Literary Landscapes : Visiting Homelands That Inspired Three Great American Writers : Jack London’s California

GLEN ELLEN, Calif. —  No matter where in the world he roamed--from the frozen vastness of the Klondike to balmy tropical islands in the South Seas--this was the spot that Jack London loved best, the place to which his thoughts most frequently turned, the place he felt at peace.

It was here, in 1903, that he began a love affair with the land that was to last until his death 13 years later. It was here that he built his farm, the aptly named Beauty Ranch. It was here that he constructed the magnificent Wolf House, only to watch it destroyed by fire just before he and his second wife, Charmian, were to move in. It was here that he died 75 years ago this November.

And it is here that the author of such literary classics as “The Call of the Wild,” “White Fang,” “The Sea Wolf” and “The Valley of the Moon” remains. If not in body, then certainly in spirit.

For those with an eye for beauty, not much has changed in the Valley of the Moon since the days when London wandered its tree-covered slopes on horseback.

The air still is fragrant with eucalyptus and pine; orchards and vineyards still paint the hillsides bright green each spring, and in shades of red, yellow and brown each autumn; at sunset, the ancient crater of Sonoma Mountain still stands silhouetted “against a rosy and mellowing sky,” just as London described it.

And nowhere, perhaps, has nature smiled more kindly on the landscape than at Jack London State Historic Park, a five-minute drive from the town of Glen Ellen and a perfect day trip for literary-minded travelers from nearby Oakland (London’s home town), San Francisco or Santa Rosa.

Whether or not they have read any of London’s works, many of those who visit the park each year leave sharing London’s strong feeling about the land and wanting to learn more about the writer and his life.

Russ Kingman, a Glen Ellen resident and one of the world’s leading authorities on the life of Jack London, explains:

“It’s like going to a shrine,” he said of visiting the park. “There are people who come up here because of Jack London who say they can feel his presence in the park.

“Then the others who come just because they want something to do on a Sunday and they get inspired. It’s almost impossible to sit in front of Wolf House without getting some kind of inspiration, especially those few of us who want to get closer to Jack London.

“This sounds a little kooky, but it is a fact. You go up there at 11 o’clock some night all by yourself and just sit there on the steps of Wolf House (and) you’ll get more inspiration than you can imagine!”

Becky London, Jack’s youngest daughter now aged 88, also believes that her father’s spirit can be felt on the ranch and is glad that the property is protected from developers.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing that it belongs to the state,” she said, “because otherwise it would be chopped up into building lots. There wouldn’t be anything left here except a faint memory.

“But so many people who walk around the ranch, the ones that have time to do it, say they feel daddy’s presence, as though if they turn around the next tree, they’ll see him. His presence is very strong. He loved it up here.”

The ruins of Wolf House, its magnificent stone skeleton rising amid the redwoods like something from a Gothic novel, is one of of the four focal points of any visit to Jack London State Historic Park. The others, in no particular order, are: the House of Happy Walls, which Charmian built after her husband’s death and which now is a superb museum of London memorabilia; the Beauty Ranch itself, still a working farm in many aspects; and the wooded knoll where London’s ashes are buried.

Any visit to the park is best begun at the museum. Jack London was only 40 when he died on Nov. 22, 1916, but into those four decades he packed more adventure and excitement than do most men who live twice that long. He also found time to write no fewer than 53 books, hundreds of shorts stories, and to become one of the most popular American authors of all time, his works having been translated into dozens of languages.

Inside the House of Happy Walls--a name chosen by Charmian London--visitors can learn the type of life London led simply by browsing the display cases. There are, for example, his boxing gloves, his fencing gear, his saddle and riding boots, and the medicine kit, star finder and sextant from his schooner, the “Snark.”

In addition to first-edition copies of all 53 of his books--the majority of the written while he lived in Glen Ellen--there are the rejection slips he received for articles he had sent to a variety of newspapers and publishers before his “overnight fame” following publication of his seventh book, “The Call of the Wild,” in 1903.

London’s travels are not neglected, either, and visitors can marvel at such items as the shields, spears, totem poles, twirling shells and dancing sticks he and Charmian brought back from the Solomon Islands. Similarly, there are mementos from London’s days as a war correspondent in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and the Veracruz Expedition of 1914. These include his camera and campaign medals, assorted photographs, letters and manuscripts, and copies of newspaper stories he filed from abroad.

The two-story museum is filled with memories, but perhaps the most poignant exhibit is a touch-button projector screening a silent newsreel film of London taken at the Beauty Ranch just six days before he died. The brief snippet of film shows London posing for photographers with Charmian; on horseback outside their cottage on the ranch; driving a fertilizer spreader; feeding pigs at the circular “pig palace;” brushing a favorite saddle horse, and waving goodby to visitors outside his study at the cottage.

The film is black and white and grainy, but it shows a happy man who seems to be enjoying every aspect of his life on the ranch. And, indeed, London did, once pointing out that he “devoted two hours a day to writing and 10 to farming.”

According to Kingman, had he lived longer, there is no question London would have made a huge success of the Beauty Ranch.

“It (the ranch) was no hobby,” Kingman said. “Jack London was extremely serious about wanting to build a scientific farm. Jack was a scientific-minded person to start with, and he read more than probably anybody has ever read on farming in history. He brought in a lot of innovations to the place.

“When he first went to the ranch, the land was in pretty bad shape, it had been farmed out. So Jack planted (soil) enriching crops, plowed them under and then when the soil was in great shape he went ahead and started planting crops.

“He had plum orchards, he had apples, he raised grapes for his own use. The reason he tore down the vineyards was not that he was against vineyards, but they were only paying $11 a ton at that time for grapes. It cost more than that to raise them.

“You have to realize the farm was only five years old when he died. People say, ‘Well, gee, the ranch never did pay any money.’ Of course it didn’t. No ranch ever pays money in five years. It’s a deficit thing for years.

“There’s no question (that it would have been a success). It was timing. Tragic timing. He died right during the first World War. His European market was dead. His local market was hurt.

“Also, he lost $8,000 in the lawsuit with film makers who just went ahead and produced “The Sea Wolf” without having permission. Then they claimed in court that writers didn’t have movie rights to their works. He won it, but the whole thing cost him about $8,000 (in legal fees).

“If he had just lived for five more years. He had the movie rights cleared. He was making arrangements with Universal and others to film his work. Also, the movies were very primitive up till 1916. If he’d just lived to the ‘20s, he’d have been exorbitantly rich.”

Today, Jack London State Historic Park encompasses 803 acres of rolling hills and valleys and surrounds another 150 acres still owned by the author’s heirs. Visitors can wander the state-owned land on foot or rent horses to roam its 20 miles of trails. Restoration work is under way to preserve all the farm buildings, including the cottage where London died, but has been slowed by lack of funds.

A walking tour of the ranch’s significant sites can be made quite comfortably in a couple of hours, allowing another hour or so if the 1 1/2-mile round-trip walk to London’s five-acre lake is included. The latter requires a strenuous uphill hike through native forest, but scenic views of the ranch and the Sonoma Valley beyond make it worthwhile for the energetic.

No matter what the season, it is easy to see what attracted London to the setting. It certainly inspired “The Valley of the Moon,” which can almost be read as autobiography, focusing as it does on a young couple in love searching for and discovering the valley, deciding to settle there and then going about turning their dream into reality--just as Jack and Charmian did.

London also used country living as the theme for two other books, “Burning Daylight” and “Little Lady of the Big House,” both of which grew out of his farming experiences in Glen Ellen.

Part of the ranch originally had been a winery, and London converted many of the stone winery buildings to his own use. Some became stables for his purebred English shire horses (ribbons he won in horse shows are displayed in the museum), others were turned into a carriage house and to living quarters for his ranch hands and rooms for his guests.

Among the other structures worth inspecting are the so-called “pig palace,” a unique piggery designed by London that gave each animal its own quarters, with the “suites” laid out in circular fashion around a central feed house; the 40-foot-high, cement-block silos, the first of their kind in California; and the “manure pit,” designed by Italian stonemasons and introducing London’s idea to fertilize his fields through recycling.

He also planted 150,000 eucalyptus trees and created the five-acre lake that served as both an irrigation reservoir and a place to entertain guests with swimming and boating parties. It even featured a redwood log bath house, still there, but today’s visitors prefer fishing for catfish in the lake or picking blackberries along its shore, rather than swimming.

The cottage that Jack and Charmian lived in can be seen from the outside only since it is undergoing extensive restoration. In any event, although it was the place where London did much of his writing and where he died, it was not where he intended the focus of the ranch to be.

The grand showpiece of the Beauty Ranch was to have been Wolf House, a four-story, 26-room, nine-fireplace structure containing almost 15,000-square-feet of floor space and costing about $75,000 over its three-year construction period.

Wolf House--the name is derived from his most successful book, “Call of the Wild”--and was to have been the London ancestral home for generations to come. It was, in a very real sense, to have been the writer’s mountain lair.

“His heart was in Wolf House,” said Kingman, whose own book, “A Pictorial Life of Jack London,” was published in 1979. But, in 1913, just a few weeks before Jack and Charmian were to move into the house, fire destroyed the building. The cause has never been officially determined--London believed it might have been arson--but Kingman, who investigated the blaze in detail, believes he knows the answer.

“The reason I investigated it is because I have a fire department background,” he said. “ So I looked at it from the viewpoint of a fireman. I quickly threw aside the arguments that the house was set on fire by arson.

“My theory is exactly the same as the contractor who built the house. He said that every night he went around and picked up the oily rags used by the men who were oiling the floors. This night he simply forgot them.

“It was a stone house. It was 100 degrees that day--I got that from Charmian’s diary--so those stones were real hot and the rags were thrown over in a corner. It only takes five or six hours for them to (spontaneously) combust. Everybody who lived in the town thought it was spontaneous combustion. There’s no question in my mind, but there was in Jack’s because he was no firefighter.”

And so, with the burning of Wolf House, London immediately set about planning to rebuild. But he did not live to see the work begun and, after his death, Charmian chose to build another home, using stones found on the ranch, and called it the House of Happy Walls.

The house of sad walls, Wolf House, would remain a ruin forever, a monument to an unfulfilled dream.

Today, a shaded path connects the two structures and from it another curves up a slight incline to the spot that London chose as his last resting place. His grave site is an unprepossessing one, atop a knoll, surrounded by an aged picket fence and overgrown with vines. A large, moss-covered boulder marks the site. There is no inscription, no indication that one of literature’s great men lies buried beneath the carpet of leaves.

“Jack really would have probably preferred that it (his grave) be completely anonymous,” Kingman said. “It’s a miracle to me that he didn’t just have his ashes scattered on the ranch. But the reason they didn’t was because he had a special sort of feeling for the Greenlaw children. (The Greenlaws were the ranch’s original owners and two children who died young also are buried on the tree-shaded ridge.)

“Jack he told Charmian and Elizabeth (his first wife) one time when they were together that, ‘You know, if I go before you, I wouldn’t mind having my ashes put up on the hill with the little children because I think they might be lonely.’

“That’s why his ashes are there. Then one time he mentioned, ‘Well, you might roll one of the big rocks from Wolf House up over my grave.’

“So that’s what they did.”

GUIDEBOOK

Jack London Historic Park

Getting there: Jack London State Historic Park is at 2400 London Ranch Road in the town of Glen Ellen, which lies on Highway 12 connecting Santa Rosa and Sonoma. It is about a 15-minute drive north of Sonoma, an hour north of San Francisco and Oakland.

Dates and times: The park is open daily year-round 8 a.m.-sunset (in winter, usually 5 p.m.; in summer, 8 p.m.). The House of Happy Walls museum is open 10 a.m.-5 p.m. every day except Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s.

Admission fee: There is a fee of $5 per vehicle (not per person) that covers parking and admission to the museum.

More on Jack London: The best place to learn more about the writer and his life is at the Jack London Bookstore, 14300 Arnold Drive, Glen Ellen, where Russ Kingman and his wife Winnie are a treasure trove of information. The rare and out-of-print bookstore is so informal that family pets, including a rooster, roam through at will.

Where to stay/eat: Glen Ellen offers a wide range of accommodations, resaturants and wineries in the area. A free pamphlet and map available at the House of Happy Walls museum lists the choices available.

More information: There are no restaurants in the park, but picnic tables and barbecue facilities are available. Portable stoves are prohibited. The majority of the park is natural wilderness, so be alert for rattlesnakes and especially for poison oak. Dogs must be kept on a leash and are not allowed in the museum.

Docent-led tours of the museum are offered, as are ranger-guided walks through the park. Both are usually available on weekends. For more information, call (707) 938-5216. For information on guided horseback rides through the park, call the Sonoma Cattle Co. at (707) 996-8566.