NOVEMBER 20 - 22, 2018
ROCKWELL
KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100
YEARS LATER
by Doug
Capra © 2018
Nov. 20-22, 2018
It’s Wednesday, Nov. 20, 1918 on Fox Island in Resurrection
Bay. Rockwell Kent is frustrated. He’s been packed and ready to venture the 12
miles north to Seward in his small dory since Nov. 14th waiting for
the seas and weather to cooperate. He wants his mail, and he has a stack of
letters and Christmas gifts to send to his wife and children, to friends – and to
his amour, Hildegarde Hirsch in New York. He’s exasperated with the mail
situation, as are Alaskans all along the gulf coast – especially with the
holiday season approaching. “Tomorrow we hope to get off,” Kent writes, “although
it still storms.” The running seas don’t concern as much as the chop created by
the north wind. “The wind above all is to be feared here. “The darkness also vexes him. Kent needs natural
light in his small cabin to paint and draw. He put in a large south facing
window and cleared trees blocking the sunlight. “Somehow on these short days it
is difficult to accomplish much,” he writes. As important as his art work is,
certain chores must take precedence for survival. He must keep up his firewood
supply; clean and fill his lamps; prepare and cook food; and fetch fresh water
from the lake about 100 yards away. After those chores, painting, making
envelopes and stretching canvases, it’s time for an early bedtime – for Kent
and Rockie hope to rise early and head out to Seward the next day. The porcupine
they captured a while back is allowed to wander freely. Rockie carries him
around sometimes by his tail, or uses Olson’s leather mittens to pick him up.
Thursday, Nov. 21-22, 1918 – Kent sleeps poorly. “The thin paper
roof made the noise deafening so that I could not sleep,” Kent wrote, “and the
surf beat and the forest roared; it was a wild night.” Another day stuck on the
island. “When shall we get to Seward,” he laments. “And here before me are displayed
all the pretty Christmas presents I have made and that Rockwell has made.”
Olson is restless, too, and spends much time at the Kent cabin, “more than he
should,” Kent complains. “We let him {Olson} sit here in silence,” Kent writes,
“and he is wise enough to be quite content.” Apparently, everyone’s nerves are
on edge. They all have cabin fever. “The porcupine is dead!” Kent writes. He
notes those animals are nocturnal, and that Rockie wanted to spend nights in
the woods with him, which would have been fine with his father. Kent does
little painting but today he did create a “beautiful” notepaper die for himself
and printed it on the envelopes he made yesterday.
Back in New York on -- Thursday, Nov. 21, 1918
– his wife, Kathleen sits down close to midnight and writes a long and firm letter
to her husband. She’s had it with his infidelities, his affairs, his cheating. “I
suppose you’ll get this letter about Christmas time,” she writes. “It would be the
surest Christmas present I ever had to get a telegram from you saying you would
do as I have asked. And I’m sure it will prove as fine a present to you, too.”
More on that letter in the next entry.
ROASTING THE MAILS
INSTEAD OF THE HORSES
Mail Steamers and
Naval Cruisers
by Doug Capra © 2018
Part 1 of 2
NOTE – A version of
this article was published in Fall 1985 issue of The Kent Collector.
During the summer of 1917 – the year before Rockwell Kent
arrived in Alaska -- mail service to the territory of Alaska, especially along
the Southcentral coast, became an issue. The U.S. Government and the steamship
companies couldn’t agree on contracts. Rejecting all their bids, the government
said mail would be carried by freight on all Alaska vessels and no longer
sorted aboard by the clerks who would now be out of work. Meanwhile, the
government continued its investigation into passenger and freight rate
increases by the steamship companies.
By the time
Kent and Rockie settled on Fox Island in late August 1918, after spending
several days in Yakutat, they had received little mail. Kent was frustrated. He
had expected to have his canvases by that time. By mid-September Kent began
receiving bunches of mail on his trips to Seward.
In
mid-October, Kent and Rocky made another trip to Seward. By this time, they had
made several friends in town. The two would sometimes stay at the house of
Seward’s mayor, Don Carlos Brownell along Lowell Creek not far from the base of
Mount Marathon. During this trip, Kent
had an important decision to make. At age thirty-six, he was now required to
register for the draft. He was against U.S. involvement in the war, a pacifist
at heart with a “fury at a world that could mess things so…” Furthermore, he
was concerned about his friend Roderick Seidenberg who had refused to register
as a conscientious objector and was
now imprisoned and being treated
inhumanely. He had stood up for his principles. Should Kent do the same?
By now Kent
was known in town, befriend and admired by some while under suspicion and
distrusted by others. People knew he had befriended some of the local Germans.
Unknown to most, though, he had arranged with hardware man Jacob Graef’s
employee, Otto Bohem. to let him know when the war ended. With patriotic furver
strong in town, their plan wasn’t a wise one. Bohem would signal Kent on Fox
Island from town using a powerful lamp, perhaps a railroad light. Kent would
build a bonfire at the far south end of his cove, a spot from which the town
was visible. They practiced making that connection, helping to create a rumor
in town that there was a German spy on Fox Island. Kent tried to remain less
vocal about the war than he had in Newfoundland, but that was not easy for him.
While in town on one occasion he attended a local dance. After the singing of
the Star-Spangled Banner, Kent took the stage to remind people that the melody
was actually from an old German drinking song. He was physically removed from
the building.
If he didn’t register for the
draft, people would know and he would be sought out, labeled a “slacker” – a
coward and law-breaker. His Alaskan adventure might end like his Newfoundland
visit had – with a blue ticket out of town or worse, a stay in prison. If the
worse happened, what would become of Rocky? On Oct. 15, 1918 -- medium build
and height, brown-eyed and partly bald (as the form reads), 36-year-old
Rockwell Kent registered for the draft at Local Board No. 13 in Seward, Alaska.
This
decision probably bothered him even after the war ended on November 11th and
fall turned to winter. His close friend, Roderick Seidenberg had declared as a
conscious objector and refused induction. On Feb. 19, 1919 Kent wrote a letter
to Ferdinand Howard that Seidenberg
“has, after ever-increasing punishment, been confined to a dark cell, fed on
bread and water and strapped upright to the door with his arms out even with
his shoulders.” Kent raged at this sadistic treatment. “It is almost beyond
belief. The cowardly scoundrels with that tender young idealist!”
The same
day he wrote Seidenberg a note that he included with a letter to Zigrosser:
“It is only by the
slender thread of the endurance of such a man as you that any of us can now
believe that the spirit of what man shall become is stronger than the best of
what he has been…Your sufferings have finally embittered my hatred of such a
civilization as is in America today and of such a government and army as, in
the name of Liberty, become Tyrants.”
Perhaps assuaging his guilt,
Kent suggested to Zigrosser that they put together a book about Seidenberg’s
torture and that of other conscientious objectors. It could be done
inexpensively and financed by subscription – but crafted so beautifully that
“wherever it appears it will be read & preserved & shown.” Kent would
do whatever he could: the illustrations, text, cover and color it. “I’d like
that to be my contribution to the war,” he wrote, but the artist in him saw
beyond the cause. “Carl, we could turn out a masterpiece of bookmaking.” Zigrosser
responded: “I was thinking the other day, Rockwell, about the terrible state
the world is in, how the brutish greed and hypocrisy of those in power is
equaled only by the sheepishness of those who are not.” By this time in
mid-February 1919, his relationship with his wife, Kathleen, in serious
trouble, he decided to leave Alaska earlier that he had planned. He became more
bitter, angry and isolationist. On Feb. 17th he writes to artist Gus
Mager: “I’m glad the war’s over. I’ve
become a confirmed anarchist. There’s something wrong with me. I don’t think I
owe anybody anything -- who has never done anything for me.” On March 6th – shortly before
leaving Alaska – he writes to Zigrosser: “Why could not a man deliberately
isolate himself from his own time if its ideals are annoyingly antagonistic to
his own; exclude all news and gossip, fence his domain against intrusion, make
of its portal the entranceway from this day, in America, without to eternity
and the Cosmos….”
On top of
Kent’s political anxieties, he his communication with is family and his amour,
Hildegarde Hirsch, is severely limited. When Kent arrived in Seward in August
1918, he waited anxiously for his art supplies to arrive. His wait continued
through the fall. “It looks as if the
steamship companies had combined to deprive Alaska of its Christmas mail and
freight in a policy of making the deadlock with the government over the mail
and freight contracts intolerable,” Kent wrote in a letter to the Seward
Gateway published Dec. 18, 1918 under the headline of “Roast the Mails.” He had
left Fox Island for Seward on November 30th returning December 4th.
Chapter 6 of Wilderness, “Excursion,”
summarizes that visit. It was during that stay in Seward that Kent wrote and
submitted the letter to the newspaper. It was safe for a newcomer to limit his
comments only to the poor mail service. Many Alaskans and Seward citizens who shared
Kent’s frustrations also blamed the steamship companies. The companies claimed
that their costs had almost doubled in a years’ time. In Chapter 6 of Wilderness he not only criticizes the
steamship companies, but also the U.S. Navy. “Meanwhile, instead of serving us, the jaunty
little naval cruisers that summered here in idleness doubtless loaf away the
winter months in comfortable southern ports. That, at least is a disgrace; and
the sooner we’re unburdened of that useless, inefficient body the better.”
TO BE CONTINUED
PHOTOS
Seward was the outfitting center and jumping off point for what Alaskan's called "the Westward." This included the Alaska Peninsula, the Aleutian Island, and even Bristol Bay. The big steamships carried the mail north from Seattle with stops along the way. Seward was the end of the line where smaller vessels, called the "Mosquito Fleet," took the mail to Westward -- and sometimes up Cook Inlet to Anchorage before the Alaska Railroad was completed in 1923. One of the trusty vessels belonging to the Mosquito Fleet was the S.S. Dora with it's mail clerk, John E. Thwaites. A talented photographer, Thwaites and Kent became friends and Kent used some of his photographs for his paintings.
Extremely frustrated with the mail situation, especially because it interfered with the Christmas season, Rockwell Kent wrote a letter to the Seward Gateway published on Dec. 18, 1918. Alaskans have never enjoyed criticisms from Outsiders or Cheechako's (Or as the old timers often pronounced it -- Chee-chak-ers.). The fact that there were no printed responses to Kent's letter demonstrates that most Alaska's were as fed up with the mail service as Kent was.
At left, some ads in the Seward Gateway on the same day Kent's letter appeared, Dec. 18, 1918. At top right, dog teams prepare to head north along the Iditarod Trail and on to Nome. Before the Alaska Railroad was completed in 1923, mail, supplies and passengers often traveled north by dogsled from Seward to Alaska's Interior. Soon after railroad was finished, airplanes became a major method of transportation beginning the end of the dog sled era. At bottom right, a photo of Seward from 1906 showing the town heading to the dock as a steamship approaches. Especially before the railroad, these steamships connected Seward and other Alaska coast ports with the outside world.
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