Highlights
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- Animal bodies mediated the experience of nature in strange and precarious places.
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- Animals were vital in pushing miners north, providing caloric and locomotive energy.
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- The materiality of animals maintained the health and well-being of miners.
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- The materiality of animals arbitrated the experience of the trail into terms more easily comprehended by miners.
Abstract
This
essay focuses on the use and abuse of animals and how the social and
economic changes introduced by the gold rushers altered relationships
between animals and humans in Northwest British Columbia and southern
Yukon Territory during the haphazard scramble northward to the Klondike.
I suggest that the embodied experience of life on the trail was
articulated and mediated through the human–animal relationships forged
out of necessity on the makeshift trails to the Klondike, built together
by the boots of miners and the overburdened animals that moved goods
through the northern plateaus. The animals brought into the Stikine
performed two functions: vital roles of pack animals and, once their
locomotive value was exhausted, as imported meat and by-products to be
sold at market. I argue that the intimate and corporeal connections
between humans and wildlife can mediate the experience of nature in
unfamiliar and precarious places. In this sense, the very materiality of
animals was essential for the maintenance of health and well-being and
became the primary physical and emotional mechanism for rendering the
extraordinary experience of the Teslin Trail into terms more easily
rationalized and commodified by miners, merchants and local populations
caught up in the epochal transformation brought into being in the
closing years of the nineteenth century.
Keywords
- Human–animal relations;
- Environment;
- Klondike;
- Material geographies;
- Commodifying nature;
- Infrastructure
Copyright © 2014 Published by Elsevier Ltd.
