'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