Alaska kid
Alaska-Kid (English original title: Smoke Bellew ) and Kid & Co are two collections of stories by the American writer Jack London , which were created in 1912 as a series for a magazine in San Francisco. They are about the adventures of a San Francisco newspaper reporter named Christopher Bellew during the great gold rush on the Klondike River in 1897, which is known there under the name Smoke Bellew . For this name, which is not very easy to understand in German, Jack London's first German translator Erwin Magnus chose the name Alaska Kid , which was then retained by most of the subsequent German-speaking translators. In addition to the Alaska Kid, the clever little trapper Jack Short, called Shorty, appears in all of the stories and becomes his friend on the arduous journey to the Klondike. The beautiful trapper daughter Joy Gastell also plays a role in several stories, with whom Kid comes into an exciting relationship. The narratives have certain inner connecting lines, but do not result in such a stringent, through-composed context that one could summarize them under the term novel. The content of the stories is visibly shaped by London's own experiences as a gold prospector on the Yukon, in Dawson and on the Klondike: In the very first story, Jack London vividly describes the tremendous hardships that the adventurers had to endure to get there. The young San Francisco reporter Kid Bellew can easily be recognized as the "alter ego" of the young Jack London, who was 21 when he set out north in 1897.
action
Alaska kid
The book begins with an explanation of its title: “Originally his name was Christoffer Bellew. When he went to university he became Chris Bellew. Later he was named Kid Bellew in the bohemian circles of San Francisco. And finally he was only known as an Alaska kid ”. This Bellew alias Kid is the protagonist of the book. At the request of a friend, he applied to the magazine “Woge” in San Francisco and was given a job right away : he was supposed to write a sequel about the romantic magic and the blaze of colors of San Francisco. (Since the gold rush in California, San Francisco has in a certain sense been a gold rush town and one of the most multicultural cities in the US, see History of the City of San Francisco .)
O'Hara, the editor-in-chief and owner of "Woge" treats Kid like a slave and lets him work for free with the constant promise that the paper will soon make money. So he is looking for a way to escape from San Francisco in order to get out of the sphere of influence of O'Hara. One day he meets his uncle John, who accuses him of being grossly effeminate and of no longer being a "man". Despite or perhaps because of that, Kid wants to accompany John when he sets off for the Klondike.
Kid travels by ship to Dyea , from where the gold diggers want to get into the hinterland via the Chilkoot Pass . In order to be able to take part in the gold prospecting at all, the gold diggers have to take equipment and food of 1000 kg with them. The distance can only be covered on foot, and so the whole load has to be moved mile by mile in a kind of relay. Kid, who is not used to such work at all, has difficulty bearing the burden at first, but gets stronger and harder with every mile that he covers. At first he had only admired the Indians , who helped the whites with hauling for considerable prices, because of their lightness, but he soon learns why they can carry the much larger loads without problems. When he gets to the height of the Chilkoot, the weather gets worse and worse - the arctic winter is just around the corner and soon the pass will no longer be passable at all. Kid also receives reports that there will soon be no trees at Lindeman Lake . The prospectors cut down large quantities of trees to make boats for the journey inland to Whitehorse and Dawson . Kid also travels on by boat. On the way he meets Jack Kurz, who will become his friend and business partner. The journey through the dangerous rapids is described in great detail.
When Kurz and Kid arrive in Dawson, they initially hire themselves out as hunters and thus get some money and a dog sled team . Then one evening the rumor spreads that gold had been found at the Squaw Creek . They secretly want to go there in the middle of the night, but the discovery is apparently no longer “secret”: entire columns of gold prospectors are on the way. Since, unlike many of the other gold prospectors, they have been on the road in the past few months, Kid and Kurz are better trained and come far ahead on the train. Several men died of exhaustion or frostbite that night, which later turned out to be the coldest of that winter. Before dawn, the Dawson thermometer will read 70 degrees Fahrenheit below zero (−57 ° C). Right at the head of the train, the two meet Louis Gastell and his daughter Joy, whom Kid had met earlier and who means more to him than he actually wants to admit. She complains about the fact that once again the Chechaquos ( greenhorns ) will make the race and the long-time Alaska residents will come to shortly. With a ruse, however, she manages to set the train on the wrong path, whereby the "old" make the race. Kid doesn't even take it amiss, although he himself - also due to a mishap of Kurz in the dark - also comes away empty-handed and doesn't get a claim.
Then Kid and Kurz try their hand at roulette in the gaming room . Kurz is convinced that you can only be successful in roulette if you have a “clue”, but you cannot find a green branch. Kid, on the other hand, finds an apparently absolutely secure "system" with which he wins a lot of money. Kurz urgently advises him to finally stop because there would be no "system" in roulette and because he would ultimately lose everything. But Kid insists on his system and wins - to the great astonishment of everyone present - more than $ 3,000 every evening. When he finally breaks the bank and is asked by the gaming room operator to announce his system for a bonus of $ 30,000, he agrees. It turns out that only the table he preferred was equipped with a deformed top so that the result could be foreseen. The whole action brings the two partners the proud sum of 70,000 dollars.
Some time later, Kid sets out alone to find the mysterious "surprise lake". It is said that this should be completely filled with gold. In the thick snowstorm he actually finds it, but soon loses it again, because later in the storm he loses his track and no longer knows where exactly he was. On the way back, Kid gets into a shootout, at the end of which he is found innocent as a murderer. Nobody cares about his version of the story as the circumstantial evidence seems clear. During the rather one-sided trial, however, Kid manages to escape with the help of Breck, whom he had helped with the trip to Dawson, and a trick.
Another time, Kid and Kurz meet a group of completely starved Indians during a sleigh trip. A race against time begins in order to get around 200 people enough food in the shortest possible time so that they do not starve to death - it takes 5 days to travel to the next place. When the Kid comes to the village to call for help, everyone is immediately ready and donates considerable sums to buy food for the Indians. - all except for one who, surprisingly, is an Indian himself. It takes time for the kid to understand that he simply did not understand that the white man, otherwise the beast who sells the soul for gold, can jump over his shadow once in a while. In the last chapter, Kid and a number of other prospectors compete in a sled race to register a claim .
Kid & Co
In Kid & Co the plot, like towards the end of Alaska Kid , consists mainly of individual, relatively independent episodes from the lives of two gold diggers.
Kid and Kurz discover a village where mysterious things are going on. Outside the village there are several dead, in the village all of them are sick with scurvy despite full and rich pantries . A fortune teller runs the village, she preaches laziness, and that's how people behave - there is disorder in the whole village and people just lie in their beds moaning. The two of them think that exercise must help against scurvy and force the sick to work. Unfortunately, this does not improve the situation and more and more people are dying. In the end they found what they knew was the only effective remedy for the disease in the only villager who had not become ill: potatoes .
In another episode, Kid and Kurz speculate with eggs , which are rare in Dawson. But things go really wrong and they are mocked for it. In the next chapter, Kid speculates with land, almost as if he wanted to forget the story with the eggs. He buys several lots across the Yukon River and behaves in such a way that the whole of Dawson thinks he found gold there. Of course, the gold diggers fall for the decoy action and Kid founds a stock corporation for the actually worthless property, which brings him many dollars in gold dust. However, this time he is not putting it in his own pocket, but donating it to Dawson Hospital.
Another time, Kid and Kurz find themselves captured by an Indian tribe whose leader is a white man. He wants to keep them with him so that no one ever finds out about this tribe. Kid escapes with the leader's daughter, who has fallen in love with him, and with a third who was held prisoner there. The escape lasted many days, during which the two companions died of the cold, exhaustion, hunger and the consequences of sunburn and snow blindness . When he finally reached the Klondike , to his great astonishment, he met the first Kurz that he still suspected to be in the Indian camp. The book ends with the kids announcing that they want to marry Joy Gastell.
background
The book describes quite impressively the life of the gold diggers during the great gold rush on the Klondike River after 1896. The writer Jack London depicts the life and the surrounding area in great detail and realism, because he himself spent some time in the gold digging town of Dawson (today's Yukon territory from Canada, on the border with Alaska ). It is also clear that although some got rich in the gold rush, many have lost everything completely. Many prospectors were unable to cope with the arctic winter and froze to death in the freezing cold. The January average temperature in Dawson is -26.7 degrees Celsius, with extreme values well below.
Film adaptations
The work was filmed several times, including in the German-Soviet-Polish television series Alaska Kid and the GDR feature film Kit & Co .
Individual evidence
- ↑ Environment Canada Climate Normals 1971-2000 , accessed September 23, 2011.
literature
- Jack London: Alaska Kid. Translation by Erwin Magnus. Loewes Verlag, Bindlach 1991, ISBN 3-7855-2420-X .
- Jack London: Gold Rush in Alaska. From the stories about the Alaska Kid (Smoke Bellew) . Newly translated by Herbert Schnierle-Lutz. Anaconda Verlag, Cologne 2012, ISBN 978-3-86647-857-2 .Wikisource: Smoke Bellew - Sources and full texts (English)
