Rockwell Kent "Wilderness" Centennial Journal

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 Before we get Kent and Rocky to Seward and their life on Fox Island, I want to go into more detail about his affairs, his concept of solitude, and how Rockie fits into the Alaska trip. Most accounts say that Kathleen objected and that Kent fought her and won. I think it’s more complicated, as the letters demonstrate. But first, let’s put this into a larger context. The Great War was like a glacier that advanced over the terrain and cleared away many old-world certainties. The seeds of these changes were planted in the years before the war with Darwin, Freud, Einstein and others. By 1918 as the war ended, many wondered if it had all been worth it with so many dead and wounded. The world-wide flu took many more lives. Women would soon get the national vote. Alaska and some other western states and territories had already done that. Prohibition seemed certain. Alaska had gone dry on January 1, 1918. Ot...

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL 100 YEARS LATER by Doug Capra © 2018 On August 1st 100 years ago Kent and Rocky rose early aboard the train. By 7:30 they were all dressed up and waiting to arrive in Vancouver for breakfast. "There we shall take the first steamer we can and go north to Skagway where we’ll probably change to another. But this is all guess work." That wasn't to be the case. Kent liked to travel with little planning. From his letters, it's clear that he rarely knew precisely what would happen next.  He wrote many letters on the train -- to his mother, to his wife Kathleen, to Carl Zigrosser, and especially to his lover back in New York, Hildegarde Hirsch. Kent's tiny handwriting script is difficult to read normally, but all the bumps and jolts on the train, which he noted, makes it all the more difficult. At this point he'd given up on getting his wife to join him in Alaska, so he turned that effort toward Hildegarde. "Wha...