Books and Buildings: Sorting the Klondike Gold Rush Park's Library in Seattle

Written from an article by Emma Rockenbeck, a National Park Service Workforce Management Fellow working with the Northwest Youth Corps.

The Cadillac Hotel in Pioneer Square, home of the park's Seattle unit. NPS.

A familiar building

In Pioneer Square, a block from King Street Station, stands the three-story brick Cadillac Hotel, home of the Seattle unit of Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park (KLSE). When Emma Rockenbeck began fieldwork there in October 2022, it felt oddly familiar: high ceilings over doorframes at odd angles and heights, dark wood paneling halfway up the walls, and a third floor cut open around a railing beneath a big skylight. It closely resembled the 1892 Maynard Building, where she had guided Seattle Underground tours. The Cadillac, built in 1889, has changed hands many times — and its history mirrors the park's, and its library's.

Two libraries in one

Her job: organize the employee library. It holds books on KLSE plus leftovers from the Pacific West Regional Library (PWSE), which the building once housed as a hub for the region's park libraries, with a full-time librarian cataloging books sent in from parks. When PWSE closed, many of its books stayed, mixed in with KLSE's — two libraries "coexisting in a chaotic harmony."

The process, led by superintendent Charles Beall:

1. Beall reviews a stack to confirm the books fit the collection.
2. She catalogs them in NPS LIBRIS, the park libraries' system.
3. She prints labels for the spines and card pockets.
4. Other Northwest Youth Corps interns help shelve them.
5. Questions go to the NPS Library Information Management Program.

What belongs?

Most books clearly fit: the Klondike Gold Rush, Seattle history, Salish Sea and Seattle-area Native American culture, local Asian American history, interpretive ranger training, and Pacific Northwest natural history. Others — like Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed and a book by bell hooks on community and hope (lower-case by the author's choice) — were less obvious. The answer lay in the park's mission:

• 1976: Congress created the park — three units in Alaska and one in Seattle — to preserve structures and trails of the Klondike Gold Rush of 1898. Straddling two NPS regions was a management challenge.
• Separation: KLSE eventually split administratively from the Alaska units, taking on new responsibilities that reshaped what its library should hold.
• 2006: KLSE moved into the Cadillac Hotel — visitor center and Klondike Gold Rush Museum on the first floor and basement; the Pacific West Region Lands Office, the Park Cultural Landscapes Program and the park partner Discover Northwest on the second; park staff, interns and the library on the third.

The museum's front door. NPS.

A building with a past

• Saved: badly damaged by the 2001 Nisqually Earthquake, the building was rescued by Historic Seattle and leased by the NPS.
• Early residents: the hotel opened in 1890, housing young men working as railroad porters, musicians, plumbers, waiters, clerks and salesmen in the booming city.
• The Tokitas: from 1936 Kamekichi Tokita and his family ran the hotel, turning it mostly to long-term residents — retired laborers living on Social Security and pensions. In 1942 the family, with other Seattle-area people of Japanese ancestry, was forcibly removed and incarcerated at the Minidoka War Relocation Center.
• Why it matters: KLSE helps manage the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, a unit of Minidoka National Historic Site, and its museum now has a moving exhibit on the WWII incarceration. The park also works with the neighboring Chinatown-International District and the Wing Luke Museum of the Asian Pacific American Experience, an NPS affiliated area and the first Smithsonian affiliate in the Pacific Northwest.

A city park with a wider job

Seattle is ringed by North Cascades, Olympic and Mount Rainier national parks, yet many residents are far removed from them. KLSE connects the city to its public lands:

• the Outdoor Recreation Information Center in the REI Seattle flagship store, helping plan trips across the Pacific Northwest;
• Trails & Rails with Amtrak, whose volunteers explain the natural and cultural history along the Seattle–Portland and Seattle–Wenatchee routes.

A growing collection

As the park's mission grows, so does the library's. Beall wants resources on community building to support staff and partners working with Seattle's communities, so the library now adds books on leadership, education, race, gender, class, oppression and the history of Seattle's marginalized communities — especially books written from within those communities.

If you're in Seattle, the Klondike Gold Rush Museum is well worth a visit.

Sources

Based on "Books and Buildings: Connecting the Past to the Present Through an Employee Library," by Emma Rockenbeck, for the "A Day in the Life of a Fellow" series, published by the National Park Service and in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words. Photographs from the park's NPS gallery replace the article's individually credited ones. Related: Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial, Outdoor Recreation Information Center, Trails & Rails.