ANNETTE ISLAND
The Elder continued up the hazy coast of British Columbia, working its way slowly north as it squeezed between Vancouver Island and the mainland. John Burroughs, famous for his gentle descriptions of the bucolic Catskills, was overwhelmed by his first attempts to capture the jagged Pacific coast in prose. “The edge of this part of the continent for a thousand miles has been broken into fragments, small and great, as by the stroke of some earth-cracking hammer,” he wrote. “Silver threads” of meltwater poured forth from the thick spruce and hemlock. The Elder made frequent stops for scientific sorties. An attempted hike to one waterfall proved that the rainforest, which rolled by with such lovely monotony from the comfort of a steamship, was, on foot, as impassable as anything explorers encountered in the Amazon jungle. The soggy climate prevented the kinds of wildfires that would clear undergrowth elsewhere. Giant thorned plants impaled the hands of hikers, who slipped on mosses as thick as fallen snow. “Traversing Alaska forests must be a trying task even to deer and bears,” Burroughs wrote.
William Dall, who had made the same sea journey fourteen times in his thirty years of exploring Alaska, cautioned his fellow passengers that the lush scenery they were passing paled in comparison with what lay ahead. If anyone knew what to expect, it was Dall. Shortly before the Elder crossed from Canada into Alaskan territory, he gave a lecture relating some of his adventures. At twenty-one, he had been a member of a scientific party that researched the possibility of stringing a telegraph line across Alaska by way of the Yukon. The group leader’s sudden death left Dall in charge, a role that required him to endure two winters in conditions that dropped below minus sixty degrees Fahrenheit. Dall spent the 1870s leading geographic surveys along the Alaskan shoreline that took him to the end of the Aleutians. By the time the Elder arrived in Alaskan waters, the territory contained a Dall Island, a Dall Ridge, and a Dall River, all named in the explorer’s honor, and was populated with Dall sheep. Twenty years earlier, Dall had even named the Elder’s first stop in Alaska, Annette Island, after his new bride.
By 1899, Annette Island was better known throughout the United States than almost any other place in the District of Alaska. It was the site of a well-publicized experiment in assimilating Alaska’s natives into American society. The Elder’s chaplain, Dr. George F. Nelson, described the process as “civilizing the savages.” When the Elder docked on the morning of Sunday, June 4, a party of Natives greeted the group and escorted them to the home of the minister behind this experiment, William Duncan.
Duncan was an Episcopalian missionary known for his work among the Tsimshian Indians of British Columbia. In 1862, he had founded a community called Metlakatla with a small nucleus of his new converts. “Duncan’s intent behind this move was to isolate them from the influences of their unconverted relatives and the vices introduced by the traders, such as alcohol and prostitution,” writes the Tsimshian historian Mique’l Dangeli. Metlakatla’s population grew quickly as other Tsimshian sought to escape a smallpox epidemic.
Duncan drew up a list of rules to help the Tsimshian adapt to the unstoppable incursion of Western society. Children were required to attend school and receive religious instruction. Ancient traditions were banned, including face painting, non-Christian supernatural beliefs, and the use of shamans and medicine men. He was especially firm about outlawing alcohol. The Anglican Church’s insistence that Duncan use wine as a sacrament in religious rituals initiated the final schism that sent Duncan to Alaska. When Duncan founded New Metlakatla (the “New” was soon dropped, to some confusion) on Annette Island in 1887, the reverend orchestrated a publicity blitz in the Lower 48 that celebrated his successes in transforming what he considered the tribe’s primitive behavior.
The Harriman team was given a tour of the town, which George Bird Grinnell compared to “an old-fashioned New England hamlet in its peaceful quiet.” The streets, he noted, were broad and straight. The houses had neat gardens and fences. Most of the team members were escorted to the town’s large church, where the entire village of nearly one thousand Tsimshian seemed to have turned out for worship. Duncan gave a sermon in the native language, which the local residents apparently listened to rapturously. Burroughs’s impression of the local tongue was one of “a vague, guttural, featureless sort of language.”
The expeditioners were terribly impressed with Duncan’s accomplishment. “It took many years for Mr. Duncan to change these Indians from the wild men that they were to the respectable and civilized people that they now are,” Grinnell wrote in an account of the visit. “Whatever they are to-day Mr. Duncan has made them.”
Grinnell was among the most sympathetic whites when it came to the plight of America’s persecuted natives; he had written deep anthropological studies of the Indians of the Great Plains and had been adopted by the Pawnee. And yet when the Elder arrived in Alaska, neither he nor anyone else seems to have bothered to ask the Tsimshian their side of the story. Perhaps they were in too great a hurry, because the expeditioners obviously missed something. The stated vision of the Metlakatla museum dedicated to Duncan’s legacy is to “nurture a constructive dialogue” on the founder’s work and to “actively promote our community’s healing from this history.”
One person aboard the Elder who had spent a lot of time among Southeast Alaska’s natives was John Muir. Without their guidance, he never would have seen the territory’s most spectacular glaciers, let alone popularized them. The Elder likely wouldn’t have been in Alaska at all.