until the winter of 2013, when thoughts about their contents started to nag me—I knew there were stories in there that Sam had written, but never published. A junior-high-school English teacher for twenty-six years, he routinely came home after school, napped in his favorite chair, then wrote. He kept a journal almost every day of his life.
Sam had written One Man’s Wilderness in 1972, recounting the story of his longtime friend, Dick Proenneke, who’d chosen to build a log cabin in remote Alaska and live a subsistence lifestyle. Using interviews, notes, and Dick’s journals, Sam had written a best-seller. Now, forty years after the book’s initial release, and long after it was reissued in paperback, sales were still strong.
Standing in our garage, I looked at the shelved boxes and wondered, What if there’s another publishable manuscript in there?
Pushing past our snow thrower and Christmas decorations, I began to pull the boxes from the shelves. Inside one, I found a smaller cardboard box. On its lid were the words Raw Quest written in Sam’s distinctive handwriting. I lifted the lid to find a thick stack of onionskin paper, a typed manuscript. A quick look told me that this was Sam’s autobiographical account of his first trip to Alaska, during which he met and shared many adventures with Dick Proenneke, as well as other remarkable men whom he befriended. Wow, I thought. This could be it.
I started reading the pages, hoping that there was a real story there, rather than just journal entries. Soon I realized I was no longer reading because the author was my father-in-law, whom I’d respected and loved. I was reading because this man’s adventures in the Territory of Alaska were at turns harrowing, funny, and fascinating—a letter home from a different time, and from the one remaining wilderness in North America. I couldn’t wait to tell Laurel what I’d found.
When she read it, she discovered a facet of her father that she’d never known. Laurel agreed—this story needed to see daylight.
Sam’s life before the events in this book was already marked by adventures. He was born in Plainsfield, New Hampshire, in 1921 and raised by loving parents with his younger sister, Anna, whom he adored. Sam’s father, Merle Vincent Keith, was a talented wildlife artist who never found the success he yearned for, and who worked a variety of manual jobs to try to support his family. The family moved frequently, from New Hampshire to Massachusetts and then to Bayside, on Long Island, New York, where Merle felt his proximity to the New York publishing world would offer more opportunities for success.
But the Great Depression hit them hard, and the publishing work never materialized. The family’s financial difficulties left lasting marks on Sam—personal scars from being forced to accept government aid as a boy, and feelings of obligation to family—which stayed with him throughout his life. To the end of his days, he was extremely humble, downplaying his own skills and talents, and poking fun at his own mistakes.
Merle Keith taught Sam and Anna about hunting, nature, and outdoor skills. Nature was a release from the hardships of life, a place both real and imagined in which a person could survive and even flourish, given the right skills and mind-set. Nature was a sacred thing, to be honored and conserved. It would play an important role in his writing. He hoped one day to write a story that his father would illustrate, and the two would find success together.
On graduation from high school in 1940, Sam joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, and spent a year building fire suppression roads in Elgin, Oregon. Then he returned to Long Island to work as a landscaper before enlisting in the Marines in May 1942. He would serve as a radio gunner in the “Billy Mitchell” Marine bombing squadron the Flying Nightmares, and survive being shot down over the Pacific Ocean. Later, he was awarded several decorations for his military service.
After the war, Sam attended Cornell University on the G.I. Bill, earning a degree in English Literature in 1950. He filled countless journals with his observations about nature, people, and life—the stuff that might later become stories.
But after graduation, a sense of duty drew him back to help out at home. His mother had passed away while he was in college, and his father remarried. The household now included Merle, his new wife, Molly, and mother-in-law, Mrs. Millet. Instead of striking out and pursuing his dream, Sam took a job in a machine shop. He began to chafe. He wanted more. He needed an adventure, a purifying experience in which he could find out what he was really made of. The territory of Alaska had always called to him, and at last, he made up his mind to go.
The following adventure stories from Alaska begin in 1952, and in them you’ll meet that man in search of adventure and acceptance. You’ll read about how he met Dick Proenneke and how their lifelong friendship began. And you’ll meet a number of colorful characters who inhabited the place that would, in 1959, become the forty-ninth state.
Sam wrote this manuscript in his after-school hours of 1974. Neither his wife nor his daughter was aware that he’d written another book. In preparing it for publication, Laurel and I, working with our insightful editor, Tricia Brown, have changed as little as possible. Occasionally, we found that his letters or journal entries about a particular event were fresher or more vivid than the manuscript version and would be more interesting to a modern audience. So we’ve tucked them in. We’ve included excerpts of his letters home, shedding additional light on his thoughts or actions. And we’ve also pared away some small bits—overly long descriptions or observations—that got in the way of telling the story.
The following is Dad’s distinctive voice, already familiar to the many thousands who have read One Man’s Wilderness.
So—please meet Sam Keith, at last telling his own story, in First Wilderness.
PREFACE
Longings
At a party in Massachusetts one winter evening in the early 1970s, several of us men drifted away from our wives and gathered in front of a snapping blaze in the fireplace. We sipped our drinks and stared into flames that turned our conversation from current events to our primitive longings. We strayed easily from talk of the trans-Alaska pipeline….
“I was all set to go, in ’48,” one said. “Right down to the military jeep and two spares. But we never got the show on the road. My roommate up and decided he wanted to go on for a master’s, and I met Nancy.”
Another man leaned in. “I was another casualty. I had it all figured out. I was going to be a wilderness trapper way back of beyond somewhere. The Porcupine. The Pelly. The Athabasca. I dreamed about marten and lynx and wolverines and sourdough biscuits. Read all the books. Still have ’em somewhere. I settled for my father’s meat business. In it ever since.”
“You won’t believe this. Right after I got out of the service, all I could think about was Ketchikan. Commercial fishing—that was the life for me. I had a name all picked out for that forty-footer I was going to own: The Northern Lady. Somehow, it just don’t sound the same plastered on a canoe.”
I had heard the same sad tunes before. On and on stretched the tombstones with their eroded epitaphs of what was going to be, yet never came to pass.
We all have our Alaska, in one form or another. It’s a place we never got to see, a goal we never reached, a dream that stayed that way.
I was one of the lucky ones. I mined some of those dreams we talked about as boys, before responsibility descended with its straitjacket. I saw things I dreamed of seeing. I did things that I dreamed of doing. I prospected my Alaska, and discovered new placers in myself. That big, awesome land brought out the pieces, like flashes of gold in black sand.
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