Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-03, Section: A, page: 1036.

Director: John Mack Faragher.

Inside Passage charts the experiences of travelers and tourists along the Alaskan coast and interior from the US purchase in 1867 to the Klondike gold rush in 1898. Focusing on the largely ignored late nineteenth-century Alaskan travel literature, the study places several decades of travel at the center of late-nineteenth century northern expansion. The title takes its name from the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that weaves a snakelike path up the coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. A flood of reportage---travelogues, guidebooks, articles, lantern-slide shows---blanketed metropolitan readers with images taken from this northern passage over several decades leading to the rush. Colonization was very much an intellectual and cultural enterprise alongside its more dramatic military, political, and economic projects. Wealthy and white travelers sought to make Alaska into an American territory. They displaced Native Alaskan spaces with a new scenic landscape drawn in the image of an unpeopled wilderness. In this makeover, a leisure class of Americans collapsed the region's possession into the frontierist drama of American pioneering. This study restores the far north to the wider sphere of global imperialism.

Bourgeois travelers, wielding words as acts, laid the imaginative foundation upon which the later gold seekers dreams were to be built. These travelers were all the more effective because they were not an official institution of the state. The type of power they exercised moved invisibly without the imprimatur of state activity, even as they effected critical functions of imperial expansion. They acted without being seen to act. Nature and Native Alaskans came under the comprehending gaze of actual visitors and a national audience connected through the vicarious experience of reading about the north. In this study, their accounts not only reflect the central features of late nineteenth-century elite intellectual life, but these representations helped to define ideas about nature and the region's indigenes. As an incorporating arm of empire, travelers fixed a new view of the north that opened the way for future political and economic conquests.