AUBURN, N.Y. -- In an unheated carriage house, the skin of a seal -- or perhaps a sea lion -- that met its end long ago in the Pacific waters off Alaska sags away from a frame of equally old wood. The bidarka -- a century and a half old -- hangs, along with its distinctive Aleutian-style paddle, above another outdated conveyance: a carriage that at one time would've been among the most well-appointed vehicles drawn by a pair of horses.
The carriage, like the bidarka, once belonged to former Secretary of State William H. Seward, and when it crashed one spring evening in Washington, D.C. 149 years ago, Seward broke his arm. Some speculate that the injury might've helped save his life. Under doctor's orders, he was resting the broken limb by hanging half off the side of his bed when a knife-wielding assassin -- part of the same plot that saw President Abraham Lincoln killed -- entered the room and stabbed the blankets on his bed several times fruitlessly, before wounding Seward and then being subdued. But the bidarka is mute testament to a story ending we already know: Seward survived to stay on as secretary of state to Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, which allowed him to negotiate the deal that made Alaska U.S. territory.
The carriage and the bidarka rest today in Seward's home, on a tree-lined street, a block from this small upstate city's commercial district. It's a majestic house -- befitting a man who rose from state senator to governor to U.S. senator and finally secretary of state -- and today is preserved as the Seward House Historic Museum.
As Alaska marked Seward's Day on Monday -- and looked forward to the 150th anniversary of the deal that brought its lands into U.S. possession -- it's natural to look to places like the Seward House for a fresh understanding of what the past meant, and how decisions as consequential as the one to purchase some 586,000 square miles of glacier, forest, rock and tundra for $7.2 million come to be made.
Historians have a lot to say on the subject of the Alaska purchase -- Russia's financial condition at the time, or the relative cost of furs, or America's desire to expand in an imperial age. But places like the Seward House -- homes that become museums -- are rarely strictly concerned with that kind of history. Instead, the intimacy of these spaces invite a different kind of experience. These are places where the past is presented in the form of some of the physical objects that were part of someone else's time and survived to become part of ours.
What can these spaces -- and the artifacts that occupy them -- tell us about what William Seward might have thought of The Great Land, whose future he altered?
It's tempting to believe that some special connection -- the ghost of whose origin might linger in a 150-year-old parlor or dining room -- links Alaska to the rest of the United States.
But however tempting, the results might not be exactly what we think of as satisfactory.
Take, for instance, the book "Alaska and its Resources," by naturalist William H. Dall. The book was published in 1870, just three years after the purchase. In fact, Dall's work in Alaska began even before the purchase, as part of a bid to scout out the potential for a Western Union telegraph to Europe by way of the Bering Strait.
Only after Alaska became a U.S. territory did it become of such interest to Americans. During a recent visit, Seward House staff combed the house's extensive library of original books before locating Seward's personal copy of this seminal work of Alaska history. It's carefully bound up with a strip of fabric, keeping together what decades of wear have sought to slowly undo. But gently opening the book doesn't yield a satisfying conclusion -- it only extends the limits we run into when we seek to encounter the past at a personal level. The volume shows signs of being well used -- its spine is falling away from the rest of the body; pages are worn ragged at the edges -- yet unlike many other books in Seward's library, it is devoid of marginalia. We can tell that he read this first substantial work on his great purchase, probably with interest. But we are no closer to knowing what he might've thought of it.
The same might be said of the small handful of Alaska Native artifacts on display at the house. They enjoy a prominent place in the house's current incarnation as a museum, but their presence does less that one might think to help us understand what Alaska might've meant to the young war-scarred nation that had just acquired it. They consist primarily of the bidarka, and a few pieces of Tlingit armor: a carved and painted wooden seal helmet, a carved wood collar, and a pair of cuirasses -- one of wood, another of leather into which was sewn Chinese coins. These were given as gifts to the former secretary of state when, in 1869, two years after leaving office, he traveled to Southeast Alaska by steamship from San Francisco. Seward was a skilled diplomat, and most of the high walls in a sizeable portion of the upstairs of the house are given over to portraits and other mementos that reflect that position.
There is one item in the house that suggests a particular significance for Alaska in Seward's later life. In the house's dining room, located in the southwest corner with a preponderance of windows to make the most of the afternoon and evening sun, hangs one of the most remarkable paintings in the home. The painting, titled "Signing of the Alaska Treaty," was made for Seward by German-American artist Emanuel Leutze, best known for the iconic "Washington Crossing the Delaware."
The painting in Seward's home depicts the secretary, seated before a globe -- on which the outline of Alaska's coast is faintly visible -- opposite his Russian counterpart Eduard de Stoeckl, and surrounded by diplomatic functionaries. When Seward's political career was finished and the circle over which he presided shrank from the staterooms of Washington to his own dining room, the moment of the Alaska purchase occupied a place of pride.
In Seward's library is a globe on which one can make out Alaska's coast, but it's a coast much different from the one provided by today's mapping technologies. Barrow has migrated hundreds of miles to the west, perhaps swallowing up Point Hope in the process. The peninsula that would one day bear Seward's name is smushed like an aquiline nose that got the worst of a brawl. The land with that not-quite-familiar coastline is labeled -- in letters that extend well east of the Mackenzie Delta -- "Russian America." Seward must have looked at that globe, but we can only speculate about his thoughts.
Perhaps the most interesting piece the museum has is a flag. It's the first 49-star flag ever to fly over the capitol building in Juneau after which it was given to the Seward House. It arrived, of course, well after the former secretary of state's death. And it's a reminder that decisions that seem monumental are only as significant as each future generation makes them.
Contact Krestia DeGeorge at krestia(at)alaskadispatch.com