Sacking a Tlingit Village for Souvenirs
Passengers on the Harriman Alaska Expedition just grabbed what they wanted and took it home as their due. After all, they were entitled.
An incident on the 1899 expedition where John Muir met E. H. Harriman laid bare the dynamics of the American conquest of North America’s Indigenous peoples. It happened after the expedition’s George W. Elder had come about and was steaming toward its home port in Seattle. E. H. Harriman had one stop he wanted to make on the way back, a place expedition painter and explorer Frederick Dellenbaugh told him about.
The artist had learned from a veteran Kodiak Island gold-miner about a deserted Tlingit village featuring magnificent totem poles. A penciled map the old timer roughed out put the village about 50 miles southeast of Ketchikan in a small bay north of Cape Fox, within easy reach of the Elder’s course south. Harriman had the captain steam toward the cape and anchor a little offshore once the village came into sight. A dozen houses lined the beach; spaced among them 19 totem poles reached into the ever-overcast sky.
The story quickly went round that the Tlingits who once lived here had nearly all died of smallpox several years earlier. The few survivors, it was said, abandoned the place as cursed and vowed never to return. Why not, the passengers wondered, turn the Tlingits’ misfortune into the Elder’s opportunity?
Crew and energetic passengers fell to, digging, hauling, and towing several totem poles from beach to ship. The poles were massive; one measured 60 feet long and 5 feet across. The passengers also collected ceremonial masks, carvings, large boxes, house screens, and baskets. The spoils were later divided among the California Academy of Sciences, Cornell University, the Field Museum in Chicago, and the University of Michigan.
Harriman kept for his personal collection two large bears carved in ferocious pose to serve as grave guardians, and C. Hart Merriam, following his boss’s lead, helped himself to a blanket draped over a grave. Neither considered their actions a desecration of the dead. Rather, the bears and the blanket were relics from a fast-vanishing Indigenous nation sure to melt in the American pot and disappear as a distinct people and culture.
Reality, however, differed from what the Elder’s eager collectors imagined. The Saanya Kwáan Tlingits who inhabited Cape Fox called their village Gaash. They had indeed fled during a smallpox outbreak about seven years earlier and settled some 50 miles northwest in the missionary community of Saxman, close to Ketchikan. Despite the wholesale move, the Saanyas never thought of Gaash as abandoned in the way Harriman’s passengers did. Traditional Tlingit law holds that kwáan property remains the kwáan’s forever whether the people are present or not, continues to demand respect and reverence, and never becomes free for the taking. The Saanyas knew the appropriation of the totem poles and other objects for the theft that it was. Years later, the Saanyas returned to Gaash to retrieve the poles that survived the looting and transport them to Saxman, where they carved new versions of the poles Harriman and his guests had made off with.
While John Muir watched the totems and other objects being gathered and hauled to the Elder, he must have been going through déjà vu all over again. On his first trip to Alaska 20 years earlier, he had witnessed a Tlingit chief’s indignity over the felling and theft of totem images by a group of Presbyterian missionaries. The chief accused the divines of grave robbing, and although he accepted money for his kwáan’s property, the act remained an indignity. Muir had to be reliving that scene as he watched the plunder of Gaash by the Harriman Alaska Expedition.
Yet his response this time around differed. Back then, he made clear his disgust at what he called sacrilege in the account he wrote for San Francisco’s Daily Evening Bulletin and included in Travels in Alaska. At Gaash he recorded nothing in his journal about the looting, except to note that two half-grown Douglas squirrels, a favorite species, were discovered in one of the totems, then “caught and made into specimens, of course.” Muir kept his protest private: when Edward S. Curtis gathered the Elder’s trophy takers for a triumphal portrait of the group and the spoils, the naturalist made sure to stay well outside the camera’s field of view. He wasn’t making a stink, but he wasn’t, he made clear by his absence, one of them.
The Harriman expedition’s members saw nothing wrong in the liberties they were taking. Carrying off totem poles, cultural artifacts, and grave goods was the enlightened action of forward-looking men who helped along evolution’s inevitable trend — and in the process added to personal collections and bolstered academic careers. Nostalgia coupled with Manifest Destiny to birth an arrogant exceptionalism that turned Indigenous cultures into lifeless museum artifacts.
Feeling ebullient after Gaash, the Elder’s passengers gathered for evening drinks and, according to Muir, a “mighty, lively & merry, witty time.” Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly, veteran army scout and one-time hunting buddy to Theodore Roosevelt, entertained with his rendition of a “Sioux war dance” that Muir found “very effective.” Kelly had hung out with Lakotas years earlier, even met Sitting Bull (Tȟatȟáŋka Íyotake) in person, and once tangled with two of his warriors, killing both but losing a finger and taking an arrow to the knee in the fight. Perhaps Kelly danced in a way faithful to the Lakota original. More likely, though, this transplanted New Yorker appropriated what he had seen in his days riding the northern plains and turned it to his own purpose to give these elite whites the savage display they expected. Kelly’s dance caught the mood and purpose of the Harriman Alaska Expedition’s totem-taking: what once belonged to Tlingits and Lakotas was now the property of Euro-America to do with as it pleased. Manifest Destiny was fulfilled, the conquest complete.
Next up: John Muir’s slave-owning soul friend.
Cast out of Eden on Tour
This coming Monday, Nov. 4, 5:30–6:30 p.m., I'll be at an in-person event sponsored by the University of the Pacific's Muir Experience and the Delta-Sierra Group of the Sierra Club's Mother Lode Chapter to talk about Cast out of Eden, take questions and comments from the audience, and sign copies. Free and open to all, no advance registration needed. Fireside Room, Central United Methodist Church, 3700 Pacific Ave. (across from the University of the Pacific), Stockton, CA 95204.