August 25-27 Part 2
ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018
August 25-27 -- Part 2
Olson towed Rockwell and Rockie from Humpy Cove to Fox Island and beached the boats.
Once Kent and Rocky climbed the steep, flat-pebbled beach, they were surprised by the “green grass lawn” and what Kent called an “orchard of neatly pruned alders to the mountains base.” Alaskans might laugh when they read this description of a green grass lawn and an orchard of neatly pruned alders. In the wild, alders and devil’s club have caused much profanity from those bushwacking through their precarious world. It does make sense, though, that Olson would clear the spaces between the alders for trails while keeping some intact. But to call it an orchard? It also shows the romantic wilderness ethic of the time that Kent so enthusiastically goes about -- pioneering, cutting down the trees, and clearing the land –essentially, taming the wilderness.
Then they saw Olson’s home. It wasn’t a simple log cabin, but a comfortable one-room house with a small loft.” Kent described Olson’s abode on Fox Island with “two windows south and west…a stove, a table by the window with dishes piled neatly on it, some shelves of food and one of books and papers; a bunk with gaily striped blankets; boots, guns, tools, tobacco boxes; {and} a ladder to the storeroom in the loft.” From the photo and the sketch, it's clear that there are two windows on the south side. One of those windows looks like it's attached to a small addition on the east side. The door and another small window are on the west side.
“Look,” the Swede told his two guests, “this is all mine. You can live here with me – with me and Nanny.” Olson had several Angora goats, but Nanny was like a pet that provide him with milk. As a family of goats nosed around them upending everything in sight looking for food, Olson first led the Kents to the fox corral and then to an old, log goat shed. There was another one further down the shore, he told Kent, a shed he had built last season for the goats where he and Rockie could spend the winter.
“But come,” he told them. “I show you my location notice.” His homesteading paperwork was all in order and he expected the title to arrive soon from Washington, D.C. “It’s all described in the notice I have posted,” he said, “and I would like to see anybody get that way from me.” On June 15, 1915 he staked 160 acres of land on Fox Island -- Latitude 59 degrees, 55-3/4’ North; Longitude 149 degrees, 20-3/4’ West. He then headed to the recording office in Seward, and filed for a homestead, declaring there was no known minerals on the land. A year later to the day, the document records that he posted notice on the ground to stake No, 1, and filed that posting five days later.
Followed by his two favorite goats, Olson guided the Kents to his shrine, a small roofed tablet nailed to a giant Sitka spruce’s trunk. Inside he had placed his location notice – but that day he found it torn to shreds. “Billy, Nanny,” he shouted at two of his favorite goats in what Kent described as mock rage as he shook his fist at them. Sensing his ire, the two culprits stood at a safe distance.
I always wondered why Olson seemed so defensive about filing in "the proper way," and so assertive about claiming that nobody would "get that away from me.” He reminded me of how some Alaskans still view land ownership in Alaska. Less than one percent of Alaska’s land is privately owned. Most is either state, federal or Alaska Native. One day, in the basement of the Seward Library while exploring musty old newspapers, I learned that the authorities had notified Olson that his attempt to homestead Fox Island was illegal. The Seward Gateway makes this clear in its July 6, 1916 issue: Reynard Island, at the entrance to Resurrection Bay, is not open to entry for homesteads, according to a statement made by Andrew Christensen, manager of the U.S. railroad lands department today. Christensen has been informed from Seward that L.M. Olson has filed a claim on that island and says that the location is invalid."
From earliest times, the island had been known as Fox Island. It’s possible the Russians did some fox farming on the island. An old Russian chart of Resurrection Bay names the island with a word that combines Aleut and Russian. Experts have told me the Russian root translates as “fox.” About 1909, USGS scientists U.S. Grant and D.F. Higgins, traveled through this area studying the geology and photographing the glaciers. They were also tasked to change place names too frequently used. Because there were so many Fox Islands along the coast, they changed the name to Reynard, the French word for fox. The new name eventually made the charts, but Seward residents were both surprised and resentful. Years later they had it changed back to Fox Island.
Olson had spent most of his life in frontier areas where the federal government had little direct influence. Land laws held no sway with the old Swede. Freedom was what mattered, and that’s what Kent admired about Olson – his free spirit, which could be assertive and even arrogant. Olson may have known he had no right to homestead on Fox Island – but that mattered not at all. He would stake his claim anyway. Olson, in partnership with T.W. Hawkins who ran Brown & Hawkins General Store in Seward, never owned the land upon which their fox farm sat, but they weren’t alone in that situation.
By 1925 , there were at least twenty large fox ranches, most on islands in Seward's district, that were members of the Southwestern Alaska Blue Fox and Fur Farmers Association. Four of the islands had been steady producers for forty years. Those twenty farms produced about a thousand pelts a year, and each had invested, on average, about $2,250 in their individual operations. About ninety per cent of these ranches were "in need of an equitable leasing law." The Seward Gateway summed up the problems of these fox farmers in a special Prosperity Edition of 1925:
"Because of the great distances by water, many of these island ranchers are far from their neighbors, and are compelled to work out their many problems single handed and alone, and almost wholly without any help from the many Government bureaus which draw the tax payers money for the very purpose; not even will it deliver his mail to him. Instead of aiding a growing industry, the ranchers have been held up, pestered and nagged by government bureaus. He is denied the right to homestead his island location; denied the right to purchase it; denied any way of protecting his investments and improvements. No two islands are alike, and when the rancher has learned his business on one island, then is forced by higher rentals or some silly whim of a department clerk, to move to another island, he must learn his business all over again. If through business reverses, sickness or some other cause he fails to pay his ever-increasing yearly rentals, he loses his location, his home, his improvements and his ranch. He must have a double-barreled license to do business, and his profit is taxed as fast as it matures. And now he is forbidden by law to catch the fishes that swim in the deep blue sea, to feed to his foxes with. But in spite of these pesky regulations, the blue fox ranchers have had two good years' business and the outlook for the future is very bright."
Part of being a “real Alaskan”for some means ranting about federal control while at the same time getting as much money from the feds as possible. That’s part of the history of the American West where the federal government controls so much land. Another part of the “real Alaskan” myth is connected to how long you’ve lived here. When you read the obituaries, length of time in Alaska is almost always included – with the phrase “lifelong Alaskan” taking top honors. Whenever a controversial issue turns up, the Letters to the Editor section in any Alaskan newspaper often begin with something akin to “I’ve lived in Alaska (10, 15, 20, 25 – pick one) years and…” It’s a kind of residency pissing contest. We enjoy it. We’re saying, in essence, that the validity of our opinion correlates directly to our length of residency.
If you’re new to Alaska, you need to just deal with it. When I first arrived here in 1971 (Notice how I snuck that in.), many cars touted bumper stickers that said: “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside” – “Outside” being any place but Alaska, especially the Lower 48. Some Alaskans like to reinvent the wheel, regularly and with style. These traditions evolved from the early pioneers like Olson. Alaska writer Michael Carey put it this way: “It might be argued that the true “real Alaskan” is the newcomer who just arrived in Alaska with a head full of dreams and doesn’t know the difference between adventure and trouble.” Carey’s father, who spent 40 years in Alaska’s interior, answered a Californian who asked how long one had to live here to be considered real Alaskan, “Just long enough to have your brains frozen.”
Continuing his effort to convince Kent to stay with him that winter, Olson said, “And now come to the lake!” If Kent had any doubts about moving to Fox Island, that stroll to the lake was the clincher. Rain, snow, sun, wind – regardless of the weather – whenever I’m on Fox Island I always travel the path they hiked that day. Their destination-- a small pool that used to be separated from the lake and fed fresh water by a mountain stream. After the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, much land in this part of Alaska dropped six to eight feet. The old creek sometimes trickles into the small pool but it is no longer separated from the now brackish lake.
This place by the lake is a key to Kent’s book. “The sun flecked our path,” the artist wrote, “and fired here and there a flame-colored mushroom that blazed in the forest gloom.” The path is well-worn today, but the forest on either side is thick and dense once all the vegetation fills it in. “Right and left we saw deep vistas,” Kent continued, “and straight ahead a broad and sunlit space, a valley between hills; there lay the lake.” Even on a windy day the lake appears flat, and that enchanting Sunday afternoon the Kents visited it “the whole mountainside lay mirrored in it with the purple zenith sky at our feet.” As an eagle soared above nothing stirred below. Not a ripple appeared on the lake. Not a sound – maybe the distant whisper of surf, Kent says – but I doubt it. I’ve never heard the surf from that spot, even on stormy days. Sometimes such dense silence tricks the senses. It’s so thick it has volume.
The quietness. That’s why I go there. Just a few hundred yards from the sea. Just a dozen miles from a town. Just 135 miles from the largest city in Alaska. It’s a place where one can experience real wildness. Kent subtitled his book as a Journal of Quiet Adventure.” It was supreme moments like this for him that gave substance to the meaning of wilderness. The place becomes the vehicle. The interior experience then transcends the place and becomes something one can find anywhere. You carry it with you wherever you go. “What man terms Paradise,” Kent wrote in his 1940 memoir, This Is My Own, “is simply that land of his wishful imagination in which as final home he’d like to spend eternity."
I’m reminded of what John J. Rowlands wrote in his 1947 book, Cache Lake Country: Life in the North Woods: “Most men who travel the north woods sooner or later happen on a lake or stream that somehow they cannot forget and always want to go back to. Generally, they never do get back…I have seen maybe a thousand northern lakes, and they all look alike in many ways, but there was something different about that little lake that held me hard. I sat there perhaps half an hour, like a man under a spell, just looking it over…Then, for no reason, I understood…I knew then I had found the place I had always wanted to be.”
Late in the afternoon on August 25, 1918, a middle-aged artist and his eight-year-old son stood in awe by that lake on Fox Island. There was probably a smile under the twinkling eyes of an old frontiersman who knew he had found companions who loved his island and understood that “infinite and unfathomable thing” -- wilderness. “Ah,” Kent wrote in his Alaska book, “supreme moment.” That intangible experience is difficult articulate. It’s beyond words. Kent perceived and embraced that paradox, yet tried to describe it. “These are the times in life -- when nothing happens – but in quietness the soul expands.”
When Kent came to his senses after his epiphany by the lake he realized time was short and that he had better return to the picnic. His first comment to Olson was “Show us that other cabin, we must go.” The artist had a critical decision to make. Would this be the place he and Rockie would stay? Olson led them along another trail, a shortcut to a goat shed he had built the year before. It was a small cabin of rough logs, 14’ x 17’ in a dark clearing with a small door. Not a large man, Kent had to stoop to enter. It had a 2’x 2’ west window, not nearly enough for the light he would need to do his work. He’d have to put in a larger window. There were unused goat stalls, and the building had also housed Belgian Hares, and a tin squirrel whirligig hung from a roof beam. It was filthy. The moss chinking between the logs had to be redone. He’d need a stove for cooking, maybe one for heat. That meant putting in a good supply of wood for the winter. They had to have a bed, shelves, a table for eating and working – all necessities. There was much work to do to make the place livable, including replacing the soiled, dirt floor. With his carpentry skills, he knew he could do the work, but his budget was tight. Kent also had food to buy, and maybe some winter clothing, pots, pans and other necessities. September would soon arrive and he knew he had to move fast. “I knew what that cabin might become. I saw it once and said, This is the place we’ll live.” The Swede begged them to stay. They could go back for supplies later. “Olson’s my name,” he finally told them. “I need you here. We’ll make a go of it.”
They had to return to Seward, Kent told Olson, but they’d return very soon. The three walked down the steep pebbly slope to the windlass and lowered the boat down the pebbly beach into Resurrection Bay. Summer’s prevailing south wind had picked up with its regular afternoon chop. Kent noticed a few white caps. It wouldn’t be long before the winter winds would shift and come from the north. Rowing across the bay with Rockie, Kent could see in the distance the sailboat that had taken them to the Caines Head berry picking party. It was heading their way, apparently searching for them. When they saw each other, the sailboat headed north toward Seward and the Kents followed them to town.
Later that day Olson went back to his cabin and recorded that visit in his journal under the date of August 25, 1918: “Wary vin Day. Over to Hump Bay got 2 salmon an artist cam ar to Day and going to seward efter his outfit and ar going to sta Hear this Winter in the new Cabbin.” Can you hear his voice? The old Swede wrote the way he spoke, so I’ll translate for you: “Very fine day. Over to Humpy Bay. Got 2 salmon. An artist came here today and going to Seward after his outfit and are going to stay here this winter in the new cabin.”
PHOTOS
Kent’s sketch of the fox farm as viewed from out on the cove. Kent’s cabin is on the far right; Olson’s is on the far left; a goat shed is between them with a fox corral behind it. Photo of Kent’s sketch in Wilderness.
Sun reflects off the pebbly beach near Olson’s cabin ruins on Fox Island the way it would have on August 25, 1918. Capra photo.
Kent took this photo of Rockie and Olson with two of his goats on the porch to Olson’s cabin. Photo courtesy of the Rockwell Kent Gallery at Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, NY.
Olson on Fox Island feeding is goats. The photo was taken out of focus. Courtesy of Virginia Darling, the daughter of Thomas Hawkins.
A copy of Olson’s homestead recording notice.
The Pioneers of Alaska held their 1916 convention in Seward. Olson was a member of the Seward Pioneer Igloo. This is a photo of some of the oldest Alaska pioneers as of 1916 with Olson at the far right. Author’s collection.
The path as it appears today heading east to the lake from Olson’s cabin ruins. Capra photo
“These are the times in life when nothing happens, but in quietness the soul expands.” This that magic spot by the lake where the Olson’s path ends and where Kent made his decision to settle on Fox Island. Capra photo.
As Kent examined the filthy goat shed Olson offered him for the winter, he may have imagined the view he would have from the new southwest facing window he would construct. This is that view. Capra photo.
The view looking south along the beach from the Kent cabin ruins. Capra photo.
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018
August 25-27 -- Part 2
Olson towed Rockwell and Rockie from Humpy Cove to Fox Island and beached the boats.
Once Kent and Rocky climbed the steep, flat-pebbled beach, they were surprised by the “green grass lawn” and what Kent called an “orchard of neatly pruned alders to the mountains base.” Alaskans might laugh when they read this description of a green grass lawn and an orchard of neatly pruned alders. In the wild, alders and devil’s club have caused much profanity from those bushwacking through their precarious world. It does make sense, though, that Olson would clear the spaces between the alders for trails while keeping some intact. But to call it an orchard? It also shows the romantic wilderness ethic of the time that Kent so enthusiastically goes about -- pioneering, cutting down the trees, and clearing the land –essentially, taming the wilderness.
Then they saw Olson’s home. It wasn’t a simple log cabin, but a comfortable one-room house with a small loft.” Kent described Olson’s abode on Fox Island with “two windows south and west…a stove, a table by the window with dishes piled neatly on it, some shelves of food and one of books and papers; a bunk with gaily striped blankets; boots, guns, tools, tobacco boxes; {and} a ladder to the storeroom in the loft.” From the photo and the sketch, it's clear that there are two windows on the south side. One of those windows looks like it's attached to a small addition on the east side. The door and another small window are on the west side.
“Look,” the Swede told his two guests, “this is all mine. You can live here with me – with me and Nanny.” Olson had several Angora goats, but Nanny was like a pet that provide him with milk. As a family of goats nosed around them upending everything in sight looking for food, Olson first led the Kents to the fox corral and then to an old, log goat shed. There was another one further down the shore, he told Kent, a shed he had built last season for the goats where he and Rockie could spend the winter.
“But come,” he told them. “I show you my location notice.” His homesteading paperwork was all in order and he expected the title to arrive soon from Washington, D.C. “It’s all described in the notice I have posted,” he said, “and I would like to see anybody get that way from me.” On June 15, 1915 he staked 160 acres of land on Fox Island -- Latitude 59 degrees, 55-3/4’ North; Longitude 149 degrees, 20-3/4’ West. He then headed to the recording office in Seward, and filed for a homestead, declaring there was no known minerals on the land. A year later to the day, the document records that he posted notice on the ground to stake No, 1, and filed that posting five days later.
Followed by his two favorite goats, Olson guided the Kents to his shrine, a small roofed tablet nailed to a giant Sitka spruce’s trunk. Inside he had placed his location notice – but that day he found it torn to shreds. “Billy, Nanny,” he shouted at two of his favorite goats in what Kent described as mock rage as he shook his fist at them. Sensing his ire, the two culprits stood at a safe distance.
I always wondered why Olson seemed so defensive about filing in "the proper way," and so assertive about claiming that nobody would "get that away from me.” He reminded me of how some Alaskans still view land ownership in Alaska. Less than one percent of Alaska’s land is privately owned. Most is either state, federal or Alaska Native. One day, in the basement of the Seward Library while exploring musty old newspapers, I learned that the authorities had notified Olson that his attempt to homestead Fox Island was illegal. The Seward Gateway makes this clear in its July 6, 1916 issue: Reynard Island, at the entrance to Resurrection Bay, is not open to entry for homesteads, according to a statement made by Andrew Christensen, manager of the U.S. railroad lands department today. Christensen has been informed from Seward that L.M. Olson has filed a claim on that island and says that the location is invalid."
From earliest times, the island had been known as Fox Island. It’s possible the Russians did some fox farming on the island. An old Russian chart of Resurrection Bay names the island with a word that combines Aleut and Russian. Experts have told me the Russian root translates as “fox.” About 1909, USGS scientists U.S. Grant and D.F. Higgins, traveled through this area studying the geology and photographing the glaciers. They were also tasked to change place names too frequently used. Because there were so many Fox Islands along the coast, they changed the name to Reynard, the French word for fox. The new name eventually made the charts, but Seward residents were both surprised and resentful. Years later they had it changed back to Fox Island.
Olson had spent most of his life in frontier areas where the federal government had little direct influence. Land laws held no sway with the old Swede. Freedom was what mattered, and that’s what Kent admired about Olson – his free spirit, which could be assertive and even arrogant. Olson may have known he had no right to homestead on Fox Island – but that mattered not at all. He would stake his claim anyway. Olson, in partnership with T.W. Hawkins who ran Brown & Hawkins General Store in Seward, never owned the land upon which their fox farm sat, but they weren’t alone in that situation.
By 1925 , there were at least twenty large fox ranches, most on islands in Seward's district, that were members of the Southwestern Alaska Blue Fox and Fur Farmers Association. Four of the islands had been steady producers for forty years. Those twenty farms produced about a thousand pelts a year, and each had invested, on average, about $2,250 in their individual operations. About ninety per cent of these ranches were "in need of an equitable leasing law." The Seward Gateway summed up the problems of these fox farmers in a special Prosperity Edition of 1925:
"Because of the great distances by water, many of these island ranchers are far from their neighbors, and are compelled to work out their many problems single handed and alone, and almost wholly without any help from the many Government bureaus which draw the tax payers money for the very purpose; not even will it deliver his mail to him. Instead of aiding a growing industry, the ranchers have been held up, pestered and nagged by government bureaus. He is denied the right to homestead his island location; denied the right to purchase it; denied any way of protecting his investments and improvements. No two islands are alike, and when the rancher has learned his business on one island, then is forced by higher rentals or some silly whim of a department clerk, to move to another island, he must learn his business all over again. If through business reverses, sickness or some other cause he fails to pay his ever-increasing yearly rentals, he loses his location, his home, his improvements and his ranch. He must have a double-barreled license to do business, and his profit is taxed as fast as it matures. And now he is forbidden by law to catch the fishes that swim in the deep blue sea, to feed to his foxes with. But in spite of these pesky regulations, the blue fox ranchers have had two good years' business and the outlook for the future is very bright."
Part of being a “real Alaskan”for some means ranting about federal control while at the same time getting as much money from the feds as possible. That’s part of the history of the American West where the federal government controls so much land. Another part of the “real Alaskan” myth is connected to how long you’ve lived here. When you read the obituaries, length of time in Alaska is almost always included – with the phrase “lifelong Alaskan” taking top honors. Whenever a controversial issue turns up, the Letters to the Editor section in any Alaskan newspaper often begin with something akin to “I’ve lived in Alaska (10, 15, 20, 25 – pick one) years and…” It’s a kind of residency pissing contest. We enjoy it. We’re saying, in essence, that the validity of our opinion correlates directly to our length of residency.
If you’re new to Alaska, you need to just deal with it. When I first arrived here in 1971 (Notice how I snuck that in.), many cars touted bumper stickers that said: “We don’t give a damn how they do it Outside” – “Outside” being any place but Alaska, especially the Lower 48. Some Alaskans like to reinvent the wheel, regularly and with style. These traditions evolved from the early pioneers like Olson. Alaska writer Michael Carey put it this way: “It might be argued that the true “real Alaskan” is the newcomer who just arrived in Alaska with a head full of dreams and doesn’t know the difference between adventure and trouble.” Carey’s father, who spent 40 years in Alaska’s interior, answered a Californian who asked how long one had to live here to be considered real Alaskan, “Just long enough to have your brains frozen.”
Continuing his effort to convince Kent to stay with him that winter, Olson said, “And now come to the lake!” If Kent had any doubts about moving to Fox Island, that stroll to the lake was the clincher. Rain, snow, sun, wind – regardless of the weather – whenever I’m on Fox Island I always travel the path they hiked that day. Their destination-- a small pool that used to be separated from the lake and fed fresh water by a mountain stream. After the 1964 Good Friday Earthquake, much land in this part of Alaska dropped six to eight feet. The old creek sometimes trickles into the small pool but it is no longer separated from the now brackish lake.
This place by the lake is a key to Kent’s book. “The sun flecked our path,” the artist wrote, “and fired here and there a flame-colored mushroom that blazed in the forest gloom.” The path is well-worn today, but the forest on either side is thick and dense once all the vegetation fills it in. “Right and left we saw deep vistas,” Kent continued, “and straight ahead a broad and sunlit space, a valley between hills; there lay the lake.” Even on a windy day the lake appears flat, and that enchanting Sunday afternoon the Kents visited it “the whole mountainside lay mirrored in it with the purple zenith sky at our feet.” As an eagle soared above nothing stirred below. Not a ripple appeared on the lake. Not a sound – maybe the distant whisper of surf, Kent says – but I doubt it. I’ve never heard the surf from that spot, even on stormy days. Sometimes such dense silence tricks the senses. It’s so thick it has volume.
The quietness. That’s why I go there. Just a few hundred yards from the sea. Just a dozen miles from a town. Just 135 miles from the largest city in Alaska. It’s a place where one can experience real wildness. Kent subtitled his book as a Journal of Quiet Adventure.” It was supreme moments like this for him that gave substance to the meaning of wilderness. The place becomes the vehicle. The interior experience then transcends the place and becomes something one can find anywhere. You carry it with you wherever you go. “What man terms Paradise,” Kent wrote in his 1940 memoir, This Is My Own, “is simply that land of his wishful imagination in which as final home he’d like to spend eternity."
I’m reminded of what John J. Rowlands wrote in his 1947 book, Cache Lake Country: Life in the North Woods: “Most men who travel the north woods sooner or later happen on a lake or stream that somehow they cannot forget and always want to go back to. Generally, they never do get back…I have seen maybe a thousand northern lakes, and they all look alike in many ways, but there was something different about that little lake that held me hard. I sat there perhaps half an hour, like a man under a spell, just looking it over…Then, for no reason, I understood…I knew then I had found the place I had always wanted to be.”
Late in the afternoon on August 25, 1918, a middle-aged artist and his eight-year-old son stood in awe by that lake on Fox Island. There was probably a smile under the twinkling eyes of an old frontiersman who knew he had found companions who loved his island and understood that “infinite and unfathomable thing” -- wilderness. “Ah,” Kent wrote in his Alaska book, “supreme moment.” That intangible experience is difficult articulate. It’s beyond words. Kent perceived and embraced that paradox, yet tried to describe it. “These are the times in life -- when nothing happens – but in quietness the soul expands.”
When Kent came to his senses after his epiphany by the lake he realized time was short and that he had better return to the picnic. His first comment to Olson was “Show us that other cabin, we must go.” The artist had a critical decision to make. Would this be the place he and Rockie would stay? Olson led them along another trail, a shortcut to a goat shed he had built the year before. It was a small cabin of rough logs, 14’ x 17’ in a dark clearing with a small door. Not a large man, Kent had to stoop to enter. It had a 2’x 2’ west window, not nearly enough for the light he would need to do his work. He’d have to put in a larger window. There were unused goat stalls, and the building had also housed Belgian Hares, and a tin squirrel whirligig hung from a roof beam. It was filthy. The moss chinking between the logs had to be redone. He’d need a stove for cooking, maybe one for heat. That meant putting in a good supply of wood for the winter. They had to have a bed, shelves, a table for eating and working – all necessities. There was much work to do to make the place livable, including replacing the soiled, dirt floor. With his carpentry skills, he knew he could do the work, but his budget was tight. Kent also had food to buy, and maybe some winter clothing, pots, pans and other necessities. September would soon arrive and he knew he had to move fast. “I knew what that cabin might become. I saw it once and said, This is the place we’ll live.” The Swede begged them to stay. They could go back for supplies later. “Olson’s my name,” he finally told them. “I need you here. We’ll make a go of it.”
They had to return to Seward, Kent told Olson, but they’d return very soon. The three walked down the steep pebbly slope to the windlass and lowered the boat down the pebbly beach into Resurrection Bay. Summer’s prevailing south wind had picked up with its regular afternoon chop. Kent noticed a few white caps. It wouldn’t be long before the winter winds would shift and come from the north. Rowing across the bay with Rockie, Kent could see in the distance the sailboat that had taken them to the Caines Head berry picking party. It was heading their way, apparently searching for them. When they saw each other, the sailboat headed north toward Seward and the Kents followed them to town.
Later that day Olson went back to his cabin and recorded that visit in his journal under the date of August 25, 1918: “Wary vin Day. Over to Hump Bay got 2 salmon an artist cam ar to Day and going to seward efter his outfit and ar going to sta Hear this Winter in the new Cabbin.” Can you hear his voice? The old Swede wrote the way he spoke, so I’ll translate for you: “Very fine day. Over to Humpy Bay. Got 2 salmon. An artist came here today and going to Seward after his outfit and are going to stay here this winter in the new cabin.”
PHOTOS
Kent’s sketch of the fox farm as viewed from out on the cove. Kent’s cabin is on the far right; Olson’s is on the far left; a goat shed is between them with a fox corral behind it. Photo of Kent’s sketch in Wilderness.
Sun reflects off the pebbly beach near Olson’s cabin ruins on Fox Island the way it would have on August 25, 1918. Capra photo.
Kent took this photo of Rockie and Olson with two of his goats on the porch to Olson’s cabin. Photo courtesy of the Rockwell Kent Gallery at Plattsburgh State University, Plattsburgh, NY.
Olson on Fox Island feeding is goats. The photo was taken out of focus. Courtesy of Virginia Darling, the daughter of Thomas Hawkins.
A copy of Olson’s homestead recording notice.
The Pioneers of Alaska held their 1916 convention in Seward. Olson was a member of the Seward Pioneer Igloo. This is a photo of some of the oldest Alaska pioneers as of 1916 with Olson at the far right. Author’s collection.
The path as it appears today heading east to the lake from Olson’s cabin ruins. Capra photo
“These are the times in life when nothing happens, but in quietness the soul expands.” This that magic spot by the lake where the Olson’s path ends and where Kent made his decision to settle on Fox Island. Capra photo.
As Kent examined the filthy goat shed Olson offered him for the winter, he may have imagined the view he would have from the new southwest facing window he would construct. This is that view. Capra photo.
The view looking south along the beach from the Kent cabin ruins. Capra photo.
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