Baseball in Alaska is today known for night games played without lights, but the game’s history in the North goes back more than one hundred years, when it was played in some of the harshest conditions imaginable. That history ranges from an Arctic baseball league started by whalers waiting for the ice to thaw to the camps of the Yukon Field Force, whose soldiers journeyed from Ottawa to the Yukon to assert Canadian sovereignty and maintain order during the Klondike gold rush.
In Boomtown Baseball Steve Rennie uncovers an overlooked chapter in both baseball history and northern history. Readers will meet brothers Clarence and Henry Berry, who struck it rich in the Klondike and bought two California ballclubs. The Buffalo Soldiers of Company L, a Black regiment deployed to Alaska to keep the peace, earned the respect of residents by forming one of the town’s first organized baseball clubs. Soapy Smith, a notorious con man, may or may not have been behind the Skagway ballclub’s founding. Drawing from primary accounts, these vignettes of baseball in the North show how America’s pastime served as a vital social and cultural force that provided home-like comfort and community in a land of frozen rivers and golden dreams.