London and the Klondike

By the time London boarded a steamer for his trip from San Francisco to Alaska, he had already led a colorful and dramatic life. He was a sloop owner and oyster pirate on San Francisco Bay and a deputy for the Fish Patrol at fifteen, a sailor traveling through the North and South Pacific hunting seals at seventeen, a coal-shoveler in a power plant, a Socialist, and a tramp at eighteen. By nineteen, a weary London saw himself, with others of the working classes, near “the bottom of the [Social] Pit... myself above them, not far, and hanging on to the slippery wall by main strength and sweat” (London, War of the Classes, pp. 274—275; see “For Further Reading”). Al ithough London was far from relinquishing his love of the active life, he feared being ruled by it. London fought in these early years to educate himself, and by that education to get himself out of the hard-laboring classes. As his hero informs his readers in the semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden, writing offered a way to stoke the fires of both the body and the imagination, and so with characteristic determination, London set himself to the task of becoming a professional writer. By 1896, however, he realized that writing alone could not support a hungry family. The following year, London and his brother-in-law Captain James H. Shepard decided to try their luck panning for gold in the recently discovered strikes along the Yukon River in the Klondike.

After disembarking in Juneau, Alaska, London, Shepard and their companions made their way to Dyea, the principle departure point for the gold fields of the Yukon and the Klondike. Buck travels the same trails that London covered—leaving Dyea, making the arduous climb over Chilcoot Pass, and pushing on to Lakes Linderman and Bennett before making the waters of the Yukon River. From here, the party traveled downstream, toward Dawson City, where they navigated the dangerous White Horse and Five Finger Rapids before reaching the relative safety of Split-Up Island, 80 miles from Dawson between the Stewart River and Henderson Creek. London staked a claim near here and made a brief visit to Dawson City to record the claim. He returned to the island, where the group passed the winter in an old miner’s cabin. These long five months proved difficult for London, who contracted scurvy by the spring from poor diet and lack of exercise.

Upon his return to San Francisco in 1898, London began his writing career in earnest. Clearly, the Klondike turned London into a writer of note, not only because he was able to tap into a ready market for all things Gold Rush, but more important, because the landscape offered London a barren theater for his characters to work out their paths in life. If, as London believed, environment determined the course of an individual’s life, then the austere and brutal, yet ultimately simple environment of the North tested the capacities of the individual (and by extension, the species) to adapt to the environment.

London’s intellectual experiences during the winter spent on Split-Up Island are as important as his physical ones; he spent his time reading, rereading, and sharing with his friends the two books he carried with him to the wilderness: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Less than a year after his return to San Francisco, London summed up his understanding of Darwin in a letter to his friend Cloudesley Johns: “Natural selection, undeviating, pitiless, careless alike of the individual or the species, destroyed or allowed to perpetuate, as the case might be, such breeds as were unfittest or fittest to survive” (Labor, p. 101). Such struggle characterizes human and animal life in The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

The Origins of The Call of the Wild

Most of London’s readers were familiar with Darwin’s evolutionary theories, in which the great biologist argues that over time species adapt to their environment and that the process of that adaptation involves a series of struggles for existence. Natural selection, adaptation, and chance are the mechanisms that govern the evolution of a species. The operation of Darwinian evolution is obvious in both The Call of the Wild and White Fang, as virtually every sentence in these texts palpitates with the deadly threats confronting human and animal in the silent, frozen world of Alaska. London sets the scene for this struggle most explicitly in the opening pages of White Fang: “A vast silence reigned over the land,” he writes. “The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness.... It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild” (p. 91). As a team of dogs, carrying two men and a coffin bearing a third, cross the scene, London continues his narration:

It is not the way of the Wild to like movement... and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man (p. 92).

The animals (human and dog alike) in London’s fiction are propelled through the landscape by “the law of club and fang,” by the constant war against predators, famine, and cold, against stupidity, brutality, and viciousness. Buck and Spitz fight to the death for command of the team and hence for supremacy in the pack; a baby White Fang eats ptarmigan chicks, narrowly escapes being killed by their mother, then watches in fear as the ptarmigan hen is snatched up by a raptor.

In The Call of the Wild, Buck’s new life as an Arctic sled dog initiates him into this struggle. Before his abduction, Buck was used to a life of comfort and security, a “lazy, sun-kissed life ... with nothing to do but loaf and be bored.” Upon his arrival in the North, Buck senses that he “had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial” (p. 15). Buck finds himself unprepared to deal with this foreign environment; significantly, he must learn about the world around him before he can begin to use it to his advantage. Indeed, both The Call of the Wild and White Fang can be read as accounts of the education of a being thrown into a testing environment. Just as White Fang must first learn to become domesticated before he can become a dog, Buck must first “learn to be wild” before he can become a wolf. Weakness, Buck quickly learns, equals death in this land of the “law of club and fang,” a lesson he learns as he witnesses Curly, the good-natured Newfoundland, torn to pieces by the pack. “So that was the way,” Buck concludes. “No fair play. Once down, that was the end of you” (p. 16).

The “fittest” species—those that are most successful in the struggle for existence—survive and reproduce. For Buck, this law translates to “Kill or be killed, eat or be eaten” (p. 60). In an interesting move, London translates these evolutionary principles into a brief Socialist tract he wrote in 1899, entitled “What Communities Lose by the Competitive System.” Darwin, along with Herbert Spencer, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx, not only confirmed London’s belief in Socialism, but also gave him a way to comprehend the communities of humans and dogs he encountered in the Klondike. In his essay, London declares, “[H]is strength lay in numbers, in unity of interests, in solidarity of effort—in short, in combination against the hostile elements of the environment” (Foner, p. 419). Labor equals survival, and labor is a collective effort. It does not matter if the laborer is human or animal, if he toils in a factory in California, delivers mail in the frozen Arctic, or stalks food on the “trail of meat.”

The “struggle for existence” that characterizes these efforts to survive and reproduce takes many forms—animal (human and nonhuman alike) versus animal, plant versus plant, and all against the forces in the environment that seek their destruction. London agrees with Darwin, who argues that the long-term survival of the species, not the survival of an individual, is the focus of this struggle. Darwin cautions his readers “to constantly bear in mind” that “heavy destruction inevitably falls” on every single organic being “at some period in life” and consequently “to never forget that every single organic being around us may be said to be striving to the utmost to increase in numbers” before that destruction occurs (Darwin, Origin, p.119).

The chilling opening of White Fang demonstrates both the absolute compunction to reproduce despite the threat of destruction and the “solidarity of effort” among laborers necessary to mitigate the effects of a hostile environment. Two communities are pitted against each other in this opening scene: one formed by Henry, Bill, and their sled dogs; the other composed of the ever-present Arctic wolf pack. Henry and Bill attempt to keep their group together—lit—erally to maintain a critical mass sufficient to ward off predation by the pack. The wolf pack possesses a logic and a system of its own: Divide and conquer. The she-wolf, the “decoy for the pack” as London calls her, plays her part well in this drama. She lures each sled dog, one by one, away from the safety of the camp and fire by the promise of the chance to mate with her. Since the propagation of the species is a drive that inexorably compels animals to act, each dog responds to this primal urge and answers the she-wolf’s call, only to meet death at the teeth of the ravening wolf pack (p. 101). The wolf pack kills Bill and is about to turn on Henry before chance, in the form of another party, steps in and saves him.

Unlike the human community, reliant upon its nonnative dogs and burdened by the accoutrements of culture, the wolf pack has successfully adapted to its environment. Its social structure is defined yet malleable. In times of famine, the pack travels together to give it the advantage over any other animals it may find. In times of plenty, the pack splits up: Male and female pair up and bear a new generation. All work performed by the wolves ensures the survival of the pack. In contrast, the work performed by Bill and Henry, who labor to bring the body of a rich man back for a “long-distance” funeral, satisfy no such essential function. These characters are weighed down and very nearly destroyed by a class structure that demands the fruit of labor not for the self, but for another. The system is absurd, unnatural, and ultimately deadly; the body in the coffin, which should, perhaps, be the first to go to the dogs, is preserved from harm while the bodies of the laborers—both human and canine—who support that body are destroyed.

At the same time, however, something more is at stake than just a “pitiless” battle for brute survival. In Origin, Darwin imagines these struggles in a “large and metaphorical sense including dependence of one being on another” (Darwin, Origin, p. 116). In his other major investigations into the coevolution of humans and animals, The Descent of Man (1871) and The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Darwin continues his reorganization of the map of the natural world. In the process, he gives nonhumans standing—specifically, moral standing—as equal participants in the communities of nature. In Descent, Darwin argues that a moral scheme rooted in evolutionary terms levels the playing field not only by giving all organisms equal status, but also by emphasizing that each is a part of and a participant in distinct yet interrelated communities.

Evolutionary principles replace a traditional conception of morality based on “selfishness” and the instinct for self-preservation with one that derives from social instincts. Darwin explains this concept in his definitions of “moral sense” and “social instincts,” which he argues have developed for the “general good of the community.” “As the social instincts both of man and the lower animals have no doubt been developed by the same steps,” he writes, “it would be advisable... to use the same definition in both cases” (Darwin, Descent, pp. 97-98). Humans are not the only ones with a moral sense, according to Darwin, who notes that “any animal whatever, endowed with well-marked social instincts, would inevitably acquire a moral sense or conscience, as soon as its intellectual powers had become developed... as in man” (Descent, pp. 71-72).

London also sees the process of evolution as a “moral” one that relies on proper action across communities. London wants to display this process, the opposite of the one narrated in The Call of the Wild, in White Fang. Evolution, he writes in a letter to his publisher, George Brett, brings with it “faithfulness, love, morality, and all the amenities & virtues.” In this letter, London explains the genesis of White Fang’s story:

I’m dropping you a line hot with the idea. I have the idea for the next book I shall write.... Not a sequel to Call of the Wild.... I’m going to reverse the process. Instead of the devolution or decivilization of a dog, I’m going to give the evolution, the civilization of a dog.... And it will be a proper companion-book—in the same style, grasp, concrete way. Have already mapped part of it out. A complete antithesis to the Call of the Wild. And with that book as a forerunner, it should make a hit. What d’ye think?” (Labor, pp. 454—455).

Although London’s Klondike days were well past him by 1906, he returns to this landscape precisely because, more than any other, the Klondike scene is “primordial.” It is an “earlier” setting, a place where the “social instincts” and the “moral sense” are not yet well developed. Simply put, the Klondike exhibits the “primordial” precisely because it offers a safe haven for an individual like Beauty Smith, White Fang’s vicious tormentor.

The letter quoted above, however, reveals a contradiction at the heart of London’s narratives, since it is clear in both texts that the “devolution” to wolf status does not necessarily mean that the now wolf-dog loses his or her social instincts or moral sense; it just changes the definitions of the terms a bit. In other words, the human community in the Arctic resembles an early stage of human civilization while the wolf pack represents the apex of wolf society. The one cannot yet survive successfully in its environment, while the other can.

Life in London’s North is openly marked by constant warfare, but Darwin stresses the fact that survival depends precisely upon this kind of interaction within and between communities. His descriptions of the interrelations of beings in nature must have resounded with London as he beheld his Klondike companions, the men and dogs with whom he shared his experiences. Darwin writes:

How have all those exquisite adaptations of one part of the organisation to another part, and to the conditions of life, and of one distinct organic being to another being been perfected? We see these beautiful coadaptations most plainly in the woodpecker and mistletoe; and only a little less plainly in the humblest parasite which clings to the hairs of a quadruped or feathers of a bird; in the structure of the beetle which dives through the water; in the plumed seed which is wafted by the gentlest breeze; in short, we see beautiful adaptations everywhere and in every part of the organic world (Darwin, Origin, pp. 114-115).

Coadaptation is a key term in Darwin’s description of the natural world; beings in nature live in distinct yet essentially interacting communities. Every organism, from the tiniest to the grandest, is equal and equally necessary to the health of the whole. Humans are not greater than animals, they are simply different from them, and each is equally well-adapted to survive in his or her environment.

Darwin’s notion of the “beautiful adaptations” that occurs among organisms begins to explicate the centrality of the relationship between humans and dogs in London’s texts. Wolves have long held a special, if complex, place in the human imagination. Romulus and Remus, the mythical twin founders of ancient Rome, were said to be suckled by a wolf. The Brothers Grimm vilified wolves in their fairy tales, and the full moon brings the fear of the hybrid werewolf. Settlers hunted wolves to near extinction in the lower United States from the first moment of contact, and even recent wolf recovery programs are hampered by deep prejudice against the species. In myth and in reality, wolves are despised and persecuted. Yet the wolf also represents the initial bridge between the ancient human community and the larger nonhuman world. This willingness of the ancient wolf to come into the human home scene hints at the deep, inarticulate, yet ultimately expressible love that London’s dog and human characters exhibit for each other. The wolf, as the human community’s first animal companion, coevolved with it and became the domestic dog; as a result, dogs have long been considered part of the family. We love them because they offer us unconditional love ; we love them because the “Wild” in them has been tamed. By making them part of our home space, we have truly domesticated them. But don’t we, at the same time, perhaps feel a little bad that we have bred that wild nature out of these creatures?

London and His Dogs

The complicated relationship of humans to dogs is what makes Buck and White Fang’s narratives so profound. Buck, in particular, has become the representative Dog. He has been described as an archetype of the collective unconscious, as a “supercanine” (in the vein of Nietzsche’s Übermensch), and as the mythic “Hero,” but also as a lowly mail carrier. He is said to devolve in the text, to evolve into myth, and to represent the yearning of man to free himself from his bonds. Only occasionally do critics speak about Buck (and White Fang, by extension) as a dog. And he is, indeed, a dog, as are all of London’s canine protagonists: Batard, Buck, White Fang, Husky, Brown Wolf, and That Spot.

But the question remains: What is it about the dog and the relationship between the human and the dog that is so powerful? The Call of the Wild and White Fang are not simply narrative expositions of instances of struggles in the natural world. Nor can London’s obvious reliance on the then-popular literary conventions of naturalism and realism—the desire to represent the “real,” unmediated experience of an individual in the environment—explain the overwhelming appeal of these books. London’s “dog-loving public” simply devoured them. The first edition of 10,000 copies of The Call of the Wild sold out in the first day, and the book remains one of the most popular novels by an American author in the world.

The normally loquacious London himself had a hard time articulating the impulse that led to the creation of The Call of the Wild. Material facts are easy to come by: London both wanted to capitalize on the popularity generated by other recently published dog books, notably Egerton Young’s My Dogs in the Northland, and to write a companion piece to his previously published short story “Bâtard.” But in letters to Brett and his close friend Anna Strunsky, London reveals that The Call of the Wild exerted a strange pull on him. To Brett, he wrote, “On my return from England I sat down to write it into a 4000 word yarn, but it got away from me & I was forced to expand it to its present length.” He reiterates the point to Strunsky and adds, “it got away from me, & Instead of 4000 words it ran to 32000 before I could call a halt.” (Labor, pp. 351, 352). As these statements suggest, some inexplicable quality of the story he was telling compelled him to continue writing; in relating this moment to his friends, London seems to wonder at the cause of it. Something about the story of a dog who thrives, despite being torn from an overcivilized world and thrust into an undercivilized (or precivilized) one enthralls him. In a way, the story, like Buck at the end of the narrative, escapes the control of the author.

Despite the fact that Buck’s story grew almost organically from the author’s pen, London did not realize the huge best-seller he had just completed. After the Saturday Evening Post serialized The Call of the Wild (June-July 1903), London sold the rights to the book to Brett outright for two thousand dollars. London imagined Buck simply as a counterpart to the dog character he had created in “Bâtard,” which was first published in Cosmopolitan magazine in June 1902. This powerful tale details the “exceeding bitter hate” that existed between the evil sled driver, Black Leclère, and his equally evil dog, Bâtard (“Bâtard, ” p. 387). Dog and man, drawn together by some inexplicable force and tied together by their mutual hatred, are products of biology and environment. Like Buck and White Fang, B ^atard is a mixed breed—the son of a “great gray timber wolf” and a “snarling, bickering, obscene, husky, full-fronted and heavy-chested, with a malign eye, a cat-like grip on life, and a genius for trickery” (“Bâtard,” pp. 387—388).

Leclère, himself the product of violence, fosters Bâtard’s innate evil until “the very breath each drew was a challenge and a menace to the other. Their hate bound them together as love could never bind” (“Bâtard,” p. 389). Equals in violence and vileness, neither can “master” the other, and throughout the story, each bides his time, assesses the other’s weaknesses, and plots the other’s destruction. At the end of the text, man and dog die together. Leclère, who has been falsely accused of murder, stands on a box with a rope around his neck, while Bâtard sits grinning at his feet. When his executioners hastily leave to assess new evidence in Leclère’s case, Bâtard exacts his own revenge and knocks the box out from under his tormentor. The executioners, who return to free the innocent man, find Bâtard clinging by his teeth to Leclère’s dead body. They shoot him for it.

After detailing this anatomy of hate, London undertook to reen-vision the relationship between human and dog, and specifically between sled driver and sled dog. Native American tribes long used dogs to pull sleds, and dogs in the Arctic performed essential functions. Without them, the delivery of supplies, mail, and other necessities would have been nearly impossible. Despite the real function of dog as work animal, however, there exists between man and dog in London’s Klondike a deep and passionate love—nowhere is this more apparent than it is in the profound relationships between Buck and John Thornton and between White Fang and Weeden Scott. London loved his own dogs; he even fought a bitter custody battle with his first wife, Bessie Maddern, over their husky, Brown Wolf. Buck loves Thornton with a “love that was feverish and burning, that was adoration, that was madness” (p. 58). White Fang loves Weeden Scott with an emotion akin to religious devotion. London saw in the relationship between a man and a dog a sentiment so raw and so powerful that it can arrest an animal’s irresistible call to roam the trackless wilds or draw that wild animal away from freedom and into bondage.

The intense love exhibited between the human and the dog in these texts is both positive and affirming and dangerous and destabilizing. On the one hand, this love confirms the greater connection between the two animals; it reiterates the initial connection that drew the wolf into the human home in the first place. But at the same time, such all-powerful love displaces the fundamental command of nature to preserve the self and the species. Such a love demands a loss of borders between the self and the other, a loss that can potentially enact the destruction of the self. Consider, for instance, Buck’s willingness to throw himself off the cliff at Thornton’s command, all for the love of a man; or, more to the point, White Fang’s near-fatal impulse to protect Weeden’s family.

Love equalizes. It dismantles the hierarchy that places humans above “lesser” animals and, as a result, forces us to envision moral codes in a profoundly different way. Love makes operative this new vision of morality—the one based on social instincts and a concern for the “general good of the community.” Naturally, some found this portrait hard to ingest. Theodore Roosevelt called London a “nature faker” and accused him of shamelessly humanizing dogs in his novels and stories. London published a scathing reply to these charges in an essay entitled “The Other Animals”; in this piece, he argues that denying the reasoning and emotive capacities of animals denies the obvious kinship of creatures in the natural world. The final passage to these charges is worth quoting at length:

Let us be very humble. We who are so very human are very animal ... No ... though you stand on the top of the ladder of life, you must not kick out that ladder from under your feet. You must not deny your relatives, the other animals. Their history is your history, and if you kick them to the bottom of the abyss, to the bottom of the abyss you go yourself. By them you stand or fall. What you repudiate in them you repudiate in yourself.

There is a lot at stake in this argument. The dogs in London’s world are kin to us, struggling with others to get out of the pit. London reminds humans that their success and survival depends on the success and survival of the entire system. Each must recognize its roles in the larger community, and all must work for the “general good of the community.”

Love: This is the mysterious element that compels London to write his dog stories, and it is the element that keeps people reading them. Perhaps we love Buck’s story because the pull of the wild, of “the pleading of life,” of the “song of the huskies... pitched in minor-key” is ultimately greater than the pull of the “love of a man.” Perhaps we respond to White Fang for the opposite reason. London’s companion piece does more than explain how the wolf first came into the human home. It restores an upset balance and confirms the coadapted community. Perhaps we love these dogs because they have agency, they have choice. In a world where humans have beaten nature—even wild nature—into submission, these dogs stand out. Buck wrests control of his narrative away from the human telling the tale, and in the end, he truly does “get away” from Jack London.

Tina Gianquitto received her Ph.D. from Columbia University and is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the Colorado School of Mines, where she teaches courses on literature and the environment. She specializes in the intersections of nature and science in American literature and has published on nineteenth-century women and their representations of the natural world.