The Call of the Wild and White Fang - Jack London [151]
Chapter V
1 . (p. 54) White River. Thornton’s camp is at the junction of the White and Yukon rivers, upstream from Dawson.
Chapter VI
1 . (p. 61) Circle City: In 1897, this was the last stop for one of seven postal routes in Alaska.
2 . (p. 64) Bonanza King: The term “king” was reserved for a prospector who struck it rich on a claim. The Bonanza King successfully prospected on Bonanza Creek, which was the location of one of the first, and richest, gold strikes.
3 . (p. 65) Mastodon King: The reference is to a successful prospector on Mastodon Creek in the Forty-Mile mining area.
4 . (p. 66) Skookum Benches: This is an area of the Klondike gold fields named after Skookum Jim, a Native American who discovered gold on a branch of the Klondike River. A bench is a terrace formed along the base of a mountain by unequal erosion or by mining.
Chapter VII
1 . (p. 70) Hudson Bay Company: One of the largest and most profitable fur trading companies in North America, Hudson’s Bay Company (not, as London calls it, Hudson Bay Company) by the 1830s had a virtual monopoly over trade in Canada from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
White Fang
Part Four, Chapter II
1 . (p. 212) Sour-doughs: This was a nickname for miners who had spent at least one year “inside” and had experienced the perils of a winter in a Yukon or Klondike mining camp. So-called because they used a sourdough mixture to make bread instead of the hard-to-obtain yeast favored by newcomers (chechaquos) to the region. London humorously describes the process of making sourdough bread in his short narrative “Housekeeping in the Klondike.”
Part Four, Chapter IV
1 . (p. 230) skin-fold: The description in the preceding pages of the battle between a wolf-dog and a bulldog caused London a good deal of trouble with President Theodore Roosevelt, a hunter and amateur naturalist. In an interview with Everybody’s Magazine in June 1907, Roosevelt called this passage the “very sublimity of absurdity.” In doing so, he initiated London into the great “nature-faking” controversy. Participants in this debate battled over how one could determine the “real” cause (instinct or reason) of nonhuman animal behavior and, by extension, how the actions, emotions, and thoughts of those animals could be expressed in literary texts. London responded to Roosevelt’s attack in a biting essay entitled “The Other Animals.” He resolves the charge against him simply: “It is merely,” he writes, “a difference of opinion.”
Part Five, Chapter I
1 . (p. 256) Sardanapalus: London uses this term as an oath. Sardanapalus was the mythical last King of Assyria (880 B.C.) who set himself, his wife, and his kingdom’s treasures on fire rather than face defeat by a rebel army.
Inspired by The Call of the Wild
and White Fang
Film Adaptations of the Novels
The spectacle of the snow-blanketed Yukon and the fervor of the Gold Rush of 1897 translate powerfully into film. Even so, no film—and there have been many, from as far afield as Russia, Italy, and Estonia—has succeeded in capturing the majesty and simplicity of London’s two greatest novels.
D. W. Griffith, the director best known for his 1915 film Birth of a Nation, first brought The Call of the Wild to the screen, in 1908, and Fred Jackman directed another film adaptation, also a silent, in 1923. The first Call of the Wild “talkie” hit the screen in 1935; director William Wellman, famous for his war epic Wings, gives this film the flavor of a Western and turns it into a romance story, with sparks flying across the frozen North between Clark Gable, playing the much-expanded Jack Thornton role, and Loretta Young. The screen-play relegates Buck the German shepherd to a secondary role, and the dog’s decision to follow the “call” at the end seems incidental to the plot.
Ken Annakin’s 1972 adaptation of The Call of the Wild, filmed in the rugged wilderness of Finland, opens with the wolf pack mauling and devouring caribou and never lets up in its attempt to convey a harsh struggle for survival, as well as the vitality of nature. Humans are portrayed