Page 18 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

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es, Buck was based on your dog at Dawson,” Jack
London wrote in 1903 to Marshall Bond of the Form
of 1884, confirming the lineage of the canine pro-
tagonist in The Call of the Wild.
Drawn to Canada’s Yukon to take part in the Klondike
Gold Rush, Marshall and his older brother Louis (Form of
1883) first encountered London in 1897, when the future
novelist and a prospecting partner, looking “unkempt and
forbidding,” set up a tent near the Bonds’ cabin and,
Marshall wrote later, “asked to be allowed to put up their
provisions in our cache for the time being, to keep them
from the depredations of predatory Malamoot dogs,
whose underfed condition kept them constantly on the
lookout for an opportunity for theft, and from light-
fingered marauders of our own breed.” A long friend-
ship began one night, as London, “a confusing blur of
cap, mackinaw, and moccasins,” revealed himself to be
“incomparably the most alert man in the room.”
“Some of us had been educated and drilled into a goose
Gold Dust a
step of conventionalism,” wrote Bond. “Here was a man
whose life and his thoughts were his own.”
Marshall Bond’s reflections, and his long correspon-
dence with Fourth Rector Samuel Drury, reveal a man no
less adventurous and no more a “goose stepper” than the
seafaring author London – and someone infinitely more
modest and, possibly, a more accomplished prose stylist.
Louis and Marshall were the sons of a lawyer, specula-
tor, and – when the boys were born in the mid-1860s –
federal judge in Virginia. In 1875, Judge Bond sent his
sons to the Gunnery, a boarding school in Connecticut.
A letter home from Louis indicates his brother’s inde-
pendent spirit (and his own independent use of English):
“My dear Papa, when Marshall goes skating he thinks
he can do as he pleases if I tell him to do what is wright
he does what is wrong you know that you told him to
mind me…after you had gone he told me that he was not
agone to mind me he said that he did not care what you
said about minding me. . . . ”
Discovering little wealth in the gold fields, alumnus Marshall Bond
found rich consolation in his friendship with Fourth Rector Samuel Drury.
by Michael Matros
“Y