Buck (dog)

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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.

[edit] Buck, the real dog Bond Brother'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.

It was transported to the Klondike Gold Rush by his older brother Louis Bond who left Seattle on a later vessel than Marshall. During the Fall of 1897 the dog was used around Dawson City mostly by Marshall and Jack London. London was working in Dawson chopping firewood and feeding the dogs for tent space 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 to the ice was based on an incident in real life. A sled loaded with one half ton of firewood had frozen and a few friends and their dogs were trying to pull it away by pulling it straight forward. It then took Marshall Bond one dog to pull it out by yanking the sled sharply to the left and right. By using a pull straight forward it would distribute te strength evenly along the skids. Pulling sharply left and right concentrates the strength to the front of the skid.

During the Summer the dog was offered for sale at a high price at which there were no takers. Another dog named Pat was offered for sale to potential buyers at the same time for much less. An innkeeper Belinda Mulroney bought Pat through Jack London. Louis Bond then made arrangements to ship the superior dog south with a shipping agent but the dog never arrived.

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. The Bonds fed the dog mummified horse kept under a tarp on the roof of the cabin and used salmon for treats a more expensive alternative. Partridge might have used salmon as the main food and if so the fee would have been used up.


[edit] References

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