Alaska’s “White Eskimo”

FAIRBANKS, ALASKA: On my first visit to the University of Alaska / Fairbanks, I was doing what you would expect a retired English professor to do: poking around the library looking for a list of books on Alaskan Lit. The reference librarian informed me that no such printed list existed in his high-tech library. I’d have to talk with their computer to build such a list on my own.

Except that I didn’t know the questions! As I was silently bemoaning my abysmally ignorant condition, my eye caught a cluster of naïve drawings about the way Eskimos lived on St. Lawrence Island off the coast of Alaska circa 1927. Wow! Here was a cache of images infinitely more interesting than an exercise in local bibliography, however delicious the titles I might have discovered.

The paintings had been hung in honor of the recently concluded biennial Inuit symposium. But however beguiling they were, the prose texts were written in such supple English that I asked who their writer was. One Otto William Geist (1888-1963). Did they have his obit? They handed me a badly Xeroxed page from the Fairbanks News-Miner. Though it was a tough read, I was hooked. And I worked my way across Alaska reading Charles Keim’s excellent biography, The White Eskimo (1969), on two rainy afternoons in Juneau and Sitka.

What a mensch! Geist epitomizes for me the can-do spirit of the Alaska pioneer. Once, in a Ketchikan department store front, he was displaying beguiling images he had commissioned form a 19-year-old Eskimo girl (along with the artifacts and fossils). Charles Burrell, president of the Alaska College of Mines and Agricultural Science (now UA / F), happened to stop by. Amazed at Geist’s talent as a collector of Eskimo lore, he wrote him a check on the spot to finance another summer of collecting.

It was probably the best snap judgment (and investment) the energetic young college president ever made. Geist went on—without benefit of even an undergraduate degree—to put the University in Fairbanks on the worldwide academic map. Even now, his spirit (“geist” you might pun) hangs like a benign ghost over the museum he founded: a great standing grizzly bear—dubbed Otto in his name—greets visitors to the world-class collection he began.

Archaeologists and paleontologists have attested to his achievements. I merely want to comment on his remarkable prehistory as a self-tutored academic in Germany and across the continental U.S.

Geist was born in a village near Munich to a family of 14 siblings whose father was a school superintendent. In due course, he went to what we would call a Vo-Tech school run by the Benedictines. He was always in dutch with the friars because he preferred rummaging through the local meadows for Roman artifacts to their dull curriculum. His teenage collecting was soon on display at a local museum. (On returning as an adult to his native village, he found that some light-fingered American soldier had lifted that collection during the Occupation. To the victorious belong the despoilers.)

He started his two years compulsory military service in the Prussian Army when he was 18. There he distinguished (or nearly extinguished) himself by his insubordinate behavior—including ringleading a posse which expressed their contempt for a particular martinet by collectively shitting in the loo-tenant’s plumed hat.

It was clear his future lay in some other sector than the military. With the money saved from his short unhappy career as a non-com, he booked passage on the maiden voyage of the George Washington between Bremen and New York. He hated the noise and confusion of New York and went to work as an orderly in a German-language hospital in Chicago run by the Alexian brothers.

Presciently perhaps, the first sentence he learned in a night class in English was “Ice is frozen water.” He didn’t yet have Alaska on the brain, but he so hated Chicago that he walked to St. Louis: It took him two weeks. Still too cooped up. He pushed on to Kansas City where, hitching a ride from a farmer, he was talked into signing on as a farm hand.

Two farms and three years later, he cashed in his expertise in mechanics by becoming a chauffeur for Sterling Morton of the salt fortune. When World War I broke out, he wanted to get in the thick of things, becoming chauffer for Black Jack Pershing during the notorious Pancho Villa raids in New Mexico. Eventually, overseas with an automotive unit, he ended up as chauffeur for the American brass in the Peace Treaty delegation. Clearly, Otto had a gift of gab and a knack for schmoozing with the powers that be.

After Versailles, he returned to Kansas City to start up his own trucking business, which unhappily coincided with the 1923 recession, and he was out of business. But not out of luck. He followed the strike-it-rich call of his brother to Alaska where they didn’t find gold, but Otto used his skills as a mechanic as second engineer on a sternwheeler plying the Yukon.

During one passage he became the protégé of a U.S. biologist doing research in the Arctic. This scientist from Jackson Hole, Wy., taught the eager student how to mount specimens. Otto had found “gold” of a different kind—and a lifelong career at the University after his serendipitous meeting with President Burrell in Ketchikan.

When the University bestowed an honorary doctorate on the indefatigable collector at the 1956 graduation in Fairbanks, the students and the faculty went wild in their standing ovation. Although his presence is still palpable in Fairbanks today, he died in an European hospital of cancer, his two-year round-the-world collecting trip aborted.

Reprinted from Welcomat: After Dark, Hazard-at-Large.