August 14-15, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

Kent and Rocky quickly settled in to their life at Yakutat, although more and more it appeared to Kent that this was not the place for what he sought in Alaska. In later years, Rocky wrote little of the train and steamer trip, not that it wasn’t exciting. It just wasn’t as eventful as his stay at Yakutat.

“We lived with the fishermen,” Rocky wrote in the Fall 2014 issue of The Kent Collector, “sleeping in bunks in the dormitory. Father was unhappy, grumbling to me about his bunk and grumbling to all about the food. He was especially contemptuous of a fellow boarder who covered his oatmeal with a quarter of an inch of sugar and added enough more to his coffee to make syrup. He told me that a man’s stupidity can be judged by the quantity of sugar he uses. Father’s unhappiness reached a zenith when he discovered that the gentleman in the neighboring bunk was pouring our tooth powder in his boots to help them slide on more easily.”

It's revealing to get Rocky’s point of view because in his 1955 autobiography, It’s Me O Lord (IMOL), Kent grumbled less: “What meals they were! And how those hungry fellows wolfed them! A free for all, it was, and no holds barred. Never had either of us tasted better food or seen so much. And it disgusted us to watch our opposite at table – say at breakfast – flood his huge soup plate-full of oatmeal with undiluted evaporated milk, heap on six tablespoons of sugar; follow this with two vast stacks of six-inch flapjacks, with butter and corn syrup to match; then eat four eggs with bacon and drink a quart of coffee; and all the while Goddam the company for starving him. It seems it took all kinds to work a cannery.” 

Kent’s letters from nearly forty years earlier expressed more honestly the grumbling Rocky recalled. Looking back from his 70’s, the experience didn’t seem all that negative – even the rain and those “huge and hairy Norwegians.” In IMOL he wrote: “…the five days we stayed at the salmon cannery of Yakutat, were memorable. Guests – we had been – of the community’s proprietors, the packing house of Swift and Company, we were appreciative not only of the company’s hospitality but of the character of the men we met, particularly our bunk-house mates…” Despite the grumbling Rocky remembered, his father did appreciate the cannery company’s hospitality and he grew to admire the character of the workingmen they met. Those “huge and hairy Norwegians” he also called “men of innate courtesy and decency of thought and speech, and naturally inclined to kind consideration of a little boy.”

Kent’s philosophy of raising children allowed much freedom to rove, at least for his son Rocky in Alaska and later Gordon who he took to Greenland. Rocky had the liberty to wander at will through Yakutat while Kent looked for a place to settle. It had to have a view of the forests, mountains and sea. Sometimes Rocky accompanied him on his hikes. Kent sang and whistled to alert bears of their approach. To Rocky’s surprise and delight, he’d occasionally reach into his pocket and pull out a piece of beef jerky and hand it to his son. Kent found an interesting location thirty miles up a river, but it would be difficult hauling supplies there. And there were the bears. “And there are wolves and bears,” Kent wrote to Kathleen on August 15th, and “would have cost me the expense of a gun.”

Occasionally Kent worked the cannery docks to raise extra cash. The town was very small, Rocky recalled, with a salmon cannery, a general store with a post office, and a bunkhouse and kitchen for cannery workers. One larger building stood out – the one owned by the cannery manager. The Alaska native village rested along the shore of a rocky beach. The area was originally settled by Eyak speakers from the Copper River area, and later occupied by Tinglits who migrated there. At the time the Kents were there the two groups had assimilated with speakers of both related languages. 

The native burial ground fascinated Rocky with what he described as its “small, one-or-two-room wooden houses. They were locked but he peered through the windows and saw the belongs buried with the dead, “guns standing in a corner, ornaments on a table along with candles and flowers.” Near the cannery he found a small wooden bridge where he could stand and watch fish being unloaded and “cans whirling around on conveyor belts.” Ten feet below a stream roared toward the sea and Rocky contemplated jumping. Would he dare? Kent told him he probably would if he dared him. Rocky doubted that, but never admitted that to his father. “Fortunately, I was never tested,” he remembered.

In Yakutat, Kent befriended the local Swedish Covenant Church minister, store-keeper and postmaster, Elof Martin Axelsson. Born at Hallestad, Ostergotland in Sweden on Feb. 28, 1879, he came to this country at age seventeen as a laborer. He married Nellie Anderson in 1901 and the next year became a naturalized U.S. citizen. By 1910 the couple was in Chicago, Elof working as minister. The next year, a son Amsden Martin Axelson is born. By 1915 the family was in Yakutat with Elof appointed postmaster. When the Kents arrived in 1918, Elof’s son Amsden was seven years old and Rocky was eight. Kent notes that Rocky learned to row a boat from two local boys, a skill that came in handy later at Resurrection Bay. Axelson had many children and his boys some locals were probably Rocky’s playmates.

Axelson did inform the artist about an island Kent spells “Night.” Knight Island is on the east side of Yakutat Bay about 12 miles (Kent says 15) northeast of Yakutat village. There was a cabin at one end of the island, Axelsson said, but local natives told him it had fallen in ruin. He could build a cabin, Kent reasoned, but it would have to be log and require a tremendous amount of time and effort -- and money. Lumber was expensive he learned. Kent also worried about transportation. He almost purchased an Indian dugout canoe for $20, and planned paddling the 24-mile round trip back and forth for supplies. It “sounds formidable,” he admitted, “But they said it could be done so I was game. But as I have said, the game seems too difficult.”

On August 16th he visited Night Island and confirmed there was no cabin. The place was “wonderful,” he noted. “I’d surely camp in that place.” But his plans had changed. Yakutat was not the ideal “Northern Paradise” he envisioned. “Yakutat village is, I am convinced, too far from the country I have come here for,” he wrote Hildegarde, “and I must move. The next place, unless on the way there I am ravished by some other spot – will be Seldovia. It’s on the Kenai Peninsula, a little beyond Seward where I just intended going. It faces Cook Inlet. 

He learned that the Admiral Farragut would be the next steamship arrival at Yakutat and could take them to Seward where they could board a smaller vessel to Seldovia. An old Russian settlement not far from Homer on the Kenai Peninsula, Seldovia had several canneries and other facilities, and there were islands nearby where Kent could remain isolated yet still be within a short distance of a town. He had to think of Rocky’s safety, but he was also thinking of Hildegarde. “And now Sweetheart, about coming,” he wrote her. “I want you more than I can possibly tell you. I can think only of wonderful happiness together.” The Great War was experiencing some of its fiercest fighting that August 1918, but Kent didn’t seem too concerned about the anti-German sentiment throughout the country. “There are so many Scandinavians that your accent would not be noticed. You’d have to come as Mrs. Kent of course but I think they’d be nothing to fear.” In the letter, Kent goes on to give Hildegarde specific directions for the trip he is hoping she will take to Seldovia.

While waiting for the Admiral Farragut to arrive, Kent worked a twelve-hour day as a stevedore loading salmon to earn nearly six dollars. When their steamship arrived, Kent again worked, this time unloading empty salmon cans. Any extra cash would help. As it turned out, on his way to Seldovia the artist was ravished by some other spot -- a deep, ice-free fjord with five islands and town not too far away.

PHOTOS

1. Photo taken 1906 of Turner Glacier at left; Hubbard Glacier to its right. Photo from the Cornell Collection of Historic Glacial Images of Alaska and Greenland.
2. Turner and Hubbard Glaciers in 2013. Descending from the Wrangell St. Elias Mountains at 18,000 feet, Hubbard Glacier is about 76 miles long and 6 miles wide – the longest tidewater glacier in North America. Photo by Doug Capra
3. Hubbard Glacier in 2013. To the right of the glacier is the entrance to Russell Fjord. Over the years, Hubbard Glacier has advanced and occasionally blocked off that entrance endangering floods which would harm the salmon-spawning streams in the area. Photo by Doug Capra
4. Some of the highest mountains in the world rise along the Alaska Costal Range along the Gulf of Alaska from Yakutat to Prince William Sound. Photo by Doug Capra
5. During the summer of 2013 I was working as the naturalist aboard the Island Princess as it journeyed between Vancouver and Whittier. Leaving Whittier on Sept. 9th, we headed along the coast toward the Inside Passage. On Sept. 10th at the Malaspina Glacier we entered Yakutat Bay. I went up to the bridge to deliver commentary over the sound system. Soon we entered Disenchantment Bay with the giant Hubbard Glacier looming in the distance. I asked one of the senior officers if they’d ever measured the height of the glacier. He thought for a moment and then said that this would be a good time for one of the junior officers to learn how to use a sextant. This is a photo of that young man taking the glacier’s measurement. At its highest point, the glacier was 345 feet from the water’s edge (115 meters).
6. The beach at Knight Island on the east side of Yakutat Bay taken in 1905. Photo from the Cornell Collection of Historic Glacial Images of Alaska and Greenland.
7. The Axelson family in front of the Mission House which belonged to the Swedish Covenant Church at Yakutat. From the age of the children, the photo looks to be from about the time the Kents were in Yakutat. Alaska Digital Archives photo.