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Introduction: It's strange how circumstances and influences come together at certain times in your life, how each affects the other until the outcome - often unintended - changes you forever. I was 12 years old and going to school in a little coal mining town named Edenborn in German Township, Fayette County, Pa. Our school was a two-story, red brick building with oiled wooden floors and individual desks anchored to 2X4 runners. The playground was a mixture of shale, red dog, and coal ashes from the school's furnace. Rolling hills - a mixture of fields, briar patches and woods - surrounded Edenborn. From my seat near the window I could look across the hills toward the mountains, a dark undulating line on the horizon called Chestnut Ridge, where deer and grouse lived, where trout swam in some of the streams. My teacher at the time was Pearl Ache, a large blond- haired lady whose name we found incongruous and daunting. At the back of Mrs. Ache's room was a three- foot shelf of paperback books. When we were finished with our work, we could get a book and read. One day Mrs. Ache handed me a book that had just arrived. "Try this," she said. The book was FOREST PATROL by Jim Kjelgaard, the story of a forest ranger in the mountains of northern Pennsylvania. I couldn't stop reading, and when I'd finished, I read it again. And again. I took it home and read it, stopping periodically to peer into the distance at those forested ridges leading away to the north. At the end of the year, Mrs. Ache looked at the book's worn cover and handed it to me. "Keep it," she said. I did, and I still have it, dog-eared and cover missing. FOREST PATROL did three things for me; it made me a reader, a writer and transported me to a world where I wanted to live, North Central Pennsylvania, the place I've called home for the last quarter century. Thirty two years after Mrs. Ache gave me FOREST PATROL, I wandered into Tom Eggler's place in Gaines to see what was new in fishing lures. As I was leaving, I noticed an older lady's name tag - Kjelgaard. I hesitated and then approached her. "Are you by chance related to the writer Jim Kjelgaard?" I asked. She nodded and told me that her husband was Jim's cousin. Stunned. I guess that's the best word. I was so surprised to find a relative of the man whose books I'd read for years that I didn't pursue the conversation. But that meeting lodged itself in my mind, and this past winter I began making phone calls to Gaines and eventually discovered that Jim's brother, Henry Kjelgaard, was alive and living in Friendship, N. Y. On a snowy day in February I visited Henry and his wife Ruth to talk about Jim. I discovered a wonderful family and sat fascinated as I heard first-hand about Jim Kjelgaard's life growing up in Potter County, graduating from Galeton High School, becoming an internationally known writer, the creator of Big Red Stories which in turn became the basis for the famous Walt Disney movie of the same name. Here is that story. 
* * * * - "Kjelgaard's Childhood" - Jim Kjelgaard was born in New York City on December 10, 1910, the son of Dr. and Mrs. C.W. Kjelgaard. When he was two years old the family moved to Potter County.
"My mother came from a wealthy family," Henry Kjelgaard explained. "Her father owned tugboats, but when his wife died he married a younger woman. The children, including my mother, were eliminated from the will but were given a sum of money. Mom and Dad used that money to buy 1800 acres up Elk Run in Potter County. They built a big farmhouse and my father became a combination farmer and doctor." As youngsters on the farm, Jim and Henry had their share of chores to do, and one of those was to bring in the cows every day for milking. "One day, Jim got it in his head that it was a good day to go fishing," Henry said. "We had to have the cows in by 4 in the afternoon but Jim saw that as wasting too much good fishing time. So, he convinced me that we ought to bring the cows in early. We brought them in at noon and went fishing. Boy, did we get a lickin' over that." Henry remembers another incident from those days on the farm. "One day Dad got a call that a fellow had fallen down in a pasture above Marshland. He got Jim and I to go with him. When we got there, Dad checked the man over and said he was gone. We had to help load the fellow onto the wagon. Jim and I each took hold of a leg and Dad lifted him up under the arms. When we lifted him, he kind of folded in the middle and the air rushed into his lungs and he made a grunt. Jim and I dropped our end and ran. The man was dead, but we never forgot that day."
There were six children in the Kjelgaard family, five boys - Bob, Winfield, Jim, Hank and John, and one girl, Betty. The outdoors was their playground. "One time," Henry remembers, "Jim and I were playing in the fields back of the house when around the hill comes a big bear. Jim saw it first and yelled to climb the apply tree. We did. The bear came close then started away. Jim dropped out of the tree and started screaming and yelling and ran for the house, but I was too small to get down. The bear came back, stopped and looked at me. I'll never forget that. Jim got a big kick out of it." Bears, it seems, made an impression on Jim Kjelgaard. In the October 1947 issue of "Young Wings", the Junior Literary Guild newsletter, he tells about an incident that was later incorporated into the book BUCKSKIN BRIGADE. "Once, as a youngster, I stood on one side of a small gully and watched five bears coming straight towards me. My rifle held five bullets. Fortunately, when I got the biggest bear, the others ran." As a boy Jim read everything he could get his hands on, and in spite of the scarcity of money in the household, his parents provided as many books as possible, from THE ROVER BOYS to Robert Burns. - "The Move Into Galeton" - "My dad was a darn good doctor but a poor businessman," Henry Kjelgaard says. "Eventually we sold the farm and moved to Galeton. In those days most of the streets were dirt. There were more horses than automobiles. It was the very first time I saw running water and an inside toilet. I was about five then. World War I was on." Dr. Kjelgaard started a stationery business in Galeton but that soon failed and the family moved from one apartment to another, eventually settling in a house on West Main Street. Putting aside his interest in business, Dr. Kjelgaard returned to his original profession. On many nights Jim made the rounds with his father. "We were poor," Henry recalls. "In those days people didn't have much money and they paid Dad in eggs, vegetables and food of one kind or another. My mother would often tell us boys to down to Pine Creek and catch a mess of trout. We lived on what we caught and killed, and we took a lot of fish and game but never more than we could use. That was the way it was back in those days." Even in those years Jim began to demonstrate an interest in writing. He built a desk out of a box and sat in his room pecking out poems and stories on an ancient typewriter. During these years another animal had its impact on Jim Kjelgaard. "Jim loved dogs," Henry says. "It didn't matter what kind of dog it was, Jim would bring it home. And he like raccoons. One time he brought a young coon home. He kept it in a cage in the house, but one day it got out and ripped the curtains down. My mother said that was enough and Jim had to get rid of it." Jim's love of dogs reveals itself in many of his stories where dogs or wolves along with boys or young men become the major characters. "SNOW DOG, STORMY, and, of course, BIG RED illustrate that affection and understanding between man and canine. During the years of Prohibition, Dr. Kjelgaard discovered a way to supplement his meager income. "Dad made a good whiskey in a still in the house on West Main Street in Galeton," Henry says. "He used to put it in two-gallon kegs and we boys buried it in the chicken yard. when there was enough, my oldest brother John would take the whiskey down to Ansonia to a hiding place. There would be money waiting there and he'd leave the whiskey. Years later I found out that the fellow buying the whiskey was a judge over in Wellsboro." As a boy, Jim Kjelgaard had what Henry describes as "fits, something like epileptic seizures. Dr. Kjelgaard took Jim to specialists and eventually got him to Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore where doctors diagnosed the problem as a tumor. "They drilled a hole in Jim's skull to relieve the pressure and that worked for a long time." Henry says. - "The Outdoorsman" - As teenagers, Jim and his brothers John and Henry (who was now called Hank), were always in the outdoors hunting and fishing. "We used to walk up to the Sunken Branch, build a lean-to and spend three or four days trout fishing," Hank says. "Sometimes we'd go up Pine Creek to where Zeke Musto lived. There was a side creek there and you could look down into a hole and see brook trout, hundreds of them and a lot of them 15 to 20 inches long. It was terrific."
The Kjelgaard boys also hunted. Deer were scarce but small game, rabbits and grouse, were everywhere. "We killed as many grouse as our family could eat," Henry says. "There were lots of bears, too. One time, Jim, John and myself were going bear hunting. We had an old 32-20 rifle and a shotgun with some punkin balls. When we were leaving the house about 4 A.M., we found a note from Dad that said: 'I want you boys to be very careful. That's a big bear and you're not overly-gunned to get him.' We all laughed at that." Dr. and Mrs. Kjelgaard were lenient when it came to hunting and fishing, but there were limits. Writing in the February, 1959 issue of "Holiday House News," the publisher's newsletter, Jim has this to say about the lure of the mountains and streams surrounding Galeton. "My brother John and I were so assiduous in our pursuit of fish and game that quite often we didn't have time to attend school. This was all to the good until one sad day when our teachers called at home, after we had been out for a week, to see if we were seriously ill. John and I took our meals standing up for the next week." Looking back on those years in Galeton, life, though difficult for the Kjelgaards, had its humorous moments.
"When we lived on West Main Street, Jim had a big airdale dog that was loyal to our family," Henry remembers, "The circus used to come every year and set up in the flat above town. One time Jim and I were watching them set up. They had three big elephants and they used them to move the heavy wagon around. " Well, Jim's airdale thought they were infringing on family property and he started nipping and barking at them and chased them all down into Pine Creek. Jim and I took off for home." - "Always A Writer" - According to Hank, Jim continued writing during his years at Galeton High School. "He was always sending out stories to hunting and fishing magazines and they were always being rejected." However, in his senior year in 1928, Jim finally sold a story. His payment was a two-year subscription to the magazine, but when the next issue appeared and his story was featured on the cover he declared, "I felt like a combination of Shakespeare, Zane Grey, and Ralph Waldo Emerson." During the Depression years, John, Jim and Hank used to work on the potato farms at Germania. They worked from daylight to dark and got 50 cents a day. According to Hank, Jim stood about 5'10", had blond hair and bright blue eyes. He was husky and a hard worker. The Kjelgaard boys were also trappers and spent many hours working Potter County's streams for mink and beaver. Upon his graduation from high school in 1928, Jim and a Galeton friend, Stanley Cool, decided to spend the winter trapping. They spent three months in a camp at Ansonia. When it was time to come with their furs, all the tires on Stanley's car, a 1922 Model T Ford, went flat. So, the two intrepid trappers filled the tires with sod and drove it back. to Galeton. "They made quite a sight and sound driving into town." Hank remembers. Finding a job after high school became a major objective for the Kjelgaard boys. They took anything that came along, and that included ditch digging. "John, Jim and I got a job digging a ditch for Sam Brendel about 8 miles above Galeton," Henry say. "The ditch was four to five feet deep and 100 rods long. It went right through the woods, so we had lots of tree roots and rocks to work on. We earned $100 for that job, which was a lot of money back then, and we gave it to our parents. I remember that job because we used to walk to work, dig ditch, and then walk home."
As the decade of the '30s' arrived, so did a new type of employment - guiding hunters. The hunters arrived on trains, stayed in local homes, camps, or hotels and were led into the woods by the Kjelgaards. "Some fellows were good hunters and some weren't." Hank says. "I remember one hunt up near Cherry Springs. Jim had a man from New Jersey on watch and John and I were driving. We put out a big buck and he went right toward Jim and his hunter. Then we heard all this shooting. When we got there, Jim was shaking his head. The buck had come up and stood right in front of the man, who emptied his gun, then reloaded and emptied it again. He shot himself out of shells and the deer just walked away. "There were times when we did shoot deer for fellas if they really wanted one. We sold deer, too, and got anywhere from $5 to $15 for a buck. One year we killed a hugh buck that had a 28 inch spread. We got $25 for that deer, and I often wonder what kind of story that man told when he got home." John Kjelgaard finally got a job as a forest ranger in Cross Fork during the early 1930's, and Jim rented a camp and he and Hank spent time with him. Jim used those experiences as the basis for his first book, FOREST PATROL, which was published by Holiday House in 1941. - "Bigwoods Influence" - Today, when reading FOREST PATROL, it 's easy to see the resemblances between the fictional town of Pine Hill and the real town of Cross Fork. The characters, John Beldin, Lew Bangorst, Poley Harris, Fred Cramer, are based on people Jim Kjelgaard met and knew in Potter County. With the acceptance of more stories in magazines like Fur-Fish-Game, Argosy, and Liberty, Jim Kjelgaard had become a writer. According to Holiday House News, Jim began corresponding with Eddie Dressen, a member of a writer's group in Milwaukee and a fan of his work. "At first Jim didn't know it, but he finally discovered that Eddie was Edna," Hank says. "She didn't like the name Edna." Eventually, Jim traveled to Milwaukee to meet "Eddie." A romance developed and they married. Milwaukee was the place to go, John traveled there to visit Jim, met Eddie's sister, and they were married. For most of the 1930's and early '40's Jim and Eddie lived in Milwaukee. During World War II, Jim tried to enlist, but because of his physical problem he was deferred. So, he went to work in a torpedo plant in Milwaukee. At night he wrote, and when the war was over he became a full-time writer. Jim's second book, REBEL SIEGE, is a story of the American Revolution in the South an is still highly regarded as a fine piece of historical fiction for young readers. Once Kjelgaard became a full-time writer, he began making trips to gather information for stories. He traveled to northern Canada, throughout the Rockies, and into Mexico. "Jim told me a story about being up in Canada," Hank says, " He was hunting grizzly and he killed one. Then the guide spotted a wolf and he wanted Jim to shoot it. But, Jim wouldn't. The guide couldn't understand it, but Jim said it was too much like a dog." Kjelgaards's third book, BIG RED, made him famous. By the time it was reissued in 1956, it had sold a total of 225,000 copies in various editions and had been published in several foreign countries. A newspaper clipping from the Elmira paper carries the headline "Kjelgaard Volume is Book of Month Club Selection." According to the article, Mr. Kjelgaard, author of over 20 books and hundreds of short stories, has had his THE COMING OF THE MORMONS chosen by the Book of the Month Club as its No. 1 selection for March." The article goes on to say that Jim has been a guest of his parents for five days but had left to travel to Canada on assignment for Esquire magazine. It was Jim's last trip home. Unbeknownst to his thousands of fans, Jim Kjelgaard had suffered from a combination of severe arthritis and the reoccurrence of a brain tumor. - "End of the Trail" - "My mother died in 1955 and Jim wasn't able to get back for the funeral. That's when I knew something was wrong," Hank says. After many years in Milwaukee, Jim and Eddie moved to Phoenix where doctors felt the climate would be more comfortable for him.
"He liked the Southwest, the desert," Hank says. "As long as he could be outdoors, he was happy." On July 12, 1959, Jim Kjelgaard took his own life at his home in Phoenix. "We got the call," Hank remembers, "Jim was gone. The pain had become unbearable. He simply couldn't take it any longer." Hank recalls that for months after his death letters addressed to Jim continued to arrive. "People didn't know he was dead. And a lot of the mail came from young people, folks who just liked his stories or wanted to talk about becoming a writer. And, you know something Eddie answered every one of those letters. "I always felt bad that Jim didn't get to see the movie "Big Red." Walt Disney brought it out later in 1959, but Jim was gone." Mrs. Jim Kjelgaard, who died several years ago, wrote the following tribute to her husband in 1960 and titled it "He Walked With Giant Strides." "For 20 years Jim Kjelgaard suffered agonizing pain and rose above it. He was the grandest, bravest person we we ever knew. The endless procession of doctors, clinics, hospitals, the eternal medicines - they took their toll, but to the world he presented an always smiling face, a delightful humor, a never-ending kindness to humanity everywhere. "And he grew more ill. This past year Jim seldom left the house, but he wrote eight books, charming, delightful, wonderful books - in one year... "He helped people everywhere. I am getting letters now to prove it. He was never too tired or ill to help a kid, nor to further the project dear to him, preservation of forests and wildlife. "Jim Kjelgaard had to the moment of the end, a brilliant - incisively brilliant mind of incredible scope. His thoughtfulness and generosity was beyond ordinary belief. He gave his family, friends, and readers 20 years of inspiring wisdom and courage. We will be sorely tried without it. "He walked with the strides of a giant and we ordinary folk had to trot along as best we could, and now he deserves - and has earned - accolades and prayers for the peace he has. "We want everyone everywhere to know that we are terribly proud of Jim Kjelgaard. And that the unfailing courage he showed for two decades will inspire us all of our lives. Nothing he ever did was small or petty - he was to great a being for earthly pettiness. "His sick body is gone and he will again tread higher peaks, proudly and grandly - as we love and know him." * * * * * In Conclusion: A recent book by Nancy Atwell deals with getting young people to read and write. Atwell did a survey of authors and listed the top three choices of boys. One of those was Jim Kjelgaard. As a reading teacher for 27 years, I've used that opportunity to introduce young people to Jim Kjelgaard. What a wonderful thing it is to see a youngster peering into the pages of FOREST PATROL or BIG RED or OUTLAW RED, oblivious to the world around them, entranced by this marvelous story teller. I suppose I see some of myself in that scene, a kid's imagination sprung loose to roam the Rasca District, to feel the silky coat of an Irish setter, to shiver under the wintry blasts inside a trapper's cabin, to gaze at ridges rolling away under the purple mists of autumn. In discussing his work, Jim Kjelgaard said he held to one standard: "I believe," he said, "that in presuming to write for young people, or for anyone else, the least the author owes is the best he can give." Jim Kjelgaard did that, and we are the richer for it. * * * * * Author's Note: I wish to thank Mr. and Mrs. Henry Kjelgaard of Friendship, N. Y. for their time, the invaluable photos and background information, and most of all for their trust in me to present the story of Jim Kjelgaard. |