The Final Frontiersman by James Campbell

Author:James Campbell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2005-10-19T21:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 7

Back-to-Nature Boys

In 1975, when Heimo Korth left Wisconsin, leaving behind everything and everybody he knew, he was answering a universally familiar call—the yearning to escape home. When he went to Alaska, he put a uniquely American spin on the theme of escape. Mythologies are relevant to all countries, and in America none has been more enduring than the notion that in wilderness a person can escape the reins and restrictions of an insipid and often corrupt society and re-create himself in the boundlessness of the natural world.

Daniel Boone, America’s protowoodsman, escaped his father’s brutal beatings by fleeing periodically to the woods. By the time he was in his midteens, he was already known as one of the most accomplished woodsmen in the Pennsylvania wilderness. The first of all the mountain men, John Colter, left Virginia for Kentucky in 1803 to join Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery. Nearly three years later, when the expedition was on its way back St. Louis, Colter parted ways with Lewis and Clark and returned to the wilderness that he loved. Jim Bridger was bonded to a blacksmith in St. Louis, Missouri. When his five years were nearly up, a notice appeared in the Missouri Republican: Major Andrew Henry and Colonel William Ashley needed “one hundred young men” to join their Rocky Mountain Fur Company and its 1822 expedition to the headwaters of the Missouri River. At the age of eighteen, Bridger signed on and became the most famous of all the Rocky Mountain trapper-explorers.

In America, the belief that wilderness can serve as an antidote to civilization, as a place of freedom and personal renewal, gave birth to a new and revolutionary literature, an authentically American narrative. When Henry David Thoreau escaped Concord and retired to Walden Pond to lead by example and live as an anchorite in the woods, demanding that people start their lives anew, he was not only passing judgment on the society of Concord, he was consciously enacting a peculiarly American story. When young American men, and women, both real and fictional, left home, they escaped to the wilderness to lose and, subsequently, find themselves. Ernest Hemingway’s Nick Adams returns home from the war and seeks refuge in the woods of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. A.B. Guthrie’s Boone Caudill takes off for the Wild West after having it out with his father. Molly Gloss’s Lydia Sanderson heads to the Oregon frontier following the death of her husband. Hoping to escape the “damp, drizzly November” in his soul, Herman Melville’s Ishmael flees Manhattan and then New Bedford and goes not to the woods but to another wilderness—the sea.

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