Worse still, from the shocked perspective of a Victorian-era missionary, was their use of human urine to guide the herd. Jackson’s Chukchi herders prove less than worthy as moral exemplars for their Eskimo apprentices: they feasted heartily on reindeer lice and enjoyed wrestling the animals to the ground and gulping warm milk directly from their teats. Jackson’s improbable scheme turns into a lifelong obsession, beset by folly and unintended consequences that range from tragic to comic.
In 1891, he crosses the Bering Strait with Captain Michael Healy, “the son of an Irish immigrant and his African slave,” on the first of many voyages to bring both Siberian reindeer and Chukchi herders to western Alaska and transform Alaskan Eskimos into self-sufficient herdsmen (p. Imagine this: a Presbyterian missionary named Sheldon Jackson decides that the best way to bring Alaskan Natives into the modern age is to make them into nomadic reindeer herders. This book shows that the old adage “life is stranger than fiction” is true, especially in Alaska. Grand Ambitions: A History to Match the Great Alaskan Landscape? Reviewed by David Arnold (Columbia Basin College) Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2010. Alaska's Place in the West: From the Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness.
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