A Window to Heaven Read online

  Four millennia before, humans had begun to cross the land bridge connecting two continents, traveling east from Asia to America. Not far from where the children were found, other archaeological discoveries have yielded tools and other remnants that are 14,500 years old. Ten thousand years ago, melting glaciers and rising waters caused the inundation of that land bridge, creating fifty-mile-wide seas, later to be named the Bering Strait, between Russia and Alaska.4

  The girls’ burial site is in what is now known as the Tanana River Valley, at Upward Sun River, or Xaasaa Na’ in the present-day Middle Tanana Athabascan tongue. The Tanana, a major tributary of the Yukon, flows northwest from the Canadian border and curves around the foothills of the Alaska Range before emptying into the Yukon at the town of Tanana. When non-natives arrived in the Tanana Valley in the 1880s, Upward Sun River was in the territory of the Salchaket band of Athabascan Alaska Natives, though none are left in the area now; two of the last speakers of Middle Tanana, a mother and daughter, gave oral histories in the 1960s, when the Alaska Native name for Upward Sun River was recorded. After the burial site was found, the local indigenous community gave the girls names in that same language: Xach’itee’aanenh T’eede Gaay, “Sunrise Girl-Child,” and Yełkaanenh T’eede Gaay, “Dawn Twilight Girl-Child.”5

  The discovery of the infants in 2013, by Dr. Ben Potter of the University of Alaska at Fairbanks, provided the oldest-yet evidence of humans on the continent, and changed what we know about the prehistory of North America. The people of Upward Sun River lived during the Terminal Pleistocene epoch in geology, the term for the end of the last Ice Age, and also at the end of the Paleolithic (“Old Stone”) Age of archaeology. Culturally, they are considered part of what scientists call the Denali Complex, occurring between 12,000 and 6,000 years ago.6

  As Potter’s team excavated the pit in close consultation with Native tribal organizations and state agencies, they made further contributions to our knowledge of the Denali Complex people. Their discovery that the burial site also contained a cooking pit, with several hearths and a semi-underground shelter nearby, meant that in addition to the highly mobile, nomadic foraging for which they had long been known, humans in this era also had settled camps—and rituals for dealing with life’s eternal mysteries. “There was intentionality in the burial ceremony,” Potter told a journalist. “These were certainly children who were well-loved.”7

  Late-Pleistocene people “would have worn skins and leggings and carried a pouch of small stone blades of Asian design… and eyed sewing needles made from mammoth ivory,” according to Childs. “[They] would have used the small blades to cut skins, and the needles to sew tailored, tight-fitting clothes… These were people with preferences and sensibilities.” They came from the Eurasian landmass “with languages and customs, body adornments, styles of weaponry, tailored clothing, pole-and-hide structures, and burial rites involving red ochre. They were not a blank slate.”8

  From their camp, the Upward Sun Valley people would have ranged widely as a matter of routine, in search of game. The same Alaska Range weather patterns that prevail today kept the interior from being covered with ice during the glaciations of the Pleistocene era. While the last Ice Age glaciation covered the Brooks Range to the north and southern Alaska from Denali to the sea, the interior between remained grassland and shrub—ideal habitat for Denali-period fauna.9 From the summer camp where they would later bury the little girls, the Upward Sun Valley people hunted bison, elk, and sheep. They also pursued small game like ground squirrels, hare, and ptarmigan or grouse, and fished for salmon in the nearby Tanana River.10 What they harvested they brought back to the site to become food, clothing, and tools.11

  Roaming southwest from the Tanana River Valley in search of these ever-moving animals and fish, the Upward Sun River clan could have looked up and glimpsed Denali and the rest of the Alaska Range.12 Like the eternal questions of life and death, the mountains would have loomed over them, overshadowing their lives, filling them with awe and wonder. What did they think about the white ice-clad pyramids? Did they worship the peaks as gods, and give them supernatural powers? Were the roars of avalanches and screams of winds considered the speech of a higher power? Did they give a name to the highest point that they could see?

  Some time after Sunrise Girl-Child and Dawn Twilight Girl-Child were carefully interred with the antler spears and rust-colored dust, perhaps the next summer, their people placed in the pit and cremated another child (Xaasaa Cheege Ts’eniin, “Upward Sun River Mouth Child”).13 The fire, made of poplar wood, burned untouched for one to three hours; neither the skeleton nor the embers were ever touched while the fire lasted.14 Then, they abandoned the camp permanently. With them, the archeological record of the Alaskan interior slams shut, not to be opened again for almost five thousand years.

  * * *

  In 1778 Captain James Cook sailed into the inlet which would be named for him, and Russians appeared there in 1785 in search of furs. But George Vancouver is credited with being the first non-Native to document a glimpse of Denali. While surveying Cook Inlet from aboard HMS Discovery May 6, 1794, Vancouver spotted what he described in his journal as ‘distant stupendous mountains,’ which would have included Denali, the most stupendous of all. Hudson Stuck would note in the margin of his copy of Vancouver’s A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean, printed in 1801, that Cook’s was “the first reference to Denali and Denali’s Wife (Mt McKinley and Mt Foraker) that has been discovered in any literature.”15

  Thus the history of Alaska, in the modern, Western sense, began. From that date, over the following century, outsiders, non-natives, have flocked to the Far North. Russian fur traders crossed the Bering Strait and aimed south and east; English explorers pushed north up the Pacific coast from the mouth of the Columbia River; miners, missionaries, adventurers, and wanderers from the south followed. All of them, upon arrival, encountered Aleut and Athabascan cultures which had been in the region for thousands of years, and who thought of the physical features of their world as being imbued with spirits. For these Native cultures, all of the natural world, including Denali, contained spiritual force as well as physical presence. Seven different indigenous languages name the mountain—and all of them refer to either ‘the tall one’ or ‘big mountain.’

  Had these cultures developed in place from the Pleistocene people who had hunted mammoth six millennia before? Had humans lived along the rivers and coasts of Alaska in unbroken succession ever since the time of the Upward Sun River settlement? That remains an open question; no human remains have been found in the Alaskan interior dating from the interval between 6000 and 3000 years ago.16 The story of Alaska between the late Pleistocene and the earliest accounts of the Alaska Natives is, for now, a closed book.

  * * *

  The first Westerners to come to Alaska were the Russians. In 1741, Vitus Bering, sailing for Czar Peter the Great at the command of the Sv. Piotr, and Alexei Chirikov, a Russian commanding the Sv. Pavel, both reached the southeast coast of Alaska. Chirikov landed on what is thought to be Prince Edward Island on July 14, and Bering sighted Mount St. Elias on or about July 15. Within two years, small groups of fur traders were voyaging east across the 51-mile-wide Bering Strait to the Aleutian Islands. There the Russian trade in otter furs began in earnest.

  According to two modern scholars, “The end of the nineteenth century gave Alaska a gold rush, but earlier, in the eighteenth century a fur rush had emerged in this land.”17 We know from indigenous stories passed down orally and recorded in the 1970s that contact between Russians and Alaska Natives was sometimes bloody.18 One oral account of a Russian-Native encounter, perhaps in 1794–5, was translated and transcribed in the late 20th century as “When Russians Were Killed at ‘Roasted Salmon Place.’ ” The Russians named the territory “Russian America,” exploiting and enslaving indigenous people in their desire for sea-otter and other furs, the most sought-after commodity of the time.19 Although “in Russian Alaska colonizers
consciously acknowedged the skills and ways of knowing possessed by native peoples,” this was acompanied by Russian “coercion of these local labor forces.”20 As one recent historian, Bathsheba Demuth, says, “ ‘small peoples’ [the Russian term for the indigenous tribes] struggled to hunt what they needed while paying tribute and enduring the smallpox and syphilis and abuse that came with its extraction.”21

  By the time of Russia’s sale of Alaska to the United States in 1867, competition with England and the US for the fur trade, combined with overhunting, had shriveled the Russian involvement in Alaska. Captain Cook had sailed from Alaska for the Sandwich Islands, only to be murdered in Hawaii; his men continued their voyage of discovery, arriving in China in December 1799. There they learned that “the spectacularly lustrous sea otter furs purchased for one dollar’s worth of trinkets from Northwest Coastal Indians” on the American coast “sold for the equivalent of a hundred dollars cash in Macao and Canton.”22 The ensuing encroachment of the British North West Company and the American Pacific Fur Company into the North left little room for the Russians. The number of Russians living in Alaska had never been more than 700 (compared to 40,000 Alaska Natives); now, they abandoned North American altogether. The fur rush was over. The gold rush was two decades ahead.

  The cruel and harsh treatment of Alaska Natives by the Russian fur traders, however, established a pattern which would typify encounters between indigenous peoples and the Western colonial powers, and reverberate through the centuries. In a lasting counterpoint, the missionaries of the Russian Orthodox Church, who had followed in the wake of Russian colonialism, fought against their countrymen’s mistreatment of Alaska Natives. Hudson Stuck would later write of the “frightful ravages” of the Alaska Natives routinely committed by fur traders before “the most noted and vigorous” of the Russian missionaries, John Veniaminoff, arrived in Russian Alaska in 1824. Veniaminoff’s career of “devoted labours” among the Natives, including translations of the Bible and other writings into Aleut, “justify [in Stuck’s eyes] the very honourable place that is given him in Alaskan history.”23

  The Russian missionaries’ policies stressing sympathy for, and taking care to retain, Native customs, languages, and culture would be taken up by others in the decades to come—most notably by the Episcopal Church for which Hudson Stuck would labor in the Far North as Archdeacon of Alaska and the Yukon.24 The introduction of Christianity by Russian, Anglican, Episcopal, and other missionaries in the period before 1869 undermined and devalued the former belief systems of the Alaska Natives; however, in the words of one Alaska scholar, “this early contact did far less to destabilize Athabascan languages and lifeways than the waves of gold-seeking migrants and later official English-only language policies.”25

  Those policies, and the overall policy of assimilation, were the work of other Protestant denominations, especially the Presbyterians led by Sheldon Jackson, who were put in charge of Alaska Native education beginning in 1885. They sincerely believed that the best thing to do for the indigenous people of Alaska, as for those in the rest of the United States, was to “civilize” them, forcing them to abandon their language and culture for that of white nineteenth-century Americans.26 Presbyterian missionary S. Hall Young, who had established the denomination’s first church in Alaska at Wrangell in 1879, wanted to let the “old tongues with their superstition and sin die—the sooner the better—and replace these languages with that of Christian civilization.”27 The era’s burgeoning of pseudo-scientific theories on race supported these actions. As one modern historian has noted, “The assertion of power by people of European descent… called out for justification. Racial theorists of all stripes were eager to provide it.”28

  Then with the onset of the gold rush in August 1896, white greed, amorality, and environmental destruction were brought into the lives of a vastly greater number of Alaska Natives.29 Although some of the seekers after gold may have been searching for “the end of the great American rainbow [that] was located somewhere near the junction of the Klondike and Yukon rivers,”30 their overcrowded shanty towns, unthinking destruction of riverine habitats, and shameless exploitation of Native women were the most destructive influences yet inflicted upon Alaska Natives.

  Not only were Alaska Natives forced to deal with these effects of the Gold Rush; they were also systematically denied participation in what benefits there were to be gained from it. They were shoved aside, not allowed to work the mining claims which by right of eons of inhabitation should have been theirs. Ancient patterns of subsistence were lost, to be replaced, the whites claimed, by gardens, farms, and manufactured food. Native ways of dwelling, traveling, eating, learning, surviving would become replaced by the patterns of the outside, twentieth-century Western civilization.31 These—the sanctimonious culture war of the white assimilators, and the depredations of whites attempting to profit from the resources of the North—were the forces that Hudson Stuck would encounter on his arrival in 1904.

  All of these invaders, though, whatever their attitudes toward Alaska Natives—whether trappers, miners, merchants, or missionaries—could see the soaring and daunting mountain ranges which crowded the landscape. They would have shared the common human emotions, that mixture of attraction and fear, toward the massive upthrusts and avalanche-laden slopes of Alaska’s mountains. Many no doubt dreamed of climbing those mountains, especially the prize: Denali.

  2 FROM LONDON TO THE AMERICAN FRONTIER

  When Hudson Stuck was born in the London suburb of Paddington on November 11, 1863, Queen Victoria had ruled over the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland for three decades. With its recent victory over Imperial Russia in the Crimean Wars, Great Britain gloried in the height of its Empire. The forty-four-year-old queen, however, remained in semi-seclusion as winter neared, mourning, as she had for almost two years, the death of her husband and soulmate, Prince Albert. The royal household was bathed in gloom, dressed in black, forbidden by Victoria from any show of frivolity or laughter.1

  For four decades London had been the largest city in the world,2 and it continued to display everything that was new and advanced, with all the swagger of an imperial capital. Not far from the Stucks’ house on Irongate Wharf Road, the first section of the London Underground had opened earlier that year, between Paddington and Farringdon Road.3 A short distance to the southeast, just two weeks before Hudson Stuck joined the world, the Football Association had been founded at the Freemasons’ Tavern on Great Church Road; on December 19 the first-ever match would be played under the rules of the Football Association (shortened by Rugby School slang to “soccer,” as it became known in the US and Canada).4

  But all wasn’t bright and shiny in 1860s London, either literally or figuratively. Charles Dickens began serializing his last novel, Our Mutual Friend, in the spring after Stuck’s birth in May 1864. He described London as “a black shrill city… a gritty city… a hopeless city, with no vent in the leaden canopy of its sky.”5 Nor did the wealth derived from India, “The Jewel in the Crown,” make any real difference in the lives of most Londoners. The stifling social and moral strictures which would give the adjective “Victorian” its negative connotations remained in force, as did as the rigid class system, to say nothing of the environmental and social evils of the ongoing Industrial Revolution. These conditions drove some Londoners to find escape in the British countryside beyond the city; others chose to join the hundreds of thousands of emigrants who left during the first two decades of Stuck’s life, when he was a resident of the British Isles.

  Hudson Stuck, for his part, did both.

  * * *

  He had been born to James and Jane (nee Hudson) Stuck; his father was a “moderately successful foreman and part owner of a lumber yard” whose strict Presbyterianism failed to take hold in his son, to put it mildly.6 Stuck would much later write of the “forgotten religious books to which… it was sought to confine my reading with notable unsuccess.”7 Clara Burke, who knew him well in Alaska, claimed
that “When he decided to join the Episcopal Church and study for the ministry, his father was so incensed by his son’s disloyalty to the family church that he refused to finance his education. So young Stuck had come to the United States.”8 Presumably she was told this by Stuck himself, although there is no indication in any of his early letters from Texas that he had decided to be a priest before 1889. Perhaps Stuck was tidying up his timeline, for others as well as for himself.

  Young Hudson Stuck’s preference for the Church of England (known as the Episcopal Church in the United States) had cultural as well as theological implications. The Anglican Church, as it was also known, with its elaborate rituals and centuries-old Prayer Book, was the church of the well-born, the social elite, in England as well as in America. The Presbyterianism of Stuck’s father, on the other hand, would have been a dissenter’s church, populated mainly by working-class believers.

  Hudson Stuck, with his love of the English language, doubtless was drawn to the beauty of the Anglican service, and its liturgy written during Shakespeare’s time. But he also was disavowing his family’s social status, and choosing a more elevated church home. Esthetically, socially, and theologically, this choice was key to his subsequent life as a clergyman in America.

  Hudson and his younger sister Caroline moved with his parents to Westbourne, a London district just west of Paddington, where he attended Westbourne Park Public School and the King’s College School, a secondary school attached to the college.9 Westbourne around this time contained “one of the capital’s leading shopping centres,” Westbourne Grove, but also the area by the Lock bridge, “one of six poor patches amid the general affluence of north-west London.”10 Stuck would describe in A Winter Circuit of Our Arctic Coast the prints by the artist and satirist George Cruikshank, “full of action and character,” that hung upon the walls of his childhood home, perhaps because of Cruikshank’s strong patriotism (he invented “John Bull” as a symbol of England) or his fierce support of the temperance and anti-smoking movements.11