About a week ago Nicola Griffith tagged me for a unique blog game. The deal was I'm suppose to write seven random/weird things about my favorite historical figure. As it happens I have spent the last week writing about Alaskan aviator Carl "Ben" Eielson - immersing myself as much as possible in the life of a man who was the first to fly across the Arctic, over Antarctica and deliver mail by air in Alaska. He died in 1929 in a plane crash in Siberia. He didn't keep journals or diaries, he didn't write a lot of letters (or if he did they aren't readily available) and he just generally was not the kind of guy to leave a big literary trail just waiting to be discovered 80 years later.

In other words, there is a lot out there of what other people think about Ben Eielson, but not a whole lot of what Ben Eielson thought.

I don't have seven specific things on Ben - not seven burning questions or seven surprises or seven shocking truths. Honestly, I don't even one or two of those. What I do have though is a list of things that bother me about Ben and the legend that has grown around him. This is the kind of stuff that literally keeps me up at night as I try to understand just who he was - and how he would have felt about being the most famous Alaskan bush pilot (and thus really American bush pilot) of all time.

1. I don't really know why he went to Alaska. I know that he was trained as a pilot during WWI and then did not get a chance to fly in the war because it ended as he was shipping out. I know he struggled to make a living flying planes anywhere he could and was unsuccessful. (Not uncommon in the post WWI era.) I know he tried to do the kind of respectable work that his family hoped for him and then met someone (who knew someone else...) and happened into an offer for a job as a school teacher in Fairbanks, AK. But that's where I don't follow. He grew up in N. Dakota and no one ever recorded or mentioned that he had an interest in going to Alaska. But he went for a job as a school teacher - something else he never expressed wanting to do. Maybe it was just something to do - a whim even - but it changed his life and a lot of others. I'd love to know why this was the offer he chose to pursue.

2. Why was he so committed to making Fairbanks (and AK in general) the center of commercial aviation for the world? It is true that a lot of international flights go through Anchorage today, but it's odd to me that as his experience grew, Ben didn't go back to the Lower 48 where commercial aviation was starting to take off in the late 1920s. Why did he stay in such a difficult environment to accomplish anything, let alone flying? It has always been taken as a given that he wanted aviation specifically in Alaska to take off. I wish I knew why he was so determined to make it there.

3. Did he ever have a romantic relationship with anyone? Most of his contemporaries were married and had children but Ben did not. In fact I haven't found any woman mentioned in connection with him although there has been strange speculation in a couple of books that he was thinking of getting married before he died - but I don't think this is true as no fiance was mentioned in any news articles (which would certainly have played that up in the wake of his tragic death). This isn't a big deal but it's odd. Men in 1929 usually were married by the time they were in their 30s but Ben wasn't - it's one more thing I just don't know.

4. There is some suggestion that Ben was pressured by a fellow pilot into taking his last flight which was in very poor weather. While I certainly believe that a pilot can be pressured, I had never read anywhere that Ben was particularly susceptible to this. He had high time among his contemporaries, had set all sorts of records, and was running the company. So how could anyone else persuade him to fly if he didn't really want to? Now succumbing to economic pressure - to the need to get the contract he had signed fulfilled - that is something I can believe. But no one ever seriously considered that at the time or in subsequent articles and books written about his death. I'm thinking about that alot though - about just what makes a pilot who was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross by the president believe that he has to take a dangerous flight in horrible weather against his better judgment. This is the kind of thing that no one will ever know and yet I can't stop dwelling on it; it says so much about who he was and we'll never know the answer.

The eternal frustration of the historian.

It's interesting to think about people like Ben Eielson - someone who is historic but also relatively unknown to the general population. He plays a part in my book (along with other bush pilots) because they created a myth that still affects the way pilots are viewed and operate in Alaska today. But we can never truly know them because these were not the kind of men who wrote things down, who considered their experiences and emotions worthy of deep self analysis. They just got the job done. As to how and why, well - that's for the rest of us to endlessly ponder.

It's a wonder I get anything done at all around here when Ben and I spend so much time together........

[Post pic of Ben Eielson looking exactly as an Alaskan bush pilot was supposed to.]