Anglo-Saxonism in the Yukon: The Klondike Nugget and American-British Relations in the ““Two Wests,”” 1898––1901

Abstract

During the Klondike Gold Rush, Americans and Britons connected their joint local experiences with the simultaneous colonial conquests in Cuba, the Philippines, South Africa, and China through the ideology of Anglo-Saxonism. From 1898 to 1901 Dawson's newspapers, memoirs, correspondence, and commercial photography demonstrated the power of this symbolic language of flags and balls, heated rhetoric and dazzling cartoons. The Klondike Nugget, the first newspaper in town and the only one run by Americans, took up the claims of global Anglo-Saxonism with the most fervor, although its sentiments were often echoed in the Canadian-edited Dawson Daily News. Differences re-emerged, especially over the boundary between Alaska and Canada, but this brief episode remained deeply imprinted in narratives of the ““two Wests””——both of the North American frontier West and the West as Anglo-Saxon civilization——told at the turn of the twentieth century.