Page 20 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

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an American Siberia where our avarice,
ambition, or love of adventure had
condemned us to exile.”
The Klondike adventure was just
as perilous as the young brothers had
hoped, its hazards and humor later
described in Gold Hunter, the biography
that Marshall Bond Jr. ’27 wrote about his
father. Of the Yukon’s dangerously icy White
Horse and Squaw Rapids, which Louis and Marshall
successfully navigated, we learn about the loss of men
“because of poorly constructed boats or overloading.”
“Some curious cargoes, however, went through un-
scathed,” writes Marshall Jr., “one of the most unusual
being a boatload of cats which were sold in Dawson
for an ounce of gold apiece. Vermin there had reached
alarming proportions.”
The excitement of the adventure was not matched by
material gain. In his final Klondike letter to his parents,
Marshall wrote about the disposition of the only $1,000
he would bring home: “Deducting father’s one-third [the
judge had bankrolled the trip] and expenses out of the
country, I shall have less than I could have made at home
playing marbles or shooting craps.”
Soon after Marshall’s return, his father offered to buy
the Seattle Post Intelligencer newspaper if his son would
“settle down and take over the editorship.”
“Marshall, however, was so imbued with dreams of
gold and high adventure,” writes his son, “that he spurned
the offer.”
Obviously the failure to find riches in the Klondike did
not discourage him from other prospecting ventures, as
the title of his biography indicates. A sensational strike
in the aptly named town of Goldfield took Bond to Nevada,
where he supported his gold hunting with accounts of
the scene for the San Francisco Bulletin and the Seattle
Pacific Tribune.
“That Godliness is an unattainable condition for every
mining camp is a widespread belief,” he wrote in a dispatch
for the Bulletin, “and for most camps the next ranking
virtue, cleanliness, has been found equally difficult.”
Gold Hunter is not a conventionally tedious family
chronology but a well-written tale filled with fortunes
gained and lost, exotic personalities, and perilous esca-
pades. It is rich with the elder Bond’s letters and journals,
as it details adventures ranging from wrangling longhorn
cattle with Louis north from Texas to hunting voyages
down the Colorado River (lengthy expeditions often in-
cluded Marshall’s wife, Amy) to delivering horses to the
U.S. Cavalry in the Philippines during the Spanish-Amer-
ican War, to responding to Teddy Roosevelt’s request to
help create a colony in Mexico for Boer refugees from
the fighting in South Africa. Following a 1927 African
expedition that took him from Cairo to Capetown and
included shooting two lions that were terrorizing a
village in the Belgian Congo, Bond sailed to England to
meet his family, presumably including the biography’s
author, but “was so ill with malaria and amoebic dysentery
that they took him to the French Riviera where, at the
villa of his classmate Richard M. Hurd (Form of 1883),
he gradually regained his health.”
In 1919, Bond began what would become an almost
20-year correspondence with the incumbent St. Paul’s
Rector, Samuel Drury. Writing from his home in Santa
Barbara, he asked, “Not knowing who is the proper person
to send it I am enclosing to you my cheque for $25 with
the request, and hope, that my second son – Marshall Jr.
– may be allowed to enter St. Paul’s in Sept. 1921.”
That fall, Bond’s older son, Richard, was already en-
rolled at St. Paul’s. In an October letter, Drury wrote
Marshall: “This morning I have had a little talk with Dick,
who tells me that he is finely. Unlike the unjust steward
in scripture, he plans to show compassion on little Dick
Hurd, who seems to him to look rather unhappy.” (“Little
Dick” Hurd ’24, son of Marshall’s formmate, and his
brother Clement ’26, illustrator of Goodnight Moon ,
constituted part of a lengthy procession of SPS Hurds).
The main purpose of Drury’s October letter was to ask
advice about the most favorable location in California for
his family to spend a six-month sabbatical and “what in
your judgment is the best route for crossing the continent?”
The California sabbatical saw the Drurys staying at an
inn in Santa Barbara near the Bonds, and a strong friend-
ship grew between the two families. Afterwards, “Dear
Drury” had become the usual salutation for Bond’s
letters. “Mrs. Drury and you have gone – and, alas, we
realize it,” he wrote in April 1920. “If I were not so fond
of the school I would say chuck it and come back.”
He followed with an account of “subscriptions” he had
arranged for the School – donations from other Santa
Barbara alumni – and closed by saying that he, Marshall
Jr., and a few others “are going over to the Santa Ynez to
camp till Sunday night. We shall do some trout fishing
and plug ground squirrels with 22 rifles, as they are a
pest, and boys like to slay.”
Hoping to return Bond’s hospitality in the West, Drury
wrote in September: “Dick will have started Eastward
and young Marshall will know that a year from now he
will be heading Concord-ward too. I had a real ‘hunch’
that you were coming this September, I had decided to
put you in the ‘Bishop’s Room” (one of our best and most
austere Rectory apartments) and had planned to force
you to spend long hours with me smoking cigars and
‘take upon’s the mystery of things, as though we were
God’s Spies.’ You will come before the snow blows, will
you not?”
Bond did eventually visit the School
in 1922, upon Drury’s invitation
that he “take the short, but im-
portant speech on the Lower
Grounds on the afternoon of
Anniversary Day, June 1st.”
In a December 5 letter he
wrote his gratitude for the
invitation, saying, “at a critical
moment you showered me with
Marshall Bond
Samuel Drury