In the 1897 edition of the annual Eskimo Bulletin, between a sales ad for walrus heads and word of the discovery of ancient Eskimo armor made from iron slats, appeared the following news item:
The success attending this third year of the mission herd of domestic reindeer at the Cape [Prince of Wales] speaks well for the faithfulness and skill of our Eskimo herders, all of whom are Christians.…Each of them has driven more than 500 miles during the winter
The author and publisher of those lines, Congregational missionary William Thomas Lopp, briefly served as superintendent of the District of Alaska reindeer station in Teller. The driving he mentioned referred to reindeer-drawn sleds whose drivers balanced on the runners in the style of dog mushers.
On Independence Day five years earlier, amid a flag-raising ceremony, cheering onlookers and a herd of 53 Siberian reindeer, district officials had opened Teller Station in Port Clarence Bay, a large, sheltered bight east of the Bering Strait. Those animals laid the foundation for a population of reindeer on the Seward Peninsula that would peak at 640,000 animals and support a booming industry that inexorably shaped the welfare of the region’s Alaska Natives.
By century’s end commercial hunting had depleted whale, walrus and caribou populations on the peninsula, and starvation haunted the local Iñupiat, an ethnic group closely related to Canada’s Inuit. Believing “God blesses aggressiveness,” the Rev. Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister, missionary and Alaska’s general agent of education, repeatedly sailed to Siberia in 1892 and imported 171 reindeer to feed the Iñupiat and provide them with livelihoods. Escorting that first shipment were four Chukchi Siberian herders he’d employed as instructors. Iñupiat flocked from hundreds of miles away to see what the missionaries at Teller were up to. Their intentions were implicit in The Eskimo Bulletin and explicit in Jackson’s reports to the federal government. The reverend—who stood just 5 feet tall but was colossally ambitious, egotistical and often tactless—considered reindeer “an important factor in the civilization of the Eskimos.”
Iñupiaq chronicler Inez Ayagiaq Black instead recalled how the newcomers’ dealings unraveled the cultural fabric of northwestern Alaska Natives. “When the young
