London fought in these early years to educate himself, and by that education to get himself out of the hard-laboring classes. As his hero informs his readers in the semi-autobiographical novel Martin Eden, writing offered a way to stoke the fires of both the body and the imagination, and so with characteristic determination, London set himself to the task of becoming a professional writer. By 1896, however, he realized that writing alone could not support a hungry family. The following year, London and his brother-in-law Captain James H. Shepard decided to try their luck panning for gold in the recently discovered strikes along the Yukon River in the Klondike.

After disembarking in Juneau, Alaska, London, Shepard and their companions made their way to Dyea, the principle departure point for the gold fields of the Yukon and the Klondike. Buck travels the same trails that London covered—leaving Dyea, making the arduous climb over Chilcoot Pass, and pushing on to Lakes Linderman and Bennett before making the waters of the Yukon River. From here, the party traveled downstream, toward Dawson City, where they navigated the dangerous White Horse and Five Finger Rapids before reaching the relative safety of Split-Up Island, 80 miles from Dawson between the Stewart River and Henderson Creek. London staked a claim near here and made a brief visit to Dawson City to record the claim. He returned to the island, where the group passed the winter in an old miner’s cabin. These long five months proved difficult for London, who contracted scurvy by the spring from poor diet and lack of exercise.

Upon his return to San Francisco in 1898, London began his writing career in earnest. Clearly, the Klondike turned London into a writer of note, not only because he was able to tap into a ready market for all things Gold Rush, but more important, because the landscape offered London a barren theater for his characters to work out their paths in life. If, as London believed, environment determined the course of an individual’s life, then the austere and brutal, yet ultimately simple environment of the North tested the capacities of the individual (and by extension, the species) to adapt to the environment.

London’s intellectual experiences during the winter spent on Split-Up Island are as important as his physical ones; he spent his time reading, rereading, and sharing with his friends the two books he carried with him to the wilderness: Milton’s Paradise Lost and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. Less than a year after his return to San Francisco, London summed up his understanding of Darwin in a letter to his friend Cloudesley Johns: “Natural selection, undeviating, pitiless, careless alike of the individual or the species, destroyed or allowed to perpetuate, as the case might be, such breeds as were unfittest or fittest to survive” (Labor, p. 101). Such struggle characterizes human and animal life in The Call of the Wild and White Fang.

The Origins of The Call of the Wild

Most of London’s readers were familiar with Darwin’s evolutionary theories, in which the great biologist argues that over time species adapt to their environment and that the process of that adaptation involves a series of struggles for existence. Natural selection, adaptation, and chance are the mechanisms that govern the evolution of a species. The operation of Darwinian evolution is obvious in both The Call of the Wild and White Fang, as virtually every sentence in these texts palpitates with the deadly threats confronting human and animal in the silent, frozen world of Alaska. London sets the scene for this struggle most explicitly in the opening pages of White Fang: “A vast silence reigned over the land,” he writes. “The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness.... It was the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild” (p. 91). As a team of dogs, carrying two men and a coffin bearing a third, cross the scene, London continues his narration:

It is not the way of the Wild to like movement... and the Wild aims always to destroy movement. It freezes the water to prevent it running to the sea; it drives the sap out of the trees till they are frozen to their mighty hearts; and most ferociously and terribly of all does the Wild harry and crush into submission man (p. 92).

The animals (human and dog alike) in London’s fiction are propelled through the landscape by “the law of club and fang,” by the constant war against predators, famine, and cold, against stupidity, brutality, and viciousness. Buck and Spitz fight to the death for command of the team and hence for supremacy in the pack; a baby White Fang eats ptarmigan chicks, narrowly escapes being killed by their mother, then watches in fear as the ptarmigan hen is snatched up by a raptor.

In The Call of the Wild, Buck’s new life as an Arctic sled dog initiates him into this struggle. Before his abduction, Buck was used to a life of comfort and security, a “lazy, sun-kissed life ... with nothing to do but loaf and be bored.” Upon his arrival in the North, Buck senses that he “had been suddenly jerked from the heart of civilization and flung into the heart of things primordial” (p. 15). Buck finds himself unprepared to deal with this foreign environment; significantly, he must learn about the world around him before he can begin to use it to his advantage. Indeed, both The Call of the Wild and White Fang can be read as accounts of the education of a being thrown into a testing environment.