Mad Dogs and Working Dogs:

When undertaking any scholarly interpretation of Jack London’s work, especially one as widely read and analyzed as The Call of the Wild, some early reflection is wise. What new can be said? What freshness can be brought to bear on a text that as much constructs the historical memory of the American Northwest as is constructed by it? London’s racial, sexual, and class politics are as on display as ever in the novel, and few texts exemplify the complicated Darwinian underpinnings of Naturalism as this particular book. By being encouraged to enter the scale and thought-space of an animal—dog space—London involves his reader directly in the psychological implications of a world ruled in equal parts by the mean logic, and immediate tactile brute force, of wildness.

 

London’s popularity in his own lifetime has not diminished a century after his death, but it is worth taking a moment to contemplate his influence. London’s novels enjoyed widespread readership and commercial success and were translated into many languages, gaining the attention of readers in, at times, remarkably high places. Vladimir Lenin was reading a copy of The Iron Heel at the time of his death (Wegner 101), and no less than Theodore Roosevelt, then a sitting U.S. President, wrote on London in 1907 criticizing him for being a “nature-faker” (Auerbach 52), an accusation against which London spiritedly defended himself.

 

And here, perhaps, is the kernel of something new to say about The Call of the Wild. Given enough time, the work of a storied writer like London inevitibly gathers layers of apocryphal meaning, but we needn't take Roosevelt, modern critics like Jonathan Auerbach, or even London himself at their word; the history of the Klondike Gold Rush is one rich in visual memory. We can reframe Buck's adventure in the Yukon by examining a visual archive of what we know about the far Northwest American frontier, about the contact zones between white and indigenous populations, and about the four-footed companion whose social-historical journey was closely tied to that of men both exogenous and indigenous: the dog.

 

The photographic record of this period is diffuse but deeply engages London's text. From it, we may view elements of The Call of the Wild with fresh eyes, keen for detail that often confirms London’s thorough familiarity with place and period, and just as often through contingent evidence draws some of the book’s notions of gender, race, and the quality of existence in the era of the Klondike Gold Rush into question.

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Ice Technic

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In recent years, Ernest Shackleton has enjoyed a resurgence in popularity. The Irish-Brit, whose failed 1907 expedition to the South Pole earned him a knighthood, turned back in extremis a mere 97 miles from the pole. This journey would later be successfully completed (and documented) in 1909 by Roald Amundsen, former associate of Frederick Cook. Cook, an American explorer, claimed to have been the first man to climb Mount McKinley in 1906 and to reach the North Pole in 1908; both claims later ignominiously discredited. The North Pole was reached the following year by American Robert E. Peary (also extensively documented in photographs and geological measurements, some of which are presented here), though his account has undergone a century of dispute over its validity, with opinion changing regularly and attempts made to re-create the journey to settle the dispute once and for all.

 

For these four men, and dozens of others who are less well-known, the call of exploration at the furthest edges of the world secured them a place in history. But a second history exists, the history in the photographs they took and the detailed accounts they made of their journeys. This history includes the equally-heroic efforts of Matthew Henson, an African-American explorer and Peary’s second-in-command, and their four Inuit companions, Ootah, Egigingwah, Seegloo, and Ooqueah, who undertook the final sprint to the pole with ten Inuit Qimmiq dogs. A photograph as singular as the flag-planting at Camp Morris K. Jesup (left), the “most northerly human habitation in the world”, instantly begins to re-write the prevailing history of the era of Polar exploration as one dominated by, and chiefly accomplished by, intrepid white men. Taken out of context, we might be tempted to call Peary’s expedition an Inuit undertaking, with the assorted mix of white (and non-white) companions along for the run, kitted out with the furs, tents, sleds, food, and “Arctic engines”—dogs—of the Inuit. This history might even extend as far as the ship waiting for their return at the edge of the ice-field, on which were stowed a multi-national mix of sailors and Inuit men, women, and children employed in an ancillary capacity to hunt seals and maintain the valuable equipment and dogs.

 

It seems certain that these Polar expeditions, at the very least, cannot properly be called white ventures. As Amundsen and Peary noted (Alexander, Peary 43), and cultural anthropologist Bryan Cummings confirms, overland travel to the Poles may have remained out of reach until the invention of the snowmobile if not for Inuit “ice technic,” which is to say: superior Inuit sled rigging, fur-lined hide clothing with waterproofed stitching, and most of all, Inuit sled dogs. Cummins attributes Shackleton’s historic failure in part to his choice of dog breed: inferior Canadian Husky (the word "Husky" not being a breed but more of a generic descriptor for a mix of arctic dog breeds) crossbred with Collie and wolf. Peary and Amundsen both used Qimmiqs, and relied heavily on Inuit ice technic. Tragically, Qimmiqs are endangered today and only about 500 individuals of the 4000-year-old breed survive (Cummins 107-9). There is some debate over whether his access to a large number of Qimmiqs (almost 250 at the outset of the expedition, which he used in successive waves to always have “fresh” dogs) allowed Peary to make the final legs of the North Pole in times that are unrepeatable today with otherwise similar gear for simple lack of dogs.

 

But even this is an oversimplification. When explorer Tom Avery attempted to recreate Robert Peary’s dash for the Pole in 2005, he was unable to repeat Peary’s reported mileage in the final stretches of the journey, but the “freshness” of the sixteen Qimmiqs Avery brought for the trip was only part of this. Avery’s modern Qimmiqs are rare and precious sport dogs, raised and fed with great care and relatively fawned over. Powerful and purebred as they were, Avery struggled to find even 16-20 suitable trail-ready dogs. Peary’s 250 Qimmiqs were mundane, trail-hardened, working dogs, hand-raised from puppies by Inuit children, but put in the traces at only a few months old, to be regularly beaten and left to sleep out of doors in the Arctic and find their own food or starve. Putting aside the kinship of DNA, Avery and Peary took two very different “breeds” of dog to the pole. Peary’s Qimmiqs no longer exist because the conditions that shaped them as a breed largely no longer exist.

 

These polar exploration narratives and their photographic documentation are interesting because in them emerges an impressionistic sketch of the contact zone between the first peoples of the far North and the migratory southerners of Canada, the United States, and even some European countries, that is seldom reflected on in any objective sense by the “story” half of history. London would have us believe that the Klondike of The Call of the Wild was the rough frontier playground of sturdy, working-class whiteness—southerners keen for trade and wide open spaces, and especially for gold. A frontier in which French-Canadians were the most exotically-diverse of the civilized folk, and where only fool-headed, incongruous women trod, whose ornamental nature led them to heedlessly overburden both men and dogs. Most outlandish, London’s Yukon contains bands of dangerous savages, and the “big breed” southern dogs like Buck are the beneficiaries of cosmic approval on an evolutionary level by virtue of their spirit, intelligence, and the space they tread between the civilized and uncivilized world.

 

The photographic evidence tells a very different story. We know from the visual history that the Yukon was a decidedly multi-racial environment that included plenty of frontier-tough women and children. The prevalence of the dog breed that dominated the North—not the softer southern dogs brought north by “tenderfeet” which were cheaply bought and thrown away when they were “played out,” but true Inuit Qimmiqs—tends to reinforce a revised reading that the North was an indigenous place, in which the tidelanders were just visiting, and doing a mediocre job of that. The Yukon and Alaska, and even the Poles, were a fascinating ecosphere for indigenous North American relations at the time. Far from the violent “Yeehats” in The Call of the Wild, Peary, Amundsen, Young, and many other travelers who kept logs made a point of mentioning the easy trade with, and neighborly demeanor of, the Inuit, Metis, and First Nation tribes of Canada. Peary writes at length on the Inuit in his narrative of the North Pole:

 

Much nonsense has been told by travelers in remote lands about the aborigines' regarding as gods the white men who come to them, but I have never placed much credence in these stories. My own experience has been that the average aborigine is just as content with his own way as we are with ours, just as convinced of his own superior knowledge, and that he adjusts himself with his knowledge in regard to things in the same way that we do. The Eskimos are not brutes, they are just as human as Caucasians. They know that I am their friend, and they have abundantly proved themselves my friends (Peary 44).

 

He credits his Inuit companions with abiding generosity and empathy, in addition to indispensible toughness in the face of challenges:

 

My own observations of this interesting people have taught me to repose no confidence whatsoever in the tales of barbaric craft and cruelty which I have heard of them. On the contrary, taking into consideration their uncivilized state, they must be ranked as a humane people...They are generous and hospitible in a crude way, almost without exception. As a rule, good and bad fortune are shared (Peary 62-63).

 

While his mention of them is peppered with turns of phrase and an overarching subjectivity we could problematize as inherently racist, he ruminates at length on the fate of such a people, and expresses hope that they will never undergo the “civilizing” effects of government. He concludes his narrative of the journey with what feels like rather poignant and genuine regret at the necessity of leaving them after being for many years in their company. Peary was not immune to the popularity of early eugenic theory, though his interest proved weirdly prophetic. He suggested that if white explorers or their native guides were unable to reach the pole that the children of intermarriages might certainly create a race capable of doing so. As absurd as this notion is given what we know of modern biology, his grandson Peter Peary whose grandmother was an Inuit, was the first person to ever reach the North Pole twice (Avery 18).

 

The Inuit are of course not the only native people in the north. The Metis peoples (a collective name for several distinct Canadian tribes including the Cree and Menominee) had a diffuse genetic presence in the Yukon region. By using the code-label "French-Canadian half-breed,” London may be implying that Francois is Metis in descent, but beyond calling him “black” and “swarthy,” and giving him a thick Patois accent, the Buck-centric narration does not explicitly register Francois as such (London 21).

           

And yet, as a historical document, The Call of the Wild is not totally without merit. Non-fictional accounts of the treatment of working dogs at the hands of white and Inuit masters alike confirm the rough conditions of the novel, and even Buck’s kidnapping by Judge Miller’s gardener seems relatively plausible. The dog of the Yukon, traded and sold in dog markets similar to the ones London describes, was a highly valuable animal, and in great demand. Working dogs were usually named and accounts by dog-drivers regularly include details about the personalities of their dogs: some meek, others aggressive, still others particularly strong or intelligent or loyal. Stories of individual dog prowess in the traces were bandied about frequently, and races and other feats of trail speeds and load-pulling were commonplace, including reports of dog teams pulling loads and making point-to-point runs of the same general weights and speeds that London describes (Cummins 107). Seasoned dog handlers jostled with tenderfeet Klondike stampeders for access to the best dogs, and the Yukon was as unforgiving to their lack of experience as London suggests.

           

But most importantly, perhaps, and the running subtext to which we will frequently return as we examine the visual record, is the coexistence of man and dog in the northern wilderness. The camera, hardly a new invention but one made more compact and affordable in the early 1900s, helped chronicle this era, and a favorite subject, as today, was the dog.

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Home Economics on the Frontier

           

A myth which may be immediately dispelled, inasmuch as London reinforces it in The Call of the Wild, is that women were unsuited to the world of gold mining, working dogs, and frontier living. There are scores of photographs of women in the Yukon, particularly in Dawson City but also on the trail mushing or leading dog trains. Some are shown in this essay, but too many exist to easily gather or include. Women, and to some extent children, were commonly present in the Klondike stampede, Polar expeditions, and more or less anywhere sled dogs could be found. While in The Call of the Wild only men appear to have the skills and brute strength necessary to handle true sled dogs, numerous accounts indicate that the “wild” Qimmiq dogs were in fact quite friendly and protective in the home, compatible with children, and perfectly happy being led or driven by women, who usually were their primary caretakers and paid them more attention than the men. Women in indigenous Canadian tribes frequently led or walked alongside dog sled trains on the trail, taking turns with the male mushers to guide the dogs and keep the traces clear. Inuit children were closely involved in the raising of their specialized Qimmiq breed of dogs, and also appear frequently in the visual archive (Cummins 96, 104-6).

 

But let us not assume that only indigenous women and children were equal to the frontier; plenty of photographs of southern women also exist from this period, and they are also frequently pictured taking care of dogs, mushing teams themselves, or even racing dogsleds. The citified woman of the south was present, but relatively uncommon by comparison in the visual record, and a fairer re-reading of narrative stereotypes might confidently infer that women transplanted to the north proved just as suitably adaptable to the wild as their menfolk.

 

London is unkind to women in this respect. There is only one female character in The Call of the Wild with a speaking part, and this typifies her characterization:

 

Mercedes continually fluttered in the way of her men and kept up an unbroken chattering of remonstrance and advice. When they put a clothes sack on the front of the sled, she suggested it should go on the back; and when they had put it on the back, and covered it over with a couple of other bundles, she discovered overlooked articles which could abide nowhere else but in that very sack, and they unloaded again (London 51).

 

While it seems clear that London held women in small esteem, or rather that the reader is meant to understand women were generally held in small esteem on the frontier, Mercedes’ actions and presence are somewhat more narratively complex than this. She isn’t useless, exactly—she is one of the few humans who seems to demonstrate something approaching sympathy for the dogs by surreptitiously “overfeeding” them on the trail—but she represents a voice of civilization that sounds a profound sour note in the novel’s context.

 

Mercedes cried when her clothes bags were dumped on the ground, and article after article was thrown out. She cried in general, and she cried in particular over each discarded thing (London 54).

 

Mercedes’ unwillingness to surrender to the roughness of the trail, to adapt to Darwin’s struggle for existence and evolve, seems most at issue. Notice here how Mercedes' description begins to take on the ominous “doomed soft tidelander” tone initially applied to Buck, Curly, and the other non-indigenous dogs who suddenly found themselves in the Yukon, their ornamental nature and extra weight becoming major liabilities:

 

Mercedes nursed a special grievance—the grievance of sex. She was pretty and soft, and had been chivalrously treated all her days. But the present treatment by her husband and brother was everything save chivalrous. It was her custom to be helpless...She made their lives unendurable. She no longer considered the dogs and because she was sore and tired she insisted on riding on the sled. She was pretty and soft but she weighed one hundred and twenty pounds—a lusty last straw to the load dragged by the weak and starving dogs (London 57).

 

Unfortunately, this is consistent with London’s general appraisal of women in his fiction at this time. The Call of the Wild was published in 1903, the same year that he separated from his first wife Bessie Maddern and two years before he married his second wife Charmian Kittredge. Charmian, by London’s own admission in works like John Barleycorn (1913), was a much more adventurous and suitable companion for him. It is unclear if London’s unhappy marriage to Bessie informed the character of Mercedes, but following his second marriage his female characters became noticeably more three-dimensional, capable, sturdy, and central to his plots.

 

Another of the iconic characters of The Call of the Wild is historically questionable: the Man in the Red Sweater. This man, a brutal, cudgel-wielding Caucasian, is “no slouch at dog-breakin” according to the other rough-hewn men who look on during Buck’s introduction to the law of club and fang (London 19), and with this the reader can only agree as the man proceeds to savagely beat Buck into submission over several paragraphs of the early novel. Variously interpreted as implacable slave-master (Auerbach 58), or simply just a new variety of toughened northman for Buck to meaningfully encounter, it’s worth noting that such characters, if they existed, probably were not present in the Yukon in large numbers.

 

Damaging valuable dogs was very bad business. Even the fight that Francois seems to allow between Spitz and Buck is a convenient exaggeration. Dog-flesh brought top dollar in the Yukon between 1895 and 1905. Accounts seem to agree that the dogs were regularly beaten (Cummins 97), but they were also possibly the most valuable possessions that a person could own. Inferior mongrel mixes were bred in large numbers, but the choicest sled dogs, pure-breed Qimmiqs, were raised in relatively small numbers (usually less than 10 dogs per family, because of food constraints) by Inuit children and women (Cummins 103). Peary’s Polar expedition log contains a rare photograph of an outdoor Inuit dog market (left), in which children can be seen managing the handful dogs for sale, and a second photograph depicts most of the 246 dogs he brought to the Pole with him. Modest as this scene is, the wealth these dogs represent is impressive even by today’s standards.

 

To gain an approximate understanding of the various breed values, we may helpfully turn to one of the Naturalist novel’s most frequent character preoccupations: the numerical pricetag associated with everyday living. Buck is “one in ten-thousand” according to Francois (London 20), an especially fine example of his breed, and initially sells for $300 (roughly $8,300 adjusted for inflation). St. Bernard mixes like Buck show up regularly in the photographic record because, as London implies, their short-run raw power was better than the average Qimmiq, though they ate more and suffered more from cold, starvation, and toil than the rarer and more valuable Inuit dogs (London 28). In an effort to rapidly populate the area with dogs, eastern Canadian labradors were brought in by ship, frequently dying in transit and a losing proposition even then because of their ill-suitedness to the Yukon. Buck's $300 pricetag, while on the high end, was not unheard of (Chandler 45), and it’s reasonable to expect that a well-bred Qimmiq would fetch a similar sum.

 

Like a horse, mule, or other southern-style working animal, the sled dogs provided a potent and eminently durable companion who could mostly feed itself, protect its owner from larger wildlife like bear and moose and, in extreme cases, be killed for its meat or warm pelt. Qimmiq fur, soft and very thick, often lined the hoods and collars of Inuit cold-weather garments (Cotel et al. 77). Qimmiqs, which could reliably pull heavy loads on the trail and could live on very little food, were in high demand during the Gold Rush. A team of four of them would cost roughly the same as an SUV today, and four Qimmiqs could easily out-pull and outrange larger teams of lesser dogs. They provided a potent currency that could be traded for harder-to-obtain items in the Yukon like food, rifles and ammunition, netting, steel knives, harpoon heads, metal tools, and other southern goods.

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Buck and the Huskies, A Parallel Border Narrative

 

With this in mind, it’s rather fascinating to follow the progression of Perraut and Francois’ mail team. At first they seem very skimpily-equipped: a Newfoundland (Curly), a Spitz-type northern European dog (Spitz), one large dog of unstated breed (Dave), and an impressive but inexperienced St. Bernard-Scotch Collie (Buck). At a glance, this mismatched “team” would have marked Francois and Perraut immediately as tenderfeet. No matter what Francois might imply he knows about dogs, he and Perraut have clearly just bought whatever dog-flesh they could get their hands on. Their best dogs, Dave and Buck, are described in negative behavioral terms as “morose” and a “red devil” respectively (London 21, 18). Such a team would have been at a significant disadvantage on the trail, a circumstance which soon becomes fatal for Curly when the wilder trail dogs casually attack and kill her in Dyea (Dyea is pictured here at the top of the page in Edwin Tappan Adney's Chilcoots and Dog).

 

Curly is then wisely replaced by a trio of additional dogs, Billy, Joe, and Sol-lecks, all Qimmiqs or “true huskies” (London 24). Francois and Perraut immediately notice an improvement in the dogs’ performance, and even Dave seems to come alive on the trail (which indicates he is likely a variant of one of the four main sled-dog types; Samoyed, Malamute, Qimmiq, or “Alaskan husky” a half-breed mix of these). Once Buck and Spitz cross fangs and Buck emerges the winner, the sled team is again considerably tougher, leaner, and more evolutionarily appropriate for the trail. This mix, ironically, mirrors the same makeup of Peary and Amundsen’s expeditions: one southern St. Bernard mix “leading” several indigenous Qimmiqs.

 

After Spitz’s demise, Buck remains the only dog in the traces who isn’t a true Yukon dog. Dolly, Pike, and Dub, Teek, and Koona, are all Qimmiqs or close cousins, and Buck’s strength, unusual fighting prowess, and his aptitude at food theft from the camps of the men they travel with are all that allow him to keep up with them. And what an interesting picture this paints: the tidelander “American” dog has encountered the doggy version of the racial “other,” and found himself both accepted and acclimated to the wilder life of the indigenous sled dog. It is a contact narrative so old and simple, and so fanstistical, that it could be a children’s book: Buck went out to meet the wild things, and they have made him their king. Buck “goes native” in a rather literal way, eventually becoming the Ghost Dog, a legendary version of himself figuratively embodying the terrifying wildness that so initially intimidates him on Dyea beach.

 

Buck makes two further brief detours along the way. The first, to endure Hal, Charles, and Mercedes so that London may use them to make a comment about what he thinks of heedless, ill-prepared, civilized tenderfeet who have no business in the North. The second, with John Thornton to re-affirm Buck’s ability to connect with human beings despite his newfound wildness. But the deciding moment for Buck is far earlier in the novel: once Spitz falls, and Buck becomes the leader of his indigenous “pack,” he has crossed out of the familiar borderlands of canine civility, an analog of human southern white civility, and into the wild.

 

Studies of Jack London’s letters and work reveal that he was heavily influenced by the work of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer during the drafting of The Call of the Wild, as were many other Naturalist writers of the period (Feldman 169). In Darwinian terms, we might be tempted to think that Buck’s assumption of leadership in the indigenous dog pack represents a sort of symbolic de-evolution. Buck’s impression of the Qimmiqs and other trail dogs in Chapter 2 certainly seems to imply they are savage and wild at heart, but something more is at play here, and this is why photographs and accounts from the polar explorers are particularly relevant to our examination of the novel: the indigenous northerners, both human and canine, are decidedly more complex even in London’s blunt figuration than simple savages. Remember: even London admits it is the Inuit dog who is most perfectly suited for the sled. The Inuit sled is most perfectly suited for the trail. And the Inuit trailcraft has allowed them to survive in the Yukon and beyond since before the founding of most modern European countries, much less America. The indigenous people and dogs of the north, in other words, possess a sort of “savage high-tech” that their southern counterparts can only aspire to. Their atavism is one of highly-Darwinistic adaptation, and the southerners, whether man or dog, who encounter them face an “other” that describes a paradoxically superior primitive.

 

This is not lost on Buck in the novel, who even envies—insofar as a dog is capable of envy—the Qimmiqs' superior adaptations. 

 

Buck's feet were not so compact and hard as the feet of the huskies. His had softened during the many generations since the day his last wild ancestor was tamed by a cave-dweller or river man. All day long he limped in agony, and camp once made, lay down like a dead dog. Hungry as he was, he would not move to recieve his ration of fish which Francois had to bring to him. Also, the dog-driver rubbed Buck's feet for half an hour each night after supper, and sacrificed the tops of his own moccasins to make four moccassins for Buck...Francois forgot the moccasins and Buck lay on his back, his four feet waving appealingly in the air, and refused to budge without them. Later his feet grew hard to the trail and the worn-out foot-gear was thrown away (London 34).

 

The solution, hide booties for his paws, is one known to have been employed by the Metis (Cummins 97), strengthening perhaps our reading of Francios as part-indigenous, and including the human "other" as part of this chiastic cultural interchange between indigenous and non-indigenous men and dogs. Many readings of The Call of the Wild have focused on John Thornton as the single pivotal human character in Buck's narrative (Auerbach, Pease, Seltzer, and others), but arguably Francois, whose racial characteristics are as transitory as Buck's, is the character most capable of understanding him. Francois is Buck's most useful guide to becoming wild, a process not of simple reversion as Auerbach points out, but which Buck must actively learn (55-56).

 

London has narrativized this border-encounter as one which takes place in a witheringly violent and mostly-lawless way, where death is close at hand most of the time, and savagery is another way to describe a necessary set of survival behaviors. But The Call of the Wild also alludes more than that: Buck discovers he belongs in the north. The cold, wild frontier appeals to him in the form of the wolf-brother and the hairy man, literalized racial memories that surface more frequently as he lets go of Thornton, his last lingering tie to the civilized world. Auerbach suggests that the Yeehats exist in the novel mostly for their instrumental destruction of Thornton so that Buck needn’t destroy Thornton himself (71). This and other psychoanalytical readings of the text get wrapped a bit too tightly in their own internal logic, but Auerbach has a point: the Yeehats are an anomalous representation of the indigenous other in the text. First Nations, Metis, and Inuit in particular were widely considered friendly neighbors and valuable trading partners, who had the best available dogs, sleds, and ice technic. In other words: the real indigenous other of the north was decidedly not savage or even particularly primitive. London’s Yeehats are, as Auerbach argues, simply convenient instruments of plot.

 

Dawson City, YT, the heart of the Klondike Gold Rush which figures prominently in The Call of the Wild and in many of the photographs displayed here, began as a tiny outpost, ballooned to 40,000 or more residents at the height of the stampede, and then shrank when the gold claims were played out. But it didn’t return to its former size. Indeed, thousands of settlers in the area decided to stay, swelling the permanent population of the city at the stampede’s end (Parks Canada). And these new residents were not just delusional miners, illiquid shopkeepers, or other listless male rabble; women came to Dawson in large numbers throughout the stampede, and a town which London would have us understand was suitable only for men in 1900 by 1915 hosted the first all-women’s sled-dog Iditarod race. It seems safe to claim, then, that the northern wild called to more than just dogs and gold-hungry prospectors, and by answering the call, in a world where trace and trail, club and fang, were the most prominent laws, might we even say that this contact zone, this borderland of the indigenous other, held a wider appeal than even London lets on?

 

The visual archive that comes to us from this period seems to suggest it did. Dawson (and the entire Yukon, to a greater extent) was a place of remarkable diversity; Caucasian- and African-Americans, French-Canadians, Northern Europeans, Asians (see image left of Jujiro Wada, a famous early Japanese explorer), and several different indigenous peoples—First Nations, Metis, and Inuit—accomplished a remarkably cosmopolitan heterosocial coexistence and discourse that included not just lonely miners and their faithful dogs, but entire families of frontier men, women, and children. And part of all of this, in their own fascinating roles and spaces in this borderland, was the dog, a companion animal undergoing its own subtly parallel border experience.

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A New Way of Seeing

 

London has left anything but easy work for his critics. Pondering Darwin’s fascination with dogs, and especially their unique capability to interface with both the civilized and the savage worlds, Religious Studies scholar David Chidester writes of them, “although no dog could be expected to be a theologian, any dog could demonstrate the basic features of religion, such as fear of the unknown, belief in spirits, or submission to the authority of a higher power” (52). Buck displays these capacities, though, as Jonathan Auerbach and Donald Pease point out, the book requires both narrative and imaginative gymnastics in order for London to keep the reader seamlessly in “dog space,” comfortable with a fantasy identification and material representation of dogs as creatures who interact with people on human levels of reality (Auerbach 55, Pease 22).

           

Nor is it terribly clear from a craft standpoint what London’s intent is by displacing the narrative focus of The Call of the Wild onto an animal. Some critics read this as a bid to avoid the “messier” moral human topics of agency and self-restraint (Feldman 169) by allowing Buck a blanket behavioral amnesty (Auerbach 57). Others see novels about animals as directly concerned with morality. Writing for the Humane Society, Marion Copeland and Heidi O’Brien argue that stories about animals allow the reader (especially the young reader) to “rehearse moral decisions,” reasoning by proxy through actions which have the potential to create moral good, and widening perspective (Copeland 51-52), and this is not so different from art historian Alex Potts’ conclusion about figurative animals which we explored more fully in "Mad Dogs and Steam Engines":

 

It might be said that in the nineteenth century, animal pictures functioned as a symbolic arena in which irrational social and psychological forces repressed by the dominant ideology of the period could find indirect expression. What could not be stated openly about the violences of social being in bourgeois society was displaced onto figurations of the animal world (Potts 20).

 

Like Potts, Mark Derr, in his book A Dog’s History of America: How Our Best Friend Explored, Conquered, and Settled a Continent, argues that animals, specifically dogs, become modern identity proxies, a living canvas on which humans paint the history of their own subconscious notions of race and class stratification (234-235). Potts ties this selective identification to those images of animals in the fine arts:

 

No images, even scientific illustrations, can be purely neutral records. To mean anything at all, they not only operate within a framework of ideological assumptions about the constitution of the social and natural world; they also depend for their effect on a set of aesthetic conventions, inherent in the languages of representation upon which they draw, governing what constitutes a vivid or telling image (Potts 12).

 

But this is exactly what is so special about the extant photographic archive included here: Potts’ ideas still apply of course, but as we can see from the “Mad Dogs and Steam Engines” and “The Pride of Trace and Trail” galleries, the visual record becomes much less authored and much more contingent with the transition from the 19th to 20th centuries. The dogs in the second gallery may be posed—indeed many very likely were, considering the requirements of clear photography at that time—but a photograph is more indelible than a painting; its memory, according to Kracauer, eliminates much of the selective discrimination of the mind because a photograph is independent of the pseudo-coherence of any one individual’s personal history (50-51). Unlike the etching, the painting, or even (in the case of the broadsheet or the novel) the text, photographs have an unselective memory, capturing a reality full of re-readable contingency that is more difficult to erode or fundamentally alter. Through this visual record, we can examine The Call of the Wild in a new way, and come to our own conclusions about London’s story of Buck and his adventures in the wilderness. 

 

Works Cited (Click)