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THE ASTORIAN • SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, 2022
Kipling put Oregon on the map
By DOUGLAS PERRY
The Oregonian
To the 21st-century ear, the name Rudy-
ard Kipling sounds as old-fashioned and mis-
conceived as his paeans to the British Empire.
Yet some 120 years ago, it meant high quality,
excitement.
The Nobel Prize-winning author domi-
nated bookshelves and literary-salon conver-
sations like no one ever had, thanks to the
novel “Kim,” the story collection “The Jun-
gle Book” and propulsive poems that off ered
timeless, manly advice.
And even though Kipling was an English-
man born in India, Oregon boosters enthusias-
tically claimed him.
The reason: the 1891 travelogue “Ameri-
can Notes.”
At the fi rst stop on the U.S. tour that pro-
duced the book, Kipling ended up deeply
unimpressed with San Francisco and its
inhabitants. “I never intended to curse the peo-
ple with a provincialism so vast as this,” he
wrote. He’d have similar thoughts about Chi-
cago: “Having seen it, I urgently desire never
to see it again.”
Off ered one wag upon the book’s publica-
tion: “No reading between the lines is required
to gather that Kipling didn’t think Britain lost
much in 1776.”
Yet Kipling did have quite a time in
Oregon.
“I have lived!” the 25-year-old author bel-
lows, recounting a fi shing expedition on the
Clackamas River that reached its apex when
a large stretch of “living silver leaped into the
air far across the water. Eleven-and-one-half
pounds of fi ghting salmon!”
Brent Wojahn/The Oregonian
Author Rudyard Kipling reportedly caught 16 salmon near this spot on the Clackamas River. A
rock wall that rises out of the water is known as Kipling Rock.
The fi shing party returned to Portland, he
wrote, “weeping tears of pure joy.”
Kipling’s fame traversed the globe in those
last years of the 19th century, and so Orego-
nians reveled in his fi sh story. (Some of them
even tried to improve on it. One man who was
part of Kipling’s Clackamas River expedition
pointed out a mistake in the published narra-
tive, insisting the Englishman used a spinner
for his impressive catch, not a “gaudy fl y.” It’s
also now believed, by the way, that the group
caught steelhead that day, not salmon.)
Whatever the case, some two decades after
the event, The Oregonian remained proud that
a “lusty” local fi sh had “attached itself to the
Kipling line, thereby winning immortality for
its fi ghting qualities as well as for its habitat.”
A boulder near where the catch occurred
long has been known as Kipling Rock.
With his recounting of the experience in
print, Kipling helped stamp Oregon in the
popular imagination, making clear to his
many readers across the world, wrote one
advocate, that a man who had “never felt the
strike and seen the leap of an Oregon salmon
had never really lived and was cheated of his
birthright.” This was no small endorsement at
a time when most Americans knew nothing
about the sparsely populated state.
But what are we supposed to think of
Kipling himself all these years later?
Not much. He’s widely derided as an Anglo
nationalist, an imperialist and a racist. In 2018,
students at England’s Manchester University
blotted out a campus mural that featured his
iconic poem “If,” replacing it with a work by
Maya Angelou.
That Kipling was “a prodigiously gifted
writer who created works of inarguable great-
ness hardly matters anymore,” The New
Yorker wrote the following year.
That greatness was especially inarguable
during Kipling’s prime, when he was the high-
est-paid — and possibly the most prolifi c —
author in the land.
Oscar Wilde enthused that Kipling
“revealed life by fl ashes of vulgarity.”
Winston Churchill, who, like Kipling,
has been downgraded by historical reevalua-
tion (and for many of the same reasons), pro-
claimed that “no one has ever written like
Kipling before.”
Mark Twain said Kipling “knew more than
any person I had met.”
That was then.
Even though the beloved “Jungle Book”
continues to be reimagined by each generation
(the most recent fi lm version arrived just fi ve
years ago), Kipling has been considered dated
for a very long time. Edmund Wilson way
back in 1941 wrote that the English writer had
“dropped out of modern literature.”
In fact, Wilson was late to that conclusion.
In 1916, when Kipling was only 50, another
American critic declared that over the previ-
ous decade-plus “Kipling has worked indus-
triously but has produced nothing that anyone
cares very much about.”
And yet such was the power of his early
work that Kiplingisms were familiar to almost
everyone who spoke English: “East is East and
West is West, and never the twain shall meet”
… “You’re a better man than I am, Gunga
Din!” … “If you can meet with triumph and
disaster and treat those two imposters just the
same” … “A woman is only a woman, but a
good cigar is a smoke.”
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