Endnotes

The Call of the Wild

Chapter I

1 . (p. 5) Old longings ... strain: These lines are from the first stanza of John M. O’Hara’s poem “Atavism,” which was first published in 1902 in The Bookman, a popular periodical. Biologists use the term atavism to describe the reappearance in an individual of certain characteristics of a distant ancestor that have been absent in intervening generations. Buck exhibits atavistic characteristics when his instincts and memories of an impossibly distant past “call” him and reassert themselves into his behavior.

2 . (p. 5) Northland: George Washington Carmack discovered gold in the Klondike in 1896. News of his Bonanza River strike reached the United States in 1897. Approximately 250,000 gold miners left for the Northland during the two big years of the Gold Rush that followed. London left for the Klondike on July 25, 1897, saying about his adventure “I had let career go hang, and was on the adventure path again in quest of fortune.”

3 . (p. 5) Buck: London based many of his canine characters on dogs he met in the Klondike. Buck, for instance, is modeled after Jack, a St. Bernard-collie mix who came from California to the Klondike with a miner named Lois Bond. Other dogs, like Curly and Koona, are based on animals London read about in Egerton Young’s My Dogs in the Northland.

4 . (p. 7) Chinese lottery: The reference is to a popular but illegal game of chance (now called keno) that Chinese immigrants brought to the United States.

5 . (p. 13) Narwhal: This small, white-gray whale inhabits the waters of the eastern Arctic Ocean and is known for its “tusk,” a singular tooth that is three to seven feet long and projects from its blunt nose. Native peoples often use the meat of the whale to feed sled dogs.

6 . (p. 13) half-breed: This term broadly connotes a person born of parents of different races. In the United States, it is often applied to children of whites or blacks and Native Americans.

Chapter II

1 . (p. 15) Dyea beach: This beach was the arrival point for Klondikers (gold miners) coming from the south and the departure point for those returning south from the gold fields. Dyea had no wharves or harbor, and its thirty-foot tide often left boats stranded on the shore.

2 . (p. 20) Canon ... Sheep Camp ... Scales ... Chilcoot Divide: These are places along the Dyea trail, one of the two most popular routes to Dawson. The other was the Skaguay trail. The trails met at Lake Bennett.

Chapter III

1 . (p. 23) Lake Le Barge: On modern maps, the name of this lake is given as Lake Laberge.

2 . (p. 27) Hootalinqua: This river is also known as the Teslin River.

3 . (p. 27) Five Fingers: These dangerous rapids on the Upper Yukon River posed a great hazard to miners traveling downstream to Dawson City. The rapids were formed by five giant rocks that thrust up out of the water and divided the river into six smaller channels.

4 . (p. 29) Dawson: Dawson City, the principal departure point for the gold mines to the far north and west, was located at the point where the Klondike River empties into the Yukon River. The “city” arose out of the wilderness just a few days after prospectors found gold in the Klondike region. Dawson quickly grew into a town of considerable size, with graded streets, water service, and businesses of all kinds.

5 . (p. 30) aurora borealis: A vibrant, luminous array of electrical discharges that lights up the northern skies, the aurora borealis displays take the form of dancing patches and columns of light, in rapidly changing forms and colors (green, red, yellow, blue, and violet).

6 . (p. 30) Barracks: The reference is to the headquarters of the Northwest Mounted Police. As people rushed into the Klondike and Yukon regions, the Canadian government maintained fifty-five mounted police stations in the Yukon territory, each staffed by at least three men. In addition, the Mounties had garrisons at Dawson City and White Horse.

Chapter IV

1 . (p. 39) Skaguay: Buck and the mail sled return south via the Skaguay trail. The town of Skaguay (now called Skagway) provided better access for docking boats and soon replaced Dyea as the main departure point for gold seekers.

2 . (p. 42) Cassiar Bar: The reference is to a location between the junction of the Thirty-Mile section of the Yukon River and the Hootalinqua (Teslin) and Big Salmon rivers.

Chapter V

1 . (p. 54) White River. Thornton’s camp is at the junction of the White and Yukon rivers, upstream from Dawson.

Chapter VI

1 . (p. 61) Circle City: In 1897, this was the last stop for one of seven postal routes in Alaska.

2 . (p. 64) Bonanza King: The term “king” was reserved for a prospector who struck it rich on a claim. The Bonanza King successfully prospected on Bonanza Creek, which was the location of one of the first, and richest, gold strikes.

3 . (p. 65) Mastodon King: The reference is to a successful prospector on Mastodon Creek in the Forty-Mile mining area.

4 . (p. 66) Skookum Benches: This is an area of the Klondike gold fields named after Skookum Jim, a Native American who discovered gold on a branch of the Klondike River. A bench is a terrace formed along the base of a mountain by unequal erosion or by mining.

Chapter VII

1 . (p. 70) Hudson Bay Company: One of the largest and most profitable fur trading companies in North America, Hudson’s Bay Company (not, as London calls it, Hudson Bay Company) by the 1830s had a virtual monopoly over trade in Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific.

White Fang

Part Four, Chapter II

1 . (p. 212) Sour-doughs: This was a nickname for miners who had spent at least one year “inside” and had experienced the perils of a winter in a Yukon or Klondike mining camp. So-called because they used a sourdough mixture to make bread instead of the hard-to-obtain yeast favored by newcomers (chechaquos) to the region. London humorously describes the process of making sourdough bread in his short narrative “Housekeeping in the Klondike.”

Part Four, Chapter IV

1 . (p. 230) skin-fold: The description in the preceding pages of the battle between a wolf-dog and a bulldog caused London a good deal of trouble with President Theodore Roosevelt, a hunter and amateur naturalist. In an interview with Everybody’s Magazine in June 1907, Roosevelt called this passage the “very sublimity of absurdity.” In doing so, he initiated London into the great “nature-faking” controversy. Participants in this debate battled over how one could determine the “real” cause (instinct or reason) of nonhuman animal behavior and, by extension, how the actions, emotions, and thoughts of those animals could be expressed in literary texts. London responded to Roosevelt’s attack in a biting essay entitled “The Other Animals.” He resolves the charge against him simply: “It is merely,” he writes, “a difference of opinion.”

Part Five, Chapter I

1 . (p. 256) Sardanapalus: London uses this term as an oath. Sardanapalus was the mythical last King of Assyria (880 B.C.) who set himself, his wife, and his kingdom’s treasures on fire rather than face defeat by a rebel army.