

cowed, unable to struggle, and economically without power.”

1005

The Soviet solution was to unite the benighted into collectives, wrest the technologies of

whaling from capitalist creditors, drive out American predators, and kill whales for the kolkhozy. In

the 1920s, the cetacean role in the Bolshevik script was as the base for an otherwise nearly baseless

local economy. “To talk about the place of marine animals in the lives of the settled natives is to

speak of the earth and its role in the lives of a Russian peasant,” one Committee of the North report

read. “It is all to them.”

1006

The Yupik and Chukchi, while having a more generous interpretation of

997

B. I. Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’ sovetov na Chukotke 1919-1923 gg.: sbornik dokumentov i materialov (Magadanskoe

Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1967), 105.

998

Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’, 104.

999

N. Galkin, V zemle polunochnogo solntsa (Leningrad: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931), 190.

1000

Mukhachev, Bor’ba za vlast’, 132.

1001

N.A. Zhikharev, V bor’be za sovety na Chukotke: Ocherki istorii bor’by za ustanovlenie Sovetskoi vlasti na Chukotke (Magadan:

Magadanskoe Knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1958), 92.

1002

See for example GARF F. 3997, Op. 1, D. 811, L. 68b; RGIA DV. F R-2413, Op. 4, D. 1798, L. 12; RGIA DV F. R-

2413, Op. 4, D. 39, L. 169.

1003

RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4, D. 39, L. 165. Whale catches were down in the 1920s, but the proximate cause was

probably a lack of ammunition and equipment due to the Soviet displacement of American traders and bad weather

conditions; see Krupnik, “The Bowhead vs. the Gray Whale,” 23-24. There were generally far fewer whales due to the

sustained commercial overharvesting of the nineteenth century which had essentially ceased in the North Pacific in the

1910s.

1004

GARF F. 3997, Op. 1, D. 811, L. 126.

1005

RGIA DV F. R-2333, Op. 1, D. 128, L.372. See also RGIA DV F. R-623, Op. 1, D. 36, L. 1

1006

GARF F. 3997, Op. 1, D. 811, L. 126-126b.

172

arctic production, also wanted to eat whale. And they wanted to hunt with manufactured tools and

motorized boats. By the late 1920s, Soviets could provide some of these things at least some of the

time in some places.

1007

The Yupik convert Mallu recalled assessing the plight of “children without

fathers,” after “a winter when we had hunger, because the sea animals did not come.” His solution:

“I decided to organize a kolkhoz.”

1008

The kolkhozy had a certain sense for coastal peoples. Certainly the communist missionaries

were preoccupied with the use of soap, the disuse of alcohol, and a whole set of rituals having to do

with flags, Lenin, and production plans.

1009

Some native converts like Mallu pressed the glories of

socialism through “a great deal of explanatory work among the population.”

1010

But the state’s ideal

communal economic form allowed that population to carry on more or less as before. Whalers

organized the same hunting parties to kill the same number of whales for the same reasons. When

Soviets went looking for class enemies in the late 1920s, they found ostensible communists,

apparently becoming less primitive by the day. The success, and the pace of change, was not exactly

dizzying. Troubling signals of backwardness beyond the specter of hunger lingered; Bolshevik

teachers lamented the continued potency of “the tradition of [native] unwritten laws.”

1011

But coastal

Chukchi and Yupik recorded and distributed their whale kills with the kolkhoz and learned to read

and went to Soviet meetings to discuss new harpoons or annual hunting plans and listened to

speeches about how “working in socialist organizations… is the only way to build our new life.”

1012

These socialist organizations still had class enemies without. Soviets working in Chukotka

saw whales as a critical answer to the local problem of calories: after all, there could be no life, new

or otherwise, without food. But whales did not choose to die more readily for a communist harpoon

than a capitalist one. The Soviets kept careful track of American vessels working in the North

Pacific. There were only a few in the 1920s, mostly killing fin and humpback whales well south of

Chukotka. But the North Pacific Sea Products Company killed a few bowheads in the Bering Sea.

1013

These reports escalated in scale and rhetoric as they moved west to Moscow. The Committee of the

North estimated that fifty whales were robbed from Soviet waters annually.

1014

One way to deal with such theft was to make the Soviet Union a beneficiary of the spoils.

Imperial Russia left no whaling industry to collectivize for the revolution, and the revolution lacked

1007

RGIA DV F. R-4559, Op. 1, D. 1, L. 43. For more on the formation of collectives, see Igor Krupnik and Michael

Chlenov, Yupik Transitions: Change and Survival at Bering Strait, 1900-1960 (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2013),

237-238. The Soviets struggled to supply Chukotkan villages throughout the 1920s and 1930s – a topic of much

complaint at local party meetings – but by the late 1920s were essentially the only option, the Americans having

abandoned trading on the Russian coast. RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4, D. 974, L. 114-115b.

1008

ChOKM, Matlu, Avtobiografiia (Rasskaz Matliu), Coll. N. 5357, L. 1.

1009

The flags and Lenin, and later Stalin, appear constantly in walrus-tusk carvings that present the history of

Yupik/Chukchi contact with the Soviets.

1010

ChOKM, Matlu, Avtobiografiia (Rasskaz Matliu), Coll. N. 5357, L. 1.

1011

ChOKM, Tikhon Semushkin Collection, “Predvaritel’nye materialy po administrativno-upravlencheskoi strukture na

Chukotke, sovremennomu sovetskomu stroitel’stvu i perspektivam,” 18. Collectivization among the coastal peoples in

Chukotka was remarkably different than the general Soviet experience, from peasants in Ukraine to the reindeer herders

on the nearby tundra. The already existing collective, and sedentary, nature of coastal life seems to have prevented the

outright violence that was the norm elsewhere.

1012

RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4, D. 974, L. 115b.

1013

GAPK F. 633, Op. 4, D. 85, L. 35-37.

1014

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 423, L. 79.

173

ships that could whale. So, in a NEP-era act of commission, the Soviet Union granted the

Norwegian whaling company Vega the rights to hunt with the Comandoren-1 off Kamchatka and

Chukotka in 1923. The Norwegians had to employ some Soviets, obey rules regarding maximally

efficient disposition of whale flesh, and pay five percent of their annual profits to Moscow.

1015

The Vega concession was unpopular among Bolsheviks in Chukotka. First, it was capitalist,

thus ideologically suspect. It was economically wasteful, leading to a “decrease in the whales in the

coastal areas of the Chukchi Peninsula.”

1016

Moreover, the ship killed several hundred whales

annually, “enough for the natives to feed themselves for ten years,” but never brought unused meat

to Yupik villages, a habit of even the most mercenary Americans.

1017

Meanwhile, Chukotkan

collectives only harvested six or eight or ten bowheads each year, and half that many gray whales.

1018

Local Soviets repeatedly blamed Norwegian-inflicted “industrial-capitalist carnage” for native

starvation.

1019

The regional problem of regional hunger became national when Pravda reported, in

graphic olfactory detail, the Norwegian’s “completely pointless slaughter” of a hundred whales.

1020

The Vega’s concession was terminated shortly thereafter.

The sense of capitalist encroachment did not end with the Comandoren-1’s departure.

Capitalist whalers still encircled communist whales. In the long term, the solution was world

communism. In the short term, it meant ending the Vega’s predation in communist waters.

1021

But in

the short term, providing regional caloric security might require transnational negotiation. “We are

not far from a time when it will be necessary to put forth the question of protecting sea animals in

the interest of safeguarding the local population,” wrote A. Bonch-Osmolovskii, “which may be

achieved only by way of an international agreement.”

1022

1015

GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 3, L. 57-61.

1016

RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4, D. 39, L. 165. Capitalist whaling was seen as especially primitive because of the 19

century hunt for baleen, rather than calories; GAPK F. 633, Op. 7, D. 19, L. 69b-70.

1017

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 423, L. 79;

1017

GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 3, L. 72. Mamonov, the director of fisheries in the

Far East, dismissed these reports, noting that killing a hundred whales took too much work to use nothing of the

carcass; L. 73.

The Comandoren-1 was managed by the Norwegian company Vega, and was granted a 15-year concession to whale in the

North Pacific. The Vega’s terms included a ban on killing nursing female whales and use of the entire whale carcass;

GAPK F. 633, Op. 7, D. 19, L. 20-21; GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 3, L. 39-45.

1018

The actual harvests of whales in these years remain incomplete. Krupnik argues that 16-24 whales, with 10-15

bowheads and the rest grays, would have been a good year in the late nineteenth century, meaning that whale harvests

were probably lower in the early Soviet period. How much this contributed to hunger is difficult to tell, as walrus stocks

were also low and the Soviet takeover disrupted trade. See Krupnik, “The Bowhead vs. the Gray Whale,” 23-25.

1019

RGIA DV F. R-2413, Op. 4, D. 39, L. 165; GAPK F. 633, Op. 7, D. 19, L. 54.

1020

GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 3, L. 72. Mamonov, the director of fisheries in the Far East, dismissed these reports, noting

that killing a hundred whales took too much work to use nothing of the carcass; L. 73. See also GAPK F. 633, Op. 7, D.

19, L. 71-72. The Vega did employ some Yupik whalers, who worked in exchange for ammunition and apparently

started a rumor embarrassing to the Soviets that all native firearms had been confiscated.

1021

The Vega’s concession ended in 1927; it was initially granted for 15 years. GAPK F. 633, Op. 7, D. 19, L. 71.

1022

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 11, L. 19.

174

TECHNOLOGIES OF EXCESS, 1920S-1930S

The Soviets were not alone in thinking that whales required coordinated protection.

1023

While

Chukotka’s Bolsheviks tried to make backward people part of the communist future by providing

nineteenth-century means of whaling production, twentieth-century capitalists had devised new ways

of killing and using cetaceans. Engineers, most of them Norwegian, built ships large enough to haul

a whale on deck without sinking and equipped with boilers that rendered fat from muscle, not just

blubber. Evaporators supplied nearly limitless fresh water. Compressors pumped whale carcasses

with air to keep them from sinking before butchering. Powerful motors propelled catcher boats.

Fitted with all manner of winches, pressurizers, hooks, and hoses, modern whaling ships were

mobile industrial disassembly lines.

1024

It was technology that exposed any whale – no matter how

thin, how huge, how distant, or how quick – to human appetites.

It was human appetite that inspired the factory ships. The means of slaughter were novel,

the ends were fundamental. Twentieth century capitalists valued whale flesh because twentieth

century chemists had learned to separate the molecules that made it taste like whale from the

molecules that made it caloric.

1025

Oil lamps and corset stays were passé, but people still ate fat. And

the seas, particularly the Antarctic waters inaccessible to nineteenth century technologies, were alive

with blubber. Fleets from the United Kingdom and Norway ate through thousands of whales a year.

By the 1930s, forty percent of the margarine Britons and Northern Europeans spread on their toast

came from whales.

1026

Such a market made companies like the British conglomerate Unilever very rich. It also

threatened to make the oceans very poor. This fact was hardly lost on whalers, scientists, diplomats,

or anyone else familiar with the industry’s past. Because factory ships killed most of their prey in

international waters, preventing what the U.S. State Department called “the indiscriminate slaughter

1023

Here and elsewhere in this chapter I am venturing into the growing literature on twentieth century international

efforts to coordinate whale hunting and whale conservation, mostly focused on Antarctica. Several recent books treat

aspects of this story with a thoroughness beyond the scope of this chapter. For a detailed, if British and U.S.-focused

account of the diplomatic history, see Kurkpatrick Dorsey, Whales and Nations: Environmental Diplomacy on the High Seas

(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2014). D. Graham Burnett’s The Sounding of the Whale: Science and Cetaceans in the

Twentieth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2012), describes in vigorous detail the scientific community’s (again,

mostly British and American) involvement in whaling and whale policy. Frank Zelko talks about environmentalist anti-

whaling campaigns in Make it a Green Peace!: The Rise of Countercultural Environmentalism (New York: Oxford University

Press, 2013). The actions of Russia and Japan remain rather opaque in both books, as the authors did not work in non-

English archives. For an account of the Japanese case, see Jun Morikawa, Whaling in Japan: Power, Politics, and Diplomacy

(New York: Columbia University Press, 2009). Ryan Tucker Jones’ work-in-progress should offer a much needed

discussion of Russian Antarctic whaling. There is a tendency in these books to celebrate the (mostly) elite (mostly) white

men who championed conservation, either as diplomats, scientists, or environmental activists, a perspective that ascribes

the why of whaling to fairly unexamined market forces (or the black box of communism) and forecloses on human-whale

interactions beyond those of factory-ship harvesting or conservation. Indigenous whaling is generally a small part of

these stories. Anthropologists like Tom Lowenstein are of course an exception; a corrective from the historians is Joshua

Reid’s excellent, U.S.-based discussion of contested aboriginal and contemporary animal rights ideas in The Sea is My

Country: The Maritime World of the Makahs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015). All of these books are generally treat

industrial whaling as a mistake; for a provocative if unconvincing argument for industrial whaling, see Arne Kalland,

Unveiling the Whale: Discourses on Whales and Whaling (New York: Berghahn Books, 2009).

1024

For more on the development of this technology, see Dorsey, Whales and Nations, chapter one.

1025

Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 21-22.

1026

Undated letter, Leonard Carmichael to Robert Murphy, SI RU 7165, Box 23, Folder 6.

175

of the kind that has been practiced in the past” required international coordination.

1027

The reasons

to curtail the slaughter varied between countries. The British and Norwegians wanted to protect

cetacean economic worth: too many dead whales drove down profits, too few drove away

consumers. In the United States, where blubber buttered very little bread, whale value was set for

the government and the general public by the Council for the Conservation of Whales.

1028

The

Council’s members, mostly scientists from the Bureau of Biological Survey, the Smithsonian, and the

American Museum of Natural History, stretched the utilitarian arguments of Progressive-era

conservation beyond the fiscal. Whales, “the greatest beasts that ever lived,” carried in their beings

medical secrets and evolutionary mysteries. As the Council argued in one of their frequent and

coordinated press releases, “it would be a scientific as well as an economic catastrophe if whales

should be exterminated.”

1029

Whales were valuable as an object of human knowledge.

Neither the British nor Norwegians, nor the Council for the Conservation of Whales, were

making an argument like that emanating from Chukotka, about human beings dying because they

had been robbed of blubber. But like Bonch-Osmolovskii, Europeans and Americans saw value in

continued cetacean existence, and believed such existence required international action. In 1931,

delegates signed the Convention for the Regulation of Whaling in Geneva. The Soviets were not

present; the issue of whaling was pressing in Chukotka but not in a Moscow dizzy with the successes

and excesses of the First Five Year Plan. The Convention called for further biological research, and

said nothing about quotas or limits beyond requiring that whalers maximize their use of each whale,

avoid hunting nursing calves and mothers, and eschew killing the species most recently decimated by

commercial whaling, the bowheads and right whales.

1030

In language familiar to anyone used to the

Bureau of Biological Survey’s game laws, indigenous people were an exception. Or they were so long

as they acted as the Convention assumed aboriginals should: employing “exclusively native” tools

and selling no part of their catch.

1031

By 1931, the actual aboriginal people whaling along Alaska’s coasts only partly met the ideal

definition of their lives devised in Geneva. Inupiat and Yupik hunters did not use walrus-tusk

harpoons. They did use motors and guns. They only abdicated from the market because the market

for baleen or the occasional barrel of whale oil no longer existed along the Bering Strait. The villages

1027

Robert Philips to Wilbur Carr, September 19 1930, NARA MD RG 59, Department of State Decimal File 1930-

1939, File 562.8F1. For a discussion of why whale fat was preferred, economically, over vegetable fats available at the

time see Mark Cioc, The Game of Conservation: International Treaties to Protect the World’s Migratory Animals (Athens, 2009),

132–133.

1028

Dorsey makes this point regarding the U.S. ability to take science seriously over profit, adding that the New

Zealanders were concerned about the biological future of whales for similar reasons. He also argues, quite convincingly,

that the U.S. State Department actually cared very little about whales at this point and was pushed to send a delegate to

negotiate at all by the CCW. See Whales and Nations, 40-45. This is a highly cursory account of the negotiations and

personalities involved in 1930s whaling negotiations. For a truly expansive discussion of the American scientists

involved, see Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, chapter three; the diplomatic history is well-treated in Dorsey’s first

chapter.

1029

“The Value of Whales to Science,” SI RU 7170, Box 10, Folder: “Information – Whale Press Releases.” The

Council’s affiliations with Progressive-era conservation ideas ran deep, and Gifford Pinochet was a member.

1030

Mark Cioc argues that the treaty avoided issues like whaling restrictions or closed seasons because the U.K. and

Norway were protecting the interests of their industries; The Game of Conservation, 128.

1031

“Regulation of Whaling,” NARA MD RG 59, Department of State Decimal File 1930-1939, File 562.8F1/25.

Indigenous use exceptions were also part of legislation regarding walrus use and that of other game animals.

176

that once enthusiastically sold whale’s teeth now sold fox’s skins.

1032

But whales still fed people. And,

as had been true for centuries, cetacean value went beyond calories. In transiting from life to death,

whales substantiated the social and spiritual worlds of their Inupiat and Yupik killers. The labor of

doing this was how people constituted their lives. The work of hunting and butchering made

someone a true human, because work made people responsible to the wider family of beings, human

and otherwise. There could be no families without food, no food without whales, and no whales

without work done with respect.

1033

Such labor was hard, continuous, and necessary. It was also

celebratory. As Paul Silook wrote in his diary on St. Lawrence Island, along with notes about trading

furs, selling ivory, fleshing walrus skins and the coming and going of people, one day the “wind

begins to blow hard and we hauled our whaleboats to our boat racks to have worship of whaling,

which we always have.”

1034

Cetaceans composed a human world both quotidian and transcendent.

ON THE SOVIET side of the Strait, parts of these rituals continued. Oleg Einetegin described

the whaling festivals of his childhood “being a full day long, with dancing.”

1035

Some were for gray

whales, most for bowheads.

1036

But the ceremonies were fading. The first generation of Yupik and

coastal Chukchi children taught in Soviet schools joined Russian-speaking communists and men like

Mallu in agitating for the civilizer’s desires – literacy, punctuality, cleanliness, women’s equality – and

the missionary’s aspiration, participation in local “groups of the Bolshevik party.”

1037

The

missionaries, native or imported, had the material prestige of the socialist state behind them, and the

metaphysical prestige of preaching a new world order. In that order there was no space for whale

kills divided by hunting prowess or age; boat captains and elders had to get “their share of the catch

in the same quantity as any of the rowers,” as one Soviet school teacher described, an act of socialist

“leveling out.”

1038

So there also no space to celebrate. Festivals, as Andrei Kukilgin put it, “had to be

thrown out altogether,” simply “because the Soviet Union had been created.”

1039

Some, like

Kukilgin, found both this reason and the activists that endorsed it idiotic. Others carried on in

1032

For an overview of the catch numbers and patterns in northwestern Alaska, see W.M. Marquette and J.R. Bockstoce,

“Historical Shore Based Catch of Bowhead Whales in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort Seas,” Marine Fisheries Review

Vol. 42 No. 9-10 (1980): 5-19.

1033

For an excellent description of the work-social relationship, see Carol Zane Jolles, Faith, Food, and Family in Yupik

Whaling Community (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 314-316. Although distinct in many ways, the

relationship between good work, done with attention and without laziness, was part of Inupiat ritual as well; see Tom

Lowenstein, The Things that Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1992), 29-33.

1034

APRCA, Otto W. Geist Collection, Series 5, Box 9, Folder 40: Paul Silook Diary 1935 (?), p. 7. Paul Silook kept

dairies for several anthropologists who worked on St. Lawrence Island, a practice he continued after they departed.

These diaries give a strong sense of the place whaling had in structuring the annual round on St. Lawrence Island. For a

description of his life and anthropological contributions, which were considerable, see Carol Zane Jolles, “Paul Silook’s

Legacy: The Ethnohistory of Whaling on St. Lawrence Island” in Allen P. McCartney ed. Hunting the Largest Animals:

Native Whaling in the Western Arctic and Subarctic (Edmonton: Canadian Circumpolar Institute, 1995), 221-252.

1035

Oleg Einetegin, in Krupnik, Pust’, 172. Einetegin notes that by the 1940s, people were no longer observing the full

festival, but doing shortened versions.

1036

Krupnik reports the ceremonial significance of whales in the 1930s in “The Bowhead vs. the Gray Whale,” 23-25.

1037

ChOKM, Matlu, Avtobiografiia (Rasskaz Matliu), Coll. N. 5357, L. 2.

1038

Katerina Sergeeva, “V Urelikskom natssovete (Bukhta Provideniia),” Sovetskii sever Vol. 1 (1935): 95-101, 97.

1039

Andrei Kukilgin, in Krupnik Pust’, 267.

177

secret.

1040

Some young people flourished. For all, Stalin’s revolution filtered out to the far Soviet

edge to transform the social expression of whaling. The regional understanding of whales as critical

to feeding human bodies was now inflected with a national desire to use them as raw material for

Soviet construction.

The world that whales composed for the Soviets by the early 1930s was the world of the

plan. Plans forecasted production of everything from cows to grain to reindeer and blubber, and

production forecasted the arrival of socialism. In 1925, production plans, such as they existed in

villages like Uelen and Sireniki, were local in origin and existential in need: the emphasis was on

killing enough calories to not die. In 1928, when the First Five Year Plan made prognosticating the

numerical construction of communism a national task, there was discussion of how much the sea off

Chukotka could reasonably produce. Whale harvests, the Committee of the North concluded, had

decreased in size “year by year, the natural result of [the Comandoren-1’s] excessive slaughter of

young and runty animals.”

1041

The Committee recommended better boats, motors, and harpoons for

native hunters, but acknowledged that people needed whales, whales had limits, so there were limits

to number of whales people could plan on killing. Hundreds per year was unreasonable, but dozens

were essential. Chukotka was not so many years distant from hunger.

The first Five Year Plan ended in four years. Socialism was being constructed so quickly it

defied expectations, even those set by Gosplan in Moscow. In Chukotka, the era of the Second Five

Year Plan saw the threat of regional famine wane. Whale harvests more than doubled, from five or

so a year to ten, fifteen, even twenty in 1934.

1042

It was the weather that likely improved the hunt,

not Stalin. But more whales could be folded into a waxing moment of socialist glory. Across the

Soviet Union, this glory was evidenced in feats of construction and increased production.

Production was idea made real: the communist promise of a new world built by collective human

enterprise. The extant, present fact of production was pushed into the future by the plan. When the

plan was met, it measured the fact of socialist progress; when exceeded, it measured the quickening

approach of utopia. Workers who produced over plan were heroes; those who could not make their

interest, intellect, muscles, and materials meet the plan were wreckers and saboteurs. If everyone

pulled together in a communist unit, the twenty whales killed this year would become fifty the next.

2031 dead, skinned, rendered walrus would become 3948. Plans were scientifically precise: in 1932

there were 1900 workers involved with hunting and processing sea mammals, but by 1937 there

would be 2156. The number of electrical workers in Chukotka would increase from ten to 159. No

one labored on “local building materials” in 1932, but 238 people would in five years.

1043

The

1040

Andrei Kukilgin, in Krupnik Pust’, 266-267. For a fuller description of what collectives did to traditional clan

organization, see Krupnik and Chlenov, Yupik Transitions, 255-259.

1041

GARF F. 3799, Op. 1 D. 423, L. 79.

1042

For harvest data on gray and bowhead whales, see Igor Krupnik and Ludmila Bogoslovskaia, Ecosystem Variability and

Anthropogenic Hunting Pressure in the Bering Strait Area (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution 1998), 109-110. The

species breakdown during this period is unclear; most are probably bowheads, with some gray whales. N.B Shnakenburg

estimated that about 40% of the whales killed between 1923-1932 were grays; see “Kitovyi promysel na Chukotke,”

Tikhookeanskaya zvezda Vol. 259 (1933): 3.

1043

This example is from GARF F. 3799, Op. 1, D. 819, L. 70, but such planning documents are thick on the archival

ground.

178

arbitrary exactitude seemed scientific, the science seemed rational, and so the plan was the logical

guide and measure of the future.

The thing that made the plan accelerate was industry. Factories, and the grand conflagration

of human and fuel energy that made them churn, were the physical prerequisite to “increasing… the

tempo of progress toward a prosperous, cultured life.”

1044

In this view, the industrial aspect of

industrial-capitalist slaughter was not just acceptable, it was desirable. So was slaughter. “A massive

number of baleen and sperm whales swim in the Arctic Ocean,” wrote one planner, “where an

industrial fleet should be sent… coal from Anadyr can extend the duration and radius of the

voyage.”

1045

If their hunting ceased to be capitalist, whales would not just fend off starvation

regionally. And if whaling ceased to be merely regional, it could feed soviet industry. A whale gave

“between 15-20 thousand kilos of fat...this fat could be used for technological purposes.”

1046

Anything that could be put to technological purposes needed to be, and quickly. As I.D.

Dobrovol’skii concluded, “the economy of our Union demands greater urgency in order to boost

the forces of the Far East in the development of whaling.”

1047

The value of a dead whale was not

just saving a few villages at the end of the Soviet earth. Blubber was potential fuel for national

construction.

What the Soviets needed was a ship. Confined to “narrow coastal bases,” as Dobrovol’skii

wrote, hunters had no access to the cetacean wealth congregated “in most cases outside our

territorial waters.”

1048

Shore whaling as practiced by the Chukchi and Yupik sufficient for local

production, but could never process enough whales to be a real industry. In 1932, a repurposed

American cargo ship christened the Aleut and attended by three Norwegian catcher boats, the

Trudfront, Avangard and Entuziast, left Leningrad. It was bound for the Bering Sea; Soviet whaling

began where American whaling ended. On the twenty-fifth of October, the fifteenth anniversary of

the Bolshevik Revolution, the crew made the Soviet Union’s first pelagic kill off the coast of

Mexico.

1049

It was an immature fin whale. “We were deeply excited,” wrote B.A. Zenkovich, a

biologist on the Aleut. “Today begins a new chapter in the history of an old fishing country – Soviet

whaling. We are the witnesses and active creators of the birth of the industry.”

1050

In 1933, the Aleut began working the summer edge of the pack ice north from Kamchatka.

The communist plan for whales had moved out of villages with their small boats and aboard ship.

1051

This ship was a difficult place to live, and to work. The Aleut was not designed to be long at sea, and

1044

GARF F. 5446, Op. 18, D. 3404, L. 3.

1045

GARF F. 3799, Op. 1, D. 819, L. 37.

1046

GARF F. 3977, Op. 1, D. 11, L. 40.

1047

GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 43, L. 28.

1048

GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 43, L. 27.

1049

The 25

is the October Revolution’s anniversary in the Julian calendar. The first nine chapters of B.A. Zenkovich’s

memoir of whaling, Vokrug sveta za kitami (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo geograficheskoi literatury, 1954) talk

about the voyage from Leningrad to the Pacific; see also Viacheslav Ivanitskii’s biography of the Aleut’s first captain, A.

Dudnik, Zhil otvazhnyi kapitan (Vladivostok: Dal’nevostochnoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1990), 88-94. Ivanitskii and

Zenkovich’s books seem to be the basis for A.A. Berzin’s description of these events in “The Truth about Soviet

Whaling” trans. Yulia Ivashchenko, Marine Fisheries Review Vol. 70 No. 2 (2008): 4-59. Berzin’s later focus was on his

experience whaling in the 1950s and later; he wrote his recollections in 1994.

1050

Zenkovich, Vogrug sveta, 47.

1051

Plans for native whaling production disappear by the late 1930s; whales are recorded but not planned for, perhaps

because whale fat was regularly delivered by the Aleut by the mid-1930s. See GAMO F. R-22, Op. 1, D. 94, L. 176.

179

so was constantly short of fresh water. Powered by coal, the engine belched dust that thickened

whale gore to a blackish paste on deck. Inside, the ship was cramped, infested with cockroaches, and

stifling, as whale effluvia from the deck oozed in through any open porthole. Inside and out, the

smell was formidable.

1052

The experience of the crew was not. Most were Russian, most could read,

and most were men, but Aleut’s crew included women, Fins, Ukrainians, Jews, Tatars, Poles and the

occasional American.

1053

Some were married, some got pregnant at sea, some came from fishing

boats. But they were not generally people familiar with whaling. On the Aleut and its catchers, the

crews had to learn the same cetacean indicators as nineteenth-century sailors: the distinct shape of

fin whale’s spout in comparison to a gray or sperm; the tell-tale slick of schooling krill; how sea birds

flock where humpbacks feed; the protective, desperate roil of a mother whale cut off from her

infant.

1054

Unlike the commercial ships that first hunted the Arctic, the Soviet fleet was not limited to

slaughtering slow fatty animals. In the 1930s, they killed fin whales, sperm whales, humpback

whales, blue whales, gray whales, and the occasional right or bowhead whale. Even orcas were

sometimes targets.

1055

But the industrial hunt was assembled from the same practical actions as its

wind-powered predecessor. The Aleut had to find prey, kill it, and rend the carcass into constituent

parts: blubber for oil, meat for canning or freezing, bone for meal.

1056

Industrial catcher boats were

fast, but not always maneuverable enough to keep pace with the dives and turns of a fleeing whale.

Zenkovich once spent six hours chasing fins in a circle, never close enough for the harpooner to fire

a true shot; the only struck whale spouted blood before disappearing.

1057

Industrial harpoons were

charged with gunpowder and anchored to motorized winches, but as one harpooner reported, “a

whale hauled to the very prow of the ship can, with a sudden jerk, break [the cable] and flee.”

1058

And then there was the dismemberment. “It turns out that to kill a whale is easier than to process

it,” Berzin recalled. “People could not do simple things: turning the carcass from one side to the

other during the flensing, finding the joint to separate the head from the body, separating a spine

into parts.”

1059

What should become of the carcass was not yet clear. When the fleet worked near Chukotka,

they brought fresh whale meat ashore, where, as one whaler reported, the “Eskimos know the Aleut

1052

See Berzin, “Truth,” 9-10; GAPK F. 1196 Op. 1, D. 227, L. 91-92.

1053

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 227, L. 13-14;

1054

Zenkovich’s role as a scientist with the Aleut fleet was in large part to document these biological and behavioral

lessons for the Soviet Union; in addition to his book, the archives in Vladivostok contain many of his 1930s reports on

whale behavior. See GAKP F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 9; GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 197.

1055

Bowhead whales killed during the 1930s were apparently unintended; a report from 1944 notes that three had been

killed since the inception of industrial whaling “had to be regarded as an accident” since the stocks of the animals were

so low evening seeing one was rare; GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 212, L. 5. For a full count of the whales killed by the

Soviet fleet in the North Pacific, see Y.V. Ivashchenko, P.J. Clapham, and R.L. Brownell Jr., “Soviet Catches of Whales

in the North Pacific: Revised Totals,” Journal of Cetacean Resource Management Vol. 13 No. 1 (2013): 59-71.

1056

These different products were not produced consistently each year in the 1930s; sometimes the Aleut fleet lacked

canning facilities or access to freezers and concentrated on blubber refining and limited bone meal production; see for

example GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1. D. 1, L. 34-37; GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 221, L. 2-7.

1057

Zenkovich, Vogrug sveta, 130-132.

1058

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 221, L. 11.

1059

Berzin, “Truth,” 10.

180

well.”

1060

Supplying Chukotka’s regional needs was not, however, the primary ambition of the fleet: it

was supposed to manufacture nationally useful products. The Aleut went to sea outfitted with

pressure cookers to preserve whale meat, “which when canned has the same quality as beef.”

1061

But

whale flesh putrefied so quickly that within a few years the assembly line could not keep pace with

the killing. Blubber too spoiled within a half day, or turned acidic in processing. There was not

always the proper equipment to boil the bones.

1062

Depending on the weather, the harpooner, the

vessel’s condition, and the size of the daily kill, the fleet might lack the “the means or opportunity to

save the raw product.”

1063

No one thought this was ideal. “To whale effectively,” wrote

Dobrovol’skii, required the “full utilization of the carcass of the beasts.”

1064

But there was no time to

wait for technical ability to match ideological appetite. In the breach, much of the cetacean tonnage

hauled rudely from the ocean dribbled rudely back down the spillway, leaving a trail of gore on the

sea.

Despite harpoons that missed whale backs, whale backs that sunk before they could be

butchered, and butchery that was too slow to salvage whales for human use, the labor of slaughter

did produce measurable progress, or at least something to measure. Each season, the Aleut’s reports

put the quantitative results of the catch into every possible permutation: the number of males and

females of each species killed; the size of the whales killed; the size of the whales compared to the

year previously; the size of the whales in comparison to each other; the total fat, meat, and meal

produced by each species; the total fat, meat, and meal produced that year and in comparison to

previous years; the quantity of raw fat and meat; the quantity of processed conserves and meal; the

total number of whales killed by month; killed by location; and killed by each catcher boat. And

above all, the reports noted the number of whales killed against the planned harvest. In 1933, the

Aleut fleet took 204 whales, more the double the plan. Two years later, the number jumped to 484,

again well over the 300 planned.

1065

Acts of creative division made it possible to be over plan in the

number of whales killed but under plan for the totals of raw products, or under plan for raw

products and overproduce canned meat.

1066

Numbers were both irrefutable and malleable in their

representation of progress.

No matter the creative acts of division, the plan kept growing. In 1936, 501 whales died. The

plan demanded 495.

1067

Captain A. Dudnik could proclaim the plan reached 101.4% fulfillment, and

was awarded the Order of Lenin for his labors.

1068

But in the same year, he warned that plan targets

needed to be curtailed, or meeting them would be impossible.

1069

The season was too short and the

1060

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 227, L. 26.

1061

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 1, L. 18.

1062

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 1, L. 19-20; Berzin, “Truth,” 10-12.

1063

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 212, L. 1.

1064

GAPK F. 633, Op. 5, D. 43, L. 28.

1065

Plan numbers from GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 3, L. 64b-65; harvest totals in Ivashchenko et. al., “Soviet Catches of

Whales in the North Pacific,” 63. Ivashchenko and Clapham have done the important and unenviably labor-intensive

work of sorting through Soviet whaling statistics for accurate catch totals.

1066

See for example GAPK. F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 226, L. 12-15; GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 4, L. 2-7. This accounting is in

every annual report, however, and usually goes on for dozens of pages.

1067

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 3, L. 65.

1068

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 3, L. 64b.

1069

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 1, L. 9b.

181

equipment too frail to demand more. And in 1937, the Aleut failed to fill its quota. It was a terrible

year to disappoint the plan. The momentum of the purges was spiraling outward from the party

select in Moscow to selections from every population in the Soviet Union. Under-production had

become an act of internal treason. In 1938, the Eighth City Party Congress in Vladivostok pledged

to fully “liquidate the consequences of sabotage and badly completed economic plans…by cleaning

enemies of the people from the party ranks.”

1070

A few weeks later, Dudnik was arrested on the

gangway of the Aleut. He spent the next six years in prison.

1071

THUS ON THE eve of the Second World War, the fault of decreasing harvests was a matter of

politics. Biology was not a particular impediment. Soviet scientists had learned enough on the Aleut’s

deck, and from talking to native whalers, to conclude that killing immature whales “should be

declared illegal,” especially since the Aleut could count on “the tens of hundreds” of adult whales

elsewhere. Research in general signaled a promising future: fin whale harvests alone could increase

by four hundred animals per year.

1072

More scientific knowledge of whale migrations and

concentrations might even increase the catch.

1073

Other than ideological wreckers and saboteurs, the

biggest issue was technology. “The failure of the fleet to meet the state’s plan in the 1937-1940

seasons,” one report noted in 1941, “is attributable solely to organizational and various other

defects” that included accidents, weather, insufficient fuel and supplies, and “seemingly small things

like the captains’ irrational gear, which does not protect them from water.”

1074

An insufficient haul,

on any given voyage, was the fault of insufficient technology, or knowledge - or worst, of

communist commitment. When voyages met plan, it was because, as Dudnik’s successor Captain

Egorov put it, “the Stakhanovite collective of the whaling fleet” managed an “intensity of whale

slaughter much higher than in all previous years.”

1075

On the deck of the Aleut any dead whale was a

good whale, because dead whales were proof of devotion, a material tally of captain and crew

correctly following the line of the plan - the plan that counted, and counted toward, the construction

of the future.

CALORIC VALUES, 1940S-1950S

There are many ways for an animal to survive the tempers of the open ocean. Jellyfish exist as no

more than a tissue. Squids take on the color of their surroundings. Fish school by the thousands and

spawn by the millions. Cetaceans’ way of living requires in bulk, longevity, and knowledge built

through experience. Like humans, some whale species pool and share this knowledge between

generations and across space. The worth of a place, the route of a journey, or the results of an action

1070

Ivanitskii, Zhil otvazhnyi kapitan, 129.

1071

Ivanitskii’s full and rather hagiographic account of Dudnik’s downfall is in Zhil otvazhnyi kapitan, 122-137.

1072

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 207, L. 64, 32-33.

1073

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 4, L. 116.

1074

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 9, L. 269.

1075

RGAE F. 8202, Op. 3, D. 1132, L. 108.

182

is inherited in the genetic code, but through communication.

1076

Some of this transmission is aural.

Sound reaches out where the yawning vastness of the ocean curtails sight or touch. Species like

humpbacks and bowheads spool out long, syntactically complex songs.

1077

Their social world is loose

and diffused in space. Gray whales do not have songs but signal each other in tones so low they

circumvent ambient biological noise. They will approach an outboard motor with curiosity, emitting

sounds that match the sputtering mechanical frequency.

1078

Sperm whales communicate through

clicks and creaks, sounds that young calves babble before they can articulate sense. The sounds they

master are their clan’s dialect, a vocabulary they share with thousands of other sperm whales over

thousands of kilometers and which anchors sperm’s identity in marine space.

1079

The knowledge of

how to communicate, taken along with the other tactics of the habitat from migrating and feeding to

taking a sunbath, forms the culture of a cetacean community.

1080

But much of what whales speak

exists beyond the human ken. It could be to lure, to entertain, to love, to protect, or to trumpet joy.

Because whales do not rework stone or metal or pigment, some sounds may be the sonic form of

things human cultures sculpt or forge or paint. Others are likely to warn.

If whales do sing songs of warning, the 1930s would have been reason for new notes of

caution. International whaling diplomacy had not curtailed the commercial persecution of cetaceans.

Communist whaling was small compared to the thirty or more Norwegian and British factory ships

hunting the world’s oceans, mostly in Antarctic waters. German and Japan joined them in the late

1930s.

1081

Diplomats, scientists, and whaling industrialists met and argued as the decade waned: did

whales deserve preservation for science or for industry? Should there be quotas assigned to nations?

Could there be quotas, given the jurisdictional issues of international harvesting? Did whales of any

value alive?

1082

The answer to the latter question was yes, but in theory. Around thirty thousand

whales died in the 1935 season. With rate of increase worthy of a communist plan, global totals

jumped to over forty five thousand whales in 1938.

1083

The industry was imperiling itself, again. And

1076

This paragraph draws where not referenced otherwise, from Whitehead and Rendell’s remarkable Cultural Lives of

Whales and Dolphins, especially chapters four, ten and eleven.

1077

Ryuji Suzuki, John Buck, and Peter Tyack, “Informational Entropy of Humpback Whale Songs,” Journal of the

Acoustical Society of America Vol. 119 No. 3 (2006): 1849-1866; Whitehead and Rendell, Cultural Lives of Whales and Dolphins

84-97.

1078

Marilyn Dahlheim, H. Dean Fisher, and James Schempp, “Sound Production by the Gray Whale and Ambient

Noise Levels in Laguna San Ignacio, Baja California Sur, Mexico,” in Mary Lou Jones, Steven L. Swartz, and Stephen

Leatherwood eds. The Gray Whale: Eschrichtius robustus (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1984), 511-541.

1079

T.M Schultz, H. Whitehead, S. Gero, and L. Rendell, “Individual Vocal Production in a Sperm Whale (Physeter

macrosephalus) Social Unit,” Marine Mammal Science Vol. 27 (2010): 148-166., Whitehead and Rendell, Cultural Lives of

Whales and Dolphins, 146-158.

1080

Cetacean researcher Toshio Kasuya makes this argument for the link between communities of knowledge

transmission and culture, as do Whitehead and Rendell. See “The Kenneth S. Norris Lifetime Achievement Award

Lecture: Presented on 29 November 2007, Cape Town, South Africa,” Marine Mammal Science Vol. 24 (2008): 749-773.

Kasuya calls for preserving the “cultural diversity” of whale species, beyond simple biological diversity.

1081

Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 291-292.

1082

Discussions of international whaling meetings are from SI RU 7165, Box 3, Folder 6, “London- International

Whaling Commission 1937”; SI RU 7165 Box 5, Folder 5, “London- International Whaling Conference, 1938”; and SI

RU 7156, Box 5, Folder 2, “London-International Whaling Conference 1939 – U.S. Delegation Correspondence.”

1083

Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 291-292. This is a considerable over-simplification of the diplomatic and industrial

debates of the time; for a more complete treatment, see Dorsey, Whales and Nations, chapter 2; and Burnett, The Sounding

of the Whale, 330-336.

183

again, as Smithsonian scientist Remington Kellogg put it, “The commercial aspects [of whaling]

seem to have outweighed the biological.”

1084

The commercial whalers were also outweighing the communists. In 1940, the marine

biologist B. A. Zenkovich wrote to Stalin in alarm: not because too many whales were dying, but

because not enough Soviets were their killers. Capitalists and fascists, Zenkovich argued, were

outpacing the Aleut at time when “our country needs fat, especially fats like those of whales, with

wide food and industrial applications.”

1085

His letter set the course of national ambitions: Zenkovich

wanted additional ships to whale the North Pacific, a fleet to hunt in Antarctic waters, and shore-

based stations in the Kirill Islands. The People’s Commissariat for Fisheries began studying the

costs.

1086

But their plans were interrupted by the Second World War. There was no time or labor to

build anything not sent to the front. From pole to pole, industrial combat between humans

diminished the industrial combat between humans and whales. Factory ships joined convoys, catcher

boats were repurposed as minesweepers. Like their crews, many did not survive the war.

1087

The

result was relative peace in the cetacean Antarctic. In the North Pacific, the Aleut did not sail in 1942

or 1943, and killed only a few whales in 1944.

The decrease in whaling was not for lack of need. Spermaceti, the fluid in the bulbous front

of a sperm whale’s skull, had various military applications. The U.S. War Productions Board

requested that the American Pacific Whaling Company, one of the few commercial enterprises in

the U.S., produce as much oil as possible. The Company complied, noting that “if we don’t take the

whales Japan will get them.”

1088

The few wartime seasons when British fleets were able to hunt, they

killed any whale, any time, and any place, regardless of international agreements, to satiate the

“scarcity of fats and proteins.”

1089

Food was even scarcer in the Soviet Union. By 1942, the

Wehrmacht occupied most of the U.S.S.R.’s best agricultural land. It was a moment of productive

panic, not just to prove fealty to the communist future but to survive the embattled present.

1090

Everything, in Stalin’s words, was for the front. No species was beyond recruitment for human

consumption, because it was human consumption that would “crush the war machines of the fascist

invaders and German occupiers.”

1091

Fisheries experts began developing recipes for seal-meat

sausage, beluga-whale brisket, smoked dolphin kielbasa, and tinned baleen whale hash.

1092

The major

problem, according the Red Army’s director of supplies for the Pacific, was the “peculiar smell of

whale meat.” His solution was to “add more spice.”

1093

1084

“ICW 1938 /19/fifth session,” SI RU 7165 Box 5, Folder 5, page 2.

1085

GARF F. 5446, Op. 24a, D. 614, L. 3-4.

1086

GARF F. 5446, Op. 24a, D. 614, L. 1l.

1087

Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 97.

1088

M.A. Lagen to Chas. E. Jackson, April 13 1942, SI RU 7165 Box 6, Folder 4. The U.S. also used Norwegian factory

vessels to hunt sperm whales in secret in 1941; see Dorsey Whales and Nations, 97.

1089

Chamber of Shipping of the United Kingdom, August 1945, “The Future of Whaling,” p. 4, NARA MD RG 43,

Entry 242.

1090

For a discussion of the hunger caused during the war years in the Soviet Union, see Wendy Goldman and Donald

Filtzer eds. Hunger and War: Food Provisioning in the Soviet Union During World War II (Bloomington: Indiana University

Press, 2015), especially Filtzer and Goldman “Introduction: the Politics of Food and War,” 1-43; and Brandon Schechter

“The State’s Pot and the Soldier’s Spoon: Rations (paek) in the Red Army,” 98-157.

1091

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 7, L. 36.

1092

RGAE F. 8202, Op. 3, D. 1166, L. 35-36.

1093

RGAE F. 8202, Op. 3, D. 1166, L. 104.

184

The other problem was the act of making whales into meat. For most of the war, the only

Soviet people killing cetaceans were in Chukotka’s collectives. These collectives, like any in the

wartime Soviet Union, were expected to “give the country more bread, more meat, and more raw

materials.”

1094

Speeches about destroying the fascists were followed by detailed production plans, the

number of dead marine mammals trialing upward toward victory.

1095

Even shore whaling, written off

in the 1930s as primitive, might have a place. “It is possible to increase the production and

profitability of maritime collectives several times over,” one Party expert reported in 1941,

particularly by hunting seals and “developing whaling.”

1096

There was no Aleut to hunt at sea, but by

“multiplying the number of dvukhsotniki, and by leading in socialist competition, and in the

Stakhanovite movement,” Chukotkan collectives could do their part for the front.

1097

The rhetoric

was of the communist factory, but the means were not. Petrol, ammunition, and outboard motors

were scarce. Whaleboats and harpoons, purchased decades earlier from American traders, were

decrepit.

1098

Between 1941 and 1944, Yupik and Chukchi collectives killed only six bowhead whales

and fifteen grays.

1099

“Here, comrades,” one of Chukotka’s Party leaders admonished in 1942, “we

have extremely poor results, as the plan for sea mammal harvests in our region is not filled… in

1941 it was only 72.6% complete,” a percentage that had to exceed one hundred percent in order to

“completely defeat the fascist hordes.”

1100

The Second World War created massive and unmet need for calories in the Soviet Union.

Among a certain set of Soviets – one that extended from Stalin with his letter promising vast fat

resources to fisheries specialists with their cetacean meatball recipes to Chukotkan collectives with

their rusting harpoons – this translated into a massive and unmet national need for whales. It was an

idea that outlasted the war. In 1945, the Red Army took possession of a German factory whaler

suitable for Antarctic voyages and relaunched the Aleut in the North Pacific. A year later, a Soviet

delegation arrived unannounced in Washington, D.C, where diplomats, scientists, and industry

representatives from other whaling nations were negotiating postwar rules for whaling.

THE UNITED STATES did not host the 1946 meeting out of national ambition to launch

factory ships. Most whalers in America were aboriginal, lived in Alaska, and the whales they killed

were, to the Departments of Interior and State alike, a regional necessity but a federal

afterthought.

1101

But the US came out of the war with a radically expanded international role, from

Bretton Woods fiscal diplomacy to a military that occupied swaths of hungry Europe and Asia.

Whaling cut across both. As Douglas MacArthur made clear in his message from surrendered Japan

1094

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 7, L. 13. See also GAMO F. P-22, Op. 1, D. 94, L. 185-187.

1095

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 7, L. 36-37.

1096

GAMO F. P-22, Op. 1, D. 94, L. 177.

1097

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 7, L. 36. A dvukhsotnik was a person who over-fulfilled their production plan by two

hundred percent.

1098

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 7, L. 19-20.

1099

Krupnik and Bogoslovskaia, Ecosystem Variability, 109-110

1100

GAMO F. P-22, Op. 1, D. 94, L. 182, 186.

1101

By 1945, no American companies were registered as whalers with the federal government; “Leviathan’s Decline and

Fall,” NARA MD RG 43 Entry 242.

185

to “Give me bread or give me bullets,” the US saw future peace depending on present welfare.

1102

MacArthur restored the Antarctic factory fleet as part of Japanese reconstruction. The British also

wanted whale bodies to meet “critical shortage of world supplies of fats and oils.”

1103

The meeting in

D.C. was to plan harvests “up to estimated requirements” for calories, as long as this caused “no

lasting damage to existing stocks of whales.”

1104

The value of cetaceans to the United States was as

calories that would help guarantee “a more peaceful and happy future for mankind.”

1105

The only way for whales to make humans peaceful or happy, however, was to guarantee that

whales existed in the future. The United States came to the 1946 meeting under no illusion that the

market, and the factory ships that served it, had any interest in the long term “perpetuation of whale

stocks,” in the words of US marine scientist Remington Kellogg.

1106

The combination of demand

from “increasing human populations on all kinds of natural resources,” with “more efficient

methods of taking and processing these resources” made industry incapable of valuing whales

alive.

1107

The proposed a global conservation regime, headed by technocrats and diplomats and

charged with establishing rational – meaning sustainable – human use. Making this position palatable

to countries with a whaling industry, like Britain and Norway, or with industrial ambitions, like the

Soviets, took many weeks and many concessions. Finally, on December 2

the Soviet Union, the

United States, the United Kingdom, Norway, Japan, and an assortment of other countries signed the

International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling.

The ICRW established the International Whaling Commission, a group of scientists,

diplomats, and industry representatives who decided, ideally, how “to achieve the optimum level of

whale stocks as rapidly as possible without causing widespread economic and nutritional

distress.”

1108

The IWC’s mandate was, essentially, to decide kinds of whales were valuable alive, what

kinds were valuable dead, and who might do the killing.

1109

Many of the rules for making these

judgements had American Progressive-era roots. Aboriginal people could kill whales with aboriginal

tools; scientists could kill whales to study them; no one could kill gray whales, right whales or whales

that were pregnant or nursing; any whale that was killed needed to be used completely; and nations

with industrial fleets could kill up to 16,000 blue whale units per year. A blue whale unit was equal to

one dead blue whale, or two fin whales, or two and a half humpback whales, or to six sei whales, and

1102

Quoted in Walter LaFeber, The Clash: U.S.-Japanese Relations Throughout History (New York: Norton, 1997), 260. See

chapters nine and ten of the same book for post-war US/Japanese relations. For a discussion of the whaling issue in

particular, see Dorsey, Whales and Nations, chapter four. For a discussion of the idea that world peace rested on world

welfare after WWII, see James Sheehan, Where Have All the Soldiers Gone? The Transformation of Modern Europe (New York:

Houghton Mifflin, 2008). For a somewhat more cynical take on American involvement in post-war reconstruction, also

focused on Europe, see Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through Twentieth Century Europe

(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2005). Germany was cut out of postwar whaling.

1103

“Draft Comments for US Delegation, November 9, 1945,” NARA MD RG 43 Entry 242.

1104

“Draft Comments for US Delegation, November 9, 1945,” NARA MD RG 43 Entry 242.

1105

“Address of the Honorable C. Girard Davidson, November 26 1946,” NARA MD RG 43 Entry 246.

1106

Kellogg to Hamilton, December 16 1946, SI RU 7165 Box 9 Folder 2.

1107

“Sanctuaries as a Conservation Measure,” November 1945, NARA MD RG 43 Entry 242.

1108

International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling, Washington, 2

December 1946, p. 1

1109

For a longer discussion of the many diplomatic and scientific intrigues involved in the 1946 process, see Burnett, The

Sounding of the Whale chapters four and five; and Dorsey, Whales and Nations, chapter three.

186

on through the commercially approved species.

1110

No one knew if that number was sustainable.

Kellogg suspected not. But there were competing national interests to consider, and it was hard to

argue against hungry countries killing more whales when even the most dedicated scientists had

minimal cetacean knowledge. Basic facts of whale migration and population were still mysteries. The

Soviets, for one, were vocal in their call for more research into Antarctic whales before any strict

limits were imposed. But no matter the great pool of unknowns, the ICRW and the multiple IWC

committees it spawned was a codified attempt to make a mostly American, mostly utilitarian,

generally market-oriented but also conservation-minded way of valuing cetaceans the global norm.

FOR PLAN AND MOTHERLAND, 1950S-1960S

For the men who haunted diplomatic meetings in the 1940s and 1950s, the idea that whales might

value each other – as singers, parents, clan members, caretakers, or teachers – was not yet thinkable.

In IWC legal terms, all whales were some standard deviation of a blue whale, and they all died to be

human food.

1111

There was industrial death, where whales became corpses in factory ships and

factory ships fed component cetacean parts to national citizens or markets. Or there was indigenous

death, where whale corpses were eaten by their killers. Both were essentially caloric interpretations

of cetacean value, an interpretation with room for scientific wonder and frank acknowledgement

that the ocean was better with whales in it. But cetaceans’ social worlds were not a part of the

statistical calculus that tallied and permitted internationally monitored whaling.

In the North Pacific of the 1950s and 1960s, however, whale hunters had geographically

distinct ways of comprehending the beasts they pursued, killed, and ate. On the American side of

the Bering Strait, the Inupiat and Yupik prized whales as food. But there could be no caloric value in

a whale without first recognizing whales as bearing their own moral values. In villages like Point

Hope, bowheads were understood as coming from their own country in the south, their nunat.

Swimming north to die was a choice. Whales lingered among the ice floes to watch, to judge, and to

discuss with their families if and to whom they would give over their bodies. The cetacean social

world made the human one. Hunters in skin boats or in motor boats knew to bring the head of the

whale down to the sea after buttering, so its great mammal soul could return to the nunat and be

reincarnated.

1112

The value of a whale on the Soviet side of the Strait, at least in public, no longer counted

cetacean souls. The ceremonies that held together the social world of people were directed not

toward the moral collective of whales but toward the material collective of man. Chukchi and Yupik

1110

The Blue Whale Unit convention predated the IWC; it was originally used as a metric to regulate whale oil

production, rather than for conservation. For a history of this early use, see Arne Odd Johnsen, The History of Modern

Whaling (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1982), 402-3; for the outcome of this use on conservation efforts,

see Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, chapters four and five.

1111

There was an exception for scientific killing, but generally the IWC of this period was focused on regulating hunting

for human food use, not research. The scientific exception became an issue later, when the Japanese in particular used it

to expand their whaling.

1112

Tom Lowenstein, The Things that Were Said of Them: Shaman Stories and Oral Histories of the Tikigaq People (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 1992), 93-94.

187

hunters killed whales for their kolkhoz. The kolkhoz turned whales into raw things, into meat and fat,

which counted toward the plan through rituals of caloric accounting grown as nearly elaborate on

shore as at sea on the Aleut.

1113

The plan, in demanding its pounds of flesh, set the number of whales

to kill each year. The reason for a whale to die was to fill a plan; the decision to die was made

entirely by human beings.

Human beings also killed new kinds of whales by with new means than in the past. In the

early twentieth century, Chukchi and Yupik “took [bowheads] with the help of American whaling

equipment,” as Naukan whaler Ankaun recalled, and relied on harpoons with “huge shells.”

1114

Such

gear, traded from Nome in the early decades of the twentieth century, was derelict by the late 1930s

and 1940s. In 1941, the village of Ungazik killed their last bowhead. Hunters in Naukan took theirs

nine years later.

1115

But gray whales could be slaughtered with rifles. As biologist Nadezhda Sushkina

saw in the late 1950s, a few open boats circled a whale for several hours, while “not less than 300-

600 bullets are fired into the animal before it dies.”

1116

As with the traditional hunt in Mechigmen

Bay, the targets were young. Kolkhoz brigades knew that larger whales, those weighing over ten tons,

were “restless, and as soon as they are hit they struggle fiercely.”

1117

When the hunting brigades

brought a carcass to shore, the whole village turned out to butcher, to share the skin, to pack away

the meat in communal freezer pits. These were all old practices. But even when shared like

bowheads, gray whales did not taste like bowheads; many people found the meat distasteful.

1118

Yet the plan had a taste for whales. In 1955, Chukotka’s kolkhozy became part of a federal

push “to further develop the fishery industry of the Far East.” Because development meant

increasing production, and because whales fell under the purview of fisheries, each collective needed

to intensify their use of whales. The answer, generally, was technology. The plan called for “a

rational industrial scheme for rendering fat efficiently even in small-scale operations” so that

maximal calories could be wrung from flesh.

1119

This in turn required more flesh to wring. “We have

whale stocks that could give ten times as much useful production in the form of fat and meat,” one

official reported, but “the number of animals fished by some collectives is far from satisfactory.”

1120

At fault was hunting that wasted both bullets and whale bodies. Perhaps a third of the whales hit by

rifle fire sunk under a spreading red stain, and the largest, fattiest animals escaped from men

“overcome by feelings of fear for these giants.”

1121

1113

See, for example, GAChAO F. R-23, Op.1, D. 23, Ll. 46-57.

1114

Ankaun, in Naukаn i naukantsy: rasskazy naukanskikh eskimosov, V. Leonova, ed. (Vladivostok: Dal’press, 2014), 20.

1115

Krupnik “The Bowhead vrs. The Gray Whale,” 26-27.

1116

N.N. Sushkina, Na puti vulkany, kity, l’dy (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo geograficheskoi literatury, 1962), 99.

1117

Andrei Kukil’gin, in Krupnik, Pust’, 159.

1118

For post-hunt sharing, see Sushkina, Na puti vulkany, 100-106; for cultural distaste of gray whale meat, see Krupnik

“The Bowhead vrs. The Gray Whale,” 28-29.

1119

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 23, L. 103.

1120

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 51, L. 178.

1121

Krupnik “The Bowhead vrs. The Gray Whale,” 27-28; quote from GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 51, L. 179. The

cutters were legally able to kill gray whales, which were otherwise protected by IWC regulations, because the meat was

theoretically for indigenous subsistence.

188

THE ANSWER WAS to remove indigenous hunting from indigenous hands. As part of the

fisheries reforms, a catcher ship with the capacity to kill “at least 200 whales per harvest season”

replaced open-boat whaling.

1122

By the late 1950s, most of the cetaceans eaten and processed in

Chukotka were harpooned in open water by crews on the Zvezdnyi or the Druzhnyi, which met

kolkhoz brigades offshore, where the bodies were towed to land for butchering. The results made

whales fully participant in the glorious rituals of Soviet production, and made Chukotkan plans fully

glorious. As one Party official proclaimed to his comrades, “in 1955-1956, only a few whales were

harvested, but in 1958 the kolkhozy of this district harvested 123 whales. Of this, the kolkhoz ‘Lenin’

killed 68, ‘Red Banner’ – 28, and ‘Lenin’s Way’ – 14.”

1123

Gray whales might not taste delicious, but

they allowed kolkhozy to over-fill their plans by 102.4%, or 123%, or even a triumphant 144%.

1124

They put the collectives “on the way to achieving their socialist obligations toward the workers of

Chukotka.”

1125

The value of whales, on the Asian side of the Strait, was as food, and as food

butchered and shared. But the value was also in being part of a kolkhoz. Yupik and Chukchi started

their whaling careers in “young Komsomol” brigades and spent their years tallying kills in the annual

plan ledgers of their collectives.

1126

Whales were partly what they had always been and partly a way

of making indigenous production like Soviet production anywhere: industrial in form, communist in

content, serving the plan with its numerical account of progress.

The shore whalers and small cutters in Chukotka were not the only cetacean hunters

oriented toward the communist plan. These other communist whalers, however, were not hunting

gray whales in territorial waters under the IWC indigenous catch exception. They were hunting every

kind of whale in every sort of water under the IWC commercial regulations. By the early 1960s, the

Soviet Union had multiple factory ships killing whales off Antarctica.

1127

In the North Pacific, the

Aleut was joined by the Sovetskaia Rossiia in 1962, and the Vladivostok and Dal’nii Vostok a year

later.

1128

These fleets were born at the Twenty-First Party Congress in 1959, where Nikita

Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union was in a new stage of history, a “period of the full-

scale building of communism.”

1129

Cetaceans were drafted as builders. In the Congress’ seven-year

plan for the “significant development of all sectors of our industry,” whales were named explicitly in

anticipation of the “annual demand for whale fat in the Soviet Union” to exceed one hundred

1122

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 23, L. 44.

1123

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 51, L. 14.

1124

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 51, L. 178.

1125

GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 51, L. 152.

1126

Khul’khug’e, in Krupnik, Pust’, 167.

1127

For discussion of the Soviet whaling program in the Antarctic, see Yulia Ivashchenko, P. Clapham, and R. Brownell,

“Soviet Illegal Whaling: the Devil and the Details,” Marine Fisheries Review, Vol. 73 No. 3 (2011): 1-19 and Yulia

Ivashchenko and P. Clapham, “A Whale of a Deception,” Marine Fisheries Review, Vol. 71 No. 1 (2009): 44-52.

Ivashchenko and Clapham have quite tirelessly tracked down Soviet catch records and compiled accurate statistics.

1128

The Sovetskaia Rossiia whaled in the North Pacific from 1962-1965; the Vladivostok from 1963-1978; the Dal’nii Vostok

from 1963 to 1979. The Slava, which was usually an Antarctic fleet, worked the North Pacific from 1966-1969. The Aleut

retired in 1967. The Soviets also had shore-based whaling operations in the Kirill Islands during the same period. The

account of industrial whaling that follows draws from the logs of all these vessels, and from ships working in Antarctica

as well, since the level of detail in any given ship’s report varies a great deal.

1129

Khrushchev quoted in Ronald Grigor Suny, The Soviet Experiment: Russia, the USSR, and the Successor States, (New York:

Oxford University Press, 1998), 407. Khrushchev consolidated his control at the 21

Congress.

189

thousand tons.

1130

Where this demand originated was neither clear nor the point. Soviet material life

was supposed to improve, improvement required more production, and more whales could be made

into products. So Gosplan financed massive factory fleets, each central processing ship escorted by

ten or twenty or more catcher boats and manned by crews of hundreds.

These hundreds of people did dozens of tasks: there were mechanics, chefs, washerwomen,

doctors, dentists, radio operators, scientific personnel, shopkeepers, an editorial staff for the on-

board newspaper, KGB officers, crew for sailing the ship, crew for cutting blubber, and specialized

harpooners for killing.

1131

They came from the army, the navy, from fishing families and university

programs for mechanical engineers or marine biology. They found a floating world both different

and familiar. Beyond the narrow bunks or wood-lined captain’s suites, the modern factory ships

were built with recognizable communal spaces: a banya, a cinema, a library. Crews played chess,

learned musical instruments, had ongoing card games, put on theatricals, and, as one sailor recalled,

“attended the night school…as for many of us the war had kept us from any opportunity to receive

secondary education.”

1132

The physical conditions were sometimes a distraction. Rendering whales

smelled horribly. Cockroaches were so endemic that medical staff dusted DDT everywhere.

Temperatures above and below deck could broil or freeze, depending on weather and mechanics.

There were accidents with ropes, gunpowder, knives, and with the drunken use of ropes,

gunpowder, and knives.

1133

The diet was short on fresh vegetables and long on porridge. But crews

ate more meat than most Soviet citizens, from slivers of raw whale heart to “steaks fried with onion,

which taste like veal.”

1134

There were discomforts, but not so many as in the early days of the Aleut,

and not so many more than in any other Soviet factory.

The products that emerged from these factories were various: bone meal for fertilizers, fat

for food, grease for industry, vitamins for strong bodies; each an element of further productive

Soviet action. But they all began in the moment that humans met whales. The ships of the 1960s,

even more than the Aleut, reduced the capacity for whale resistance – any whale, from aggressive

sperms to fast fins –to essentially nil. If the crews could find whales they could kill them. The

catcher boats were fast; the harpoons were armed with “long, sharp grenades attached to endless

synthetic lines. The harpoons cut into whales, the grenades exploded inside.” Once dead, dead

whales were pumped full of air until they floated like “giant pontoons on the surface,” and tagged

with radio receivers for the factory ship to find. A successful catcher could hunt twenty-four hours a

1130

GARF F. A-262, Op. 5, D. 8259, L. 1.

1131

The North Pacific voyages were less glamorous than those going to the South Polar seas, which put into ports in

New Zealand and Australia and came with ample opportunity to visit exotic foreign locales and purchase goods.

1132

Anna Berdichevskaia,“Proshchai, Antarkitka, i prosti” Iug, November 30, 2006. This is a long interview with Vasilii

Kondrachuk, a whalemen’s association chairman, interviewed on the sixtieth anniversary of the launch of the Soviet’s

first Antarctic fleet, the Slava. Here as elsewhere I have sometimes used the records of Antarctic whalers to fill in

experiences not accessible in the archive of the North Pacific whaling experience.

1133

Descriptions of life onboard ship from GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 990, Ll. 98-116; GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 983, Ll. 3-

14; “Skol’ko zhe mozhno zhdat,” Dalnevostochnii kitoboi, December 1, 1967; First Mate P. Panov, “Eto kasaetsia vsekh”

Dalnevostochnii kitoboi, January 12, 1968; “Poleznaia vstrecha,” Dalnevostochnii kitoboi, January 26, 1968; “Sudovoi

Mekhanik,” Dalnevostochnii kitoboi, October 22, 1967; Berzin, “The Truth,” 3-4; Vladimir Verevkin, “Gorzhus’, chto byl

kitoboem,” Gazeta Vladivostok, Septemver 19, 2008; and Berdichevskaia, “Proshchai.” The Dalnevostochnii kitoboi was the

on-board newspaper of the Sovetskaia Rossiia; in the years for which I have copies, the fleet was working in Antarctic. I

have used examples that are not location specific or that are alluded to in the GAPK records.

1134

Zenkovich, Vokrug sveta, 73; Berzin, “The Truth,”

190

day, and left a half dozen, or a dozen, or twenty whale corpses in its wake in a day. The factory ship

then took them up and the crew ripped them down: blubber from meat, meat from bone, bones

from viscera, then all into separate rooms and hoppers, freezers and boilers.

1135

It was intimate work, forcing whalers to stare into the eyes of whales “as their resistance

finally broke” and their life ran out in bloody gouts, then wade into each rib-valued cetacean body

amid a rising, humid stench.

1136

The intimacy was also in knowing how whales navigated their

world, from the bubbly sign of feeding humpbacks to the communal schooling of sperms.

Shipboard newspapers carried scientific reports of animal intelligence, probably only confirming

what hunters knew the “increasingly cautious behavior of whales” they watched flee.

1137

And hunters

saw enough cetacean extremity to use words like “love” or “help.”

1138

Zenkovich wrote about a

female humpback that, struck and bleeding “with danger looming over her, only pressed closer to

her calf, protecting him with her body… she hugged the little whale, their spouts mixing” through

the hours-long ordeal of killing both.

1139

Some sailors, at least retrospectively, alluded to the

empathetic toll of slaughter. “If whales could scream out in pain like people,” one sailor

remembered, “we would all have gone mad.”

1140

But whales did not scream. They substantiated the

world of their hunters by dead weight, not as living subject. So also like their capitalist predecessors,

Soviet whalers learned to use young whales as lures and signals. Nursing calves paddled up the

slipways of factory ships after their mothers’ still lactating carcasses, to become another few tons in

the computation of the plan.

1141

Whaling for the plan was the central task of the factory ship. The original production targets

were handed down from Gosplan in Moscow, as part of the Five Year Plan. Between the Five Year

Plans, there were annual plans; within annual plans there were quarter-year targets; within the targets

there were categories for total numbers of whales each ship should kill; the total raw weight; the

quantity of food-grade blubber, medicinal blubber, industrial blubber of the first grade, and

industrial blubber of the second grade; the weight of meat for food, and meat for animals; the

pounds of spermaceti, bone meal, and frozen liver; the number of sperm whale teeth; the grams of

vitamins and ambergris.

1142

One whale could be counted dozens of ways in any given year, and new

plans were reconstituted from how pieces of whale were counted the year before, often increased by

1135

Berzin, “Truth,” 30-31. See also Iosif Benenson, Kitoboi i kitoboitsy, no page numbers, 2011. Manuscript in possession

of author.

1136

Benenson, Kitoboi i kitoboitsy.

1137

G. Veinger, “Nezvanyi gost,” Dalnevostochnii kitoboi, May 9, 1968; quote from GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 983, L. 10.

1138

Berzin, “The Truth,” 47.

1139

Zenkovich, Vokrug sveta, 159-161; see also Berzin, “The Truth,” Zenkovich notes that this kill of a calf and mother

was an accident, and that he tried to impress upon the Aleut crew the importance of leaving nursing or pregnant whales

alone, especially as this incident came after the USSR signed the ICRW.

1140

Berdichevskaia, “Proshchai.” Zenkovich also uses empathetically descriptive language in some of his accounts of

whaling.

1141

Berzin, “The Truth,” 26. Berzin also notes that Soviet whalers learned to track adult whales by watching where the

young, who need to breathe more frequently, surfaced; “The Truth,” 47.

1142

See for example, “Vypolnenie plana po pererabotke syrtsa i vypuska produktsii za 1964 god (Dal’nii Vostok),”

document in author’s possession; GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 1001, Ll. 38-46; “Svedeniia o vypolnenii plana po vyrabotke

produktsii k/f Vladivostok za 1968 god,” document in author’s possession; GAPK F. 66, Op. 1, D. 1033, Ll. 9-25. The

list of these annual reports could go on and on – every voyage produced dozens of pages of accounting paperwork for

the number and disposition of whales.

191

a percentage ambitious enough to demonstrate progress.

1143

All of this addition, multiplication, and

division – ultimately based on subtracting life from a whale and a whale from the ocean – then fed

back to the Five Year planners. Thus in 1962, Gosplan called for 1000000 tsentner of dead whale

flesh, the total subdivided into fats, meat, bone meal, and other products. This number was expected

to jump to 1600000 tsentner the next year, and reach 2000000 by 1965, or roughly the equivalent of

eleven thousand blue whales.

1144

THERE WERE PRACTICAL motivations to these grandiose acts of cetacean slaughter. From

Yupik skin boats to Yankee tall ships, whaling had long been a collective enterprise, also but one

that rewarded a vanguard individual, usually the harpooner.

1145

This combination lent itself well to

Soviet labor ideals. Everyone worked for collective glory: meeting targets earned crews a twenty-five

percent salary bonus over their base pay, and workers could more than double their salaries if they

exceeded the plan by twenty percent.

1146

Because all production started with dead whales, and all

dead whales started with a successful harpoon strike, “all successful production depend[ed] on the

harpooner,” in the words of one ship’s log.

1147

Harpooners could easily be singled out as

Stakhanovite over-producing heroes, their support crews spurred on by healthy socialist

competition.

1148

The fleet newspaper reported the results, ranking individual successes in the quest

1143

For more on how plans were made, see Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Soviet Illegal Whaling,” 4-6 and I.F.

Golovlev, “Ekho ‘Misterii o kitakh’” in Y.A. Yablokov and V.A. Zemsky eds. Materialy sovetskogo kitoboinogo promysla

(1949-1979) (Moscow: Tsentr ekologicheskoi politiki Rossii, 2000), 11-24, 16. Golovlev states that plans took the

previous year’s catch plus a minimum of ten percent, but the reality seems to have been far less fixed and the basis of the

plan is often unclear.

1144

“Plan dobychi kitov i vypusk produktsii iz syrtsa kitov po upravleniiu kitoboinykh flotilii na 1960-1965 g.g.”

Document in author’s possession, from a collection provided by Yulia Ivashchenko. A tsentner is equivalent to 100

kilograms. These numbers were later revised upward, with the expectation that the Soviet fleet could kill 2500000 tsentner

in 1965.

1145

Skilled harpooners were paid more on Yankee whaling voyages, and indigenous whalers had rules regarding how the

choicest bits of the kill were distributed based on an individual’s role in the hunting party.

1146

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Soviet Illegal Whaling,” 4.

1147

GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 991, L. 42.

1148

The idea of socialist competition originated with Lenin, but was given intense social import during the 1930s; see

V.I. Lenin, How to Organize Competition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964). Studies of labor as daily practice and site of

cultural production have not been much the vogue since the Soviet archives became fully open, particularly when it

comes to post-WWII studies. This makes the comparison of factory ship whaling to other types of factory work

incomplete. Whaling ships, especially in their treatment of harpooners, carried on some of the tropes of pre-war

Stakhanovism, by pitting individuals against the norms of the plan and rewarding overproduction both rhetorically and

materially; for an account of Stakhanovite origins and operations in Soviet factories see Lewis Siegelbaum, Stakhanovism

and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Lewis

Siegelbaum and Ronald Grigor Suny eds. Making Workers Soviet: Power, Class and Identity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1995). Stephen Kotkin also discusses the world of Soviet labor, though through the lens of subject-creation in the

Stalinist period. What he identifies as the “centrality of labor in personal identity” remained true on whaling ships WWII

(a centrality that is arguably hardly Soviet); see Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilization (Berkeley: University of

California Press, 1995), 150; and chapters three and especially five. For studies of labor after the war, see Donald Filtzer,

Soviet Workers and Late Stalinism: Labour and the Restoration of the Stalinist System after World War II (New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2002) and Soviet Workers and de-Stalinization: The Consolidation of the Modern System of Soviet Production

Relations, 1953-1964 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Filtzer paints the Soviet labor experience as a

gloomy one, with planners in an ongoing, low-level war against laborers in a way that produced widespread productive

dysfunction. Whaling was often less dreary, at least when the air compressors worked, and its chosen dysfunction was

overproduction.

192

for collective triumph.

1149

“Comrade Kurazhagomedov has shown himself to be an excellent

harpooner,” the report of the Vladivsotok noted in 1964, and his “humility, scrupulous work, and

tireless vigilance won him the praise and respect of the other whalers.”

1150

Underperformers were

critiqued, or worst, cast out of the collective. The end result of such health competition, according

to the Dal’nii Vostok log, were catchers that “successfully met the government plan, but in the lead

are still those whalers who are masters of their craft – Kozakevich, Novikov, Remeniuk,

Nasonov.”

1151

The celebration of such “Heroes of Socialist Labor” did not stay at sea. The national press

carried gushing accounts whaler’s skill and bravery, like those of “harpooner Comrade Gnilyank,

who started hunting even in stormy weather, or the harpooner Comrade Tupikov, who mastered

striking a whale at a great distance. Now these innovative methods of hunting are used successfully

by all harpooners.”

1152

These accounts joined Pravda articles that educated readers on the uses of

ambergris and whale fat, celebrated the launch of whaling vessels, and, of course, applauded “not

only the successful implementation of the state plan” but a year with “three and a half million rubles

in above-plan profits.”

1153

And Pravda, like fleet newspapers, captains, and many crew, tied plan

fulfillment to Party membership. The best Stakhanovite harpooners were also people whose “daily

work and trials of labor…pull Party and non-Party organizations closer” and eventually increased

Party membership while “growing and tempering people.”

1154

On the Vladivostok in 1965, where

over twenty percent of the crew were Party members already, any “problem in implementing the

state plan” could be solved by the Party “mobilizing staff to implement plans and through socialist

pledges” and by “improving the moral and political qualities of each member of the crew.”

1155

Good

whalers were excellent producers, and excellent producers were loyal communists, and loyal

communists were Party members. Laboring for the plan was tied neatly to ideological practice at the

frequent ship Party meetings, movie screenings, and other events. For the people living on Soviet

factory ships, taking up whale bodies and breaking them to pieces made a real, existing, floating

palace of Soviets.

The model of Stakhanovite labor realized on whaling fleets was borrowed from factories.

But instead of pushing their bodies or their machines to produce as much as possible, whalers

pushed the ocean to produce more than possible. Whalers had every reason to meet the ever-

expanding plans, and the plans, in the end, came down to the number of whales killed; the actual

products made from their corpses were secondary. So harpooners, in their acts of labor heroism,

often killed beyond the ability of the disassembly line. The result made modern factory ships more

deadly to live whales than the old capitalist sailing rigs, but no more efficient with their bodies. The

Soviet plan of canning or freezing meat never produced either efficient processing or terrestrial

1149

“V Bazovom komitete, ” Dalnevostochnii kitoboi, January 12, 1968.

1150

GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 982, L. 66.

1151

GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 991, L. 42.

1152

“V dalekoi Antarktike,” Pravda, May 5, 1955.

1153

“Krepkii splav,” Pravda, October 24, 1964.

1154

Quote from “Krepkii splav,” Pravda, October 24, 1964. For a scattershot example of national press coverage of

Soviet whaling in this period, see “Kratkie novosti,” Pravda, January 15, 1961; “Bagatstva okeana – Rodine,” Pravda,

October 24, 1963; “Zolotoi kashalot,” Pravda, January 16, 1967; “Bogatye ulovy” Pravda, April 2, 1965.

1155

GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 990, L. 118.

193

appetites, so cetacean bodies were often stripped only of their fat, the meat and bone disgorged back

to sea. Other whales were never rendered; their bodies left to suppurate in the heat leaking from

tons of extinguished life. Others were lashed to ships’ sides as “fenders,” the contact between

catcher boats and the factory ship insulated by corpses.

1156

None of this violated the plan. The plan

did not require that cetacean species have a future. The world Soviet whale ships substantiated was

incommensurate with the biological facts of being a whale.

It was not a fact lost on the Soviet marine scientists from the Pacific Research and Fisheries

Center (TINRO) who shipped out with the whaling fleets. By 1941, the Aleut reported the

humpback, sperm, fin and gray whales they killed were shrinking.

1157

In 1951, Zenkovich worried

that sperm whales were being killed too young, in “a manner which is not right and not

expedient.”

1158

Four years later, the marine biologist S.K. Klumov lamented that production targets

were far larger than could be sustained even as fleets in the North Pacific, fixated on output, ignored

“outrages taking place in the whaling industry regarding the huge loss of blubber, and the poor use

of graksa [a component of margarine] and other whaling products.”

1159

By 1965, N.V. Doroshenko

tallied the kills of the Vladivostok and the Dal’nii Vostok with alarm, reporting that after just a few

seasons of hunting “humpback whale stocks in the North Pacific and Bering Sea are in a critical

state. After one more year of such intensive catches, whale stocks will be so depleted that it will be

impossible to continue any whaling.”

1160

A year later, the Dal’nii Vostok stayed south of the Gulf of

Anadyr because a scouting mission found no “important whales” in the formerly cetacean-swarmed

waters. The captain blamed Japanese whalers, sailed to new hunting grounds, and managed to over-

fill a monthly plan by 130.4%.

1161

Finding new seas to whale drove the North Pacific fleet from the

northern Bering Sea off Chukotka, southeast to the Aleutian Islands, then into the Gulf of Alaska,

and into the eastern Bering Sea and the waters off the western coast of North America. Other

voyages balanced the equation of absent whales and ever-expanding production plans by ordering

new harpoons or devising more rational – meaning more communist – forms of labor

organization.

1162

1156

For discussions of waste on whaling ships, see Golovlev, “Ekho ‘Misterii o kitakh’”, 20-21; Berzin “The Truth,” 15-

25; E.I. Chernyi, “Neskol’ko shtrikhov k portretu sovetskogo kitoboinogo pormysla,” in Y.A. Yablokov and V.A.

Zemsky eds. Materialy sovetskogo kitoboinogo promysla (1949-1979) (Moscow: Tsentr ekologicheskoi politiki Rossii, 2000), 25-

30, 26; and N.V. Doroshenko, “Sovetskii promysel bliuvalov, serykh i gladkikh (grenlandskikh i iuzhnykh iaponskikh)

kitov v Severnoi Patsifike v 1961-1979 gg” in in Y.A. Yablokov and V.A. Zemsky eds. Materialy sovetskogo kitoboinogo

promysla (1949-1979) (Moscow: Tsentr ekologicheskoi politiki Rossii, 2000), 96-103. The use of fender whales appears in

various places in the archives; see for example GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 9, L. 47.

1157

GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 9, Ll. 55-56.

1158

Yulia Ivashchenko, P. Clapham, and R. Brownell, “Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions in the North

Pacific, 1955-1978,” Publications, Agencies and Staff of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Paper 127 (2006), 6. This collection of

documents was copied and transported out of the closed archives of the Pacific Research and Fisheries Center (TINRO)

in Vladivostok by Alfred A. Berzin, the former director of the center’s marine mammal program, and translated by

Ivashchenko. Because TINRO remains closed to researchers, it is a rare glimpse at the internal debates about whaling

between Soviet scientists and planners. Some of these also surface in the archives of the RSFSR.

1159

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions,” 8.

1160

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions,” 10.

1161

GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 1001, L. 7, 15.

1162

GAPK F. 666, Op. 1, D. 991, L. 55; GAPK F. 1196, Op. 1, D. 9, L. 269.

194

Changing geography and technology, rather than adjusting the plan, was the preferred tactic

in Moscow. TINRO biologists met yearly with the plan-makers at the Whaling Coordination

Department, within the Ministry of Fisheries. A vocal group recommended, with increasing urgency,

that the whale catch be diminished.

1163

Humpback and blue whales were near extinction. More

whaling in the Pacific Ocean and the Bering Sea endangered “the economic value of these

stocks.”

1164

But TINRO scientists were not the only experts. Gosplan, with the credentials of

planning the communist future on their side, held that it was a “lack of high speed whalers,” not “a

sharp decline in the average size and weight” of whales that caused decreased returns.

1165

Moreover,

better ships could fish further afield, and “take at the expense of the ‘American’ whale population

around 800 additional units of baleen whales and about 1500 sperm whales.”

1166

And, one Ministry

of Fisheries official argued, if whales were eradicated then trawlers could mechanize what had been

the work of a whale into the work of industry and harvest krill.

1167

Above all, Gosplan made the

plan, so the plan kept growing.

The only way to meet the growing plan was to kill any and every whale. Killing any whale

meant violating not just cetacean biological reality, but the interpretation of cetacean biological

reality as understood by the International Whaling Commission. The Soviet fleets whaled out of

season; they whaled protected species; they killed nursing females and calves and juveniles; they

slaughtered whales they did not butcher and they butchered whales they did not use. Doing so, in

the 1950s and 1960s, was the only way to make plan, with all its practical and metaphysical import

for harpooners and crew. “In total, illegal whales represented 68.3% of whales by number, and

48.6% by weight,” --- reported in 1967. “If the fleet had strictly followed the ‘Regulations’ the yearly

plan target would not have been fulfilled.”

1168

The simultaneous public embrace of international whaling regulations and their systematic

internal violation had another result. It made the communist plan rule the seas. Such rule, especially

in the North Pacific, had a long history of evading Russian grasp. It was American predators who

stole seal, walrus, and whales in the nineteenth century, and thwarted Soviet rule in the early

twentieth. In the Far East, memories of these humiliations lingered. A.N. Solyanik, one of the Soviet

fleet’s most influential captains and eventual director of Antarctic whaling, grew up on stories of

marine predation on the eastern coast. Citing the history of killing walrus and bowheads, Solyanik

told his crews that the drive for profit made market hunters incapable of restraint.

1169

His view of

1163

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions,” 19. See also N.V.

Doroshenko, “Sovetskii promysel gorbachei (Megaptera novaeangliae) v Severnoi Patsifike,” in Y.A. Yablokov and V.A.

Zemsky eds. Materialy sovetskogo kitoboinogo promysla (1949-1979) (Moscow: Tsentr ekologicheskoi politiki Rossii, 2000), 48-

95.

1164

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions,” 13.

1165

GARF F. A-262, Op. 5, D. 8259, L. 21. These debates with Gosplan began at least in the late 1950s, when Klumov

testified to the grim condition of North Pacific stocks. Gosplan’s response was to launch the Vladivostok and Dal’nii

Vostok a few years later.

1166

GARF F. A-262, Op. 5, D. 8259, L. 7.

1167

Berzin, “The Truth,” 57. The Soviet Union did attempt to harvest some krill in Antarctica.

1168

1967 report of the Dal’nii Vostok, appendix to Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Soviet Illegal Whaling,” 19.

1169

Golovlev, “Ekho ‘Misterii o kitakh’”, 14-15. Solyanik probably has more to answer for when it comes to Soviet

whaling and its abuses to both man and beast than any other individual; this is certainly Berzin’s take. See “The Truth,”

27-37.

195

capitalist duplicity and rapaciousness may have been assisted by witnessing, as a delegate to the

International Whaling Commission in the 1950s, debates about regarding Aristotle Onassis’ illegal

hunting and the general “desire of the whaling companies to gather in every whale they can find.”

1170

It was a theme A. A. Vakhov made national in a trilogy of whaling novels, beginning with a tragic

Imperial captain and ends with a Soviet factory fleet victorious over capitalist spies, idiots, and

idiotic spying diplomats whose “extensive talk” about “saving the whales from extinction” should

“not fool” wise Soviet whalers from pursuing their prey.

1171

Some of this language, of encroaching

Cold War threat, capitalist excess, and the IWC’s conservation message as a cover for commercial

slaughter, must have been common in the Ministry of Fisheries. It was routine enough to leak into

the meetings of the International Whaling Commission, where in the 1950s the Soviet delegation

accused the United States and Canada of using regulations and cetacean science to manufacture a

“land grab” in the North Pacific.

1172

In the 1960s, Soviet suspicions rested on limits which unfairly

privileged capitalist quotas.

1173

Mostly it was action, not words, which mattered, and in action the Soviet whaling fleet had

no desire to save whales for once and future commerce. Year after year, after agreeing to smaller

quotas or closed seasons at IWC meetings, the Soviets went back to their ships and whaled for an

expanding plan. That this violated international terms was known by whaling captains and planners

alike, not to mention by Soviet biologists, who were ordered off the decks when particularly rare

whales were killed.

1174

These kills did not make the reports sent to the IWC each year. Animals killed

at the wrong time or at the wrong size or of the wrong species were re-written, by the KGB officers

that sailed with each fleet, into new tallies. A wrongly killed right whale became a legal humpback;

illegally small humpbacks became blue whales, too many blue whales became very many sperm

1170

IWC Verbatim Record 1959, Eleventh Meeting, Document XIV, p. 25. Onassis posed the first enforcement crisis at

the IWC, which was unable to regulate his actions; Onassis was eventually indicted for fraud by the U.S. and forced out

of the whaling business. See Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 145-151. That capitalist countries at the IWC worried about

how their discussions of catch appeared to the Soviets is clear; as R.G.R. Wall of New Zealand noted at the IWC

meeting in 1958, “I cannot help but feeling that the Commissioner from the Soviet Union must be taking careful note of

[reports of depleted stocks but no reduction of quotas] as evidence of the inability of capitalist industries to rationalize

their activities, because the plea is that the industry got itself into such a position that only by carrying on with the

extermination of the whale is it likely to survive.” IWC Verbatim Record 1958, Tenth Meeting, Document XIII, p. 83.

1171

A. A. Vakhov, Fontany na gorizonte (Khabarovsk: Khabarovskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1963), 141. The first in this

series is Tragediia kapitana Ligova, (Magadan: Oblastnoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo, 1955) and the second, Shtorm ne utikhaet

(Magadan: Magadanskoe knizhnoe izdatel’stvo 1957), and the final is Fontany. Together paint a portrait of Russian

whaling against the world, with the Far East as the main backdrop. Petr Sazhin’s novella Kapitan Kiribeev has a similar

setting, although the hero is a young marine biologist and the plot rather more romantic (Moscow: Khudozhestvennaia

literatura, 1974).

1172

“Minutes of the Scientific Committee Meeting, May 30 1952,” SI RU 7165, Box 14, Folder 1. At issue were possible

restrictions on whaling northeast of the Bering Strait, which the Soviets objected to. Burnett reads the Soviet actions at

this meeting as a cynical stalling tactic, a view I think underestimates the paranoia regarding the vulnerability of Far

Eastern resources; see Sounding the Whale 454-455.

1173

“Statement of the Delegation of the Soviet Union,” February 10, 1967. SI RU 7165 Box 28, Folder 1. These are only

a few choice North Pacific examples; there are many others, especially from the Antarctic. Much of my thinking on this

must, sadly, remain conjecture, as important archives related to internal policy debates about whaling remain closed, or,

as E.I. Chernyi speculates, have been destroyed.

1174

Berzin makes this claim throughout “The Truth”; see also Golovlev, “Ekho ‘Misterii o kitakh,’” 15-18, who bases his

statements on direct observation of Soviet whaling as a national inspector; his attempts to enforce whaling rules were

systematically ignored.

196

whales, too many small sperm whales became one large one.

1175

The hundred and forty-five

bowhead whales and the hundred and forty-nine gray whales and the six hundred and eight one right

whales killed in the postwar North Pacific were reconstituted as fin and sei and humpbacks, their

banned bodies made posthumously legal.

1176

This too was a kind of communist labor. Whaling to

excess in the name of the motherland, for some, righted the historical wrong of capitalists killing too

many whales in Russian waters.

THUS BY 1970, there were three ways humans valued a whale in the North Pacific. There was

the whale as local sustenance and moral influence, as in North American Inupiat or Yupik villages.

There was the whale that provided community food and communist participation in Soviet Chukchi

and Yupik villages. Or, on the high seas, there was the whale as the material basis for building full-

scale communism. None of them precisely matched the IWC vision for whales as a thing to be used

according to rational, balanced economic and biological logic. But the Soviet national ideal was the

most incompatible. Like all industrial postwar whaling, its origins were in the Second World War; for

Soviets in the extremity of sustaining the revolutionary state through the Great Fatherland War and

its aftermath. But by the 1960s, there was no more active revolution or existential threat. The fascist

hordes were gone. Lenin’s presence was constant, but in the quiet everyday of dead letters, his name

on metro stops, streets, libraries, schools, ships. Stalin lacked even letters, having been officially

written out of the state he helped shape. But working on a whale ship, with its socialist competitions

and Party rewards, its shock work amid shocking gore, made tangible the ideal of a tight collective

moving with efficient purpose toward an ideologically supported goal. From captain to harpooner to

deck hand, whaling labor enlivened Lenin’s promise that socialist work was “heroic, in the world-

historical sense of the word.”

1177

On a factory ship, the heroics were not, usually, in mortal sacrifice, or in killing people in the

name the leviathan of the revolutionary state. It was in killing actual leviathans. The only thing that

had to die was a whale. Slaughtering that whale, any whale, but preferably many whales,

substantiated the plan, and the plan composed the social world of whalers, from the celebration of

the voyage’s first kill to triumphant Vladivostok homecomings, where the most productive catcher

boat lead the fleet into harbor.

1178

On a Chukotka kolkhoz, butchering whales caught by schooners

made people part of the national Soviet project with their own regional materials. For the

bureaucrats writing plans in Moscow, diagraming cetacean extermination made the entire ocean feed

the maw of communist creation. Socialism might exist in one country, but it could eat away at any

whale that touched any distant shore. It grasped at last what capitalists had grasped first. By doing

so, Soviet whaling turned full-scale communism into the international subversion of values that were

not communist. For the whaler or the planner, if not for the biologist, whaling was not a bad way to

fashion a Soviet person.

1175

Berzin, “The Truth,” 54; E.I. Chernyi, “Neskol’ko shtrikhov,” 28. Chernyi also notes that captains usually sailed with

a mate at the rank of Party Organizer of the Central Committee of the CPSU and a passel of secret informers, at least on

Antarctic expeditions, where visits to foreign ports were frequent.

1176

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell Jr., “Soviet Catches of Whales in the North Pacific,” 63.

1177

Lenin, “How to Organize Competition,” 408.

1178

Dalnevostochnii kitoboi, September 28, 1967; Verevkin, “Gorzhus’, chto byl kitoboem.”

197

THE HARMONIOUS DEEP, 1970S-1980S

There is not a history, yet, that puts in human terms the cetacean experience of this period, this great

un-fashioning of generations of whale minds: minds that listened as their seas grew quiet, watched as

their clans shrank, fled as their families were consumed year after year in the adrenal chase, the

agonized strike, the desperate breaths that ended in a fountain of blood. Perhaps the whales in their

songs and clicks teach this past; perhaps they tell each other that the peculiar and terrifying work of

humans is to compose a world without whales. And perhaps they carry no such burdens. People can

and have, at least twice over, imagined a world made better by maximal cetacean killing. The world

that killing made for its survivors remains beyond the ken of bipedal, terrestrial mammals.

By the 1970s, these survivors were a ragged fringe of their former biological and social mass.

Between 1948 and 1979, the Soviet industrial fleets killed over a hundred and ninety thousand

whales in the North Pacific.

1179

In the early 1960s, when the Vladivostok and the Dal’nii Vostok

launched north, they killed twenty or thirty humpback whales per day and a few thousand a season;

within a few years there were too few to hunt.

1180

In Chukotka, collectives were supplied with gray

whales by schooners, a hundred or two hundred at a time. They were supposed to feed foxes on the

kolkhozy fur farms, but there was so much meat some carcasses were dragged inland with tractors to

rot, alongside the heaps of whale bones no small kolkhoz could process.

1181

At sea, blue whales were

rare, lone creatures by the mid-1960s.

1182

Right and bowhead whales, their stocks barely recovered

from the predations of Yankee ships, were again near extinction.

1183

Over a hundred and fifty

thousand sperm whales died in Soviet industrial ships.

1184

Cetacean biomass in the North Pacific was

twenty percent of what it had been less than two hundred years earlier, communists having done to

every species of great whale what capitalists, in their slow ships, managed with only a few.

1185

By 1970, delegates to the International Whaling Commission were well aware that the North

Pacific cetaceans, along with whales the world over, were decimated. Rumors that part of the cause

was the Soviet fleet hunting out of turn began in the 1950s. By the end of the decade, the US

1179

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell Jr., “Soviet Catches of Whales in the North Pacific,” 63. It bears repeating

that the bulk of the Soviet whale harvest actually came from Antarctica, where the scale of the slaughter was far greater.

1180

Doroshenko, “Sovetskii promysel gorbachei,” 64-65.

1181

Eduard Zdor, Personal Communication, May 2014; GAChAO F. R-23, Op. 1, D. 51, L. 179.

1182

Doroshenko, “Sovetskii promysel bliuvalov,” 96.

1183

For a discussion of these species in particular, see Yulia Ivashchenko and P. Clapham, “Soviet Catches of Right

Whales Eubalaena japonica and Bowhead Whales Balaena mysticetus in the Northern Pacific Ocean and the Okhotsk Sea,”

Endangered Species Research Vol. 18 (2012): 201-217.

1184

The pre-industrial sperm whale population for the North Pacific is not known. Hal Whitehead estimates that,

worldwide, there were a little over a million sperm whales prior to 1800. Ship whaling dropped the population to about

70% of its historical norm, while industrial whaling dropped it to just a third of the initial population. However the

density of sperms in the North Pacific specifically is unclear. See Whitehead, “Sperm Whales in Ocean Ecosystems,” in

J.A. Estes, D.P. DeMaster and D.F. Doak et al. eds. Whales, Whaling and Ocean Ecosystems (Berkeley, CA: University of

California Press, 2006), 324-334

1185

See Bete Pfister and Douglas Demaster, “Changes in Marine Mammal Biomass in the Bering Sea / Aleutian Islands

Region before and after the Period of Commercial Whaling,” in J.A. Estes, D.P. DeMaster and D.F. Doak et al.

eds. Whales, Whaling and Ocean Ecosystems (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2006), 116-133.

198

Department of State had “little doubt that Russian whalers take all the whales which come in range

of their harpoons, regardless of size or quota.”

1186

Lack of compliance and an inability to enforce

anything, including membership, plagued the IWC.

1187

But the communists, so excessive in their

catches and excessively duplicitous in their diplomacy, were not the only members whose values of

cetaceans diverged from the values written into the IWC. The Commission’s mandate, as one

chairman stated, was “to maintain a proper balance between economic requirements and natural

resources.” “Protection” of the whales as whales was not the aim, only safeguarding their value as

present and future commodities.

1188

Rational use, in this view, balanced the two prerogatives. IWC

scientists had the task of enumerating this balance by determining maximum sustainable yield.

In the 1950s, this classic Progressive solution snarled in debate, both scientific and political,

over the size of a sustainable maximum. Marine scientists like Remington Kellogg advocated killing

fewer animals. Industrial whalers countered that the science was unclear and their fleet investments

demanded the revenue of large harvests. By the 1960s, with whales shrinking in body and range, the

science clearly indicated lowering annual quotas to a point “adequate to preserve and increase the

sustainable yield from this resource.”

1189

But politics, in the form of delegates allied with national

industries and loyalties, consistently voted to push the harvest recommendations off for a few

seasons. “I believe [the objections] all boiled down to what is necessary to provide a profitable

operation,” one U.S. participant noted in 1963. Not “a single consideration [was] based on

conservation.”

1190

In response, the new US delegation led by John McHugh, frustrated by the

inability of maximum sustainable ideals to yield any result, reconceived cetacean economic value.

Instead of the “purely aesthetic view” of conserving “these majestic beasts for posterity,” whales

should be managed based on “economic objectives.” Cetacean economicus could be harvested like a

mineral, with gold-rush “deliberate periods of over-fishing” followed by a biologically-prescribed

respite.

1191

McHugh was channeling a new, or renewed, line of capitalist theory. Economists like

Scott Gordon and S.V. Ciriancy-Wantrup argued that conservationists ignored “the history of man’s

successes in discovering new resources to take the place of old.”

1192

It was also an understanding of

whale value familiar to nineteenth century capitalist captains. Rational use did not require the future

of whales as whales, only the future of the capital held temporarily in their flesh. Thus one way for

cetaceans to compose the capitalist world was in the liquidation of an individual or species, to let its

corporeal revenue live on in some more profitable venture.

Such bonanza economics were rational, for at least some capitalists, because it was the once

and current reality: whales vanished and the market moved on. British and Dutch companies left the

1186

“Foreign Service Dispatch, November 24, 1958,” SI RU 7165 Box 25, Folder 5.

1187

I am, as any historian of diplomacy or science would be eager to point out, glossing over the many complexities of

these events, not least the ongoing and strenuous Soviet objected to international observers, for obvious reasons. For a

thorough discussion of the 1960s debates over whale quotas, regulation, and observers see Dorsey, Whales and Nations

Chapter 5, and Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale chapter 5.

1188

IWC Verbatim Record 1958, Tenth Meeting Document XIII, p. 2.

1189

IWC Verbatim Record 1960, 12/11, p. 51.

1190

IWC Verbatim Record 1963, 15/17, p. 68.

1191

John McHugh to Remington Kellogg, December 10, 1962, SI RU 7165, Box 27, Folder 1.

1192

Scott Gordon, “Economics and the Conservation Question,” The Journal of Law & Economics Vol. 1 (October 1958):

110-121. The association of McHugh’s view with those of these new conservation economists, including S.V. Ciriancy-

Wantrup and Anthony Scott, is also in Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale, 511-512.

199

whaling industry in 1963. The Norwegians had a lone factory ship hunting by the end of the decade.

In Europe and the United States, eatable fat calories were made mostly from soy, palm, rape seed,

pigs or cows. There was little demand for whale meat beyond dog feed.

1193

Japan still whaled

aggressively for national reasons and the Soviets fed socialism with whale bodies. But by 1970, the

world market had more or less ceased its formal valuation and exchange of cetacean calories and

component pieces.

Yet ingesting blubbery calories was not the only way to consume a whale. In the same

period that capitalist fleets dwindled, cetacean cultural products proliferated. In North America,

people listened to Pete Seeger sing about whales or whales sing to themselves through Roger

Payne’s recording of humpbacks.

1194

Cetaceans on television saved humans from misadventure and

on the theater screen saved them from nuclear annihilation.

1195

John Lilly’s bestselling books Man

and Dolphin and The Mind of the Dolphin popularized the idea cetacean intelligence and the capacity for

interspecies communication, one that began in scientific experimentation before listing into LSD-

fueled speculation.

1196

In some coastal towns, it was possible to watch migrating whales from tour

boats. And next to the old whaling yarn Moby Dick, a novel in which the pursuit of whales was a

metaphor for the gap between the human mind and knowledge of God, bookstores sold Farley

Mowat’s A Whale for the Killing, an autobiography in which the pursuit of whales was proof of human

Godlessness. Why, Mowat mused, would anyone kill such animals: intelligent, peaceful, so unlike

people with their technological addictions, so able to “survive successfully as natural beings”?

1197

Living as natural beings was, in the 1970s, increasingly an American aspiration. People from

middle-class suburbanites to college-campus activists, from scientists to politicians, and from

hunters to hikers, saw the world around them sliding toward “the greatest cataclysm in the history of

man.”

1198

Springs were silent. The population was a bomb. Paradise was not made from Cement as in

the Soviet novel; it was paved over with a parking lot.

1199

Astronauts showed the earth as a lone blue

1193

The exception was sperm whale oil, which still had a market – mostly fed by the Japanese and Soviets – as an

industrial lubricant. The Soviets used it in their intercontinental ballistic missile tubes; the U.S. Navy in nuclear

submarines.

1194

Scott McVay discusses sonic forms of cetacean appreciation, including playing whale song at an IWC meeting where

the Soviets were particularly intrigued; “Can Leviathan Endure so Wide a Chase,” Ecologist Vol. 1 No 16 (October

1971):5-9.

1195

The childish version is Flipper, which aired as a movie in 1963 and later became a television program. The 1973

movie The Day of the Dolphin features highly trained military cetaceans; it was an adaptation of Robert Merle’s book of the

same title.

1196

Lilly was a deeply eccentric researcher, eventually driven out of the mainstream scientific community for his

experimentation with LSD and experiments that featured young female researchers masturbating male dolphins; see

Zelko, Make it a Green Peace, 185-189. For more on the development of cetacean science in this period, including on Lilly,

see Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale¸ chapter six.

1197

Farley Mowat, A Whale for the Killing (Vancouver: Douglas & McIntyre, [1972] 2012), 39.

1198

Paul Ehrlich, “Eco-Catastrophe!” Ramparts Magazine (September 1969): 24-28, 28.

1199

The literature on the postwar American environmental movement is substantial if often geographically or

thematically fragmented. I am drawing here, variously and partially, from Samuel Hays Beauty, Health, and Permanence:

Environmental Politics in the United States 1955-1885 New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987); Adam Rome, Bulldozer

in the Countryside: Suburban Sprawl and the Rise of American Environmentalism (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001);

Hal Rothman, The Greening of a Nation?: Environmental Politics in the United States Since 1945 (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace

College Publishers, 1998); Stephen Fox, The American Conservation Movement: John Muir and His Legacy (Madison: University

of Wisconsin Press, 1985); Linda Nash Inescapable Ecologies: A History of Environment, Disease, and Knowledge (Berkeley:

University of California Press, 2006); Adam Rome, The Genius of Earth Day: How a 1970 Teach-In Unexpectedly Made the First

200

marble, “a single spaceship,” in economist Kenneth Boulding’s words, “without unlimited reservoirs

of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, many must find his place

in a cyclical ecological system.”

1200

Human beings had rejected this cyclical time, one in which, as

environmental theologian John Claypool put it, was “man part of the animals’ and plants’ support

system, just as they were part of his.”

1201

They had done so in the name of progress that was in

reality its opposite – what ecologist Paul Ehrlich termed “the rape and murder of the planet for

economic gain.”

1202

Pollutants filled streams and bloodstreams. Nuclear capacity threatened disaster

now for a geological half-life. Oil spilled, rivers caught fire, species vanished, wilderness retreated

from slouching suburbs. These “were the apocalyptic facts.”

1203

The apocalyptic future could be avoided by returning the past; the past meant a time of

balanced nature; balance meant curtailing growth, consumption, and otherwise excising industrial

humanity from the “rhythms of the natural world.”

1204

This was not preservation for aesthetic

enjoyment or even conservation for market utility. It was a vision that looked beyond economic

rationale for its moral heft. It required what Maine senator Edmund Muskie called an

“Environmental Revolution – a commitment to a whole society…one of values, not ideology” and

“a sense of balance.”

1205

Balance and wholeness were concepts borrowed from ecologists. In its

popular form, ecology had a normative edge: nature without humans tended toward life-producing

harmony, but nature as used by industrial humans upset what Rachel Carson called “the delicate

balance of populations by which nature accomplishes far-reaching aims.”

1206

These aims were global

life itself. There were various ways to restore natural harmony, from the legislative – which

produced the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, and the Endangered Species Act – to the

consumptive, which produced organic food.

Green Generation (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010); Zelko, Make it a Green Peace; and Paul Sabin, The Bet: Paul Ehrlich,

Julian Simon, and Our Gamble Over the Earth’s Future (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013).

1200

Kenneth E. Boulding, “The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth,” in Henry Jarrett ed. Environmental Quality in

a Growing Economy: Essays from the Sixth RFF Forum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), 9.

1201

John Claypool quoted in Adam Rome, Genius of Earth Day, 175.

1202

Ehrlich, “Eco-Catastrophe!” 28.

1203

John Claypool quoted in Adam Rome, Genius of Earth Day, 176. Rome’s discussion of how environmental ideas were

disseminated and coalesced during the late 1960s and especially in 1970 and the years shortly after are excellent, and

show how broad but also heterodox the environmental coalition was in this period; see Genius of Earth Day chapters four

and five.

1204

Mowat, A Whale, 9.

1205

Edmund Muskie, Congressional Record – Senate Vol. 120, Part 9 (April 23, 1974): 11324-11327. See also, Transcript of

Hugh Downs on the Today show, April 20 1970, in Frank Herbert ed., New World or No World (New York: Ace Books,

1970), 19-20. Revolutionaries of the more traditional, social mode were not always impressed with the idea of turning

back the clock, viewing it as too conservative; see Rome, Genius of Earth Day, 135-137. Nor did all actual conservatives

agree that environmental revolution was desirable; for discussion of the backlash to environmentalism, see David

Helvarg, The War Against the Greens: The ‘Wise-Use’ Movement, the New Right, and Anti-Environmental Violence (San Francisco:

Sierra Club Books, 1994) and Sabin, The Bet.

1206

Rachel Carson, Silent Spring (New York: Houghton Mifflin [1962] 2002), 57. I am glossing here over some

fascinating moves within ecological science, and in its popularization. For more on the history of ecology and its

relationship with postwar environmentalism, see Donald Worster, Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Sharon Kingsland, Evolution of American Ecology 1890-2000 (Baltimore:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005); and Frank Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More than the Sum of

the Parts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993). John Kricher is far more critical of the balance idea; see Balance of

Nature: Ecology’s Enduring Myth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009)see also Dana Phillips, Truth of Ecology:

Nature, Culture, and Literature in America (New York, Oxford University Press, 2003).

201

Yet revolutions are not just material acts. They require mental reconstruction.

Environmental collapse originated, in the minds of many revolutionaries, with the conceptual

separation of humans from nature. From this original sin, nature was bent to industrial purpose, and

industry annihilated the garden of natural harmony.

1207

Ending earthly degradation, therefore,

required transcending the mental dualism between nature and culture. Different sorts of

environmentalists cast around for different methods. They tripped LSD, adored Native Americans,

moved back to the land, contemplated Gaia. Others found a path out of the human predicament

that wasn’t human at all. Many of the cultural whales Americans consumed in the 1960s and 1970s

were innately nonviolent, nontechnical, and non-dualistic, a “naked body encasing the floating mind,

the two, split by technological culture…one again.”

1208

With the power of their individual minds,

they could solve a “major riddle of nature and relations between species,” teaching humans to “live

in harmony with Nature instead of ruthlessly plundering the seas that nurtured us.”

1209

Where

American cetacean advocates once wanted to save whales to feed people, the new generation wanted

to save people with whales.

Valuing whales for their transcendence was very far from the pragmatic economics of the

International Whaling Commission. It was even further from the valuing whales as fuel for the

communist plan: Farley Mowat’s whale was a guide to a restored natural past; the Soviet whale was

the raw material of a perfectly human future. But for whales to play their part in the communist plan

they needed not just to exist but exist in ever greater numbers. And the numbers were gone. TINRO

biologists sent a dispassionate history of recent cetacean apocalypse to Moscow. Where thousands

once schooled, V.I Prevalichin reported, “humpback and blue whales in the North Pacific can be

considered to have been practically eliminated.” The Dal’nii Vostok could only find a few dozen fin

whales to kill. Half the sperm whales they harvested were pregnant or nursing. Extinction

loomed.

1210

In 1970, Gosplan reduced the annual plan for the North Pacific. The fleets went on

whaling in excess. Two years later, after more than a decade of stalling, the Soviet Union agreed to

allow IWC-affiliated international observers on their ships to record the catch.

1211

Perhaps it was

some sea-change within Gosplan; perhaps it was so bureaucrats at the Ministry of Fisheries could

earn plush salaries as observers abroad; perhaps it left the discipline to the capitalists, letting them

1207

Some of these thinkers were foundational to the field of environmental history – the intellectual grandparents of this

author, if you will. Most explicit in the critique of Enlightenment dualism is Carolyn Merchant, especially in The Death of

Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1980). For the degree to which I am

trampling on their legacy by reducing a decade of thinking to a paragraph, my apologies.

1208

Joan McIntyre, “Mind Play,” in Joan McIntyre comp., Mind in the Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales

and Dolphins (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1974), 196. Mowat expresses similar sentiments throughout A Whale for the

Killing. McIntyre was involved with the Friends of the Earth anti-fur campaigns before taking up the cause of whales,

after hearing whale song recordings. For more for the connection between these ideas and cetacean science, see Burnett,

The Sounding of the Whale¸ chapter 6.

1209

Peter Morgane, “The Whale Brain: The Anatomical Basis of Intelligence,” in Joan McIntyre comp., Mind in the

Waters: A Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1974), 93.

1210

Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell, “Scientific Reports of Soviet Whaling Expeditions,” 20-22.

1211

IWC Verbatim Record 1971, Meeting 23, 25-27.

202

take blame for the inevitable.

1212

Whatever the reasons, after 1972, North Pacific fleets kept their

kills more or less in line with International Whaling Commission limits.

1213

Soviet whaling was whimpering toward an end. The decline was far too slow, however, for

people who valued whales not materially but transcendentally – people for whom the IWC’s

utilitarian policies were hopelessly corrupted by industrial ties and ignored how killing such spiritual

creatures violated basic “morality,” as marine biologist Victor Scheffer argued, “the simple right of

the animal to live and to carry on its ancestral bloodline.”

1214

Whales had new and vocal advocates

for these rights, from established groups like the Humane Society to the cetacean-focused Project

Jonah. Activists tried boycotts, letter-writing campaigns, or making their pets vegetarian lest dog-

food contain Soviet-killed whale.

1215

Such advocacy helped add great whales to the Endangered

Species List, granting them protection in the U.S. This, however, did not touch international

whaling. So advocates played humpback songs at the 1970 International Whaling Commission

meeting, hoping that evidence of communication would move the Soviets to treat great whales as

the ‘marine brother of man.’”

1216

Five years later, the Soviet whaling program was confronted by music of a different sort. For

lack of whales, the Dal’nii Vostok had abandoned hunting in the Alaskan basin, moving south to the

waters off the coast of California. On June 27

, the crew was on deck flensing sperm whales when

the sound of tinny, English voicing singing “We are the whales, living in the sea / Come on now,

why can’t we live in harmony?” Likely few on board understood the words. When they peered over

the factory ship’s gunwales, even fewer knew why they were being hailed by guitar-playing, camera-

toting men in inflatable boats.

1217

So for a few strange minutes, the gore-spattered Soviet crew

danced along as bearded men in wetsuits sang “We’ll make love, above the ocean floor.”

1218

The singers were activists from Greenpeace. The group began by protesting nuclear

weapons; inspired by Farley Mowat’s public declarations that human and cetacean annihilation were

linked by the sperm oil that lubricated nuclear missiles, they turned to saving whales.

1219

The group

was varied – a photojournalist, a former Soviet prisoner, a man who called himself Walrus

Oakenbough, an I Ching mystic. Some were holistic ecologists, and others more motivated by the

1212

Berzin argues that the Soviets were motivated by foreign salaries; see “The Truth,” 38. The current archive does not

offer evidence on the Soviet decision.

1213

Some fraud did continue, abetted by the fact that Soviets observed Japanese ships and vs-versa, and both countries

were apparently involved in illegal harvesting during the period. However, the scale of illegal hunting dropped

substantially along with the total Soviet harvests in the North Pacific. See Ivashchenko, Clapham, and Brownell Jr.,

“Soviet Catches of Whales in the North Pacific,” 64-67.

1214

Victor Scheffer, “The Case for a World Moratorium on Whaling,” in Joan McIntyre, comp. Mind in the Waters: A

Book to Celebrate the Consciousness of Whales and Dolphins (New York: Scribner and Sons, 1974), 230.

1215

For a discussion of the boycotts and letter campaigns, see Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 237-240.

1216

McVay, “Can Leviathan Endure,” 6-7, 9.

1217

Some on the Dal’nii Vostok might have known of Greenpeace’s intent; the group knew about the fleet’s position

because of information another member received at the IWC meeting happening simultaneously.

1218

Robert Hunter, Warriors of the Rainbow: A Chronicle of the Greenpeace Movement 1971-1979 (Amsterdam: Greenpeace

International, [1979], 2011 Kindle Edition), 192.

1219

Rex Weyler, Song of the Whale (Garden City NY: Anchor Press/ Doubleday 1986), 119. Sperm oil was considered

strategically important in the U.S.; see Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 235. Weyler was a journalist who became very active

in Greenpeace. Here he is recounting an interlude between Mowat and Paul Spong, a cetacean researcher and one of the

original Greenpeace crew. For a thorough history of Greenpeace, including the diverse social and intellectual origins of

the group, see Zelko, Make it a Green Peace.

203

idea of individual cetacean rights. But by the time they confronted the Dal’nii Vostok, they had spent

a month on the Phyllis Cormack attempting to communicate with gray whales – by playing music or

mediating – an experience that, the group’s leader Robert Hunter recalled, had the effect “of

‘converting’ everyone into whale freaks.”

1220

It was conversion that made the primary objective, of

disrupting the whale fleet, morally pressing. The actual smell of the Dal’nii Vostok, and the sight of it

gushing blood from the gunwales in the midst of butchering, was unexpectedly shocking. “We

realized,” Hunter wrote, “that here was a beast that fed itself through its anus, and it was into this

inglorious hole that the last of the world’s whales were vanishing – before our eyes.”

1221

With

cameras rolling, and with the whalers no longer clapping, the Greenpeace crew tried to shelter a pod

of sperms from industrial death with their own bodies.

1222

From the resulting confusion of roaring

engines, screaming humans, spouting whales, and seeping gore, the Dal’nii Vostok harvested two

sperms. Greenpeace took away priceless footage of a Soviet harpoon exploding into the flesh of an

exhausted whale, its explosive charge barely clearing the people risking their lives to shelter her.

For the next several years, Greenpeace pursued Soviet fleet, using coordinates provided by

the Pentagon – which thought the Dal’nii Vostok was a surveillance front – to throw human bodies

between cetaceans and the harpoon, and human cameras between the Soviet vision for whales and

the American.

1223

The heckling opprobrium of international activists, which only increased IWC

pressure to reduce quotas or cease the hunt altogether, offered the Soviets yet another reason not to

whale. It had been decades since the country had driving material cause to kill cetaceans. By the late

1970s, there was no longer even an ideological purpose. Whales had value to the communist project

as blubbery manifestations the plan, the plan that in is increase substantiated the promises of

socialist progress. Scarcity violated this, lessening the value of whales and the labor of killing them.

Capitalists eighty years prior whaled limited stock because there could be real market value in

paucity. But for the Soviet whaler, cetaceans fueled the fiction of the plan, the fiction of endless

expansion, only in the act of ever-increasing death. And death could not increase year after year

without eating finally into its generative source, the slow-breeding stock of life. The milk spilled on

Soviet decks left communist hunters floating on a sea of lack, their rituals emptied of whale content

and impossible to perform. Harassed by singing men in rubber boats, the ocean was no place for

socialist heroes. Soviet palaces became rusting monuments to earthly limits. In 1979, the USSR

withdrew its last factory fleets from in the North Pacific, a few years before a worldwide

moratorium on industrial whaling.

1224

After nearly a hundred a fifty years of combined capitalist and

communist mass slaughter in the North Pacific, the remorseless havoc ceased. Leviathan had

endured.

1220

Hunter, Warriors, 176.

1221

Hunter, Warriors, 207.

1222

I have not found Russian language accounts of this event; the narrative here is based primarily on Zelko, Make it a

Green Peace, chapter nine; and Hunter, Warriors, chapter two.

1223

Zelko, Make it a Green Peace, 285-286. Greenpeace was apparently suspected by the Soviets as a spy front, an image

assisted by the fact that it targeted only Soviet ships, since the Pentagon had no use for tracking the Japanese; it is an

image the group retains in Russia today.

1224

The IWC moratorium went into effect in after the 1985/1986 season; some countries, Japan most notably, did not

follow it or used the scientific exception to the disgust of many. The Russian Federation has filed an objection to the

moratorium, but does not currently whale. For a history of how the moratorium was passed, see Dorsey, Whales and

Nations, chapter seven.

204

COMPOSING A FUTURE

A gray whale born in the late 1980s did not swim through the same sea of risk as its parents, or its

grandparents. The people in New Bedford and Moscow no longer released the value of a live whale

to human society only through its death, its parsed transition into capitalist commodity or

communist statistic. For much of the world, a world far from the Bering Strait, the right thing to do

was let calves grow into mottled, barnacled adults. Dead whales had once been valuable as light; left

alive, they had become a sign of enlightenment.

Enlightenment, even one born in the longing for a pre-lapsarian past, envisions a universal

line from the benighted world to a better one. In the Bering Strait, capitalists had tried variations on

this theme of progress through private property and markets. Communists tried salvation by

collective production. Neither vision proved precisely or particularly universal; both stumbled over

real existing arctic nature and split into variations of themselves. Enlightenment, as understood by

environmental activists, was supposed to fly by such anthrocentric nets. People had to progress

(back) to a better world by living in harmony with their environment.

The end of industrial whaling seemed like a successful exercise in creating harmony: people

learned about whales and stopped killing them. Capitalist and communist ideals of value had bowed

to the environmental. But in the Bering Strait, enlightenment-as-harmony met an ecology in which

people still wanted and needed to kill whales. Inupiat and Yupik hunters from North America killed

ten or twenty bowhead whales each year.

1225

Across the Strait, schooners hunted for Chukotkan

kolkhozy, taking dozens of gray whales for the final, local enactment of plan-making with whale

bodies and old ideas of community. Did this count as harmonious? The issue of indigenous whaling

revealed a schism in environmental thinking about whales, and a more general difficulty with making

natural balance normative. On the one hand were people who valued whales – or humans or any

other creature – equally in an ecological sense. If whales contributed to marine habitats at the

species-level, any given animal was unimportant, part of a larger equilibrium that included human

predation. It was a position that implicated all human life in all other life; people could hunt because

other animals hunted. On the other were activists who saw whales, like humans, as bearing selves,

souls even, granting each individual rights. This position implicated all life – at least all life intelligent

enough to warrant rights – in a moral order imposed by the human mind, while asking human

bodies to withdraw from the fleshy business of finding prey.

Neither vision worked, exactly, in Beringia. Animal rights ran afoul of human rites. Paul

Spong, a Greenpeace activist and cetacean researcher, concluded that native hunters used too much

technology to be traditional hunters; they should instead think of whales, “as neighbor and friend, an

object of curiosity and affection, rather than food.”

1226

Native hunters responded by organizing

politically, asserting to Congress and the IWC that they held whales as objects of affection and

sustenance simultaneously. They had done for a very long time, in a place where abstaining from

1225

Indigenous whalers were given legal exception from the Marine Mammal Protection Act. After 1970, the number of

bowhead whales increased fairly dramatically, as more hunters were able to buy whaling kit due to a surge in oil revenue

in the state. Inexperienced new crews killed more whales, and struck more than they landed.

1226

Paul Spong, “In Search of a Bowhead Policy,” Greenpeace Chronicles (November 1978): 2.

205

taking life meant their own death. First in Alaska and eventually in Chukotka, Inupiat, Yupik, and

Chukchi hunters won the political entitlement to enact their version of cetacean value.

1227

The vision of ecological harmony faced a different challenge. The gray whales that Chukchi

and Yupik hunters hunted in the late 1980s did not swim through the same ocean as their ancestors.

In killing off most of its great cetaceans, humans helped alter the composition of the Bering Sea.

The different species of whales in the wider North Pacific – not just the grays and bowheads, but

blues and sperms and humpbacks further from the Bering Strait – were gone, and their work with

them. Sperm whales stopped eating so many squids. Baleen whales stopped consuming as much

krill. Around their absence, the movement energy through the layers of the ocean, from the small

creatures through to the fish, shifted. There were more flat-fish and fewer herring. Deprived of

young whales, orcas began killing more seals. Energy moved through the ocean differently, and

perhaps less was fixed in the bodies of plants and animals.

1228

But energy is always changing how it

moves through the oceans. What of these changes came from the death of great whales and what of

it was climate; and what of the climate was inevitable and what was human, is impossible to parse.

These alterations in the Bering Sea ecology challenge the value of judging human action by its

accordance with ecological balance. Human beings are implicated in the harmony, constantly playing

with the tune even while trying to catch its rhythm.

The ocean will roll on even when human beings rewrite its score of species, from the

leviathan to the diatom. The grand reshuffling of Bering Sea energy in the nineteenth and twentieth

centuries might come to appear, in the twenty-first, like a mild prelude to the cascade effects of a

warming climate. Humans may have become greater than the greatest whale in the capacity to make

life, or to take it away. Temperature changes are already working their way across the ocean floor

and up through the bodies of fish and mammals. Yet the ocean will roll on. It does not answer the

questions posed by its changing depths. On what time scale will the marks of Homo sapiens shock and

fade, ebb and pulse over the earth? What makes for a right and just association between beings and

things, human and otherwise? These questions are not abstract. They are the cumulative result of

daily life. They are questions of value, of what human imaginations make real through political

decision and practical action. The transformed relationship between people and whales along the

Strait over a hundred a fifty years demonstrates the power of that imagination. It made landing a

bowhead whale on St. Lawrence Island in 2016 host a whole social world; it made capitalist whalers

and Soviet factory ships alike deny the present for hope of the future; it made those same factory

ships so horrible to other people they risked death in stopping them. Yet none of the ideas

capitalists or communists or anyone else hurled north made the Bering Sea roll fully to the will of

markets or plans or other trajectories of perfection. The foremost limit to the ideological

imaginations of the twentieth century was in believing there were no limits. The twenty-first century

may be less idealistic, but we are still embarked. We must wager on the world we wish to compose.

Meanwhile, the Bering Sea rolls on, making do with the sunlight and silt.

1227

For more on the politics of the bowhead whale controversy, see Dorsey, Whales and Nations, 244-255.

1228

For an overview of the trophic cascades initiated by whaling, see and Croll, et. al., “Ecosystem impacts” 202-214;

National Research Council, The Bering Sea Ecosystem; and Phyllis J. Stabeno et. al., “Physical Forcing,” 1177-1212.

206

CONCLUSION

BERINGIA, 2015

In late autumn, Beringia’s ravens begin to gather. They are fat and glossy after the endless day of the

arctic summer, chicks grown over two feet high and ready, with their parents, to join in the company

others. If there is a town or village nearby, the flock may turn to it, air hissing through their wings as

they settle amid the eves. Beyond, the tundra is turning deep red after the frost, the river valleys

become looping lines of gilt yellow willows. Along the coast the sea is pewter dark and rimmed with

ice. One day is lit by watery sun; the next will bring winter, all at once, in a blizzard. Against this the

black birds cluster, patterns of ink forming and resolving as they move in the air.

Ravens flock but do not go south. They do not need to. The common raven, Corvis corax, is

omnivorous and intelligent, and finds ways to live across every arctic continent – and in deserts,

temperate forests, plowed fields, and cities. In the north they inhabit every ravine’s birches, every

coastline’s sheltering patch of spruce. And always with one rolling black eye on the world of people.

It is not idle curiosity; the birds learned long ago to prospect among humans because humans make

energy predictable: leaving piles of steaming carrion, untended racks of drying fish, tins of cast-off

miners’ biscuits, the endless possibilities of refuse heaps. So the birds come into Beringian villages

when the cold bears down on the land.

1229

Oil-slick black bodies gather around a dog-team at

feeding time, perch on a gunwale to snatch fish from a net, congregate at dusk to gurgle and rasp

and cry in their liquid croaking voices.

From their ubiquity, Chukchi, Inupiat, and Yupik wove ravens into their narratives of origin.

Across communities of the Strait, the birds are both tricksters and saviors, using their wits to fetch

earth for drowning people, cast away the evil spirits that torment reindeer, or kill a great whale to

make land.

1230

The people at Point Hope have a story about a raven that covets a skin ball, horded

underground by a night-loving peregrine falcon. The ball holds the whole life-giving sun, made

sterile by internment. Raven’s plot is to free the light in order to make a new world, a better world,

for human beings.

1231

Liberating energy is the root of a human revolution in a story first told long

before its tellers met a metal oil lamp, let alone an internal combustion engine.

In the twenty-first century, it was people rather than a black bird that came to liberate energy

from below Beringia’s habitable surface. They came not for light but for its relics. Under the

Chukchi Sea are millions of gallons of old sun made flesh by plants, made petroleum by time and

1229

Descriptions of raven behavior and appearance are drawn from the author’s experience; information on range,

population, and habits come from W. Boarman and B. Heinrich, “Corvus corax: Common Raven,” The Birds of North

America, 476 (1999): 1-32.

1230

For examples of raven stories, see Kira Van Deusen, Raven and Rock: Storytelling in Chukotka (Seattle: University of

Washington Press, 1999), 21-23 and 102-104; Edwin Hall Jr., The Eskimo Storyteller: Folktales from Noatak, Alaska

(Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1975), 93-95, 347-348, 447-449; Nicholas Gubser, The Nunamiut Eskimos:

Hunters of Caribou (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965); and Tom Lowenstein, Ancient Land: Sacred Whale: The Inuit

Hunt and its Rituals (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1993), 3-6; 65-66.

1231

Lowenstein, Ancient Land, 65-70. Lowenstein’s telling of the raven and light story echoes versions told elsewhere

across Beringia, but I am in debt to his ability to make real the telling and meaning through poetics in English.

207

heat and pressure, and made precious by the internal combustion engine. Geologists knew for much

of the twentieth century that oil pooled under Beringian waters in a submarine field as rich as

Prudhoe Bay. But only in the twenty-first century was there technology and demand sufficient to

attempt extracting petroleum so guarded by water, earth, and climate. In 2005, Royal Dutch Shell

began buying development leases in the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. One day in May, a decade later,

a half-submersible oil-drilling rig named the Polar Pioneer arrived in the Port of Seattle. With its eight

yellow towers suspending a central drill and bristling with cranes, it bore little resemblance to the

ships that bore whalers, hunters, and miners north the past. But like them, the Polar Pioneer was

waiting for the sea ice to retreat and liberate value from the arctic. Like many of the prospectors

gone north before, that source of value was energy. Only this time, instead of making do with

reindeer meat and whale blubber, Beringia seemed poised to offer up industry’s most potent fuel.

THE POLAR PIONEER is a fitting coda for the previous five chapters. Sailing an oil rig to the

Chukchi Sea was an endeavor heir to the appetites and motives of the long twentieth century. For

the US government, not exploiting Beringia resources risked, as one editorial argued, of jeopardizing

“America’s global competitiveness, leadership and influence in the Arctic.”

1232

Modern economies

grow on inexpensive energy; the thirty billion barrels lying under the seabed made access to energy

predictable.

1233

Barak Obama authorized arctic drilling, since “US production of oil and natural gas is

important,” and “importing it…is bad for our people.”

1234

Royal Dutch Shell, the fourth largest

corporation in the world, cared less about sovereignty but plenty about growing profits. Through

drilling they saw “a future of new ports, new airports and permanent rigs,” able to “bind Arctic

Alaska to the rest of the world.”

1235

The Russian Federation, with its own offshore ambitions, its

own claims to the arctic seabed, and its own partnerships with Shell, sent a ship to surveille the Polar

Pioneer.

1236

Environmentalists worried that the end of the world lay under the ends of the earth. In

the words of Bill McKibben, “Shell helped melt the Arctic and now they want to drill in the thawing

waters,” noting that arctic oil is “exactly the sort of carbon we need to leave underground if we’re

going to have any chance of avoiding [climate] catastrophe.”

1237

Inupiat communities found

themselves torn between the possibility of participating in the market through oil jobs and or being

left with nothing but the sludge of oil spills. Their past was a guide to the goods and havoc energy

prospecting brought. “‘The hunger for oil,’” Point Hope mayor Steven Oomittuk told a reporter,

“‘our ancestors went through it before.’”

1238

The motives and ideas that flocked around the Polar Pioneer as it sailed north in June 2015

were not new. Walrus were once folded into national border-making, a miniature act of sovereignty

1232

Gary Roughead, “In the Race for Arctic Energy, the U.S. and Russia Are Polar Opposites,” The Wall Street Journal,

August 25, 2015.

1233

“A Narrow Opening for Arctic Oil,” The New York Times, May 13, 2015.

1234

The White House Press Release, “Remarks by President Obama in Press Conference after GSS Summit,” May 14,

2015.

1235

McKenzie Funk, “The Wreck of the Kulluck,” The New York Times December 30, 2014. The size of Shell was true

when it purchased the Beringian leases.

1236

Jack Tapper and Jeremy Diamond, “Russian Intelligence Ship Spots American Oil Vessel,” CNN.com, September 7,

2015.

1237

350.org Press Release, “Bill McKibben Responds to White House Decision on Arctic Drilling,” May 11, 2015.

1238

William Yardley and Erik Olsen, “Arctic Village Is Torn by Plan for Oil Drilling,” New York Times October 11, 2011.

208

through energy. Reindeer made local populations participant in markets or their collective

denunciation. Gold and tin from the Straits went everywhere and left behind ports and airports and

roads. Hunting whales bound Beringian waters to distant people, first as buyers of lamp fuel, then as

participants in socialist construction or advocates of cetacean rights. And beyond the familiarity of

the energy hunger it was built to feed, the Polar Pioneer entered a Beringia littered with artifacts of

prior revolutions. Present everywhere were traces of the individuals and ideas that unmade small

nations; made national borders; remade the environments of the sea, the shore, and the land; and

reformed through practice the concepts, desires, and motives of the region’s inhabitants.

Yet notably absent from the twenty-first century was the possibility of utopia. Communism

and its vision of transformation through collective industry was gone. Russia’s petrol ambitions had

them cooperating with Shell, not denouncing the imperialism of global capital while attempting to

make a new world order. And capitalism’s world order had lost if not faith altogether, than its

bygone sense of progressive anticipation. When Shell lobbied for northern drilling rights, they ran

television ads showing a little girl in bed, a polar bear on the lampshade illuminating her book, while

a narrator told viewers that to “keep the lights on for her, we will need to look at every possible

energy source.” Capitalism in the twenty-first century requires aggressive growth just to stand still.

On the environmental side, the argument is no more hopeful. The environmentalists who protested

the Polar Pioneer in editorials and from kayaks in Seattle’s harbor and so not in the service of Eden

restored, but to keep the grubby present from deteriorating further. These were not narratives of

progress or even preservation, but of hard-won stasis. Nor was the language of public policy any

more triumphant. It divided roughly between those who valued Beringia for its goods – its oil, its

minerals – or for “ecosystem services.” Some of the services were cultural or ephemeral, like the

experience of a frontier or the aesthetic pleasure of the wild. Others were concrete, as when sea ice

assists in regulating climate, or when a whale enlivens the surrounding ocean. But the terms are

telling; goods and services are the primary units of capitalist value. They are units of worth that

deflate easily into the abstraction of currency, that conflate monetary value with utility with

rationality. A sunrise lights deep orange steam as it rises from an icing autumn river: this is a service.

The salmon battling up that river, carrying ten thousand years of genetic memory, next year’s

potential spawn, and the energy of its delicious flesh: that is a good. Utopia is gone from this, the

dominant rhetoric of our time. What remains are thoughts and prospects constrained by the

apparent universality of economic estimation.

What this ignores is history. The long twentieth century was often terrible. It was terrible to

people and terrible to the landscapes and living things that existed alongside them. Its years saw

Inupiat, Yupik, and Chukchi villages wracked with disease and filled with starving children. It saw

men die in mines and on ships, for money and for ideas and for no reason at all. It saw rivers and

mountainsides remade, and saw species left near extinction to fuel markets and collectives. But the

twentieth century was also a place of continual experimentation done for progressive impulse.

Under scrutiny, it is also a place where universals fared badly. Capitalism and communism did not

look the same across space. At sea, the technological capacity for humans to kill whales overcame

whales’ adaptive avoidance, meaning that the modernist expectation of efficiency and growth

through technology ran afoul of slow-breeding animal biology. On the coastlines, both the United

209

States and the Soviet Union recognized these biological limits in walrus populations, choosing to

curtail hunting, a moment of shared ecological recognition that violated the idea that the market or

Marxist production managed best. On the tundra, capitalist and communist efforts to standardize

reindeer as an agricultural resource did change indigenous lives, but did not become a stable

resource because of climate factors. And in their hunt for gold, both countries proved able to master

the static problem of geology and do with the land what they wanted. Beringia flexed hard ideas into

new forms; human values and politics constantly compromised between ideological drive and

material circumstance. The result indicates that the rule of the past is not universality, but plasticity.

It is a lesson buried in the post-communist moment, when we have cast aside the hope for a better

world and retained faith in universal historical laws. It is an equation that the twenty-first century

may require we reverse.

A RAVEN LIVES for a decade. Fifteen generations of Corvis corvax watched Beringia’s long

twentieth century, from the whaler’s revolution of 1848 to the arrival of miners in 1898, from

domestic reindeer coming to Alaska and Bolsheviks coming to Chukotka, from the advent of Cold

war borders in 1948 to the whimpering end of Soviet factory whaling in 1978. The ravens watched

people come to the arctic for the raw material upon which human ideas feed, and ravens ate the

leftovers of the revolutions that followed. From the Alaskan shore, ravens were witnesses to the

Polar Pioneer turn and leave Beringia in the autumn of 2015. After ten years and six billion dollars,

Shell discovered too little oil in their test well to legitimate the expense of work among the familiar

arctic burdens of cold, distance, rough seas, and intemperate weather. Compounding material

problems was a contest over value; the US government imposed strict and costly rules meant to

protect the services of the arctic, the species and seascapes, from the contamination of leaking oily

goods. Come to the arctic to take energy, Shell left having expended far more than it gained. Its plan

adapted to local circumstances, like many a plan before, by failing. The one universal in Beringia is

the inconsistency between human desire and material outcome.

Around the anchors the Polar Pioneer left on floor of the Chukchi Sea, the arctic world is also

failing. It is failing to exist in the form these chapters described, the form familiar to the hunters,

miners, government workers, missionaries, whalers, teachers, merchants, prisoners, communist

converts, capitalist resisters, and occasional tourist. The most recent revolution in the arctic is to rob

it of its defining coldness through the distant, furious activity of billions of people burning up the

fixed carbon artifacts of ancient sunshine. In the creeping absence of frost, the sea is coming for

whole villages. Black spruces die and lean drunkenly as the permafrost melts from beneath them.

Walrus without their usual frozen berths beach themselves by the thousands. Caribou and reindeer

catch their antlers in shrubs grown tall and thickly green by warmth. Salmon eek north to find cold

rivers. On iceless shores, polar bears meet grizzlies and between them make strange new creatures:

perhaps fit for a warmer age, perhaps unfit for any. Their lives are heir to a thousand natural shocks,

many now of human origin.

Writing about the rapid alterations to Beringia is elegiac. But it is not entirely an act of

mourning. Ravens, like some other species, are not afflicted by a warming climate or human

presence. Their range has expanded onto the high tundra because they learned that houses and

210

equipment substitute for nesting trees. In their apparent contentment in raising their young under

streetlights, the birds are a warning against using nature as a universal measure for what people

value. Ravens thrive in this changing world. We may not. Estimating Beringia is a human endeavor,

an ideological endeavor, and that makes it adaptable and subject to political contest, not perfect

measurement or universal outcome. It is also an endeavor that will never entirely shake the influence

of the natures it tries to harvest, to protect, to value.

IN THE INUPIAT legend of raven stealing light, he is successful in creating a new world. But it

is not quite the world he planned. When the raven takes the ball of the sun from the falcon, they

fight. In the course of their battle, the two birds etch a pattern of dark and light into the land and the

sky, patterns that are neither all shadow nor sun, neither all old nor all new. Looking at this pattern,

the birds decide that light and dark are better together than separated. The mixture, born in the

happenstance, makes seasons and time. It is in the blending that the world becomes habitable. At its

origin, this is not a story about how the human and nonhuman world fit with each other. But it

could be, at least as a metaphor. It could be a story about the inseparable pattern of things born

from contest, from conflicting desires, from the hope to make existence better, and from the raw

elements that make a place our home. There are human beings, and there are all the other beings

and features of the earth. As the raven told the falcon,

“It would be no good,

if we had one and not the other.”

1239

Lowenstein, Ancient Land, 66-70.

211

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