The late nineteenth century:
collectors and tourists

Ivory engravings became popular with ethnographers and explorers alike. Perhaps the most avid collector of such engravings during the second half of the nineteenth century was Edward William Nelson (1855-1934; Fig. 7). Between 1877 and 1881 Nelson worked as a weather observer for the U.S. Signal Service at St. Michael. This gave him the opportunity to assemble a vast collection, including hundreds of engraved artefacts, for the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. Alaskan Natives seemed to appreciate this unexpected opportunity for trading. Captain Calvin Leighton Hooper of the U.S. revenue steamer Thomas Corwin commented that:

‘[E.W. Nelson's] custom of buying these carvings, and many other things which were of no value except as specimens for a museum, pleased the natives very much, and to many to whom his name was not known, he was described as “the man who buys good-for-nothing things”.’ (Hooper 1884: 37)

Selling ivory engravings, carvings and other artefacts thus provided a welcome additional source of income for Iñupiaq families. They also started to make artefacts that were intended for sale to traders and other visitors (Fig. 9).

Opportunities for trade were abundant in late nineteenth-century northern Alaska. Intertribal markets, such as the one near present-day Kotzebue, attracted not only Iñupiat and other natives, but also whalers and traders. After the establishment of a coal stockpile in Port Clarence in 1880, about twenty to thirty steam whaling vessels called each summer to refill their coal supplies and to trade. Last and not least, pictorial engravings were popular souvenirs among the more than 40,000 prospectors attracted to the Seward Peninsula during the Nome gold rush (1898-1900). This high demand ‘(necessitated) prodigious production by numerous carvers’ (Ray 1980: 7). Many of these Iñupiaq carvers and their families came to settle in or near Nome for all or part of the year.