• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2969 0

Benton was painting huge murals about American life in the 1930s, receiving commissions from, for example, the Missouri state capitol and the Chicago World’s Fair. Marshall saw Arctic Village as his prose mural of one Alaskan frontier town, where everybody was his or her own master. Ancient peoples lived in perfect harmony with guys from Brooklyn and Philadelphia in search of freedom. Old sourdoughs from the Klondike gold rush of 1898 used to come over to Marshall’s cabin to drink beer and play records like “Ol’ Man River” and Hungarian Rhapsody on the turntable. Outside the wind might roar in seeming harmony with each crescendo. Moose stew and caribou steaks were favorite dishes. Homegrown turnips and potatoes were ladled out in heaping mounds from serving bowls. The midnight sun provided marvelous growing weather for certain vegetables, allowing farmers to produce giant cabbages weighing up to eighty or ninety pounds.

Political banter in Wiseman was usually aimed at the folly of Madison Avenue slicksters and the thieves at the House of Morgan. There were conversations about the Ku Klux Klan, the New York Yankees, agricultural prices, sexual escapades, and the mating habits of seals—nothing was off-limits. There was some decidedly populist bias against elites of any shape or form. There was an ingrained distrust of big government. “If them bastards would cut out some of their battleships and spend the money for aviation research,” the gold seeker Vernon Walts complained, “we wouldn’t have to finance people like the Guggenheims to give money to it.”26

To honor his friends in Wiseman, Marshall started naming topographical wonders after them. Over time, U.S. Geological Survey maps accepted 164 place-names that he had conjured up in the Koyukuk region. In a fit of community patriotism Marshall named beautiful features Big Joe Creek, Ernie Creek, Harvey Mountain, Holmes Creek, Jack Creek, Kupuk Creek, Snowden Creek, and so on. Whatever trepidation his newfound friends had about this PhD from Baltimore asking questions about their sex lives and hunting habits vanished when they learned of the permanent high honor Marshall had accorded them in the Rand McNally atlas.

But Marshall’s biotic journals from his expedition of July–August 1931 exploring the Alatna and John rivers are most treasured by outdoors types. Using a compass and old field guides, Marshall, accompanied by Ernie Johnson, carefully inventoried the mountain walls along the Arctic Divide. The serious-minded, scientific side of Marshall seemed to evaporate amid such magnificence. Pausing at Loon Lake—which he named because of the high concentration of Arctic loons—Marshall scribbled enthusiastic notes, which were published posthumously in Alaska Wilderness (1956). “Nothing I had seen, Yosemite or the Grand Canyon or Mount McKinley rising from Susitna, had given me such a sense of immensity as this virgin lake lying in a great cleft in the surface of the earth with mountain slopes and waterfalls tumbling from beyond the limits of visibility,” he wrote. “We walked up the right shore among bare rocks intermingled with meadows of bright lichen, while large flocks of ducks bobbed peacefully and unmindful of us on the water of the lake, and four loons were singing that rich, wild music which they added to the beautiful melodies of earth. No sight or smell or feeling even remotely hinted of men or their creations. It seemed as if time had dropped away a million years and we were back in a primordial world.”27

IV

Nobody has written about the beautiful desolation of the central Brooks Range with the love that Bob Marshall brought to Arctic Village (and later Alaska Wilderness). To Marshall, his time spent in the central Brooks Range, where clouds wrapped the serried peaks, was like witnessing all the snows of yesteryear in a single jaw-dropping glance. Even the best cameras couldn’t capture the wavy glow of the northern lights. The sky could turn from cold gray to a huge shimmering curtain of flashes within an hour. The air was rent with silence. The frosty dew along