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  • “You Were Right, Old Hoss; You Were Right”: Jack London in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild
  • Caroline Hanssen

The opening chapter of Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild presents a dual epigraph, establishing Jack London’s formative role in the life of Chris McCandless: First, a quote from a graffito dated May 1992, declaring “Jack London is King,” allegedly carved by McCandless and signed with his alias, Alexander Supertramp. Below that, Krakauer includes an excerpt from Jack London’s White Fang, describing the severe physical landscape of “the Wild, the savage, frozen-hearted Northland Wild.”1 Interwoven into this account of a young man’s failure to survive an Alaskan quest, this juxtaposition highlights the irony of McCandless’ apparent appreciation of an author whose works for at least a century have warned against man’s hubris in nature in general and an accidental death in the subarctic wilderness in particular. Throughout his reconstruction of the events leading up to McCandless’ confounding demise, Krakauer repeatedly revisits his subject’s preoccupation with Jack London and the author’s Yukon stories. However, overshadowed by his own rugged adventurer persona and his personal disdain for London, Krakauer dims our reflection of London’s cautionary purpose and muddles any understanding of both Chris McCandless and the type of man who embarks on such an overly risky endeavor under the banner of self-discovery.

Published in 1996, Into the Wild revisits the final years of McCandless, who, upon graduating from Emory University, burned all his cash, donated his savings, and turned his back on his family in order to pursue a modern-day hobo lifestyle, traveling until his death two years later, in an abandoned bus along the Stampede Trail, outside of Healy, Alaska. Krakauer’s journalistic approach relies primarily on interviews with McCandless’ [End Page 191] family members, fellow tramps, and traveling acquaintances as well as candid excerpts from McCandless’ own journals and correspondence during much of his cross-country journey. To this historical sketch, Krakauer adds another dimension by recounting tales of other modern adventurers, including himself, who have sought personal transcendence in the farthest reaches of the American wilderness. By means of these indirect comparisons and selected testimony, Krakauer sheds oblique light on what may or may not have spurred McCandless to strike out against his upper-middle-class upbringing and embrace the ramshackle existence of a life on the road, one of both pavement and iron.

In 1990, before heading out to the Last Frontier, Chris McCandless sought to ready himself to the task by trekking across much of the southwestern United States. In addition to bumming rides, sleeping out, and scavenging food, McCandless sought intellectual inspiration from writers whose values he aspired to, namely Tolstoy, Thoreau, and London. Despite the incongruity of this chosen respite in light of his anti-capitalist leanings, McCandless settled for a while among the strip malls of Bullhead City, Arizona, where he forged a friendship with Jan Burres, a “rubber tramp” who states that McCandless “was big on the classics” and that “London was his favorite.” In his research, Krakauer indicates that McCandless read London voraciously and that he had been “infatuated with London since childhood”; in fact, several of London’s books were in the young man’s possession at his death. Specifically, according to Krakauer, McCandless “read and reread [London’s works],” namely The Call of the Wild, White Fang, “The Wit of Porportuk,” “An Odyssey of the North” and “To Build a Fire” (43–44). Although these literary tales are constructed along plot lines of heightened action, Franklin Walker emphasizes that all contain autobiographical elements from London’s Yukon expedition during the second Klondike Gold Rush.

Fascinated by the rekindled allure of the golden ore, London joined the stampede of miners headed to stake their claims in the Klondike. Arriving on the Alaskan coastline in August 1897, London spent ten days traversing the Chilkoot Pass, packing much of his fifteen-hundred pound outfit over the mountains before building a boat with which to bring himself and his companions four hundred miles downriver and through dangerous rapids. Once in the Klondike, London lived the life of a hard-rock miner, dwelling in a...

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