Thursday, August 22, 2013

'The Seventymile Kid'







Last night I finished reading Tom Walker's new book "The Seventymile Kid" totally exhausted.  It was a sympathetic exhaustion after following the adventures of Harry Karstens through every gold rush in Interior Alaska and to the very summit of the continent's tallest mountain.

Over years of reading, I have been fascinated by the toughness of pioneering Americans beginning with the French voyageurs and following people like Daniel Boone, the mountain men who followed him west, Lewis and Clarke, early polar explorers and those hardy folks who came north for the gold rushes in the Klondike and Alaska.  It is not their accomplishments that are fascinating as much as the hardships they overcame to reach those heights.  This book details the life of one such wilderness man and in the process celebrates that pioneering toughness.

While today many people consider a trip of a hundred miles as arduous even in a warm automobile, the people who made those early voyages and treks over thousands of miles, often in temperatures well below freezing, enduring weather conditions that seem to defy belief, undertook them with a seemingly matter of fact attitude of nonchalance.  Seemingly, because the experienced ones who survived knew the dangers and came prepared with equipment, but also experience and the kind of determination it takes to handle those conditions and the inevitable disasters that develop from them.

Tom's book follows Karstens from his initial trip as an 18-year-old cheechako over the Chilkoot Pass and down the Yukon River to the Klondike, through years as a freighter, mail hauler, prospector, hunter and outdoorsman to just about every place in Alaska that harbored a gold rush.  In the process this man who could be on the cold interior Alaska winter trails for months at a time, made a reputation for himself as the kind of wilderness hand even the toughest of a breed of tough men could admire.

It was this reputation that led him to the summit of McKinley for the most part dragging Hudson Stuck with him. Tom Walker takes a reader on almost every agonizing step over those trails and up that mountain in a way that makes us feel at least a little of what those adventurers did, the hard work, the cold, the wind, successes and disappointments. Tom's description of the difficulties of that climb where each small success seemed to be met with a newer, greater challenge, is so vivid, the actual summit, rather than another obstacle, came as a surprise when I reached that point.

In the process he sets the record straight as to whom the responsibility for the success of the first party to reach the summit belongs.  Ask anyone who was the first to summit Mount McKinley and most will say Hudson Stuck, an Episcopal missionary known for his work throughout Alaska.  Taking nothing away from Stuck, Tom's account, based on extensive research including locating handwritten journals made by other members of the party, reveals the story of how four men made that summit and how none would have been there had it not been for Harry Karstens.

To develop that account, the word exhaustive comes to mind again, referring to the amount of research Tom did over the years.  He told me some time ago he had been working on this project for more than 20 years.  On and off it took that long to find the documentation that leads to an authoritative account of something that happened a hundred years ago.  A six-page bibliography in very small typeface is testament to the sheer volume of that research.

Tom adds a credibility of his own to the account, though subtle.  He has traveled many of those same trails, endured some of the same hardships, during his years in Alaska, trekking most of the state, most often alone, in pursuit of wildlife photographs and material for his books.  Without falling into a first person "I understand because I did the same thing" sort of addition to the story, his own experience on the trail allows him to write credible accounts of what the men in the book endured.  It all makes for a great read.

Harry Karstens was named the first superintendant of the newly formed and now-called Denali National Park and served in that position through most of the 1920s; his duty involved defending the country where he had spent so much time, often from people quite like himself.

This is a book that belongs on the shelf of anyone who claims to be an Alaskan.

Find it on Amazon

1 comment:

  1. Thank you so much I really appreciated the work, 👍🏼

    ReplyDelete

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Memorable quotations

The best way to know you are having an adventure is when you wish you were home talking about it." — a mechanic on the Alaska State Ferry System. Or as in my own case planning how I will be writing it on this blog.

"You can't promote principled anti-corruption without pissing off corrupt people." — George Kent

"If only the British had held on to the airports, the whole thing might have gone differently for us." — Mick Jagger

"You can do anything as long as you don't scare the horses." — a mother's favorite saying recalled by a friend

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The thing about ignorance is, you don't have to remain ignorant. — me again"

"It was like the aftermath of an orgasm with the wrong partner." – David Lagercrants “The Girl in the Spider’s Web.”

Why worry about dying, you aren't going to live to regret it.

Never debate with someone who gets ink by the barrel" — George Hayes, former Alaska Attorney General who died recently

My dear Mr. Frost: two roads never diverge in a yellow wood. Three roads meet there. — @Shakespeare on Twitter

Normal is how somebody else thinks you should act.

"The mark of a great shiphandler is never getting into situations that require great shiphandling," Adm. Ernest King, USN

Me: Does the restaurant have cute waitresses?

My friend Gail: All waitresses are cute when you're hungry.

I'm not a writer, but sometimes I push around words to see what happens. – Scott Berry

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“The rivers of Alaska are strewn with the bones of men who made but one mistake” - Fred McGarry, a Nushagak Trapper

Many people hear voices when no one is there. Some of them are called mad and are shut up in rooms where they stared at walls all day. Others are called writers and they do pretty much the same thing. – Meg Chittenden

A non-writing writer is a monster courting insanity. – Franz Kafka

We are all immortal until the one day we are not. – me again

If the muse is late, start without her – Peter S. Beagle

Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. ~Mark Twain Actually you could do the same thing with the word "really" as in "really cold."

If you are looking for an experience that will temper your vanity, this is it. There's no one to impress when you're alone on the trap line. – Michael Carey quoting his father's journal

Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing. – Benjamin Franklin

It’s nervous work. The state you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums of money to get rid of. – Shirley Hazzard

So far as I can remember, there is not one word in the Gospels in praise of intelligence -- Bertrand Russell

You know that I always just wanted to have a small ship to take stuff from a place that had a lot of that stuff to a place that did not have a lot of that stuff and so prosper.—Jackie Faber, “The Wake of the Lorelei Lee”

If you attack the arguer instead of the argument, you lose both

If an insurance company won’t pay for damages caused by an “act of God,” shouldn’t it then have to prove the existence of God? – I said that

I used to think getting old was about vanity—but actually it’s about losing people you love. Getting wrinkles is trivial. – Eugene O’Neill

German General to Swiss General: “You have only 500,000 men in your army; what would you do if I invaded with 1 million men?”

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Writing is the only thing that when I do it, I don’t feel I should be doing something else.—Gloria Steinem

Exceed your bandwidth—sign on the wall of the maintenance shop at the West Coast/Alaska Tsunami Warning Center

One thing I do know, if you keep at it, you usually wind up getting something done.—Patricia Monaghan

Do you want to know what kind of person makes the best reporter? I’ll tell you. A borderline sociopath. Someone smart, inquisitive, stubborn, disorganized, chaotic, and in a perpetual state of simmering rage at the failings of the world.—Brett Arends

It is a very simple mind that only knows how to spell a word one way.—Andrew Jackson

3:30 is too late or too early to do anything—Rene Descartes

Everything is okay when it’s 50-below as long as everything is okay. – an Alaskan in Tom Walker’s “The Seventymile Kid”

You can have your own opinion but you can’t have your own science.—commenter arguing on a story about polar bears and global warming

He looks at three ex wives as a good start—TV police drama

Talkeetna: A friendly little drinking town with a climbing problem.—a handmade bumper sticker

“You’re either into the wall or into the show”—Marco Andretti on giving it all to qualify last at the 2011 Indy 500

Makeup is not for the faint of heart—the makeup guerrilla

“I’m going to relax in a very adult manner.”—Danica Patrick after sweating it out and qualifying half an hour before Andretti

“Asking Congress to come back is like asking a mugger to come back because he forgot your wallet.”—a roundtable participant on Fox of all places

As Republicans go further back in the conception process to define when life actually begins, I am beginning to think the eventual definition will be life begins in the beer I was drinking when I met her.—me again

Hunting is a “critical element for the long-term conservation of wood bison.”—a state department of Fish and Game official explaining why the state would not go along with a federal plan to reintroduce wood bison in Alaska because the agreement did not specifically allow hunting

Each day do something that won’t compute – anon

I can’t belive I still have to protest this shit – a sign carriend by an elderly woman at an Occupy demonstration

Life should be a little nuts or else it’s just a bunch of Thursdays strung together—Kevin Costner as Beau Burroughs in “Rumor has it”

You’re just a wanker whipping up fear —Irish President Michael D. Higgins to a tea party radio announcer

Being president doesn’t change who you are; it reveals who you are—Michelle Obama

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