The problem was that after his years in Indiana Brady no longer had much liking for city life and felt a powerful urge to return west. As it happened, Brace was then struggling with the question of what to do with “large boys” (fourteen years and older) who were turning out to be less than ideal placements, often making trouble for their employers and running away. During a long night at the Children’s Aid Society, Brace and Brady came up with a means of solving both of their problems. They decided that John should move to Texas and start an industrial school where boys fourteen to nineteen years old could get a year of basic agricultural training and then be found a job on a farm.
Brady devoted the summer of 1877 to pursuing this plan. In quest of financial support, he visited Theodore Roosevelt, Sr., but got no certain promise of help. He had far better luck with a “lady friend,” apparently a major donor to the CAS, who promised him $9,000 if he found a suitable site for his school. He promptly set off for Texas and did find a 1,700-acre plot on the Brazos River that could be purchased for $7,000. But 1877 was a year of great economic upheaval and labor unrest, and during his absence the “lady friend” experienced such severe losses on her investments that she no longer had any money to spare. The industrial school was not to be.
John Brady spent his whole life looking for a father, or at least for an older man whom he might trust to guide him. He had found that man in a series of ministers at Randall’s Island, at Tipton, and at Sharpesville, Indiana. He had found him, most especially in Judge Green, and perhaps for a time in Charles Loring Brace. But the man who was to become the single most important influence in Brady’s life was Dr. Sheldon Jackson, the remarkably energetic superintendent of the Presbyterian church’s missions in eleven western states—a district that covered more than half of the nation’s total land mass.
Brady had gotten in touch with Jackson through the intercession of a Yale classmate even before cooking up the Texas industrial school with Brace. Jackson seems to have taken to the young minister almost immediately. On the basis of an exchange of letters and perhaps a meeting, he pegged Brady as a smart, driven man not unlike himself, and he invited Brady to assume a pastorate in Colorado’s silver mining district. By that point, however, Brady had committed himself to the industrial school project, so he put Jackson off. When the project collapsed, Brady told Jackson he would be interested in the pastorate after all, but by then the elder evangelist had an entirely new proposition in mind.
Like many a missionary before him, Jackson was an immensely ambitious and skillful power broker who was never able to abide within the strictures of his church’s hierarchy. Shortly before establishing contact with John Brady, and without the approval of the Presbyterian Home Missionary Board in New York City, Jackson had opened the first Presbyterian mission in the newly acquired U.S. possession of Alaska, expanding the territory over which he had jurisdiction by nearly 50 percent. But this move also brought Jackson an entirely new sort of power, since, for the next few decades, missionaries would make up a substantial portion of Alaska’s de facto government. The other top members of the Presbyterian hierarchy, both in New York and the West, resented Jackson’s end-run around their authority, but he was too wily and powerful to be removed from office, and they had no choice but to live with his fait accompli. Jackson, for his part, was eager to consolidate his holdings, and so when Brady got back in touch, he invited him to found a second Alaskan mission. The first had been in the panhandle village of Wrangell. The new mission would be in Sitka, another panhandle village, and the only other settlement of any importance in that enormous, wild land. Not insignificantly, Sitka was also Alaska’s capital.
In 1878 no more than 200 white Yankees lived in Alaska—almost all of them in the forested archipelago of the southern panhandle. The panhandle settlements were also occupied by about 2,000 “Creoles,” the mostly Russian-speaking descendants of fur traders and native women. The overwhelming majority of the Alaskan population—more than 30,000 people—were members of four Native American groups: the Eskimos in the northwest, along the Bering Sea; the Aleuts along a trail of islands arcing westward toward Siberia; the Athapascans in the Yukon Valley, which roughly bisects the Alaskan mainland in an east-west direction; and finally, the Northwest Coast Indians in the panhandle.15
When nearly thirty-year-old John Brady marched down the gangplank of the SS California on Saint Patrick’s Day in 1878, Sitka was little more than a settlement of two or three score white clapboard houses clustered between a row of jagged hills and the rocky coast. Its grandest buildings were the onion-domed Saint Michael’s Church and the Baranov Castle, a multilevel, hotel-like structure that occupied the highest promontory near the harbor, both of which had been built by the original Russian settlers.
At the time of Brady’s arrival, one hundred or so white Yankees occupied the highest strata of Sitka’s social hierarchy. Some of these were the customs and naval officers who had been posted to Alaska—virtually all that existed of government. But the majority were transients—men mostly, attracted by Alaska’s great emptiness and tales of its extraordinary natural resources. They were trappers, fishermen, lumberjacks, carpenters, blacksmiths, coopers, and shopkeepers, and most of them did not stay for more than one of the territory’s dark, interminable, gut-freezing winters. The next level down from the whites were the Creoles, permanent residents who plied many of the same trades as the Yankees and also served as translators between them and the local Tlingit-speaking natives. Below the Creoles were a smattering of Chinese, Turks, and other non-Europeans, many of whom had been imported to perform menial, quasi-slave labors. And finally, at the very bottom rung of Sitka society were the Tlingits, who lived in a separate, desperately poor section of town called “the Ranche.”
In his early visits to the Ranche, Brady was struck by its resemblance to the slums of New York City. Here too stinking open sewers ran along the streets; here too were drunken, brutal husbands and drunken, beaten wives and children with shut-down faces who lived by begging and thievery, and “fallen women” who had been forced to “surrender their virtue,” often to white trappers and sailors, and had no place in either culture. Like Brace before him, Brady knew that preaching and prayer were not enough to solve the problems of the Ranche. So he decided that the first major project of his mission would be the founding, at long last, of his industrial school.
Brady’s career is fascinating not only for how it illustrates the influence of Brace’s work and personal magnetism but for the way Brady’s own work reveals hidden aspects of Brace’s. Brady’s efforts to duplicate elements of the CAS in Alaska show the cultural limitations of Brace’s ideas and illustrate how, even in New York, the CAS unwittingly worked to suppress the values of one culture (or class) in favor of another.
Everybody in Alaska despised the missionaries. The natives hated being forced to submit to their humiliating rituals and nonsensical ideas about clothing, sex, home life, and the spirit. The whites hated the missionaries because they “loved” the natives—and supported prohibition.
When Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867, Congress decreed that the territory’s entire 586,000 square miles should be off limits to “spirituous liquor,” a policy meant in part to prevent Alaskan natives from succumbing to the ruinous alcoholism of Native Americans in the “Lower Forty.” Not surprisingly, liquor smuggling was a major Alaskan industry, as was the distillation of a local concoction called, in the native language, hoochinoo (from which we derive the word hooch). The very boat that first dropped Brady off at Sitka also carried twenty-two barrels of molasses, which were hurried straight from the docks to illicit distilleries.16
By law, local customs officers and a minute naval force (two single-stack steamships) were responsible for enforcing the liquor ban, but in practice the most visible opponents of alcohol consumption were the missionaries. They were constantly preaching against drunkenness and liked nothing so much as to overturn a vat of hoochinoo onto a muddy street. Although never a te
etotaler himself, one of Brady’s very first acts as a missionary was to get all of the merchants of Sitka to sign a document saying that they would import no more molasses for use in illegal distillation. The merchants kept their word. They ordered brown sugar instead, and hoochinoo production went on without interruption.17 Brady soon realized that prohibition in Alaska was a total failure and he would become a strong campaigner for its suspension.
Yankee Alaskans also despised missionaries for their role in U.S. education policy. Although building schools was always presented as quasi-charity for the benefit of natives and whites alike, education was the primary means by which the federal government hoped to pacify Alaska’s enormous population of “ignorant savages”—yet another “dangerous class” who needed serious retrofitting if they were not to become a burden or a threat to American society. Education was such a high priority that for twenty-one years after the establishment of civil government in 1884 Alaska’s sole representative in Washington—the man who advised presidents on all territorial matters, including the appointment of governors—was the general agent for education. It did John Brady’s career no harm that this all-important bureaucrat was none other than Dr. Sheldon Jackson.
According to the prevailing theory, Indians and Eskimos had lifted themselves out of primal “savagery” but were stuck in the phase of “barbarism” that preceded “civilization.” Many whites, including Brady and Jackson, who styled themselves as sympathetic to natives, saw education as the mechanism that would at last enable these benighted peoples to achieve civilized enlightenment. As early as 1819 the U.S. government designated an annual appropriation of $10,000 to a “Civilization Fund” for the purpose of educating Indians. Soon after the purchase of Alaska from Russia, the U.S. commissioner of education urged the creation of a similar fund to educate Alaskan natives. And shortly after Jackson’s appointment, he and Brady were able to win $15,000 specifically for Brady’s industrial school.18 Some years later they managed to raise the federal contribution to Alaska’s total education budget from $30,000 to $145,153 per year. What infuriated many white Alaskans was Brady and Jackson’s stipulation that this money be spent without regard to race—which, as the Yankees saw it, meant less money and learning for their own children. Most whites believed that every dollar spent on the Indians was wasted. If the natives became a problem, there were much simpler ways of civilizing them.
Brady may have served the federal government’s interest in native pacification, and his own church’s interest in conversion, but he did so for profoundly personal reasons. Sounding the urban missionary, he told a gathering of church women early in his career, “To Christianize the Indians without helping them to new industries and new methods of earning money is to impoverish and to make them more wretched. The work of the church is only half done in giving them the gospel; she must also assist them in their efforts to live a Christian life.”19
Although Brady founded a maternity hospital for native women, and an all-Indian police force that kept the peace in the Ranche, his industrial school, the Sitka Training Institute, was the absolute center of his missionary labors. The school was constructed entirely by skilled native carpenters. (Woodworking—the construction of totem poles and large, plank lodges—was an ancient part of Northwest Coast Indian culture.) The students were taught how to do needlework, to weave and to fish with nets, and to operate cannery and sawmill equipment. They were also taught the four R’s of all mission schools. But for Brady, the last R—religion—was less a matter of church doctrine than the values of bourgeois liberalism.
Brady had considerable respect for Indians and their culture. During the course of his career he frequently asserted that native Alaskans were “a hardy, hardworking and industrious people, and have always been self-supporting.”20 He was one of the only white officials in Sitka to learn to speak Tlingit, and he amassed a substantial collection of Tlingit art that he ultimately put into a museum open to both natives and whites. With all of his respect, however, there were certain traits of Indian culture that Brady could not abide and felt that native Alaskans must transcend if they were ever to achieve dignity and contentment within American society. And it was to these traits that he was referring when he declared that the church must assist the Indians in their “efforts to live a Christian life.”
Prime among those traits, of course, was native religion, which seemed mere superstition to Brady. He also strenuously objected to the Tlingit practice of slavery. But he was most a man of his era when he condemned communal living and property. Echoing Brace’s anxiety about overcrowded tenement basements, Brady believed that the custom of large extended families living under one roof (in one large room, really) corrupted the morals of girls and was thus the main reason for the Ranche’s large population of “fallen women.” And communal property, he thought, deprived Indians of a major incentive to adopt the Protestant work ethic, as well as to develop self-reliance, individuality, thrift, and that most mercurial of virtues, ambition. Communal property also made it difficult to punish natives, since they could not be fined or deprived of assets if they did not own anything. Thus, Brady attempted to help natives in their “efforts to live a Christian life” by encouraging them to move into single-family homes, by attempting to pass laws sanctioning native ownership of land, and finally (in a variation of the strategy that had transformed his own life) by separating children from their parents.
Children could not attend the Sitka Training Institute unless their parents agreed to let them live there for at least five years. Expressing Brace’s own “environmentalist” beliefs in more naked and global terms, Brady asserted that only through such an extended separation from their families could native children be cleansed of the most pernicious elements of their culture. He sometimes subjected particularly promising or troubling students to even more profound separations by sending them to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. Founded by Richard Henry Pratt, the Carlisle school had adopted the motto: “Kill the Indian and save the man.”21
Although Brady may well have modeled his career on Brace’s, he would never so wholly devote himself to laboring “among the poor, the weak, the forgotten.” He had been poor himself, after all, and knew far more intimately than Brace what a fragile privilege it was to have good and wholesome food on the table and a warm coat on his back. Also, however high-mindedly he may have lectured his students about the importance of hard work and the acquisition of property, he was living at a time and place in which such virtues were far more—and less—than moral ideals. This was the era when Carnegie, Morgan, Rockefeller, and others were building up the nation’s first great fortunes. And in spite of its extraordinary beauty, the Alaskan frontier was a place where most people came only for one reason: to get rich quick.
Soon after his arrival in Alaska, Brady went into partnership with an ex-liquor smuggler, Amos T. Whitford, to open the Sitka Trading Company, a one-room store selling everything from oil lamps and canned food to underwear and native art. The store did so well that Brady and Whitford soon opened a second branch in Juneau. The two partners were never wholly compatible, however, especially on moral and social issues. Brady particularly objected to Whitford’s desire to institute a Jim Crow policy, which would have required natives to enter the store by a back entrance. But when Brady finally sold his share of the company to Whitford in 1891, it was not for moral reasons, but because he wanted to put more money into his second business, the Sitka Sawmill Company.
This profitable venture grew directly out of his missionary work. In 1882, capitalizing on what he had learned working at a Pennsylvania sawmill during a summer vacation from Yale, Brady bought a primitive, steam-driven saw with the idea of providing vocational training for his industrial school students while at the same time generating income for the school. Apparently Brady’s mill was considerably more profitable than Brace’s cobbling and box-making businesses. In 1889 he built a new mill with an up-to-date saw and planer, and by 1891 Brady had spun th
e venture off as a wholly independent business with himself as the sole owner. Even after the mill had become independent, Brady drew on native apprentices from his industrial school to operate it and, for this reason, was charged with slavery by his enemies.
Brady was certainly not one to pass up a bargain, but as he saw it, while he may have profited from the students’ free labor, they were getting on-the-job training—just exactly the sort of exchange on which the apprentice system had been founded. He also had paid native mill hands, mechanics, and engineers working for him—some of them Sitka Training Institute graduates. One of these natives, Peter Simpson, eventually capitalized on what he had learned working for Brady by founding Alaska’s first all-Indian business: a sawmill on Gravina Island.
Brady’s store and sawmill earned considerable money and helped transform him into one of the pillars of Alaskan Yankee society. But the true engineer of his fate remained Sheldon Jackson. In 1884, shortly after his appointment as general agent for education, Jackson persuaded President Chester Alan Arthur to designate Brady one of Alaska’s four commissioners. As a commissioner, Brady was, in essence, a justice of the peace; he adjudicated in assault, petty larceny, liquor smuggling, probate, and other similar cases. Long after rejecting Judge Green’s offer of a partnership in his law business, Brady finally did study law, and on May 6,1885, he officially became known as Judge Brady. He was the fourth person admitted to the bar in Alaska.
When Benjamin Harrison was elected president in 1888, Jackson saw an opportunity. Harrison was both a Republican, like Jackson and Brady, and a Presbyterian. Jackson hoped that the new president might be inclined to help solidify what the press called the “Presbyterian hierarchy”—a group of missionaries and fellow travelers, including Brady, that, thanks to Jackson’s efforts, was coming close to dominating the political establishment in Alaska. On January 22, 1889, shortly before Harrison’s inauguration, Jackson wrote him a letter that was addressed: “Dear Brother,” and read, in part, “It gives me great pleasure to transmit to you the action of the Presbytery of Alaska, and also of the Missionaries and teachers of the Southeastern Alaska recommending to your favorable attention Mr. John G. Brady of Sitka, as Governor of Alaska.” Jackson went on to remind Harrison that the governors appointed by his predecessors, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and Chester Alan Arthur, had been “Godless, drinking” men, and that eight-tenths of Alaska’s population were “Indians or natives just emerging from barbarism,” whose interests could be served by no one better than John Brady.22 Jackson also had dozens of congressmen, ex-Alaskan officials, religious leaders, and members of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union deluge Harrison and his secretary of the interior with similar letters.
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