Aug. 11-12, 2018

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

I woke up this morning – August 11, 2018 – made my coffee, had some breakfast, and watched the news. A hundred years ago at the same time Kent and Rocky were aboard the Admiral Schley anticipating their arrival later today in Yakutat. 

Kent wrote letters to pass the time. Those to Hildegarde are descriptive and revealing. By the evening of August 5th the two travelers were in Petersburg where Kent sent off a few posts. During the next days at sea Kent sat on the upper deck “writing and reading and blowing my flute.” The passing scenery amazed him, especially the mountains with their sides “cloaked in dark spruce forests while their peaks, bare of trees, patched with snow, are up in the clouds.” The weather had been clear and warm, but after Petersburg it started to rain. “I think we’ll not find an intense cold on this coast,” Kent wrote, “and rain through the winter rather than snow.” His forecast would be correct. After they left Juneau, Kent reminded Hildegarde that from that point on there would be no ports with regular mail service. Now mail collection and delivery times could be a matter of weeks.

At three o’clock in the morning, August 12, 1918, Kent and Rocky arrived in Yakutat and climbed down the gangplank. “I found the superintendent of the cannery to whom I had a letter of introduction,” Kent told Hildegarde. “He received me without any visible pleasure or emotion of any sort and grunted that he’d put us somewhere. There are no boarding houses here…so I had to throw myself upon the mercy of the cannery. Rockwell and I were escorted through the darkness to a cabin on the hill.”

I must remind the reader that Kent traveled by the seat of his pants, as they say. Imaging wayfaring with your eight-year-old and arriving at a wilderness outpost like Yakutat in 1918 at 3 a.m. with no notion of how you would be welcomed or where you would spend the night. Kent’s arrival in Yakutat tells us as much about the hospitality of Alaskans as it does about the artist’s risky wandering style.

Early the next morning -- on August 12, 1918 -- the two nomads climbed down from an upper bunk, about two feet six inches wide, in a cannery bunkhouse. There had been a few blankets, no pillow, and a mattress of rough boards. “So it was poor sleeping for us,” Kent wrote to Hildegarde later that day. “Nevertheless we slept till morning and woke at six thirty to the clanging of a discordant bell. Presently the fishermen, great hairy fellows, Norwegians, arose and dressed. At first I knew {nothing} to do for breakfast, but one of the men took us into the mess hall and there amid a great room full of fishermen we had our first meal ashore in Alaska.”

That first full day was “raining and unagreeable.” Kent was not impressed with what he saw. “So far the country about Yakutat is a complete disappointment. It has been impossible so far to get even a glimpse of mountains that are its only title to picturesqueness, clouds have obscured everything…”

All along the Inside Passage, Kent had been disgusted with the towns. To him, Yakutat was no different. “The town about the cannery is hideous,” he wrote. “Consisting of a row of shanties, a window at each end and one door, a plank walk before a store, one or two other little buildings, all painted a commercial red, and you have a white man’s tour of Yakutat.” Yes, it was a “white man’s” view of an Alaska Native village controlled by a large Outside resource-extracting corporation – a perspective steeped in Kent’s romantic perception of the wilderness. He wrote:

“The summer village of the Indians is grouped about the cannery on the other side. It is a grizzled looking group scrawling upon the hillside with steep paths and steps leading up to it and through it. The Indians are filthy, for the most part utterly unprepossessing and utterly uninteresting. The winter village of the Indians is better. It lies on the hill from here. The houses face the water standing all in a row. They are perfectly ordinary, cheap one or two-story frame buildings and quite ill kept. One has totem poles beside it. It is the chiefs. Another has a large totem painting on the wall facing the front door. I have yet to see that closely.” 

When Spanish explorer Allesandro Malaspina sailed into Yakatut Bay in 1792 he was looking for the Northwest Passage. As he ventured further into the bay, what confronted him wasn’t the route he was seeking, but rather what’s known now as Hubbard Glacier – much further advanced than it is today. “Peurto del Desengano” he named that inner portion of Yakutat Bay. Disenchantment Bay it reads on the current charts.

Kent only stayed in Yakutat a short time, but that fortnight was significant. He was a disenchanted explorer, too. He later called the “Northwest Passage he was seeking his “Northern Paradise.” But on his first few days in Yakutat he had no idea where that special place would be. And already he may have been doubtful that it would be at Yakutat.

At this time 100 years ago, Kent had no idea the ideal location he was seeking would be on an island in Resurrection Bay, 12 miles south of Seward.

PHOTOS

1. Hubbard Glacier at the head of Disenchantment Bay taken from the bridge of the Island Princess on Sept. 9, 2013. We were about three-quarters of a mile away. (Doug Capra photo)
2. Map of the Yakutat area from Wikipedia
3. Yakutat circa 1913-1939 -- Alaska State Library Digital Archives
4. Yakutat circa 1913-1939 -- Alaska State Library Digital Archives

For more information about the Yakatut of today check out

https://yakutatak.govoffice2.com/