OCT. 18 - 21, 2019 PART 10: LARS MATT OLSON'S FINAL YEARS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

Part 10: Olson’s Final Years

Oct. 18-21, 2019

ABOVE – Lars Matt Olson’s gravestone at Jackson Hole, Wyoming's Aspen Hill Cemetery located near the ski resort on Snow King Hill. Photos above and below by Seth DePasqual, who put some stones from a Kenai Lake beach on Olson's grave before he took this photo.

BELOW – Olson’s grave with the town of Jackson Hole, Wyoming in the background.

OLSON OF THE DEEP EXPERIENCE

The stepping-stones are chancy to the second island…,

So, we learn from Kent’s letter that Olson left Vermont and returned somewhere out West. But where did he end up, and whatever happened to him? One more mystery to solve. 

In the 1980’s, while wandering through pages of the Seward Gateway, I found a notice of Olson’s death in the Jan. 5, 1923 issue – Olson’s body was found in an old cabin at Jackson Hole, Wyoming and he had been dead for some time. “His remains were discovered,” the newspaper said, “by persons who chanced to pass by.” The Rev. Arthur H. Beatty had conducted Olson’s funeral service. Fortunately, those who found him located among his possessions a Pioneers of Alaska receipt of membership. From that they connected him with Seward, so the notice of his death was sent to Carl M. Brosius, head of the local Igloo.

BELOW – Olson’s death notice in the Jan. 5, 1923 issue of the Seward Gateway.

I contacted the historical society at Jackson Hole, and they sent me the notice of Olson’s death in the Nov. 23, 1922 Jackson’s Hole Courier.  His body had been found on Nov. 17 about seven miles above Jackson Hole in the Flat Creek area. They had no record of a coroner’s inquest, even though the newspaper said one was held. In those days, one local historian told me, they probably met in a bar over a few drinks, called in an inquest, and quickly agreed he died of natural causes. There are many unmarked graves sites at several locations around the valley, a member of the Teton County Historical Society wrote me, including one up Flat Creek where Mr. Olsen homesteaded; and that bodies of deceased were frequently not brought into town in those days for burial, particularly if they had been found days after dying and decomposition had begun. Records showed that Olson had never purchased a grave. So – it appeared Olson’s burial site was lost forever.

BELOW – Olson’s death notice in the Nov. 23, 1922 issue of the Jackson Hole Courier.

In 2006 I met a young archeologist working for the Chugach National Forest, Seth DePasqual. At the time, he was researching the history of the old railroad work camps and road houses, especially the Alaska Railroad’s Grandview area for consideration as a National Historic District. He knew my work with Rockwell Kent but knew little about Olson. During one of our conversations, I learned he was from the Jackson Hole, Wyoming area. After his work in Alaska, he was heading back to Jackson Hole, so I asked him if he would look for Olson’s grave. The area where Olson settled is now part of the National Elk Refuge, and they had torn down most of the old ranch houses, I learned. Olson had lived and died along Flat Creek within the Wes Muirherin homestead, Seth discovered -- but he could find nothing about Muirherin or his homestead. Seth learned that a man named Ike Powell found Olson’s body.

BELOW – The man who found Olson’s body – Ike Powell – from the March 13, 1924 issue of the Jackson Hole Courier.

 Seth wrote me: It is my belief that Olson moved to town, befriended a man named Muiherin who had a homestead on Flat Creek, did some work for him, and eventually settled on the property.  Maybe as a ranch hand.  I think that since Muiherin didn't find him on his own accord, maybe Olson had been watching the place just before his death.  And since Ike Powell found him, I suspect that they lived on adjacent ranches.  Many of the town's founding fathers are located on the grounds…The impression gained from the obit is that Olson may have been buried on site; however, the truth is that he was brought into town for burial.  Likely done as part of the inquest mentioned in the obit.

Seth did learn that an inquest was held the day after Olson’s body was found, and he was buried the next day at Jackson's Aspen Hill Cemetery located near the ski resort on Snow King Hill.  It was winter when Seth learned this and all the low markers at the cemetery were covered with snow. In the spring, he returned and took photos of Olson’s grave. He placed a rock from Kenai Lake on the marker. The fact that Olson’s body was brought back to Jackson Hole, and buried with a marker at a cemetery where many of the town’s founders rest – may indicate that he was known and respected as a local pioneer.

ABOVE – Olson’s grave. Photo by Seth DePasqual. This is where Lars Matt Olson’s story comes to its end – at least for how. I’ve contacted the museum and historical society at Jackson Hole hoping to find more information. Olson probably brought with him several items -- personal possessions -- from Alaska to Vermont and then to Jackson Hole -- some that may have been connected to Rockwell Kent. These may have been drawings and/or a small painting. He may have had some of these items at his cabin at Jackson Hole when he died, including his journal. They may be listed as unidentified items at the museum. 

BELOW -- The only other local reference I’ve found about Olson ran in three weekly issues of the Jackson Hole Courier in April 1925. The one below is from the April 2 issue. Since Olson died without a will, there were legal matters to be settled regarding his homestead land.

When Rockwell and Rockie left Fox Island in mid-March 1919, Kent realized – as he wrote in Wilderness – that the idea of his quiet adventure will soon become in our memories like a dream or vision, a remote experience too wonderful, for the full liberty we knew there and the deep peace to be remembered or believed in as a real experience. His prediction had come true. In Vermont he lacked the best of that quiet adventure -- the full liberty, the deep peace, and the intense solitude. It was a struggle for him to recover and put into images and words the essence of those Fox Island days as he worked on his Alaska paintings and the book. It was indeed a battle with everything else happening in his life – but he had succeeded. In August, probably 1920, he wrote from Vermont to a friend, Here one is actually thrown back upon that damned thing Imagination. Literally one has to imagine that there is loveliness in the world, that all human beings are not physically deformed, slouch-gaited, dull-eyed, dead-souled…I don’t like it a bit, New England. He couldn’t transplant the Fox Island experience to the Green Mountains of Vermont. The nutrients of the New England soil, rich as they were, could not sprout that island life as it should be, serene and wholesome; love but no hate, faith without disillusionment, the absolute for the toiling hands of man and for his soaring spirit.

BELOW – Lars Olson in his Fox Island cabin with his goats. Photo by Rockwell Kent, courtesy of the Rockwell Kent Gallery, Plattsburgh State University, NY

Olson arrived in Vermont on July 1, 1920. He most likely left before the year ended. At the end of Wilderness, Kent had referred to him as Olson of the deep experience, strong, brave, generous and gentle like a child; and his island – like Paradise. Those words had been written many months earlier. For Kent now, a different life called that Autumn of 1920. When he left Alaska, he had planned to return to explore the Kenai Fjords coast, perhaps with Kathleen and the older children. His friends in Seward agreed to host Kathleen and the little ones. For many reasons he decided to explore new ground. For some time now, Tierra del Fuego and Cape Horn had been on his mind.

ABOVE -- Kent’s cove on Fox Island today. Photo courtesy of Kenai Fjords Tours.

BELOW – A view from the ruins of the Kent cabin. Capra photo.

Shortly after Kent returned from Alaska, he helped his composer friend, Carl Ruggles, by finding him work teaching music. One of the students was Mrs. Janet MacDonald Grace, wife of the shipping magnet Joseph P. Grace of Grace Lines. She soon ended the lessons. In an Aug. 26, 1966 letter to John Kirkpatrick (who was helping Ruggles organize his files), Kent wrote: Though I didn’t know Mrs. Grace, I volunteered to try to see her and urge her to continue the lessons. I recall talking with her, urgently, in her rose garden. I was asked to stay the night, and her husband having returned…My acquaintanceship with Grace led me eventually to asking him for passage to the Strait of Magellan on a Grace Line freighter and being signed on to the Curaca as an assistant freight clerk – with no duties and a titular salary of 256 a month, the same as that issued to the Captain’s wife, who was signed on as “stewardess,” with no duties but to share his bed with him. That trip I have recorded in my book, “Voyaging.” 

The last line of Wilderness echoes Kent’s mood at the time Olson leaves Vermont: Ah, God,- and now the world again! He is convinced he had become a new man on Fox Island, that an escape from the city to a distant, rural paradise will save his marriage. But his success now brings him back into the business of art, and its urban center. By 1922, the year Olson dies, Rockwell Kent is off on another adventure, escaping from his still troubled marriage and from The Gold Camp – his nickname for the city – the place where he can amass the money necessary to finance his escapes into the new risks and delights. By 1928, his success and fame are cemented, and he writes to Francis Lee, his second wife (March 19): I have turned into a machine for money making.

BELOW – Rockwell Kent’s drawing of the fox farm on Fox Island showing his cabin at right, the fox corrals and a goat shed in the center, and Olson’s cabin at left. From Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska.

"The Second Island"

by

Dereck Thomson

When we reached the island

it was evening

and we were at peace,

the sun lying down

under the sea’s quilt

and the dream beginning anew.

But in the morning

we tossed the cover aside

and in that white light

saw a loch in the island,

and an island in the loch,

and we recognized

that the dream had moved away from us again.

The stepping-stones are chancy

to the second island,

the stone totters

that guards the berries,

the rowan withers,

we have lost now the scent of the honeysuckle.

This poem, “The Second Island” by Derick Thomson is from “Real People in a Real Place,” in Towards the Human: Selected Essays by Iain Crichton Smith (1996). The poem was written in Gaelic and translated by the author.

NEXT ENTRY

SOME THOUGHTS 

THEN...

A SUMMARY OF ROCKWELL KENT’S LIFE FROM THE TIME OLSON

LEAVES VERMONT  UNTIL KENT RETURNS TO ALASKA IN 1935 ON A 

WORKS PROGRESS ADMINISTRATION (WPA) GRANT TO PAINT A MURAL.