The Golden Rules

It is with a strange sense of irony that the one place you might think effected the most by the dwindling movement of supplies would be the place where they were always scarce to begin with, that being the furthest end of the Russian Empire. It is true that, materially speaking, Alaska was poor in the pre war era, however, that is not to say they were dirt poor and, in fact, it was just the opposite, they were very literally, dirt rich. Not only was the populace of Alaska used to feeding themselves before the war began but, suddenly, the export of gold came to a screeching halt because the powers that be did not want these ships being captured or sunk.

Even before the conflict, the Russian authorities had a very inefficient system in regulating the removal of the gold from the upper Yukon valley. Claim jumping, normally a euphemism for murder and theft, was quite common before the war and, oddly enough, it did not get worse under war time conditions. Prospectors in Alaska were already well armed and on guard for such things so the additional violence, which usually targeted things other than gold, caused an actual decline in such activities. The other reason for this was because, suddenly, gold was widely available and easily obtained by less violent methods.

With a halt to most international shipments, gold began piling up in Alaska and everyone suddenly had bags of the dust, or giant nuggets, that could have bought them a mansion in San Francisco or Vladivostok. That is not to say that everyone was rich because, at the time, a huge nugget that was worth thousands of dollars in the rest of the world was barely enough to get a drink in a Ketchikan Saloon. This might sound like hyper inflation and one might suspect that it would be the result of an ever smaller store of goods but, that was anything but the case. Since the beginning of the war, the amount of goods that were trickling into the Alaskan ports were growing by substantial and very noticeable amounts.

This might sound as if it is contradictory to the law of supply and demand but, only if you do not realize what the demand truly was. The gold market outside of Alaska had never been higher. Contrary to popular myth, war does not stimulate economies and more often than not, they bankrupt the nations waging them so the demand for gold was at a premium by 1901. The demand in Alaska was the act of getting that gold shipped to somewhere that it was actually valuable because the supply in Alaska far exceeded it’s need. In fact, the only thing that really made it hold any value, at all, in the Russian colony, was the fact that everyone knew the war would eventually end.

For most people, the idea that if they held on to their stockpiles till the end of the war, when they could leave the harsh conditions of the wilderness behind them and retire in some comfortable place, was enough. It also bred some strange sights and behaviors. It was very typical during the war for housewives to have, in their kitchen, a jar of flour, a jar of honey, and a jar of gold dust. So many people were burying gold under their cabins that, even today, finding lost gold in Alaska is a major recreational hobby. Tourists actually pay to dig holes around the wrecked sights of old cabins that have been picked over for decades. Despite this sit and wait attitude, it was not enough for some.

If banditry was making a come back in some places that had long since been cleared of such activities, again, Alaska was the exception because those kinds of behaviors had been the norm in the colony since long before the war. It was the real law on this frontier and it bred a good number of people who were more than prepared for the harshness and violence that war breeds. It was very Darwinian in that many men such as Wyatt Earp, Seth Bulloch, and Vladimir Ulyanov had long since proven their ruthlessness, ambition, and wit. Those who could not see far ahead had long since been weeded out or subjugated to lesser roles in the organizations that would spring up during the war. These growing factions in Alaska (and Northwest Canada as well) were singular of purpose and mind. Their primary goal was not to wage war for the benefit of some far off government and, in fact, it was not to wage war at all. They only wanted to get the gold out of Alaska as fast as they could.

Look at what people do and not what they say. This is a golden rule that will explain much of the confusion about the war in Alaska. Despite the relative ease in obtaining huge sums of gold during the war, that was not to say there was no shortage of violence and, quite often, this violence was rapped in a flag and sold to others as an act of patriotism. More often than not, the people behind this violence had no qualms about which flag they used and quite often traded them as their needs fit. In the beginning, the violence was most often due to personal reasons when people with long standing feuds saw the perfect opportunity to right some kind of wrong. Eventually these personal vendetta’s became more organized and directed for purposes that had more to do with business, even if the violence itself became more ruthless.

It was men like Wyatt Earp who understood that senseless killing could be made into killing for cause and created his own bandit kingdom, much like Ioseb Jughasvilli in Georgia. There were profound differences though. Earp, nor any of the other Alaskan power brokers, ever targeted the Russian Government or, at least, in the beginning. The authorities were near powerless anyway and had no real orders to stop Earp. Bribes and the occasional accident took care of any official that became too interested in the gold smuggling. Oddly enough, if that was true of Russian officials the same can be said of those in Canada. Despite the reputation that Earp had on the Canadian side of the border, that of being their arch enemy, he had little problem in dealing with British sources and there is plenty of evidence that he did.

The same can be said of Ulyanov and Bulloch. All three men seemed to have become convinced of the same idea and, quite possibly, they did it together over beers. The time to get the gold out was while the war was still on. Not only were the markets at their peak but, after the war, there was every chance that the government would no longer be so ineffective and might try and come back and take that gold for themselves. To put it simply, these men understood another golden rule, which was, and still is, that time is money.

This is relevant to the war in that it governed the course of campaigns in this most remote of theaters. While much has been made in popular legend, after the war, about various ‘battles’ along the frontier, a closer examination of these ‘engagements’ seems to suggest that they had more to do with factional disputes amongst smugglers than military strategy. It’s very hard to get an exact picture because the participants in these incidents were rarely soldiers, kept no records, and their personal accounts vary so widely that it is sometimes hard to know if the witnesses are actually talking about the same incident or not.

Ironically, one of our best sources on the ‘Great Northern War’ is also an illustration of the problem of figuring out exactly what happened. Jack London wrote much on his experiences in Alaska during the war and, as I have noted before, he eventually had a falling out with Wyatt Earp and returned home to San Francisco. The reason why this source material is both priceless and problematic is because it is one of the few sources we have that is even remotely reliable and, London romanticized the picture he paints for us. This romantic view has since entered pop culture, been the inspiration for many movies and novels, and has since clouded many crucial details about the war in Alaska.

After many decades we have now cleared up at least some of the fog of war and managed to dispense with many myths. This is largely due to the fact that one such battle, that was apparently the result of a dispute over smuggling routes, would go on to change the course of the war in some very profound ways. In fact, you could almost say that the war started and ended on the Alaskan/Canadian frontier.