Marshall Latham Bond

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Marshall Latham Bond was one of two brothers who were Jack London's landlords and among of his employers during the Autumn of 1897 and the Spring of 1898 during the Klondike Gold Rush.

Marshall Latham Bond was born at Orange, Virginia in 1867 and died in Seattle, Washington in 1941. He was the son of Judge Hiram Bond and Laura Ann Higgins. Marshall Bond was a cowboy, mining engineer, stock broker, real estate broker and outdoor guide. He was educated at Denver Public Elementary Schools, The Gunnery from which he was expelled, St. Paul's School (Concord, New Hampshire), Yale University where he was a member of Delta Psi and Stanford University Mining School.

1 Family
2 Ranch Boyhood near Denver Colorado
3 Jack London and The Call of the Wild
4 American Mechanical Cashier Corporation
5 Assistance to Boer refugee colony
6 British Columbia
7 Bond International Counter Intelligence Agent
8 Mining consulting in Mexico
9 Research on Billy the Kid
10 Europe again and safari in Africa
11 Mojave borax prospecting
12 References

[edit] Family

Marshall Bond was married to Amy Louise Burnett daughter of Charles Hiram Burnett and Jeanette Campbell McLean. Charles H. Burnett was from Seattle and had been Seattle's City Treasurer, a commission merchant, real estate investor and operated coal mines. When his wife died young he had sent Amy Louise and her brother Charles H. Burnett Jr. to live with family friends Dr. and Mrs. Howard Cranston Potter of Tacoma who had children. One of Amy Louise Burnett's foster sisters Bertha Potter Paschall Boeing was the wife of aviation industrialist William Boeing.

Marshall Bond and his wife had two sons Richard Marshall Bond and Marshall Bond Jr.

[edit] Ranch Boyhood near Denver Colorado

In 1872 Judge Hiram Bond purchased a quarter section 160 acre ranch named Villa Park near Denver, Colorado now a neighborhood of Denver. Hiram Bond's brother in law was Latham Higgins another attorney with a legal education at Harvard owned a larger ranch further out of town. As he was growing up Marshall Bond and his older brother Louis were given increasing responsibilities on his father and uncles ranches. By the time they were at Yale University during their summer vacations they were participating in buying trips and cattle drives as far away as New Mexico and Chihuahua, Mexico.

[edit] Jack London and The Call of the Wild

During the Klondike Gold Rush 1897 to 1898 Marshall Bond and his brother Louis Whitford Bond owned a log cabin, storage building and tent ground on a hill overlooking Dawson City. One of their tenants during the Fall of 1897 and part of the Spring of 1898 was a young man who did chores on a labor exchange for one of their tent spaces. This was author Jack London. The main character of the novel "The Call of the Wild" Buck was based on a dog the two brothers owned.

The dog which was fictionalized as the novel's main character in "The Call of the Wild" was a St. Bernard/Collie owned by the Bonds. The dog was lent to Jack London by the Bonds for the performance of his work.

[edit] American Mechanical Cashier Corporation

Marshall Bond worked in 1901 and 1902 as an executive for American Mechanical Cashier Company which his father was a major share holder and President of. Among those people who Marshall Bond tried to bring in as an investor was a friend from his time at St. Paul School John Jacob Astor IV. Despite the candy eating contest with school room mate Francis Marion Ward Chanler an Astor relation in 1883 which turned fatal or perhaps because of it the Chanlers and Astors remained friendly with the Bonds.

[edit] Assistance to Boer refugee colony

In 1902 Vice President Theodore Roosevelt requested that Marshall Bond assist Roosevelt's cousin Leila's husband Edward Reeve Merritt a Bond friend to help a group of Boer refugees purchase ranchland and establish a colony in Mexico. Judge Hiram Bond's cattle dealing at Villa Park Ranch near Denver, Colorado had included some previous experience with purchases from and sales to ranchers in Mexico. After Marshall Bond and Edward Reeve Merritt met and negotiated with the federal officials in Mexico City and visited various potential sites they bought a large ranch from Governor Luis Terrazas located on the Rio Conchos near Camargo, Chihuahua. For more see Creel-Terrazas Family The Boers managed to farm there for about fifteen years when they were displaced by Pancho Villa.

[edit] British Columbia

Since the Bonds established a presence in Seattle in 1891 to invest in Washington they had also been active as well in British Columbia. They were involved in the mining in Ruby in the early 1890s. Among the local business leaders they were involved with was the James Dunsmuir Group. and Count Alvo von Alvensleben. Marshall Bond also went camping, hunting and fishing in British Columbia many times. A book on the Tsimshian tribe of Hartley Bay recounts Bond's hiring an Indian chief for an excursion. A particular sojourn was made with British traveloger explorer Warburton Pike along the Stikine River Valley in 1911.

Among the people that Bond and Pike met there and were then associated with was Osborne Beauclerk, 12th Duke of St Albans When Bond and Pike had first met Beauclerk he was recuperating from a gunshot wound in an Indian village where he had been treated with a gunpowder and oatmeal poultice by a Shaman. They put on a modern dressing and anti biotics. In order to have the Bond and Pike take him along Beauclerk volunteered as camp cook and fire tender. Beauclerk was also aide de camp to British Field Marshall Douglas Haig during World War I. Beauclerk was a co investor with Bond in various mining projects. When Pike died his gravestone was paid for by Bond and Beauclerk.

[edit] Bond International Counter Intelligence Agent

During the first World War Marshall Bond was turned down for military service. As a substitue form of national service he joined the Counter Intelligence section of the United States Secret Service. In this office he did port watching to reduce sabotage and politically inspired work stoppage. His duties also included arresting enemy nationals which included among them a German Count Alvo von Alvensleben who was the godson of Kaiser Wilhelm and an Austrian Count Karl Maria Rolo von Coudenhove who before the War were co investors in various mines including Cassiar in British Columbia. Canada being a part of the British Commonwealth declared war on Austria and Germany before the United States and so they had come south. There was a suspicion one or both were spies. After the war it developed that Alvensleben had supported the Canadians, Coudenhove had sided with Germany and Austria but the actual spy was Cassiar company secretary clerk Joachim von Ribbentrop

[edit] Mining consulting in Mexico

In 1917 a lieutenant of Pancho Villa kidnapped a group of American mining engineers working in Mexico from a train. When they tried to escape they were killed and it became difficult to recruit mining engineers for work in Mexico. As a consequence the compensation offered to the mining engineers went up. Among those who took advantage of the opportunity was Marshall Bond who took a consultancy with Mexican mining magnate Pedro Alvarado owner of a mine named Palmillo near Parral, Chihuahua in 1918. Alvarado was friendly with Villa but Villa's men tried kidnapping Bond to hold him for ransom anyway. They were unable to find Bond because instead of hiding in town he joined a group who fortified and supplied a nearby cave.

[edit] Research on Billy the Kid

In 1926 Marshall Bond Sr. and junior accompanied a friend Miguel Antonio OteroII on a trip to New Mexico to interview the survivors of the Lincoln County War. Judge Hiram Bond had been among those who had been allies of John Tunstall and Alexander McSween. Judge Bond was a landowner who lost land the Chavez Grant near Socorro, New Mexico due to the machinations of the Santa Fe Ring around Thomas B. Catron and Samuel Beach Axtell. Miguel Otero was the former Governor of the state of New Mexico whose family had been merchants between St. Louis and Santa Fe, ranchers and cattle traders. They were business associates of Judge Hiram Bond during his time ranching at Villa Park Ranch in Denver. This resulted in a jointly authored book which was published under the name Miguel Otero and one of the most widely read books on Billy the Kid.

[edit] Europe again and safari in Africa

In 1927 Marshall Bond took a trip through Europe and Africa writing articles for the Santa Barbara News-Press with a travelogue writer named Deniston Crockett. Despite his having arrested Count Coudenhove during the First World War they had resumed communication and he was made the subject of a series of articles by Coudenhove in the Vienna press. Jack London's "The Call of the Wild" was a tremendous success when translated into German as "Ruf der Wildnis" and Bond was introduced to other members of Austrian nobility and the Habsburgs

The Deniston Crocket group traveled by boat and overland from Cairo to Capetown. Between the Aswan Dam and Khartoum they traveled on the Nile by steamboat for two weeks with two Hungarians Count Laszlo Szechenyi husband of Gladys Vanderbilt Szechenyi and explorer Laszlo Almasy. Almasy was later involved with the Hungarian government when allied with the German government of Adolf Hitler in the North African Campaign of World War II. The English Patient is a fictionalization of his career. There was a correspondence until 1934 of Almasy trying to get Marshall Bond to have Marshall Bond's friend William Boeing donate an airplane to North African exploration.

[edit] Mojave borax prospecting

In his seventies when most people would have retired long before Marshall Bond took a tent, camping and his mining equipment and patented a borax claim in a remote location in Kern County, California out in the Mojave Desert.