Free Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier Page A

George Kennan’s first publisher. And some years ago, when I was interviewing a very old and distant cousin named Winthrop Wickham (born 1901), he told me that as a boy he took piano lessons from George Kennan’s sister. Some people who you read about you have a special affinity for; George Kennan I feel I know to the cowlick in his hair.
    George Kennan, small-town Ohio boy, who Norwalk old-timers remembered getting a whipping from his father under the apple tree in the family’s backyard or walking along Main Street from the telegraph office to the newspaper with the latest dispatches in his hand, went on tobecome the most famous Siberian traveler of the nineteenth century. Indeed, to this day, no traveler in Siberia has made a reputation to compare with Kennan’s. It happened like this:
    In 1828, a man named John Kennan came to Norwalk to take the job of principal of the Norwalk Academy. Ohio had been a near wilderness just a dozen years before, and the local boosters hoped that a good secondary school would add distinction and substance to their town. A Vermonter by way of New York State, John Kennan had recently graduated from Hamilton College. The year after he arrived, he married a Norwalk girl, Mary Ann Morse. They would have six children, of whom George would be the second youngest. John Kennan was of a type common on the frontier in that he tried many careers. He soon quit being principal, then opened a law office, ran a daguerreotype parlor, served as county auditor, put out a short-lived newspaper, and in the 1840s became fascinated with the telegraph, which was just beginning to spread itself across the country. After the line reached Norwalk, John was hired as the town’s Western Union operator, a post he held for years.
    John’s enthusiasms included a weakness for bad investments. Eventually the family’s finances declined to the point that George, who had shown an aptitude for the telegraph since he was small, left school at the age of twelve to help out at the telegraph office full-time. When the Civil War started, George’s youth and physical frailness kept him at home, but he did participate through the telegraph, that war’s essential mode of communication. In a letter of February 1862, Lucy Preston Wickham, one of the matriarchs of the town (and my three-greats grandmother), wrote, “George Kennan has just received a dispatch that Fort Donelson has been taken.” For my ancestors, all of them vigorous supporters of Lincoln and the Union, the fall of Fort Donelson was the first substantial good tidings in the war, and seventeen-year-old George was its bearer. As the first to hear important news, and especially to take down the fearful lists of casualties—Norwalk lost many boys in the war—the Kennans became figures of some moment in town. George’s skill at telegraphy soon won him promotions and transfers through the ranks of Western Union. He was sent to Cleveland, to Columbus, and to West Virginia. By the time he was nineteen he had been made an operator at the Military Telegraph Corps’s central Midwestern station in Cincinnati.
    Elsewhere, in the big picture, telegraph technology of that era had hit an obstacle. Wires had proved cheap and easy to string on land and hadquickly crossed North America. Crossing the Atlantic Ocean to Europe, however, presented a tougher challenge. In 1858, a competitor of Western Union had tried to lay an underwater cable from Newfoundland to Ireland, but it broke. As an alternative, Perry McDonough Collins, an energetic American entrepreneur and promoter of the advantages of trade with Russia, proposed linking America to Europe by running a line to Alaska, across the Bering Strait (a much shorter and shallower water crossing), through Siberia, and onward to the west. The Russian government went for the idea and gave the necessary permissions and promises of help. Western Union liked the plan, too, and in 1864 acquired Collins’s rights-of-way. As soon as