Rockwell Kent "Wilderness" Centennial Journal

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 Kent and Rocky quickly settled in to their life at Yakutat, although more and more it appeared to Kent that this was not the place for what he sought in Alaska. In later years, Rocky wrote little of the train and steamer trip, not that it wasn’t exciting. It just wasn’t as eventful as his stay at Yakutat. “We lived with the fishermen,” Rocky wrote in the Fall 2014 issue of The Kent Collector, “sleeping in bunks in the dormitory. Father was unhappy, grumbling to me about his bunk and grumbling to all about the food. He was especially contemptuous of a fellow boarder who covered his oatmeal with a quarter of an inch of sugar and added enough more to his coffee to make syrup. He told me that a man’s stupidity can be judged by the quantity of sugar he uses. Father’s unhappiness reached a zenith when he discovered that the gentleman in the neighboring bunk was pouring our tooth powder in his boots to hel...

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 “I can’t face the thought of the loneliness I’m going into…Can you come to Alaska with me?...Never did I enter upon any course with such a sense of necessity, of duty, as drives me into this Alaska trip.” Rockwell Kent in letters to his wife, Kathleen 100 YEARS AGO While aboard the Admiral Schley Kent wrote some letters, perhaps while in the ship’s salon where a picture of a “forgetful looking person” reminded him of that duty. “Yesterday was one of the most beautiful days imaginable,” he wrote to his friend, Carl Zigrosser, “ever so clear, so that the distant Rocky Mountains or the Cascade Range was visible. The islands fascinated him and the mountains were “most romantic and alluring with canyon and forest.” Rocky played on deck for hours by himself while Kent viewed the scenery and played his flute. It would be difficult work creating a home place in the Alaska wilderness, and Rocky wou...

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 "I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with it's hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins. Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands. I love this Northern nature, and I what love I must possess.” Letter to Dr. Christian Brinton in "Wilderness," p. xxxi Kent and his son overnighted in Seattle on Aug. 2, 1918. Rocky wasn't feeling too well, it was raining, and Kent wasn't impressed with the city. He wrote another long letter to Hildegarde:  "Rockie {sic} is here in the room with me, in bed, recovering from a little upset he has had. I must nurse him quietly back into shape for tomorrow night we start for the north. I’m under the weather, too just so much irregularity. Well my Sweetheart, there...

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 “Later in the century, painters of talent and vision would go north to stay. If many of them produced larger bodies of northern work than Kent, and in the end had a greater impact on the image of Alaska, none captured the spirit of the northern landscape with greater passion and clarity than Rockwell Kent.” Kesler E. Woodward in Painting the North: Alaskan Art in the Anchorage Museum of History and Art (1993) As we travel back 100 years ago today, Rockwell Kent and his eight-year-old son, Rocky, are also traveling – west -- riding a Canadian Pacific Railway train on their way to Alaska. “I was probably not overly excited,” Rocky remembered about the five-day trip. Moving from place to place was just part of life in the Kent family. He had little knowledge of Alaska, and there would be no school to miss. Kent believed, travel and home schooling was the best education for his children. Kent had be...