After the Gold Rush
Growing Up in Skagway
After the Gold Rush begins in January 1926, when the
ship carrying Robert Dahl steams into the harbor in Skagway,
Alaska. The ten-year-old boy has been traveling for over a week
with his mother and two brothers from the tiny town in northwest
Iowa where he was born. As the ship’s crew prepares to dock,
the brothers eagerly scan the wharf for a glimpse of their father,
who arrived a few weeks earlier to become the town’s only physician.
Driven by hopes of finding Yukon gold, thousands had once
passed through Skagway. By the time of the Dahl family’s arrival
in 1926, the population had shrunk to five hundred. Although
some buildings remaining from the Gold Rush days made sections
of Skagway look like a ghost town, the young boy from the plains
of Iowa was entranced by the wild beauty of the surrounding
mountains, which he would explore in the years to come.
In this highly personal tale of Robert Dahl's years in Skagway,
we meet the people of the town—at school, at work, at play,
hunting and fishing. We meet town “characters,” a few remaining
from the Gold Rush days, others whose drifting had ended in
Skagway. We meet Tlingit Indians, who were made “outcasts in
their own land” by the visible and invisible barriers of small-town
life.
The author concludes with the hope that "this lovely
piece of our world will be preserved as long as human beings, and
our fellow creatures who inhabit those splendid mountains, valleys,
forests, rivers, streams, and, yes, even the glaciers, continue
to live on this earth."
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About the Author
 Robert
A. Dahl is
Sterling Professor Emeritus of Political Science at Yale University.
He is the author of twenty-three books and textbooks, several of
which are considered definitive landmarks in the field. He has been
called “the premier democratic theorist of our time” by Fred I.
Greenstein of Princeton. He has received ten honorary degrees from
universities around the world, the first James Madison Award from
the American Political Science Association, and the first Johan
Skytte Prize in Political Science from Uppsala University, the only
international award in the field. Dahl has said that growing up
in the small town of Skagway instilled in him a life-long love of
people and a fascination with the ways in which we address our communal
problems—factors that lie at the heart of his interest in the workings
of democracy.
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