Northland Stories Read Online Free Page A

foundations, London bypasses the missing father altogether to reanchor racial identity along matrilineal lines.
    London codifies this genealogy of mothers in the dedication prefacing The God of His Fathers, which reads: TO THE DAUGHTERS OF THE WOLF WHO HAVE BRED AND SUCKLED A RACE OF MEN. Ostensibly a parallel to the dedication prefacing his first volume, this second, curious dedication actually works quite differently. London would seem to have skipped a generation. Although he introduces these women as daughters of the “Wolf” clan (presumably still representing the white race), London immediately shifts to their roles as mothers, so that “a race of men” have in effect become the sons of the daughters of the Wolf. Part of the confusion stems from London’s effort in these stories to treat two very distinct sorts of women at once: Indian wives, who are celebrated in tales such as “Where the Trail Forks,” “Siwash,” and “Grit of Women” (narrated by Sitka Charley) for their loyalty and endurance of hardship, and white mothers, who somehow magically pass on their own strength to their sons.
    By such a sharp bifurcation between the roles of mother and helpmate, London manages to avoid (for the most part) the unsettling prospect of the half-breed—a possibility which has loomed large in his Northland since the character of the pregnant Ruth appeared in “The White Silence.” Akin to the mulatto, the figure of the half-breed threatens to blur racial difference. But in steering clear of such blurring by keeping the roles of mother and wife so separated, London creates other problems for himself, obscuring the very distinction between “Raven” and “Wolf” that he had initially posited in his early Klondike tales.
    Comparing these two dedications enables us to see a larger set of contradictions beginning to riddle Jack London’s growing Northland field. As the second dedication suggests, London is moving in two directions at once: backward in mythic time searching for the origins of patriarchy, and forward in historical time documenting the incursion of whites in the Yukon Territory. The introduction of Mrs. Eppingwell in the Far North signals a stage in the colonizing process that inevitably must follow the appearance of the original “Wolf” Mason, but which also functions for London to explain how these men got there in the first place. Historians of the Canadian fur trade have noted how the introduction of white women into the Far North triggered an increase in racism aimed against native women, who were readily accepted as mates until white women arrived on the scene. 2 In this regard there is some historical validity behind London’s dedication in The God of His Fathers praising white women, whose strength is linked. to the ideology of Anglo-Saxon supremacy. Such an ideology, or rather theology of race, is depicted most dramatically in the volume’s first (and title) story. But in so refusing to give up native women as wives, emphasizing white women solely as mothers of the race, London mixes history with myth in his continuing search for the foundations of patriarchy.
    In his next collection, Children of the Frost, that search would take him past symbolic mothers to return to the missing father. The “Wolf,” London discovered, could be understood only directly in relation to those tribal elders whose daughters had been taken as brides. In a letter to his Macmillan publisher, George Brett, London remarked that his ambition in writing this volume of stories was to represent the Indian’s point of view. But most of these rarely reprinted tales have a far more specific focus, documenting in effect the tragic destruction of patriarchal law itself at the hands of the white race. These Indian leaders are old and they are dying along with their children, emasculated by liquor (“The Death of Ligoun”), by