On the basis of this campaign and Brady’s reputation, the Juneau City Mining Record newspaper considered him almost a shoo-in:
He is the unanimous choice of the better element in Alaska. . . . He is a Christian gentleman of high intellectual abilities, and has used every effort to aid the missionaries in reclaiming Indians from barbarism. As a businessman he has been successful, and has gained an almost unlimited knowledge, through long residence, of the habits and customs of the Indians. . . . Mr. Brady is a staunch Republican. . . . [T]he only opposing faction in either party consists of those who ridicule missionary efforts and are engaged in the sale of intoxicating liquors, illegally in Alaska.23
In the end, however, not wanting to appear prejudiced in favor of his own denomination—or so Jackson theorized—Harrison chose a non-Presbyterian for governor. Jackson and Brady had to wait for the better part of a decade—until another Republican, William McKinley, was elected to office—before they could launch a second campaign. And this time Brady took a much more active role in working toward his own appointment.
In February 1897, the month before McKinley’s inauguration, Brady headed south to Seattle, Portland, and San Francisco, where he gained the support of prominent western politicians, religious figures, and businessmen. Then he journeyed east, to New York, where he visited Charles Loring Brace Jr., who had assumed leadership of the Children’s Aid Society on his father’s death in 1890. The younger Brace gave Brady a letter of introduction to C. N. Bliss, the secretary of the interior, and the man who would become Brady’s immediate superior should he be appointed governor. Brady then headed south to Washington, where he stayed with Jackson’s family, met with Bliss, and, in April, had a meeting with President McKinley. The new chief executive was pleasant, but noncommittal. Brady returned home in early June, certain that the brewing war with Spain would cause McKinley to delay making appointments to crucial posts. But on June 25, Brady received a letter from Interior Secretary Bliss: “There is transmitted herewith, under separate cover, a commission from the President for your appointment to the office of Governor of Alaska . . . you have been so nominated to and confirmed by the Senate.”24
John Green Brady served as governor during the wildest and most corrupt period of Alaska’s history. On August 16, 1896, an American prospector named George Carmack struck gold on Bonanza Creek, a tributary of the Klondike River in Canada’s Yukon Territory. News of the strike did not leak out until the fall, and because of the territory’s long harsh winters, the Yukon Gold Rush did not begin in earnest until just about the time of Brady’s appointment.
While the gold strike had been in Canada, the two main routes for traveling to the Klondike passed through Alaska. The easiest of these routes was to travel up the Yukon River from the Bering Sea, right across the center of the territory. A route that seemed much shorter but was far more arduous was to travel across the coastal mountains from the panhandle. During the warm months of 1897 and 1898, tens of thousands of often ill-prepared prospectors traveled across Alaska in quest of riches. Some would walk away from the Klondike with hundreds of thousands of dollars in their pockets, but most did little more than bankrupt themselves financially, physically, and morally. In scant weeks whole cities rose up where there had been only tiny settlements—cities that stank, buzzed with flies, and were infested with rodents and every variety of human vermin: gamblers, thieves, prostitutes, claim jumpers, drunks, and con artists. Rising crime rates also brought a rise in vigilante justice. In the aptly named boomtown of Skagway, where it was reported that “at least every other house is a saloon or a dance house,”25 a Frenchman caught midrobbery by a group of miners was shot to death while he screamed for mercy. As a warning to others, the Frenchman’s body was then hung from a tent pole for three days—not a sight that encouraged much respect for the law.
The gold rush also caused many less colorful but nonetheless serious problems. A huge escalation in demand for goods and services led to a steep rise in inflation and considerable hardship for the poorest Alaskans, especially the town natives. As winter approached, public concern arose that droves of greenhorn prospectors might starve or freeze to death. So Brady amassed food and sent out troops along the major gold rush routes to hunt—in vain as it turned out—for potential victims. While few if any greenhorns succumbed to starvation or cold, the long, lightless, frigid winter during which prospectors sometimes spent weeks isolated in their cabins apparently caused so many to go mad that Brady had to order the construction of an insane asylum to house all the lunatics who descended on the cities and towns with the spring thaw.
The intensity of the Klondike Gold Rush diminished considerably with the start of the Spanish-American War in April 1898. The sure pay offered by the army, as well as the chance of glory, was more than many of the exhausted and penniless prospectors could resist. But by the autumn of 1898 the war was all but over and gold had been struck again—this time in Nome, on the southern edge of the Seward Peninsula, not far from the Bering Strait. The following spring a whole new crop of prospectors came north with their picks and pack mules and their lust for lucre and liquor.
As a result of the two gold rushes, Alaska’s white population doubled in the last half-decade of the nineteenth century, reaching an estimated 24,000, and coming close to parity with the 31,000 natives and Russian Creoles—whose population actually diminished in some places.26
Governor Brady was deeply troubled by the effect of the gold rushes on the native populations, especially the Eskimo, whose situation he described in his annual report of 1902:
We have invaded his country and have killed and driven off the whale, walrus, seals, and caribous, and in places have made fish scarce. We have gone along the shores of Bering Sea and have burned up the driftwood on the beach, set fire to the tundras, have driven off the birds, and in our mad hunt for gold we have burrowed under his rude barrabbara and allowed it to tumble, even when the inmates were sick and dying.27
Brady had been a strong advocate for native Alaskans from the very beginning of his administration. His first annual report in 1898 asserted that Alaskan Indians and Eskimos should “be admitted to the enjoyment of all the rights, advantages, and immunities as citizens of the United States, and . . . be maintained and protected in the free enjoyment of their life, liberty, and property.”28 Much of his work as governor focused on improving conditions for the native populations—although always with an eye toward aiding the progress of “civilization.” He imported herds of Siberian reindeer, for example, for two reasons: to give the Eskimos and Athapascans a new source of meat and fur to compensate for what the prospectors had eaten and driven away, and to keep them too busy maintaining reindeer herds to succumb to the lure of the white men’s saloons.
He employed a similar rationale in his drive to win Alaskan natives the right to federal “homestead” claims. In 1862 Congress had passed the Homestead Act, a law designed to speed white migration into the Midwest and West. Under that law, for a $10 fee, the government would give 160 acres of land to anyone who farmed or otherwise improved it for five years. Although the Homestead Act clearly accomplished its goal of drawing crowds of settlers west, its application had been so full of conflict and corruption that Congress would not extend it to Alaska. For much of his tenure as governor, Brady had to fight for the homestead rights for any Alaskans—red or white—but in asserting that natives also had a right to homestead claims, he argued that land ownership would naturally tend to “civilize” them by breaking down their communalism.
In the pursuit of these and other causes, Brady traveled frequently to Washington to lobby Congress. On one such trip he stopped off at the Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, where he shared the stage with the former governor of North Dakota, a robust and good-looking man of forty-nine with a weighty, dark mustache and receding hairline. Brady too was forty-nine, and entirely white-haired, with a full, closely trimmed beard, but still possessing the compact, wiry body and defiantly lifted chin of a
street tough. These two men had looked decidedly different the first time they had sat beside one another, nearly forty years before. The former governor of North Dakota was none other than Andrew Burke, Brady’s fellow inmate from Randall’s Island whom he had befriended on their orphan train.
While Brady had moved north to Tipton, Andrew Burke’s first placement had been with a man who lived right in Noblesville, the town where, during lunch in Aunt Jenny Fergusson’s hotel, the children had first been on display. Although Burke would live with three different families during the time that he was tracked by the CAS, he claimed to be happy and “doing well” in each one of them.29 After serving as a drummer boy in the Union Army during the Civil War, he attended college at Ashbury (now DePauw) University in Greencastle, Indiana, but dropped out as a result of a breakdown attributed to “over study.”30 There is no way of knowing how often he and Brady communicated with each other over the years, but Burke’s CAS file does mention a letter from Brady stating, “Andy is attending College in Greencastle,” and it may well be that Burke’s military service was what had made Brady so eager to be a drummer boy during the Civil War.
After trying his hand at various businesses in Indiana, Illinois, Ohio, and Minnesota, Burke became a cashier at the First National Bank of Casselton, Dakota. (The territory had not yet been divided into north and south.) He was elected treasurer of Cass County, Dakota, three times and became the second governor of the new state of North Dakota in 1891, after being elected by a substantial majority on the Republican ticket. Like his predecessor and successor during those turbulent first years of statehood, Burke lasted only one term and left office in January 1893. He failed in a go at the grain business back in Minnesota and finally got himself appointed inspector of the U.S. Land Office by President McKinley, a position he held until his retirement. At the time of his reunion with John Brady, he was living in Colorado but would soon move to New Mexico, where he would remain until his death in 1918.31
Like many street kids before them, these two men of state were making the best of their stories. Indeed, Andrew Burke’s Horatio Alger rise in society is featured prominently in many contemporary accounts of his career32 and must certainly have played a role in his campaigns. Brady does not seem to have made much of his origins until after his election, but then he was frequently feted as he was at the Carlisle School. In 1900 C. P. Vedder, a former state senator from New York, presented Brady with an award at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel, proclaiming, “Alaska’s Governor illustrated the possibilities open to any American boy. Grander victories than those of Napoleon are on the common field of life.”33
Brady and Burke were not, of course, the only ones using their stories. Everyone who celebrated, toasted, awarded, or merely praised them did so to glorify any number of causes, from the Children’s Aid Society to American democracy. Typical of such eulogies are the remarks of the Wall Street Journal reporter who, not long after Brady’s award at the Waldorf, wrote: “The Governor’s life is all wrapped up in the country. The story of his own life is so remarkable, and his rise to distinction so unique, that he naturally is in great love with American institutions, and naturally is using his present power to extend them fully over Alaska.”34 What none of these commentators (nor perhaps Brady and Burke themselves) seem to have recognized was that the very uniqueness of the two orphan train riders’ rise in society said at least as much about what was wrong with the world in which they lived as it did about what was right.
Brady exploited his own story most blatantly at a meeting of western governors in Portland, Oregon, in 1900. The meeting had been called to honor the governor of New York, Theodore Roosevelt Jr., who was William McKinley’s new running mate in his bid for reelection. When candidate Roosevelt walked into the room, the western governors lined up to greet him, with Brady bringing up the rear. Roosevelt and Brady’s conversation was transcribed in Corinne Roosevelt Robinson’s memoir of her brother:
BRADY: Governor Roosevelt, the other governors have greeted you with interest simply as a fellow governor and a great American, but I greet you with infinitely more interest, as the son of your father, the first Theodore Roosevelt.
ROOSEVELT (while shaking John’s hand warmly): In what special way have you been interested in my father?
BRADY: Your father picked me up from the streets of New York, a waif and an orphan, and sent me to a western family, paying for my transportation and early care. Years passed and I was able to repay the money which had given me my start in life, but I can never repay what he did for me, but it is through that early care and by giving me such a foster mother and father that I gradually rose in the world, until today I can greet his son as a fellow governor of a part of our great country.35
With all of his phenomenal success, in the presence of this up-and-coming patrician Brady instantly reverted to street-boy beggar, hustling Roosevelt with the most battle-proven Victorian clichés about the noble benefactor and the deserving and grateful waif—most of it sheer fantasy. If the elder Roosevelt actually was the man who picked Brady up from the street, he certainly never contributed a penny directly toward the boy’s expense, and far from paying him back, when they met again, Brady only asked for more money. It is not clear how the candidate responded to this overture. Although it is true that Brady scored many of his most important Washington victories during Roosevelt’s administration, Roosevelt had no hesitation about casting Brady aside the moment he became inconvenient.
Within a year of this first meeting the newly reelected William McKinley was assassinated at the Pan American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, and Roosevelt became the twenty-sixth president of the United States. For a while Roosevelt was Brady’s firm ally, strongly seconding his opinion that Indians should be granted citizenship and the right to equal treatment with whites under the law, and helping to bring about the legal recognition of Creole Alaskans’ “natural-born” rights of citizenship. (Full-blooded Indians and Eskimos would have to wait until some years after Brady’s term of office to be granted equivalent rights.) It was also during Roosevelt’s administration that Brady and Jackson were able to quintuple federal education expenditures in Alaska and Brady himself finally succeeded in getting Congress to pass legislation granting native Alaskans the right to homestead 160 acres of government land—although this happened only after whites had been granted the right to homestead twice that acreage.36
Brady was least successful during the Roosevelt administration as an advocate for Alaska itself. Like many of his constituents, he worried that competition from Cuba, the Philippines, and the other islands the United States had acquired during the Spanish-American War would drain federal funds and programs away from Alaska. He took advantage of every opportunity to tout the territory’s economic and strategic importance to the United States but on several occasions ended looking the fool. One time, for example, when he had made extravagant claims about Alaska’s agriculture, a senator told a story about a mule who had been made so miserable by the territory’s harsh climate that “he walked down into the ocean, waited for the tide, and committed suicide.”37
Despite such occasional missteps, Roosevelt had enough respect for Brady to appoint him, in 1905, to an unprecedented third term as governor. In the end the relationship between the two men would not sour over Brady’s performance of his official duties but over his pursuit of his own financial advantage.
Roosevelt took office during the Progressive Era, a period of heightened public intolerance of governmental corruption, and thus he was eager to stay clear of any appearance of impropriety. One of Brady’s great assets as a presidential appointee was that everyone, even his enemies, considered him thoroughly honest. If anything, Brady was opposed for being too good, for being naive and not supportive enough of business interests—for being a “damned missionary.” All of this began to change in the summer of 1902, when, for the first time in his life, he surrendered himself to the influence of a man who was something of an evangelical—but decidedly
not a missionary.
H. D. “Harry” Reynolds was a flamboyant, big-talking businessman from Boston, the very embodiment of the profit-oriented utopianism that Brady had sought to inspire in Washington. He walked down the gangplank onto the Sitka pier spewing gorgeous visions of an amalgam of railroad, mining, and real estate ventures that would combine business and community development into a mutually reinforcing cycle of growth. The problem was that Reynolds was less interested in actually creating the reliably profitable business ventures (primarily mining) on which all of his other schemes depended than in the beauty of his vision. His main goal seemed to be to convince people that he was an up-and-coming captain of industry, a man whom they could trust with their money and their hopes. He was, in short, a consummate con man—the nineteenth-century entrepreneurial spirit’s revenge against itself. Investors all over the East and in Alaska believed his hype about the arm-in-arm progress of business and frontier settlement and poured their money into his paper corporations. Brady himself turned over, to the horror of his wife, Elizabeth, all the money he had saved for their children’s education. His biggest mistake, however, was to allow Reynolds to name him as the “resident director” of the Reynolds-Alaska Development Company, and to attach his signature to at least one promotional letter.
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