Northland Stories Read Online Free

completely reinvent, turn-of-the-century notions of manhood as well as race.
    A small but especially important clue to understanding this conceptual revision can be found in London’s prefatory dedication to The Son of the Wolf. Summing up the collection’s thematic integrity, this preface serves as the author’s sharpest gloss on his own work. The dedication reads: TO THE SONS OF THE WOLF WHO SOUGHT THEIR HERITAGE AND LEFT THEIR BONES AMONG THE SHADOWS OF THE CIRCLE. By linking the ambiguous word “heritage” with the verb “sought,” London implies that white manhood is a condition that must be earned, achieved, and won, not passively taken for granted. Like the White Silence, racial categories in the Northland refer primarily to a state of mind. Here London overturns the prevailing belief of many of his contemporaries who assumed that racial difference was grounded in a set of natural, biological givens. For all of his professed adherence to Darwin’s theory, London’s views on race more closely anticipate Durkheim’s. Analyzing totemic kinship as an abstract system of social organization governed by the symbolic logic of religion, Durkheim insisted that clan affiliations in primitive societies need not depend strictly on geographical region or biological blood-lines, as previous ethnographers had supposed.
    If London’s protagonists become Wolves amidst the White Silence by virtue of their will and hard work, then it stands to reason that the category of “whiteness” would be available to anyone. In this regard the most interesting and resonant recurring Northland character is not the Malemute Kid, but Sitka Charley, an Indian trail guide and letter carrier who (unlike the Kid) continues to show up in London’s fiction after the first volume of stories. Charley is a “white” Indian, as London takes some length to explain in the opening paragraph of “The Wisdom of the Trail”: “Sitka Charley had achieved the impossible. Other Indians might have known as much of the wisdom of the trail as did he; but he alone knew the white man’s wisdom, the honor of the trail, and the law.... Being an alien, when he did know he knew it better than the white man himself.” While the concluding reference to the native as an “alien” generates a sharp set of ironies of its own, at least London entertains the possibility that an Indian man could in effect convert to whiteness by virtue of fully realizing its higher law. Charley’s symbolic status becomes crucial later in the story when he is paired on trail with a Mrs. Eppingwell, one of only two white women in The Son of the Wolf. Unwilling or unable to imagine reverse miscegenation—a red man taking a white bride—London links Charley and this (already married) woman at a more abstract conceptual level: What Charley learns to love and respect about Mrs. Eppingwell is her toughness, which in so resembling his own enables him to appreciate “why the sons of such women mastered the land and the sea, and why the sons of his own womankind could not prevail against them.”
    Introducing this white mother by way of a converted Indian, whose “manhood” is “nourished” by her presence, London’s thinking on race takes a considerable turn in “The Wisdom of the Trail.” In the absence of any white fathers (the presumed father W. H. Chaney had denied him, after all), London relies on white mothers to help define his sons of the Wolf precisely at the moment a powerful “white” red man has emerged in his fiction to destabilize fixed racial categories. As many feminist theorists have suggested, patriarchy is anxiety-provoking because fathers can remain invisible, in ways that mothers, as birth givers, tangibly cannot; to counteract the authority of a “white” Indian who threatens to undermine the “Wolf” clan’s essential