Anyone who has read much history knows that some of the best details are in the footnotes. For example, in a brief endnote to comments about pestilent insects along the Yukon River in 1900, the late historian Gary C. Stein quotes an Army sergeant from the same summer who wrote, “we had hoped that there would be fewer mosquitoes around. post this spring as we burned over all the countries near here last week and burned up about 8,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,429,765,382,170,210,000 of them. But the loss that much seems invisible.”
This particular nugget can be found in “I Wish You Could Come Too,” Stein’s compilation and annotations from the diaries of James Taylor White, a doctor who made several trips north to Alaska as a member of several Revenue Cutter Service crews, and a keeper. personal notes about what he encountered along the way.
White was born in Washington State and educated in California. His father was a well-regarded captain in the Revenue Cutter Service, a precursor to the Coast Guard. Meanwhile, other relatives have been pursuing medicine. So it’s perhaps no surprise that he juggles the two jobs with ease. He had an observant nature and interests in botany, ethnography and other fields that interested educated people of his time. Even more than that, he has a sense of adventure, and the sea is his calling.
White first traveled north in 1889 aboard the Revenue Cutter Bear. Barely two decades after the United States had acquired Alaska from Russia, it was still a vast territory, governance barely reached beyond Sitka (still the capital at the time), and law enforcement was practically nonexistent. So revenue cutters are sent to the Bering Sea and beyond to carry out whaling and sealing laws and administer justice, sometimes months after crimes as severe as murder have been committed.
In the next decade, White made three more trips to Alaska, extending as far west as the coast of Siberia, and culminating in a full year spent in the Interior starting at the end of the summer of 1900. He experienced Alaska just as it fully entered our nation. consciousness, transitioning in the public mind from a wasteland of ice to a massive depot of exploitable resources that some still see as. And he saw firsthand the deadly results of the Gold Rush for Indigenous people.
Stein, who received his PhD from the University of New Mexico in 1975, and who worked as a research historian for the University of Alaska and the Department of Natural Resources, acknowledged that White, a somewhat obscure figure who served under him. mercurial revenue cutter Captain Michael Healy and helped the controversial missionary Sheldon Jackson, with whom everywhere he went to take notes.
Those notes form the framework for the first half of the book, in which White’s diary entries are short, but Stein’s accompanying endnotes are large. In this section, White sketches an outline of what happens every day, while Stein’s extensive notes offer historical context, as well as provide valuable details like the mosquito story quoted above. Those who ignore the footnotes will miss much of the best of this book’s content.
When White first sailed north with Healy in 1889, the Arctic remained largely unexplored. The Franklin disaster was still fresh in the memory, and the disastrous failure of the Greely and Jeanette expedition was recent history. Neither pole was reached, and the Northwest Passage had to be navigated. Whalers and sealers, however, did not wait for government-sponsored expeditions to clear the way. With money to be made, they are on location, killing only profit, without regard to the fact that they are taking food from the mouths of people who have lived from the Bering Sea and the Arctic Ocean for centuries. Northern waters remain dangerous, but administrative tasks must be carried out to avoid disasters.
White writes about finding and seizing ships, transporting criminals, helping Jackson ship reindeer from the Chukchi Peninsula to Alaska, and more. He was a man of his time, and in the politically correct times we live in, he deserves criticism. As with the writings of the previous period, there are moments of appropriateness in this book, but in general he appears progressive for his time. And as a doctor, he helps everyone.
It was especially famous when he headed up the Yukon in 1900. By this time the Gold Rush was at its peak. This time is often romanticized even by the best historians, but White’s diaries paint a much different picture. Prospectors rushing in from Canada and Alaska’s southern coast had brought influenza, while smallpox spread inland from the west. Villages were destroyed. The lengthy section covering White’s penultimate Alaska expedition is an often harrowing account of his journey upstream, nursing Yup’ik and Athabascan victims of disease, victims too sick to bury their own dead, too sick even to get winter food. It was a dreamy journey, and a reminder that while the United States has never waged war against the Alaska Natives as it has against the indigenous population of the lands claimed by our country elsewhere, the arrival of the Americans still caused an unceasing wave of death for those already there. . “We went wherever we could,” wrote White, “distributing food and medicine and doing the best we could, but it was very little.”
The White Bering Sea diary entries are fairly brief, but the writings from his time on the Yukon are extensive, as are Stein’s notes. The combined result is a book that offers an in-depth examination of the political, legal, cultural, and economic realities of everyday life in Alaska at a time of great change. This book is not a straightforward narrative. It’s more of a collection of information built around four trips. Stein didn’t live to see it published, but he gave us a gift. This book will be referenced by future historians for decades to come.
“I Want You to Come Too”: The Alaska Diaries of Dr. James Taylor White 1889, 1890, 1894, 1900-1901
