Free Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier Page B

George Kennan learned of this development, he wrote to his top superior and asked if he could join the expedition to survey and build the line.
    In late September 1864, Kennan received a response asking if he could be ready to go to Alaska in two weeks. He had been declining mentally and physically in Cincinnati under the pressures of wartime telegraphy; he cabled back that he could be ready in two hours. Unfortunately, he then came down with typhoid fever and had to return to Norwalk to recuperate. His parents, still worried about his health, hesitated to give permission for him to go, but finally they did. Kennan sailed from New York to San Francisco in December, spent some months there, and in July 1865 embarked on a small Russian vessel bound for Kamchatka. By November he was driving dog teams across the tundra. He had not yet turned twenty-one years old.
    Seldom has a trip had greater consequences. Work on the telegraph project was divided among a number of detachments, each assigned a section of the line. Kennan’s party—four men, under the command of a Russian nobleman and major, Sergei Abaza—had to find a route and construct it over about eighteen hundred miles of tundra and forest between the Bering Strait and the mouth of the Amur River. To cover the territory, the party further split up into individuals or groups of two. Sometimes Kennan spent months by himself with just an interpreter and Korak or Yakut guides. His main responsibility was a five-hundred-mile stretch between the Anadyr River and the northern coast of the Sea of Okhotsk.
    Much of what we know about the expedition comes from a book Kennan wrote,
Tent Life in Siberia, Adventures Among the Koraks and Other Tribes in Kamchatka and Northern Asia
(1870), a lively accountwhose good literary quality testifies to the soundness of the Norwalk primary schools, the author’s only formal education. In
Tent Life
, Kennan dodges danger and has adventures of thrillingness or awfulness on almost every other page. We see him galloping along a Kamchatka beach in a race with the incoming tide for thirty miles fenced in by sheer cliffs, and climbing into reindeer-herder dwellings that can be entered only by the chimney hole, and being dragged nearly to his death by a runaway horse, and dancing with every woman at a ball in the Siberian village of Anadyrsk in the middle of winter, and almost losing his life when a small sailboat he’s in becomes dismasted in the Sea of Okhotsk, and battling flights of mosquitoes that turned the tundra sky gray, and enduring a dogsled journey so cold and grueling that one of his comrades, having survived it, shot himself soon afterward. Despite all difficulties, Kennan’s team made good progress, and eventually had poles and supplies in place to begin building the line.
    Then in late May 1867, after two full winters in Siberia, Kennan and his coworkers learned from the captain of a New Bedford whaling ship coasting along the Sea of Okhotsk that a new Atlantic cable had been laid the year before. “Does it work?” Kennan asked with trepidation. “Works like a snatch tackle,” the captain cheerfully replied. Not only that, but the previous, broken cable had been fished up and repaired, and it now was working, too. Kennan and the others understood what this meant. Some weeks later a Russian-American Telegraph Company ship arrived in the Sea of Okhotsk with the official announcement that the project had been abandoned and instructions that the parties in the field sell off all supplies, pay the remaining debts, and disband.
    Kennan wound up the last of his business in the region and started for home across Siberia. First he traversed fifteen hundred miles of roadless wilderness to Yakutsk, then went by river to Irkutsk. In Irkutsk his route would join the Siberian Trakt, Russia’s great trans-Asian road for mail, goods caravans, prisoners, and exiles. Irkutsk and its attractions—the city was then known as “the Paris of