Conditions were desperate. Stories of malnutrition, drownings in quagmires under heavy loads, extreme cold and hunger-triggered insanity by Klondikersdesperate to strike it rich feature in many accounts of the period. Many took up employment with so-called ‘Klondike Kings,’ who monopolised areas rich in finds, and paid prospectors a wage to line their own pockets with gold.
After landing in Alaska, Jack London and his band of well-supplied prospectors navigated a series of perilous lakes and river rapids, through the Alaska Range to the Chilkoot Pass – where Alaska ended, and the Yukon began. This dreaded, snow-thick steepsometimes required up to 40 ascents and descents to move food and equipment toits top which a slum of exhausted Klondikers began to grow.
An image from a postage stamp commemorates the rigours of the gold rush that drew Jack London north – and led to stories such as To Build a Fire, The Call of the Wild and The White Silence.
Photograph by Peregrine, Alamy
Dawson City became gold rush city in the final years of the 19th century. The dichotomy of endless winter night and constant summer daylight, coupled with the exhaustion and malnutrition of many prospectors, led to reports of widespread insanity – as immortalised in stories by London, and the poetry of Robert W Service.
Photograph by Asahel Curtis, Wikimédia Commons
A prospectors' map, published in a guide for Klondikers, c. 1898.
Photograph by Wikimédia Commons
Staking out a 500ft area at the side of the Stewart River, Jack London returned to Dawson City to file his claim. Hisdowntime in the smoky, character-rich saloons of the 'gold rush city' were a warm contrast to the hardships of digging for gold in a wretched, freezing riverbank –and it’s here the seeds were cast for many of the characters of thebooks to come. TheseincludedaSt Bernard-collie mongrelnamed ‘Jack’belonging to two brothers he had met –who allowed London to camp beside their cabin. The dog’s owner, Marshall Bond, would write of his tenant that he “had an appreciative and instant eye for fine traits, and honoured them in a dog as he would in a man.”
The Chilkoot Trail in 1898. This led to its namesake pass –which was the biggest test for equipment-laden prospectors hoping to access the Yukon's gold fields. Of 100,000 would-be Klondikers who set off for the Yukon, only an estimated 30,000 made it.
Eventually a combination of malnutrition and lean pickings led London to return to California after 11 months in the Yukon. He later wrote ‘I brought nothing back from the Klondike but my scurvy’, though this wasn’t quite true. His intense experiences in Canada and his decision to escape the ‘work trap’ by trying to earn a living as a writer combined,yielding several short stories dealing with existential and elemental themes on the stage of the uncompromising far north. “It was in the Klondike that I found myself.” he later wrote. “There nobody talks. Everybody thinks. There you get your perspective. I got mine.”
Characters London met in the north became characters in his stories –andin 1903, the turn came for Marshall Bond’s dog. ‘Jack’ became ‘Buck’ – the stolen Californian mutt that travels north to work as a sled dog, and is the lead character in what would become London’s first great literary triumph. Buoyed by good reviews and sell-out copy sales,TheCall of the Wildwas published in 1903 to instant success.
Dawson City today retains much of its old-world charm –and all of its atmosphere of being an elemental outpost of the far north. There is a Jack London square, and visitors can view the author's old cabin, relocated to the city from the banks of the Stewart River.
Photograph by Pjworldtour, Alamy
‘Ahead of his time’
Jack London was married to teacher Bess Maddern in 1900, and the couple had two daughters. In 1904, London embarked on a sortie as a war correspondent, filing reports from the Japan-Russian conflict for the San Francisco Examiner. Travelling to Japan on the SS Siberia, London found himself in a cohort ofhard-drinking journalists known as ‘the Vultures,’ which included correspondents from the New York Herald and The Times.
His dispatches were controversial, and were seen by some to fuel fear and bias against rising Asian powers against the west and attest to London’s own racial bias –even white-supremacist sympathies.A committed socialist from his days in Coxey’s Army, London’s stance on race have been interpreted inconsistently – with leading biographer Earle Labor describing London’s views as ‘a bundle of contradictions.’
Jack London (fifth from left) and 'The Vultures' – a team of war reporters sent to correspond on the Russian-Japanese conflict in 1904, pictured on the SS Siberia.
However, later analysis of London’s dispatches from the Japanese-Russian war byDaniel A.Métrauxin the Asia Pacific Journal argued that London was in fact the opposite – a perceptive liberal who empathised with the underdog and prophesised later conflict.“A close examination of London’s writing shows… he was ahead of his time intellectually and morally,“ wroteMétraux, describing his dispatches from the war as “balanced and objective reporting, evincing concern for the welfare of both the average Japanese soldier and Russian soldier and the Korean peasant, and respect for the ordinary Chinese whom he met.“ London would later write the futuristic story The Unparalleled Invasion (1910), which depicted the annihilation of China by an malicious west.In her analysis of London’s short fiction,Jeanne Campbell Reesman described the story – set in 1975 – as ‘a strident warning against race hatred and its paranoia, and an alarm sounded against an international policy that would permit and encourage germ warfare.’
Call of the Wild (1903) was London's first commercial success, telling the story of a dog that leaves humans to return to its primal roots. White Fang (1906), the follow up, inverted the dynamic, while The Sea Wolf (1904) was based on London's time on a seal-hunting boat in the northern Pacific.
London’s work both traversed and transcended his own experiences – with some of his most acclaimed work relatively obscure. “London wrote dozens of top-notch short stories. ‘A Piece of Steak,’‘Koolau the Leper',and ‘South of the Slot’ (all 1909) are three excellent examples,” says Kenneth Brandt, Professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design, and editorof The Call, the magazine of the Jack London Society.. “He once claimed thatThe People of the Abyss(1903), an exposé of the impoverished conditions in London’s East End, was the favourite of his works. Posing as a homeless man, London went undercover to [research] the book first-hand.”
The call of the ocean
With a steady income and worldwide acclaim, London could afford to indulge two of his steering interests: the land, and the sea. Following the collapse of his first marriage in 1904, London had married Charmian Kittredge, and in 1906 commissioned a custom-designed 55ft ketch calledThe Snark –named after Lewis Carroll’s nautically flavoured nonsense poem. The construction of thisboat illuminates London’s adventurous and ultimately unwise attitude towards investment: of the ballooning cost of theSnark– $30,000 (£23,000)versus an original budget of $7,000 (£5,000), in a San Francisco still reeling from the 1906 earthquake – London wrote simply “I signed the cheques and I raised the money.”
London and his second wife Charmian on the Snark, 1907.
Photograph by Pictorial Press LTD, Alamy
Despite the boat’s modest size, he intended to sail The Snark around the world on a multi-year expedition. An article in July 1907’sPopular Mechanicsmagazine reported that London was about to spend ‘seven years looking for trouble’ on the vessel, before adding that it was equipped with every modern convenience and ‘a small arsenal of shotguns, rifles, revolvers and one rapid-fire gun.’ He later penned an account of the voyage, The Cruise of the Snark (1911) – and hisSouth Sea Tales(1911), a collection of short stories written about the voyage, is considered one of London’s finest works.
The tone of thePopular Mechanicsstory suggests the public persona of London as an extravagant, adventuring hell-raiser in the mould Ernest Hemingway would later fill. London was certainly adventurous, and not just in his investments: the first half of theSnark's voyage, from San Francisco to Hawaii,wasa melee of contaminated fuel tanks, a leaking hull, storms, DIY dentistry, bad navigation and voyages into the territory of alleged cannibals.The adventureended prematurely in Australia when London developed,as just one of a combination of ailments,yaws –a crippling skinconditionthat prevented him from his contractual writing duties aboard. Fever, a sloughing of his skin, rapid thickening of his nails and all-over psoriasis,it was feared hehad leprosy; five weeks in an Australian hospital werefollowed by five months convalescing in a hotel. Medical staff were stumped – and only a return to California cured him. London himself described it as a ‘happy, happy, voyage.’
Jack London at the wheel of his 55ft ketch, The Snark, 1907.
“Fever, a sloughing of his skin, rapid thickening of his nails and all-over psoriasis, it was feared he had leprosy. London himself described it as a 'happy, happy voyage.'”
‘A variety of identities’
London’s optimistic attitude towards The Snark's nautical escapades perhaps says a lot about his character as one who thrived on adventure and all its collective experiences,rather than one who went looking for trouble.“He wanted it all, craved a bunch of everything, and seemed able to inhabit a variety of identities at once: professional writer, gold rusher, socialist, sailor, bohemian, swashbuckler, political agitator, farmer, surfer, journalist. The list goes on,” says Brandt.“London had an extremely fertile imagination and was remarkably energetic and efficient.”
His love of what he described as a ‘return to the soil’ led him to purchase, by piecemeal over the course of his career, what would become a 1400-acre swathe of land in Glen Ellen in the hills above Oakland, California. Here he ran a farm, managed land and built ‘Wolf House,’ a grand 26-room property featuring a 760-ft library and built of local redwood and stone that was to be the home for London and his wife.
But London’s dream of a romantic and sequestered life in the house he hoped would ‘stand for a thousand years’ life was dealt a cruel hand on the night of August 22, 1913, when workers on the ranch noticed a glow in the sky. Wolf House was ablaze –and everything except the house’s stone walls was destroyed. The couple’s possessions had just been transferred into the house, and they were due to move in imminently. Arriving at the blaze by horseback, there was nothing they could do but watch.
The night had been hot, but calm – and the uncanny timing and no obvious cause led Charmian London to write that it was an ‘indisputable fact that it was set afire by some enemy.’ Many rumours circulated in the aftermath, and many suspects suggested, from disgruntled ranch hands, to resentful neighbours, to Charmian herself, enraged and aggrieved by her husband’s dedication to the build.
No cause for the fire was discovered until 1995,when an investigation by forensics analyst Bob Andersonpointed to self-heating and spontaneous combustion of a pile of cotton rags soaked in linseed oil – probably left by careless cabinet-makers – likely led to the house’s loss.
The personal investment in the property,both financial and emotional,was considerable. Charmian wrote that the loss of the house ‘killed something in Jack.’
