Let’s not think unidimensionally about scoundrelism, scalawags, miscreants…
Back in 2013 I imagined that I knew what a scoundrel was. Now, after considering a few
dozen candidates, settling on one definition or a good/evil divide, or even a
positive/negative score that rates all candidates fairly seems more elusive than ever.
Some people conflate “scoundrel” with the superficially similar-sounding “scandal.”
1. A publicized incident that brings about disgrace or offends the moral sensibilities of
society: a drug scandal that forced the mayor's resignation.
2. A person, thing, or circumstance that causes or ought to cause disgrace or outrage: a
politician whose dishonesty is a scandal;
3. Damage to reputation or character caused by public disclosure of immoral or grossly
improper behavior; disgrace.
4. Talk that is damaging to one's character; malicious gossip.
“Scoundrel” is a word that defies word-origin sleuths. Olde Scots? Medieval French? We
don’t know where it came from. In legalese, such ill-documented, ambiguous loan-words or
immigrants to the English language are unlikely to hold up as evidence for libelous or illfounded accusations of any kind.
So let us bravely enjoy ambiguities and intrigues of northern history’s scoundrels. I haven’t
found a “purely” positive nor a “purely” negative scoundrel yet.
1
Let’s compare several lives and several biographic treatments of those lives. We’ve had a
good run at Judge James Wickersham from both his admirers and detractors. His principal
biographer was Evangeline Atwood (1979).
By contrast, we have not really considered either of two great rebellious geologists of the
20th century in this course on scoundrels in northern history. Bretz’s Flood by John
Soennichsen (2008) captures the sequences of thought processes that sustained J Harlen
Bretz through his stormy (and long) career as a field geologist and faculty member, mostly
at the University of Chicago.
James Wickersham needs no apology for qualifying as a candidate for “scoundrel in
northern history.”
Bretz needs my defense, because he was firmly a lifelong resident of the contiguous United
States. But his passionate interest centered around glaciological phenomena during the
waning years of the Last Glacial Maximum of the Pleistocene, when continental ice sheets
terminated near the U. S. border with Canada in a number of today’s smaller states.
2
Although I was not smart enough to get Excel to graphically analyze the connection
between autobiography and biography, a solution for doing so occurred to me some days
after I first tried and failed. All 15 of Atwood’s citations of Old Yukon are made between
Chapter 9 and Chapter 20. Furthermore, there were no other 1938-dated citations in those
11 Chapters. So it proved easy to highlight those 15 citations, and with vertical arrows
(here in red) compare them to the timelines of Atwood’s other 530 citations of primary
sources. Just as they should, these vertical arrows point to 1900 and 1908-9, the span of
years covered in Old Yukon.
Two observations:
1. Wickersham clearly would have liked to write and publish additional volumes covering
his legislative and later years, but his eyesight was failing in the last year of his life, and he
simply could not go on writing.
2. Biographers are wise to use autobiographies sparingly. Diaries are a much more credible
source of un-self-serving or un-doctored commentary on events, and Evangeline Atwood
used diarist Wickersham’s unpublished daily notes very heavily.
3
This, for a certain kind of book, is something like diagramming a sentence, if anyone
remembers that lost grammatical art and teaching tool.
I have become fascinated by scoundrels during my work on this OLLI course, and
necessarily, each significant scoundrel deserves to be treated by at least one scholarly
biography. Here’s my idiosyncratic analysis of M.J. Kirchoff ‘s (2007) attempted biography
of Jack Dalton by. In June of 2016, I had never heard of Jack Dalton, nor of this book, for
which I paid $40.00 at the Sheldon Museum in Haines AK.
Kirchoff’s biography is a tour de force. He cites in his chapter footnotes 748 individual
statements, drawn from mostly dated articles, letters, books, court records, mining claims,
newspaper accounts and internet sources for his 245-page book on JD. That tremendous
amount of research, and Kirchoff’s travels to archives from Fairbanks to Washington D.C.
are explained in part by Jack Dalton’s cryptic behavior. He shunned being photographed,
declined to be recorded or written about whenever he could, and wrote only very sparingly a
few thoughts in letters until late in his life. Most of a ninety years had elapsed since Dalton
and his third wife left Alask by the time Kirchoff set out to try to write Dalton’s definitive
biography. Kirchoff makes abundant use of secondary sources post-dating Dalton’s death in
1944.
This graphic interpretation becomes more interesting when compared with real or imagined
biographies of others: Mad Trapper, Soapy Smith, Wickersham, Gruening.
4
Mark Kirchhoff modestly conceded that he had failed to write a complete biography of Jack
Dalton. I disagree with that modesty, because I don’t believe that anyone could have done
better than Kirchoff, given the deliberate obscurity of the first one-third of Jack Dalton’s
life. Further, I note Kirchoff’s subtle salute—as author--to the subject of his book, found on
the inside back dustjacket panel of the biography.
How long since anyone here has seen a gentleman “doff his hat” as a sign of respect?
5
In the case of John Soennichsen’s 2008 biography of Bretz, there was an amply useful
autobiographical account by Bretz (Memories: Some recollections of a Geologist on
Entering his 90th Year) Parts I, II, II and an addendum, privately printed, Homewood IL
1972-74.
Bretz’s long life made grasping his various stages of thinking difficult for a biographer. On
the other hand, Bretz’s familial descendants probably off set this challenge by offering
many recollections from those stages.
6
We can trace International Polar Years (IPY) since 1881 with other processes and events
related to Alaska. IPY I and IPY II were 50 years apart, as planned. But then, WWII wiped
out so much of the data and international cooperation achieved by IPY II, the visionary
organizers of global science decided to hasten IPY III into a new hurry-up mode, and into
mold of geophysical –hence International Geophysical Year of 1957-1959. Then, of course,
IPY IV returned to a 50-year return, in 2007-2009.
Right around IPY I’s startup in 1880, two tough-minded scientists were born: Alfred L.
Wegener in Germany, and J Harlen Bretz in the U.S. Wegener lived for 50 years until an
accident or heart failure claimed his life on the Greenland Ice Cap, whereas Bretz lived to
be almost twice as old, until old age won out over his often-cussed independent thinking.
Wegener died, thinking that his great theory of “Continental Drift” was destined to be
disbelieved, perhaps disproven.
Coincidentally, the key years of reactions to both Bretz’s and Wegener’s introductions of
new paradigms took place roughly in the same 40-year range, 1925 to 1965
7
“Scientific research by its nature leaves an ample paper trail. But in their own way,
scientific papers are as incomplete as any political or social records. While they recount the
evidence and arguments at stake they omit much of what is of human interest: how people
came to their discoveries and insights and how they felt about them…” Naomi Oreskes
(2003) xii.
The myths: a) that there is a universal scientific method; and b) that scientists think and
unfold their investigations as methodically as implied in this idealized outline of a scientific
paper…in a word? Fantasy. Admittedly an ideal, but rarely how the real world works.
There is ample room for fraud and deception in carrying out scientific research. Famous
deceptions include Britain’s “Piltdown Man” scandal, Germany’s self-deceived
cartographer, August Petermann, Britain’s rogue psychologist who misrepresented IQ tests
of identical twins (Sir Cyril Burt) and so on.
But, warts and all, scientific inquiry can be compared to democratic government ideals, as
in the words of Winston Churchill.
8
These analyses are complementary as much as they are competitive. Each of the camps has
a different emphasis, and they probably took various gestation times for good reasons, even
if I don’t fully grasp those reasons.
Menard (published 1986; = 1967 + 19 yr) had retired from a distinguished,
high-profile, lavishly funded, scientific career among top-notch scientists from leading
research institutions in Europe, North America, and Asia, whose intellectual contributions
were mainly concentrated in the decades from the mid-1930s to the mid 1960s, and which
perhaps necessarily included the WW II years (1939-1945). Most of these scientists spent
most of their field time at sea, teasing clues from the sea floors of the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans.
The series of retrospective analyses by John Nance, Brian Atwater, and
George Plafker (published 1988-2012 or 1967 + 21 to 45 yr). Their emphases were all
directed toward the field verifications of Plate Tectonic Theory by seismologists and related
disciplines involved in analyzing catastrophic events related to earthquakes, tsunamis,
turbidity plumes, and volcanic eruptions. Our own OLLI class on the 1964 Alaska
Earthquake agreed with Nance, Atwater, and Plafker, on the significance of the Alaska
Earthquake in bringing about acceptance of Plate Tectonics.
Naomi Oreskes and co-authors published two major works in 1999 and 2003
(1967 +32 and +36 yr). Their focus was to wonder retrospectively what took western
scientists so long to drop its collective, chiefly academic, resistance to continental drift and
to global tectonic theory.
9
It is useful to compare the outcomes of two scientists’ careers whose lives started at about
the same time, and whose ideas were equally unorthodox in similar time frame.
Wegener and J Harlen Bretz were born within two years one another (1880 and 1882). Each
began to espouse a counter-current notion of how to explain his observations, just before
World War I broke out.
J Harlen Bretz concerned himself with a more geographically discrete puzzle than did
Alfred Lothar Wegener. Rather than fitting all the continents together, Bretz confronted
what appeared to him overwhelming evidence over the eastern half of Washington State that
one or more horrendous, catastrophic floods or cataclysms had savagely torn away soils that
should have built up as they had everywhere else in the Pacific Northwest, just south of
Pleistocene continental ice sheets.
As an undergraduate at the Methodist school, Albion College, Bretz discovered his
irreverence toward church doctrine. The student editor of the college newspaper was a
pious believer. Bretz could not resist a joke on him. Posing as a Methodist minister, Bretz
wrote a letter to the editor, seeking help to interpret the inscription on an urn supposedly
excavated recently in the “Holy Land.” The editor published images of an urn, and of the
inscription in an issue of the Albion student paper. Only after it was in print did the editor
“get” the joke that had been played on his credibility.
10
Bretz, christened “Harley” resisted following his father into farming, instead
cultivating (rather spectacularly!) an interest in natural sciences, parlayed through gaining
admission to Albion College at the tardy age of 20. And Harley loved college life,
absorbing many interests and sorts of pursuits. Among those heady pursuits was the love of
his life, Fanny. Harley would have chased Fanny, the artist and woman, into a profession
as a religious missionary, if necessary. That, according to his biographer, Soennichsen.
After college and marriage, Fanny and Harley migrated westward to Seattle,
where Harley took a position at Franklin High School as a Biology instructor. After three
years of that, Harley’s relentless curiosity about the way that Planet Earth functions, had
converted him from Biology to Geology, particularly to a fascination with the pervasive
influence of ice on the landscapes of Washington State during the latest “Glacial Maxima”
of the Pleistocene, or Ice Age(s).
In fact, Bretz had roamed and studied the glacially-affected surface features
of northern and western Washington so thoroughly, that he had the outline of what would
become his Ph.D. dissertation all laid out—and pieces already published– in periodical
literature by the time he entered the University of Chicago as a grad student in 1912. He had
renamed himself J Harlen Bretz, as it sounded more scholarly and dignified than “Harley.”
While in Seattle, Bretz spent time poring over new topographic maps as soon as they were
issued by the U.S. Geological Survey local offices. In 1910, one such newly issued map was
that of Potholes Coulee. According to his biographer, Bretz was deeply intrigued by the
non-sensical features of the map.
11
Bretz raced through his University of Chicago graduate school experience, completing his
doctoral work and graduating in scarcely more than two years. He was driven as much by
the need for a well-paying geology position for Fanny and himself as he was sheer
brilliance.
And Bretz secured a teaching position at the University of Washington in
short order. That position proved a big disappointment, because none of his faculty
colleagues at the time were as smitten as he was with field studies—the Geology
Department was grounded on recitation of theory and textbook dogma of the day, rather
than on conducting new and original research. Within a year, Fanny and J Harlen were
headed back to the University of Chicago, where Bretz settled into a life of teaching,
conducting strenuous field research programs with both undergraduate and graduate
students, building a home, having children…
Legend has it, however, that Bretz’s initial wonderment over the puzzling
topographic map of Potholes Coulee stuck with him. Perhaps the legend is correct, but in
any case, the unresolved contradictions of the Potholes Coulee make a good entrée for
studying the anatomy of the heretical ideas that distinguished Bretz’s long career in earth
sciences.
12