Page 19 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

19
d Cigars
There is some question about whether Marshall was
expelled from the Gunnery, but, in 1880, the judge sent
the two brothers to St. Paul’s. In 1883, Marshall and his
roommate, Marion Ward Chanler (Form of 1885), entered
into a contest to see which could consume more of the
Turkish delight candy sent to Chanler by his grandfather,
Samuel Ward (his other grandfather was John Jacob
Astor). Marshall lost the contest, but he survived his
opponent, who died from eating too much of the candy.
The brothers graduated from Yale, and Marshall earned
a master’s degree in mining from Stanford. Then it was
on to the Klondike for them both.
Marshall’s letters from the Yukon, just over the Canadian
border from Alaska, confirm the most unlikely Gold Rush
tales of fortunes dug up and spent, of fighting the cold in
moose-skin parkas, in which “we look like two cows on
their hind legs,” and of raucous and violent Wild West
mining towns. In the town of Dawson, in the Dominion
Saloon (where the bartender “was quite a gentleman and
a graduate of Oxford”), the Bonds encountered Mukluk
Maud, who “put her foot on the brass rail and said,
‘Come on, boys, and have a drink,’ ordering champagne
for the crowd. Champagne was selling in the dance hall
for $40 a pint, and the bill came to $200, which she paid
from a moose-skin sack of gold dust.”
“The saloons and dance halls offered heat and light,
companionship, women, liquor, and music,” Bond wrote
in his journal. “They were the clubs of the community,
were well patronized, kept most men from going insane,
and demoralized and ruined a few. It is hard to imagine
what the dreary winter of 1897-98 would have been
without them. The comfortable urban moralist is in no
position to censure or pass judgment upon either men
or women so situated. The Yukon was a world unto itself,
Marshall Bond (l.) with his dog, Jack, and fellow prospectors
in the Klondike (1898). The dog was the inspiration for
Jack London’s fictional “Buck” in The Call of the Wild.
PHOTO: YALE COLLECTION OF AMERICAN LITERATURE, BEINECKE RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY