Buck (dog)

:"This article is about the fictional canine character; see also other uses of buck."Buck, a fictional dog, is the main character in the novel "The Call of the Wild" by Jack London. His mother was a Scots Shepherd; his father was a Saint Bernard; and Buck himself is a strong, intelligent dog weighing about 140 pounds.

Daniel Dyer (1997) writes::Jack acknowledged in a letter to Klondike acquaintance Marshall Bond that he had based Buck on Bond's dog Jack, an animal that had much impressed London in the North. The dog was a mixed breed--St. Bernard and Scotch shepherd. London said he selected the name Buck because it was "stronger" than Bright, another name he had considered.

In the book "The Call of The Wild", a dishonest gardener steals Buck from from a sunny Santa Clara estate, and sells him to meet the demand for sled dogs during the Klondike Gold Rush. Buck passes abruptly from a soft, easy life to a brutal existence in the far North. He adapts, survives, and eventually thrives in his harsh new environment. As the story progresses, Buck becomes more and more feral as he is passed from one owner to another, until he at last joins a pack of wolves.

Buck, the real dog - Marshall Bond's Jack

In real life, the dog Buck was based on was named Jack and was purchased by Marshall Bond from the owner of a bar in the Puget Sound area. This was probably a Swiss immigrant named Karl Koenig or Charles King. King operated a bar the Olympus Cafe in Pioneer Square in a building owned by the Bonds and was from Switzerland, home of the St. Bernard.

Jack was transported to the Klondike by Louis Bond, Marshall's older brother, who left Seattle on a later vessel. During the Fall of 1897 the dog was used around Dawson City mostly by Bond and Jack London. London was working in Dawson chopping firewood and feeding the dogs in exchange for board from the Bonds and earning cash working for other clients. During the Winter, the dog was used mostly out on El Dorado Creek by Marshall Bond. During the Spring the dog was lent to Jack London who had a main job pulling logs for a sawmill.

The famous scene in the novel in which Buck pulled a sled free from being frozen in the ice was based on an incident in real life. A sled loaded with half a ton of firewood had frozen and a few friends and their dogs were trying to move it by pulling it straight forward. Marshall Bond used Jack to pull it out by yanking the sled sharply to the left and right, breaking the sled free.

Dick North the founder of the Jack London Interpretative Center, a museum in Dawson City theorizes that the Bond's Jack might be the same dog as a dog named Jack of similar description which later belonged to Otto Partridge, an entrepreneur from England who was acting as a shipping agent in Dawson City in 1898. Both the Bonds and Partridge were involved in the fruit packing industry in Santa Clara, California in the early 1890s. North theorizes that Louis Bond may have sold the dog to Partridge.

Richard Bond, Marshall Bond's grandson's response is that the truth might be in between. A shipping agent would have been given a sum for feed and shipment. If the feed bill exceeded the fee the shipping agent might have foreclosed taking the dog in payment.

References

* [http://www.jack-london.org/05-mat-bond_e.htm Marshall Bond's eulogy on Jack London] Has an image of the Bonds' dog Jack, on whom the fictional Buck was based. The tent was one of four located just behind the vantage point of the photograph. [Richard Bond]
*Dyer, Daniel (1997), "The Call of the Wild: Annotated and Illustrated," University of Oklahoma Press, ISBN 0-8061-2920-4
* [http://web1.seattle.gov/dpd/historicalsite/QueryResult.aspx?ID=1105258158 Department of Neightborhoods - Historical Site Search Results]
* [http://www.skagwaynews.com/alaskan2003.html Skaguay Alaskan 2003 Jack London]