Hamilton
Mack
Laing
September 27, 2021
Many books, articles and reports have been read and mined for details of the happenings during the Mount Logan expedition, from Hamilton Mack Laing’s perspective and from the mountaineers’ viewpoint as well, as I’ve been writing this book. But as I’ve been completing my afterword, which looks at how specimen collecting was the way ornithologists and mammalogists, prior to the development of still photography and motion picture photography, studied the natural world, as well as presented it to the general public in city museums, I’ve been reading texts from the time that present what the prevalent scientific thinking was at the time, and how to go about hunting for it.
Of course, in 2021, it would be considered horrid for a naturalist to head out into the backwoods, shoot an animal, and prepare it for mounting at a museum or for scientific study. Today I found myself saying out loud: “It seems contradictory for a person who is wanting the public to develop an appreciation for the creatures of the natural world to shoot an animal so that it can be stuffed and put up on display.” This was in response to reading William Temple Hornaday’s book Camp-Fires in the Canadian Rockies. Published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1907, it features Hornaday, possibly the most famed of America’s conservationists at that time, in a ripping yarn of an adventure in southeastern British Columbia in 1905. It was a specimen collecting expedition that found him, along with colleague and Pennsyvania State Game Commissioner John M. Phillips, tramping the hills and climbing mountains in search of game that they could hunt, then prepare for display at museums in the eastern United States. At several points in the book, Hornaday points out his reluctance to shoot any more animals. One hunt had both men claiming mountain sheep rams. Phillips had one to present to the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. Hornaday had one for the Brooklyn Institute Museum. The book no doubt had eastern readers chomping at the bit to see what heights would be scaled and risks would be taken for these men, accompanied by intrepid guides and a hunting-dog named Kaiser, as they traveled deep into the British Columbia backcountry to capture the latest exhibit for a nearby institution.
But what was innovative about the expedition was the role photography played in capturing the image of an animal in its natural habitat. Phillips took extreme pains to get close-up photographs of mountain goats, high up mountainsides, at a time when cameras did not do close-ups. He had to go to the goat. These tales are some of the more nail-biting of the lot, knowing that this man was on a precipice over a drop of significant height, just to get the photograph that might be seen by someone in a city, reading Hornaday’s book, and develop an appreciation for the animal in its own world.
It was this tradition, twenty years later, that Laing was following, as he collected bird and mammal specimens, diligently took note of them, but also took movies and photographs of the animals in their natural habitat. In the afterword, I’m trying to develop an understanding as to where Laing found himself, in 1925, from a position of conservation as well as the trade he was plying as biologist, or naturalist, attached to the expedition. “Naturalist” had a different definition than it does today, in a world where we have many a high definition nature documentary available at all times, and where still photography has got to such heights that it doesn’t require us to risk life and limb anymore to study the wonderful creatures of the natural world.
Camp-Fires in the Canadian Rockies is, however, a good book that gives readers a fascinating and, perhaps, even stress-inducing view as to how scientific understanding of the natural world was carried out at the beginning of the twentieth century. Readers also get to find out why there are places named Phillips Peak and Hornaday Pass in southeastern British Columbia.
March 17, 2021
It is an incredible human endeavour. Today, to climb Mount Logan, a helicopter takes you close to the mountain from Haines Junction and much is known about the Logan massif, including its various summits. But back in 1925, when the expedition took place, the mountaineers had a certain degree of reconnaissance and a 1913 survey to give them some confidence about their trajectory, but once they got to a certain point: they didn’t know where the summit was.
I’ve just written a section, in parallel with what naturalist Hamilton Mack Laing was doing back at Hubrick’s Camp to further his biological work, about what happened to the mountaineers from June 15th to the 17th. MacCarthy, Lambart and Read have separated from the others who went down to Windy Camp to get more food because the expedition realized that more provisions were necessary as the conditions were harsher and distances were greater than expected. MacCarthy, Lambart and Read were all lying prone on the edge of a saddle between two peaks, having gone ahead to 18,500 feet altitude and are straining to see out into the distance but not able to see clearly the peaks ahead, and only seeing fleeting glimpses of where they needed to go. It truly, from that point on, was a journey into the unknown.
January 28, 2021
I was in discussion (virtually of course) with author Geoff Mynett in November when we talked about rabbit holes. During research, we found it easy to get distracted by other fascinating stories that might sidetrack us, sending us down these different rabbit holes on the hunt for the trajectory of the story we’re trying to tell. Sometimes they can lead to other writing projects. Sometimes they’re just fascinating distractions.
Recently I spent the better part of two days getting distracted by the fascinating history of Canadian Pacific’s British Columbia Coast Steamship Service, specifically the ships that left Victoria’s Inner Harbour for Seattle in 1925. On April 20th of that year, Mack Laing found himself waiting for his ship to Seattle to come in, and it so happened that, according to Robert D. Turner’s fascinating book Those Beautiful Coastal Liners, this happened to be the same day that a new steamship, the Princess Marguerite, was arriving in Victoria, having travelled all the way from where it had just been built, at John Brown & Company’s Clydeside shipyards in Scotland. But in Laing’s notes there is no indication of anything auspicious taking place. He’s most fascinated though by the cormorants and Holboell grebes he sees in the harbour while standing next to the newly-built steamship terminal building designed by famed architect Francis Rattenbury.
It would seem that naturalist Mack Laing had his eyes on the prize and didn’t get tempted by distractions.
November 26, 2020
As Laing’s time at Hubrick’s Camp went on into June of 1925, so did his becoming embedded in the natural landscape. He became less the objective scientist and more the living thing adapting to the actions of other living things around him.
He would have regular visitors to his tent. The ravens were becoming more of a fixture. The Canada Jay, or Whiskey Jack as the bird was commonly known then, that was by Laing’s own admission a camp robber of exceptional intelligence. He had regularly offered a pancake to a jay pair that had been visiting his table, hoping to secure food to pack away to, what Laing knew was, a brood in a nest in the spruce woods behind camp. But he was making it increasingly difficult for them. One morning he would nail a piece of bannock or pancake to the table, then watch how the jays would work out the problem. A jay would peck at the pancake until it would be packed away in sections to the woods. Then one day, he made it very difficult. And he’d be rolling film to capture how the jays did.
Laing tied a piece of hard biscuit or bannock to an elastic string, attaching it to a tree perch above a platform, so that the food dangled out of reach from the platform and the perch. The jays sorted it out, and I’ve just described the clever solution for the manuscript. It proved to be one of the most impressive acts Laing would observe in the land of superlatives that he found himself in for several months over the summer of 1925.
November 13, 2020
Never Cry Wolf was a book on the recommended reading list in elementary school. I read it before I was twelve. When the Carroll Ballard film arrived in a local movie theatre I was eleven and seeing it had a great impact on me. Not only did it define adventure in my young mind, it would make me question things and see that nature wasn’t something to be conquered or overpowered. Nature, I thought, is in many ways beyond our understanding.
In the film Tyler goes on what he thought would be a test of his courage, then sees it as he’s flown into the icy wilderness in a de Havilland Beaver as a suicide mission. He soon finds the classic conflicts of many stories (man versus nature, man versus himself, man versus man) and comes through the process a changed person for the experience.
I certainly had changed after traveling in northern BC on my motorcycle.
I have been reminded of Never Cry Wolf while writing Capturing the Summit; Laing traveling into the unknown, living by his wits and experience, coming to know the natural world around him and discovering the creatures around him to be more than potential specimens. He goes beyond the expected objectivity of the scientist, as something apart of nature and becomes part of it. There’s a transformation afoot in his journal entries in the man who’s trying to prove himself to the world of man, he becomes part of the world of nature.
October 29, 2020
I was wondering what route Laing was taking when on his day hikes behind camp into the spruce forest and further up. Reading one of his reports I learned about his admiration for the engineering of the Dall mountain sheep (Ovis dalli dalli) who created the trails he was following. Who knows how many years the sheep had been following those trails. The flocks of sheep were a daily sight for Laing, who was, in his early days at Hubrick’s Camp and on his jaunts, wondering where the lambs were. One of the guides had told him of seeing a golden eagle flying off with a lamb. These hidden lambs continued to concern Laing as he got to know his surroundings.
But he quite liked the pre-developed routes made by the sheep.
Speaking of routes, the mountaineers by late May were coming to terms with the uncertainty of theirs. Limited understanding of the area around King Glacier had the potential to stop the expedition in its tracks. They had photography taken from a great distance by boundary surveys, but weren’t sure if the King Glacier would lead them up to the Logan massif, or a dead end.
October 28, 2020
It was the spruce seed that fascinated Mack Laing in May of 1925. So many creatures depended on it. The red squirrel was numerous in the Chitina valley, fed on the spruce seed and the squirrel was a food source for several winged predators. He was beginning to spot the makings of a food chain only two weeks in to his solitary vigil at Hubrick’s Camp.
Of course hiking away from camp helped him deal with his loneliness and intimidating surroundings. On one of these outings he spotted massive deposits of spruce cone scales, sometimes with red squirrels standing among them and it may have been then that he realized a central part of what kept the local creatures fed.
My discovery of Laing’s discovery of a food chain is the latest made in my ongoing writing. I’m moving on into June 1925 now.
October 19, 2020
On Tuesday I was part of a Zoom “virtual discussion” about writing biography with Geoff Mynett, author of Service on the Skeena. The resulting video should be up on Ronsdale Press’ website soon. One of the many things we talked about was the enjoyment of discovery through research. The discovery of an artifact at BC Archives in Victoria while researching Riding the Continent was very exciting for me. It was the journal in which Hamilton Mack Laing had meticulously written his thoughts during his cross-continent journey on his Harley-Davidson. I remember the sense of awe in just holding the notebook in my hand. The realization that he had held that very object and it had been with him throughout his adventure across the continental United States was a real jolt. Historical artifacts like that will also generate excitement because they’re another clue, another piece in the puzzle, as to what the story was, how it happened and how it was recorded. Luckily for a fellow like me, Laing was a dedicated diarist and took detailed notes.
It would be at BC Archives a couple of years later that I would hold in my hands three nature diaries, notebooks that Laing would have with him in Alaska’s Chitina valley while a naturalist accompanying the Mount Logan Expedition of 1925. Again, he wrote down detailed notes of his observations and discoveries. And those two days I spent reading and taking notes from his diaries, before the pandemic took hold, were intense days where I tried to absorb as much information as I could, and they would lead to the next few months of writing in my home office in Vancouver. Other sources of information would include federal reports, digitized and found online, and articles from journals dating back to the 1920s I photocopied at the Vancouver Public Library. Without them, I would not have been able to get started. I’m now about a third of the way in to a first draft of the book.
Recently, while reading Laing’s expedition report to the National Museum of Canada, I discovered something else I had overlooked. I was struggling to find the name of the ship he and the mountaineers sailed on from Seattle to Cordova, Alaska. In a place I did not expect to find it, in a section dedicated to the savannah sparrow (Passerculus sandwichensus) he mentions how one “travelled all day on S.S. Alaska” and I had found my answer. This workhorse for the Alaska Steamship Company was the regular ship that took passengers up the west coast to several points in Alaska, including Ketchikan and Cordova. I would further read about the company on various websites.
Sometimes exciting research discoveries can be put in my hands or be found virtually online. Both can generate a sense of renewal for the writing task ahead.
October 1st, 2020
I found myself in the early part of 2020 back in the saddle as they say, researching my next book project at British Columbia Archives. That trip to Victoria took place just prior to the pandemic becoming official.
You’d be right in thinking that the book project had to do with Hamilton Mack Laing, but unlike his account of the transcontinental motorcycle journey featured in Riding the Continent, in this story he finds himself part of a major expedition of which he called himself “the tail of the kite.”
The Mount Logan Expedition of 1925 had Laing travelling by rail, sea and on foot into one state he didn’t travel through on his motorcycle journey: Alaska. Assigned as the naturalist, sometimes referred to as the biologist, to the expedition by Canada’s Department of Mines who oversaw the work of the National Museum of Canada, Laing was following some mountaineering greats on the first known assault on the tallest mountain in the nation. He would be camped at a place where he could study the bird and mammal life that would feature prominently near the Alaska/Yukon boundary.
Walking over eighty miles from McCarthy, Alaska to Hubrick’s Camp with the mountaineers, guides and pack train, Laing would be a solitary figure in the wild for two months, observing and cataloguing the wildlife he encountered, while the mountaineers pursued their fate on the Logan massif.
If you were thinking this might be an ideal project to be working on during a pandemic, the thought had crossed my mind too. Since I’ve worked on this project I have found myself transfixed by Laing’s solitude, his only company the birds and animals surrounding him. At the moment I’m writing about the pesky mosquitoes, temperamental to say the least, that Laing had to deal with on the evenings when the sun never set. But Laing could be seen, in his self-isolation, as in something of an idyllic situation for a naturalist, and for someone wanting to get away from people and civilization. His home in Comox was hardly a crowded place, but in some ways, certainly from my observations having worked on Riding the Continent, I think he preferred the company of birds to men.
