American Notes: The Klondike and The Native, by Voltairine de Cleyre (1897)
An excerpt from an article simply titled ‘American Notes’ in ‘Freedom: A Journal of Anarchist Communism’, September 1897, London, UK
The fools are rushing on to Klondyke. Gold hunting knows no patriotism, and Americans would as lief [soon] dig under the British rule as their own. The old history will be repeated. The miner will dig and turn over what he digs to the imperturbable gentleman who sits in Wall Street. And no one will be better off but this last, though thousands will be worse.
Meanwhile, the most mournful thing is this final in-surge of the Anglo-Saxon upon the last retreat of the North American Indian. Beaten backward year by year from the milder regions of the Saskatchewan and thereabout, by the “settling up” policy of the Hudson Bay Company, the Indian hunter took refuge in the impregnable fortress of frost and storm, willing to surrender anything rather than his free nomad life. Along the frozen rivers of the North, among the great fir forests, in the mountain passes, brother to ice and sleet, he passed far up the Yukon valley hunting his precarious living, content so only that the hated white man’s claim did not come to partition the soil and set up stakes.
Now he must learn that, for the tinsel god of gold, the white man, too, will brave the North. He is there, his “claim” is there, property is there, government is there. Freedom has withdrawn to the Arctic Ocean. Nothing is left to the Indian.
V. DE CLEYRE