History is Tricky

History is Tricky:  Being an Interpretive Ranger in a Historical Park

There is an essay at the bottom about the difficulties of interpreting history. But first, interpret this yourself:

Daily life here is very much like last year.  I work and after work I’m tired but I mostly manage to get to yoga and always manage to get to the Writers’ Circle which we can call Quills since we had a porcupine visit us one night.  On my July weekends, I visited Ken, Laurel and Karen in Fairbanks, led a dance evening with Skagway Deb’s help, picked up Seattle Lynne in Anchorage, backpacked with her to Donoho Basin, visited Valdez, and had a mini-vacation on the Nabesna Road with Yukon Jim.  This past two-day weekend I spent almost entirely in my cabin, reading, eating, cleaning, sleeping and hiding from others.  Oh, how sweet to do nothing.

Hope this note finds everyone happy, well and doing good work.  Blessings from Charlotte

Photos from this summer:

McCarthy’s new airport terminal, an improvement over last year's awning.

Laurel with Pingo

Charlotte in 4th of July parade as a school teacher

Jim who hates wet feet.

Lynne at Donoho

Charlotte at Lake Kennicott at the toe of the Kennicott glacier

Lynne throwing her cares off the Kuskulana Bridge.

Lynne with glacier ice

Smoke in Kennecott Valley from July fires

History is Tricky

When I first worked at the Klondike Gold Rush Park in Skagway, I’d listen to the interps discuss history in the workroom:

“According to Berton there were 101 stampeders killed in the avalanche.”

“Hey, our own publication says there were 98 bodies.”

“Well, folks, then why are they only 89 bodies in the cemetery?”

I thought that they were nuts to be arguing about such trivial details!

Now, though, I, too, am a National Park Service interpreter at a historic site and we, too, find ourselves discussing such minutia, surprisingly with passion.  Because I’m daily in a teaching position with talks, walks, slideshows and over the counter information, truth in this post-truth world has become of greater importance to me.  God forbid that I would get the number of men who died in the mill wrong, gasp!  Still I care that I give out the correct information.  It matters enough that I spend hours searching for some detail that isn’t significant in the overall history of this area, but still is important to me.  Some days I think I’m nuts!

History is tricky.  Someone repeats what they thought they heard ten years ago.  Someone else writes in their diary that so much such and such happened at such a time.  These scraps of history may be totally correct or they may be as accurate as the different recollections my sisters and I have of our trips to our childhood dentist.   In Kennecott one guide correctly states that enough silver was recovered in each ton of copper to pay for the smelting.   Guide number two interprets that to mean enough silver was recovered to pay for the smelter.  The third guide says that enough silver was recovered to pay for the whole mill.  Occasionally I’ve been the third guide.   I hate myself when later I find I was handing out false information, no matter how trivial it is.

Another temptation is for me to dramatize events. I look at the river and imagine everything flowing under the surface. I read emotion and excitement into historical events without any factual corroboration.  My imagination grabs hold of a fact and immediately expands it out into an event with more emotion.  Without any conscious awareness, facts become novels.  The Japanese in Kennecott were paid half of what most men and the female secretary earned, they were segregated in the basement, they were called “boys” no matter how old they were.  Does this mean their lives were miserable?  No. Does this mean I know what they actually felt?  No.

A third temptation is to leave out details that I share, not because I do indeed have to shorten my information, but because It’s more dramatic to make everything black and white.  Thus the Guggenheims become the greedy capitalists while the miners are innocent pawns in an industrialists’ game.  It wasn’t that simple, really.

Finally, a great deal of the time, we just don’t have the information we desire.  How many men did die in the mines?  Why was there so much turnover?  Why didn’t more men leave behind diaries so we can know today what they did and felt?

You, my friends, know I frequently make mistakes and I trust that you take some of what I say with a grain of salt.  I trust that you know my good intentions.  But, when I deal with the public, it’s a different shipment of copper; I want to be as accurate as possible. Or I couch statements with words such a “possibly, probably, we don’t know for sure, and around that time, I imagine that”   Today in America, though, when our president’s single, outstanding trait is the number of lies he tells in a day, my internal struggles appear symbolic of our nation’s struggles with alternate facts and fake news.  I wish it weren’t so.

Nonetheless I persist.  I find myself more confident in talking to visitors.  I speak with more authority.  I keep checking my facts and dates.  I keep reading.  We are called Interpreters because we do try to make sense of what happened here over one hundred years ago.  We do try to help visitors make intellectual and emotional connections with the past.  My newest walk is on (a) the immigrants who built the railroad, the mill and the mines;  (b) a brief history of attitudes toward immigration in this country* and  (c) the personal immigration stories of my visitors.  So far discussions have all been civil.  I keep my fingers crossed every single time.

*Benjamin Franklin said, “Those who come hither are generally of the most ignorant Stupid Sort of their own Nation….Not being used to Liberty, they know not how to make a modest use of it.