Poetry and Alaska : William Henry Seward's Alaskan Purchase and Bret Harte's "An Arctic Vision"

Abstract

On 30 March 1867, William Henry Seward, American Secretary of State (1861-69), provoked controversy both at home and abroad by signing the treaty that ceded Russian America to the United States. On the East Coast of America, reactions to the newly renamed Alaska were coloured by a personal antipathy towards Seward and the administration that he served. The British considered the cession unfriendly towards their ongoing foreign policy of Canadian confederation in British North America. Geographically, Alaska, now under United States control, lay menacingly adjacent to the west and north of British Columbia. This potentially vulnerable British colony, which had not then entered the Canadian Confederation, quickly became the focus of conflicting territorial ambitions. For Britain, British Columbia would supply Canada with a much-needed Pacific coastline, while for Seward, it would link Alaska and Washington Territory to form a continuous Pacific coastline for the United States. For ten fraught days, Seward fought to ratify the Alaska treaty. On the West Coast, where the economic benefits of Alaska's purchase were more immediate, Seward won the approval of the popular press. Among his less likely supporters was the American writer and journalist (Francis) Bret Harte, author of such stories of mining life as "The Luck of Roaring Camp," and conventionally thought to be a writer of western literature, turned the attention northward with a poem entitled "An Arctic Vision."