Northland Stories Read Free Page A

sequence, but whose title London chose for his first collected volume. And so began Jack London’s lifelong fascination with the figure of the wolf, his personal projection of dominance and power, as well as the intimate nickname by which he would call himself a few years later in affectionate letters to his wife, Charmian, and his best friend, George Sterling.
    Trading in the surname “Chaney” for “Wolf,” the aspiring author in the field of the Klondike “found myself” (as he fondly liked to recall) by replacing his biological father with an imaginary set of tribal clansmen. By “Wolf” London meant something rather specific, as the seldom reprinted title story makes quite clear. A young but grizzled gold prospector named Scruff Mackenzie leaves his cozy cabin to seek wealth of another sort—a wife and helpmate. He boldly chooses for his bride the daughter of an Indian chief, whose tribal clan, “the Raven,” has come to identify these few strange white men invading the Northland as “Sons of the Wolf.” Forcibly stealing the royal daughter against the wishes of the natives, Mackenzie warns his vanquished foes to heed “the Law of the Wolf.” This law the Indians themselves have associated with “the fighting and destructive principle”—the Devil—as opposed to the “creative principles” governing their tribe.
    â€œWolf” thus stands for the white race, whose sons are conceived by London as belonging to their own totemic clan which is defined by, even as it is opposed to, Native Americans. While “the Law of the Wolf” in this story explicitly concerns the white man’s exacting brand of punishment, more generally, totemic law functions in London’s fictional Northland to dictate social relations. These relations depend on racial difference, which is why Mackenzie seeks a red bride, no less than a princess, who also happens to be the sister of Ruth in “The White Silence.” The irony is that although the Indians in the tale argue against interracial marriage in order to preserve the purity of their threatened clan, the “Wolf” Mackenzie fears no such impurity. In fact the white man is compelled to take a racial Other as his mate, given the practice of exogamy, which under totemic law prohibits marriage within a single group. The native “Raven” conversely adopt the familiar rhetoric of United States citizens, such as President Teddy Roosevelt, who reacted to the great influx of immigrants and “alien” peoples at the turn of the century by darkly prophesizing racial suicide. By putting this dread of mixed blood in the mouths of Indians, London forced his contemporary readers to question some of their most basic assumptions about race.
    Clearly not all of the more than fifty stories London set in the Klondike concern miscegenation. “In a Far Country,” for instance, tells the chilling tale of two men of differing social classes cooped up together in a cabin—a difficult “marriage” of another sort anticipating the intense homoerotic strife between men that London would later explore in his novel The Sea-Wolf (1904). But from “The Son of the Wolf” and “The White Silence,” which introduces us to the pregnant native wife, Ruth, (and her impending half-breed child), to the powerful tales “The League of the Old Men” and “The Story of Jees Uck,” miscegenation lies at the very heart of London’s early Northland narratives. In “An Odyssey of the North,” to cite one notable example, London actually offers two stories of racial intermingling: the tale of the Indian Naass who narrates his obsessive quest to retrieve his intended Indian bride, Unga, stolen from him on his wedding night by a mighty superhuman white man; and the related myth of the Indian’s own racial origins which can be traced to a prior primal