The Shameless Diary of an Explorer by Robert Dunn

Miserable Mt. McKinley expedition, with anti-Semitism

Robert Dunn was a journalist, born in Rhode Island and educated at Harvard. After gaining some travel experience in Alaska, he accompanied Dr. Frederick Cook on his 1903 expedition to climb Mt. McKinley, now known as Denali, the highest mountain in North America. Dunn chronicled the journey in his 1907 book The Shameless Diary of an Explorer. In his introduction, Dunn states that his intention was to write an honest account of wilderness exploration, one unencumbered by romantic baggage and phony heroism. Perhaps this asserted frankness is what Dunn means by “shameless.” He certainly doesn’t sugar-coat his narrative of the trip. In fact, he has very little good to say about Alaska or his traveling companions.

Cook’s team was not the first to attempt to climb McKinley. By 1903, however, no one had yet charted a successful route to the summit. After debarking from a steamer at the coastal village of Tyonek, Dunn and company spend half the book just getting to the base of the mountain, a tedious and arduous journey. Day after lugubrious day Dunn’s diary tells of trudging through muddy tundra and sucking swamps, fording countless streams and rivers—always wet, always filthy, plagued by mosquitos, always irritable. The six men in the company soon grow to dislike one another, or at least Dunn despises the rest, which is all you hear about. Dunn may have accomplished his goal of brutal frankness, but the resulting narrative leaves little for the reader to enjoy. I could have used just a touch of that romantic heroism he worked so hard to eschew.

Dunn says he was appointed by Cook as second in command of the expedition. He also served as geologist, but barely mentions geology. Another team member was a botanist, but if there was a scientific purpose to this expedition, it is not revealed by Dunn’s narrative. Climbing the mountain was the primary goal, and mostly what the reader gets is an account of the drudgery and misery involved in working towards that end. The best this book has to offer is a few passages of natural description that somewhat convey the beauty of the Alaskan wilderness. Most of the time, however, Dunn seems more concerned with ostentatious verbage than with educating the reader, so his prose is often annoying and frustratingly difficult to decipher.

Cook’s name is never mentioned in the book; he is only referred to as “the professor.” Dunn may have changed the names of the other four members of the expedition as well, in order to give himself free rein to speak poorly of them. The impression one gets, however, is that Dunn is the last person with whom you’d want to climb a mountain. He speaks as if he were a genius with all the answers, while the rest of the group are a bunch of idiots. In doing so, he reveals the ugliness of his own personality. It is often apparent that he would rather complain than contribute. In addition, Dunn makes comments that reveal him to be a racist and an anti-Semite. One of the team members was Jewish, and Dunn never lets you forget it. He has nothing good to say about the guy, and attributes all the man’s faults to his ethnicity. In 1903, it was not uncommon for white writers to extoll the glories of the Anglo-Saxon race while propagating stereotypes of everybody else. Jack London or John Muir may have had the literary talent to partially offset such antiquated bigotry, but Dunn does not. Plenty of explorers and nature writers have penned travelogues of Alaska. Don’t waste your time reading this one.
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