NOVEMBER 23-24, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Nov. 23-24, 2018

The following promotion appeared in Seward Gateways during November 1918

Nov. 23, 1918 – Fox Island – Resurrection Bay, Alaska – 12 Miles South of Seward.

            Rainy but calm. Kent and Rockie are up early. They eat a quick breakfast hoping to get off to Seward morning. But within an hour as the tide turns, “the northwest wind whips down from the mountains and the rain falls in torrents.” The two fell a tree and start breaking it down for firewood. Kent paints some but the dismal darkness within the cabin makes it difficult. He works mostly in black and white. “Rockwell has been industrious as usual, drawing at my side,” he writes.

            Kent is angry, frustrated and anxious about not being able to get to Seward to send off all his Christmas letters and packages. He also wants to collect many weeks worth of mail, hoping for more uplifting, encouraging letters from Kathleen, and loving ones from Hildegarde. He has a deep need for the assurance of love and loyalty – despite his own infidelity. Hildegarde is young, beautiful and sought after by other men. Does she have other lovers? He suspects she does. He now realizes his wife has become more blunt, unafraid to express her dissatisfaction with their relationship. But he probably doesn’t expect the frank letter he’ll receive around Christmas – the letter Kathleen is writing nearing midnight on Thursday, Nov. 21, 1918.

         Kathleen’s letter is 14 pages – long for her. She’s angry. You can see the pressure of her pen – the ink is dark on the paper. When she crosses her “T’s” – the line stretches across the whole word. She’s angry. In his letters to her, Kent often writes he is love is  “her own.”  She doesn’t believe that anymore. “Oh, how I wish you were really – truly all my own, own, own heart and soul,” she writes. She’s told him before, but now she says it again – her love for him is no guarantee anymore. He’ll have to earn it, since – “…after the way you treated my heart’s love and trust, you cannot expect from it what was yours once.” She recalls their courtship and wants Kent to “Pretend you’re are wooing me…” Kathleen wants to be cherished “as you would some wonderful jewel, and take care of me, as if I were the most precious of earthly things, to you.” This is most likely a not-so-subtle reference to The Jewel, the unique fairy tale within a hand-made book that Kent wrote for Hildegarde. Kathleen wants to be appreciated for her good qualities, a reference to all the complaints Kent makes in his letters to her. “Don’t let yourself find fault with me in endless little things,” she demands, “that makes me terribly miserable and I can’t {help but} to turn immediately to someone who doesn’t find fault.” That sentence a clear reference to other men like the mail boat clerk, and Mr. Walker, the coast guard man on Mohegan Island. Kathleen had promised to be faithful before Kent left for Alaska. She will keep that promise, “but you must do your share too,” she says. If their marriage is to survive, they must “sweep the ground clear and begin all over again” – and Kathleen knows specifically what must be swept away.

She’s been to New York. “I learned many things which concern me and which I didn’t know before,” she writes. She has her informers. “I was terribly upset and terribly angry and disappointed.” Several weeks back she had to pay the doctor $30 to treat their daughter Clara’s eye problem, Kent complained about not having the money. While she was living frugally – “in the kitchen with the kiddies, with no maid” -- and economizing, she writes, “…you spent hundreds! Yes, precious hundreds of dollars on a piece of jewelry for Hilda.” And that wasn’t all Kathleen discovered. “And you paid her, for a while, the same salary she got at the theater, to keep her from going back to the stage…And then you couldn’t give me a paltry thirty dollars to pay the Dr. so Clara could have the attention she should.”

A page from Kathleen's Nov. 21, 1918 letter to Rockwell

Kathleen learns more interesting information. “I don’t know how well you know Hilda,” she writes, “but whether you know this or not, it is necessary I should tell you.” This is why it’s in your best interest to leave Hildegarde. She’s making a fool of you. Remember that auto trip she took last summer with a man she said she didn’t care for, Kathleen writes? Well, guess what? Remember Elizabeth’s friend George? You know, the man who showered Hilda with all those expensive gifts? Hildegarde spent several nights with him this past fall – in Elizabeth’s apartment – and there’s a long, long line crossing the “T” in apartment. Hildegarde is sleeping around. Elizabeth put a stop to it but not before Hildegarde “obtained all this man’s money in the form of expensive presents,” and then she jilted him. Elizabeth did some sewing for Hilda and she never offered to pay her. Hilda’s sister, Frieda gave money to her to pay Elizabeth but Hilda kept it yet told Frieda she had given it to Elizabeth. She owes me money, too, Kathleen tells Kent, and often speaks of paying me back but it never goes further than words. “She is doing no work now, but spending fortunes on clothes,” Kathleen tells Kent. “I wonder where she gets the money?” Kathleen visited Hilda’s apartment and noticed that “she’s using as if it they were her own, things that belong to you and me. Well, that’s part of the haul she got out of you.”

Kent will get this letter with his Christmas mail in a few weeks. It’s the second of four letters Kent will get from Kathleen that I believe impels him to leave Alaska early to save his marriage. The first two came in mid-September when Kent was in Seward. Kathleen tells him about Mr. Walker’s attentions to her. As she states in the Nov. 21^st letter, the one quoted here, she’ll turn to other men for the appreciation and respect she doesn’t get from him. The third will come in February, convincing him that Kathleen has reached a point where she is close to leaving him.

“Now Rockwell, dear,” Kathleen ends the Nov. 21 letter, “I could go on with this all night but I shan’t. I have been pretty sick and disgusted beyond anything over it all…Rockwell, if you want my love wipe Hilda completely out of your existence from no on! And if you ever have another affair, don’t make so much a show about telling me everything, all the truth and no lies!” She might be able to live with his indiscretions if he doesn’t flaunt them, she implies. At least pretend there’s some shame and embarrassment involved, at least for me. “I suppose you’ll get this about Christmas time,” she finishes up. “It would be the nicest Christmas present I ever had, to get a telegram from you saying that you would do as I have asked. And I’m sure it will prove as a fine present to you too.” A letter won’t do, she tells her husband. I want a telegram. “I think of our dear little kiddies, and how much I have suffered from and for you.” It’s not just about me, she reminds him. It’s about our children, too. “It’s twelve o’clock, I must go to bed now,” Kathleen concludes. “Kiss my darling little son for me. Your loving Kathleen.”

Sunday, Nov. 24, 1918 on Fox Island – Kathleen’s letter is on the way to Alaska. It snows and the storm continues with Kent still trapped on the island. Olson brings them some goats milk and Kent makes junket. It seems more like March and the bay looks wild. That evening it’s clear and cold with a brutal north wind. With snow on the ground the reflection makes the cabin look brighter. Better for painting and Kent does so with some success. “Eight canvases are far along so that I’m proud of them.” As usual Kent and Rockie cut firewood. They haven’t seen a steamship pass the island in two weeks. One certainly must arrive soon. “Will the north wind begin to blow again tomorrow?” Kent wonders. “The chances are that it will and Seward and the sending of my mail will be as far away as ever.”

ROASTING THE MAILS INSTEAD OF THE HORSES

Mail Steamers and Naval Cruisers

by Doug Capra © 2018

Part 2 of 2

NOTE – A version of this article was published in The Kent Collector. You’ll find the first part of the article below in the last entry of this blog -- for Nov. 20-22, 2018.

Getting mail to outposts like Alaska has always been a challenge. Rockwell and Rocky learned that during their Resurrection Bay adventure. Seward, sitting on an alluvial fan created by glacial run off, a precarious foundation of unstable rock and soil – was founded in 1903 as a gateway to Alaska’s interior. Steamers from San Francisco and Seattle plied the Inside Passage delivering and collecting mail along the way. From Sitka they often headed along the coast stopping at ports like Cordova and Valdez before arriving in Resurrection Bay. From Seward, the mail would head up the rails to points north, and via smaller vessels to the westward ports.

Today it’s difficult for us to appreciate the importance of a steamer arrival for a town like Seward. A description from ten years after the Kents were on Fox Island, still captures the thrill of mail arriving from the Outside:

            “Once a week, a strangely marked day rings its silver toll all over Seward. In a less, poetical sense it is but the whistling of a certain ‘boat’ arriving from the States. There is scarcely a house in Seward which does not rejoice in advance at somebody or something to be brought by the vessel. She is the link chaining you together with the rest of the continent and the world. The sounds of her whistling are like silver-bells in your ears. You drop your work and go to welcome her. What does she pour forth? People venturing from a business or wedding trip. New-comers willing to try their fortune as others have done. Books and newspapers, furniture and meat, raw-materials and ready-made ware. Necessities of daily life as well as those of a higher one. Above all, heaps of letters are to be unloaded. You get the ones bearing your address, you hurry to reach your home, you smile and weep over them. They are the messengers hastening through continents and oceans to give you the love, the greetings, and thoughts of those you left behind. A strong smell of the old country is in your nose. Remembrances awaken within you. You dream with your eyes open. you dream it all over again.”

            When Kent was here, the U.S. Post Office Dept. cut their costs by sending all Alaska mail via freight. With no postal clerks aboard mail wasn’t sorted between port calls. Quite often, the steamers stayed in port for only a few hours, usually not enough time for local clerks to complete the sorting. One often reads accounts in the Seward Gateway of entire bags of mail headed for one port ending up somewhere else.

When I first came to Alaska in 1971, I got a job teaching on the Aleutian Island of Adak, a cold-war Naval station with nearly 6000 people and one of the larger communities in Alaska at the time. Many of us were civilians. I was the only English teacher in a high school of about 80 students. Twice a week we got our mail – on Tuesday and Thursday as I recall. That may not mean much today to those too young to recall the days before email and instant text messaging. Those two days were special.  From Adak I went to Seward where we had two television stations and regular mail service, except in winter when several avalanches usually closed down the Seward Highway for days at a time. Today it’s much better in Alaska. There has been much change in the nearly fifty years I’ve lived here.

The letter Kent published in the Dec. 18, 1918 Seward Gateway

The mail problem Kent experienced during 1918-19 was nothing new for Seward, but it had gotten worse for several months before the artist and his son arrived at Resurrection Bay. One June 15, 1918, the Seward Gateway wrote: “An “anxious subscriber” wrote to the editor asking: ’What is the longest day in July?’ The longest day in July, according to the present-day almanac, will be the day before the next steamer arrives, with 16 days mail, sometime next week. And that’s no joke. The next day, the newspaper hinted at food supply problems caused by infrequent steamers. ‘The Editor received another letter this forenoon from a ‘subscriber’ saying: ‘Roast the horses.’ The Editor hot-footed it right over to Billie Ellis {a local butcher} and asked him if there was any need to ‘roast the horses?’ Mr. Ellis said that he had plenty of beef, fowl and pork on hand to last until the next steamer arrived. Thus, there will be no horse barbecue.”

About two weeks before the Kents arrived in town on August 24, 1918, the Seward Gateway, for several days, was printed on thin wrapping paper and heavy paperbag-like stock. The editor noted that the paper he had ordered had been “accidently” left on the dock by the steamer and ruined by rain. People were fed up with the chaotic mail delivery, and Kent’s letter was welcome. (Some of Kathleen’s letters to Kent from November 1918 appear severely water damaged and difficult to read. The fact that they are also written on what looks like onionskin paper doesn’t help. Scholars have assumed this damage happened during the 1969 fire at Kent’s home in upstate New York. That could be the case, but it’s also possible they were water-damaged when left on an Alaska dock in the rain with other mail.)

Within city limits, Seward has no mail delivery. We have post office boxes. In small towns like Seward, collecting the mail is a social event. It’s not uncommon to see groups of people standing around the mail boxes in the lobby socializing. Even while waiting in line, going to the post office gives us time to catch up on local news and gossip. Deaths and funeral announcements are posted on post office doors. People post garage sale notices on one of the stop sign poles in the parking lot. All this may technically be against regulations, and over the years new postmasters have announced an end to this behavior – but it continues, and the post office has learned culture not only has strategy for breakfast, but also can devour minor government regulations. Olson and Kent would love it.

Several years ago, the feds in Washington, D.C. decided to eliminate the centralized mail boxes at the post office building in Seward. They would install groups of boxes in stations at neighborhoods within city limits and deliver to those kiosks. When word got out, the town was outraged. All kinds of justifications to kill the plan emerged – privacy and safety issues – in essence, we didn’t want to give up our daily visit to the post office to talk with our friends. The post office department gave in.

When Kent wrote of the “jaunty little naval cruisers” in Resurrection Bay, he was talking about what Seward called the “big grey boat,” the U.S.S. Saturn under the command of Lieut. Frank Luckel. The captain and crew had been popular in Seward, and Kent’s comment couldn’t have pleased the town. The Saturn, with a mission to install a wireless communication system, left Mare Island in May 1916 and headed to Unalaska, then to St. George Station and on to Cordova. It arrived in Seward sometime in mid-July to build a naval radio station. Seward was excited that the broken cables problem would finally be resolved. Soon after its arrival for the 1917-1918 winter, the crew gave “one of the best dances ever pulled off in Seward,” described as “the big affair of the winter season.”  This was the kind of “idleness” and “loafing” Kent writes about in Wilderness.

While the Kents were in Seward, the Government Railroad was under construction – eventually named the Alaska Railroad. From about 1900 until the completion of the Alaska Railroad in 1923, attempts at railroad building in Alaska were all about access to coal. The U.S. Navy needed coal as it expanded its operations in the Pacific and there were no coaling stations on the West Coast. Some coal came from Washington State and Oregon, but most had to be shipped via rail from East Coast coal mines. Some came via ship from England. In agreeing to finance the construction and operation of the Alaska Railroad, the U.S. government confirmed its interest in reaching the coal lands north of Anchorage. Vessels like the U.S.S. Saturn were seeking communities along the coast to build coaling stations, and Seward had excellent prospects as the railroad terminus. That’s why Seward, and other communities considered potential coal station sites, wined and dined those Naval vessels when they arrived in port.

The Influenza Epidemic was always a fear in Seward and a concern for Kent. Photo at upper right shows Seward's Main Street (Broadway) looking north as it appeared at the time Kent was on Fox Island. Photo at bottom right was taken on July 4, 1906 and shows Seward residents heading for a picnic on the Alaska Central Railway under construction.

If the winter of 1917 was the engagement phase of Seward’s romance with the U.S.S. Saturn, the following fall and winter, while the Kents were on Fox Island, represented the marriage. The reunion began with the cruiser’s arrival on August 2, 1918, just a few weeks before the Kents arrival in town. Its commander, Frank Luckel, returned with many of the same crew and they celebrated their arrival by presenting a special 18-act vaudeville show on August 8^th.  The Seward Gateway reported: “The vaudeville show brought out society folks in evening clothes and taken from all angles was the biggest affair given in Seward since last winter.”

A series of dances, parties, concerts and baseball games followed -- sponsored either by Seward or the Saturn in honor of the other. In fact, the day after Rockwell and young Rockie arrived in Seward, while they were staying at the Sexton Hotel, the fighting Saturn nine challenged Seward’s baseball team. During this time, while Kent looked around for a place to spend the winter, most of Seward’s social life centered around the Saturn and its crew. In early September 1918 three Saturn crew who had been manning the naval radio station got lost while hunting. The town sent out search parties and rescued the sailors after about a week. They were uninjured, though tired, hungry and scratched up.  Throughout the fall and early winter, the Saturn-Seward social season flourished. Kent regarded this as an idle waste of tax payers time and money.

It’s interesting that Kent’s letter complaining against the mail service got no responses from local residents, at least as letters to the editor. By this time, the town knew of Kent’s stay on Fox Island. Some knew of his socialism, pacifism, and knowledge of the German language – a few may even have read of his Newfoundland fiasco which was covered by the New York Times. The fact that there are no letters responding to Kent’s complaint, suggests that most in Seward agreed with him and shared his frustrations. It’s not common, even today, for Alaskan’s to just accept published criticism from “Outsiders” without responding – usually angrily.

In early August Kent had briefly settled in Yakutat. He later decided to move to Seldovia, but eventually settled upon Seward for several reasons – one of the more important being the regular mail service. The poor mail service during 1918-19 combined with other factors, augmented his sense of isolation and exile on Fox Island.