The Last Man on the Mountain: The Death of an American Adventurer on K2 (2 page)

Dudley Wolfe in his French Foreign Legion uniform, 1919.
(Courtesy of the Dudley F. Rochester and Dudley F. Wolfe Family)

Rockport, Maine—1907

D
udley Francis Cecil Wolfe stood at the helm of his beloved fifteen-foot sloop watching the wind change course across the water of Glen Cove inside the larger Penobscot Bay. Feeling each of the wind’s ripples in his fingertips as he teased the rudder in tiny flicks, he smoothly brought the boat back toward the shore where the family’s hired boatkeeper waited on the dock. Dudley was eleven years old and this was his maiden sail as captain.

Some children are born with a silver spoon in their mouths; Dudley had the entire mine, thanks to his grandfather, B. F. Smith.

Benjamin Franklin Smith and his three brothers had, in little more than forty years, created an eight-figure fortune from nothing but their own prescience, persistence, and pluck. From their family farm in the hills of Berwick, Maine, the four men set out in the 1840s to make their way in the world, eventually joining the wagon train west. But unlike the dusty pioneers with whom they shared the trail, the Smith brothers had already made enough money in publishing and commissioned lithographs to start a bank in Omaha. From those profits they bought stakes in quartz, silver, and gold mines in Colorado, one of which was the prolific Briggs Pocket in the Gregory Tailings discovered in the mid-1800s. More interested in building capital than in running the mine, they sold their gold as shares on the New York Stock Exchange at the height of the market, earning several times what the gold was worth on the scales back in Colorado, and they turned that money into real estate, railroads, and the second largest stockyard in the country.

By the time the Smith brothers returned to Maine in the 1880s to build a vast summer estate overlooking Penobscot Bay, they had amassed a fortune rumored to be somewhere between twenty and thirty million dollars—more than $450 million today. But while they were proficient in business, they were less successful in producing heirs. Their grandparents had had twelve children, ten of them boys, and their parents had had six children, four of them boys, but Francis, George Warren, and David Clifford Smith had no legal heirs.
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The Smith family name was therefore left to the youngest brother, B. F., to carry on. While B. F. had a son, Clifford Warren Smith, in 1868, it was his daughter, Mabel Florence Smith, who would provide him with the heirs which the family so desperately wanted.

Mabel had the strong features of her father and uncles: dark, wide-set eyes in a square face, thin lips, and a broad forehead. Too determined-looking to be considered pretty, she had an arresting self-confidence and the look of a woman who enjoyed her place in the world. In 1891, when she was twenty-six, Mabel met a dashing Englishman dressed in the fashionable four-button long coat of the times, who offered all of the charm and mystery her life in the dusty mining towns and cattle yards of Colorado and Omaha had not. His name was Dudley Wolfe.

Expertly groomed and trim, Dudley Wolfe had the effete good looks of gentility: an aquiline nose, cleft chin, neat mustache, and startlingly clear blue eyes. After disembarking from Liverpool and filling out his immigration papers in 1888 at the age of twenty-nine, he ventured off to find his fortune in the bustling, dusty, horse-and-buggy-filled streets of lower Manhattan. Once established as a coffee and nut trader, and with a genuine enjoyment of opera and the arts, he mixed easily in the upper-class English and American societies of New York. At dinners hosted by visiting English nobility at the Waldorf, St. Denis, and Brunswick hotels, Dudley Wolfe would charm and entertain tables of rapt diners with tales of his youth in India hunting tigers and visiting the Taj Mahal. At one such gathering he met one of the richest young women in America, and on October 15, 1892, at the Grace Church in New York City, Dudley Wolfe took Mabel Florence Smith as his wife. They quickly started their family and over the next eight years had four children: Clifford Warren, Dudley Francis Cecil, Gwendolen Florence, and Grafton.

If it looked like a fairy tale, in fact that’s all it was. While presenting himself as a successful coffee importer, living on an estate in the Connecticut suburb of Harrison-on-the-Sound, Dudley was actually on the brink of financial collapse, and the year after he and Mabel married, he and his partner in the import business declared bankruptcy. Nonetheless, only months after the bankruptcy, Dudley organized the Knollwood Golf Club in Elmsford, New York, with fellow founders Oliver and H. M. Harriman, William Rockefeller, and Frederick Bull, which boasted one of the nation’s first full eighteen-hole courses designed by the famous Scotsman Willie Park. Dudley moved his family to the nearby town of Irvington-on-Hudson, twenty miles north of Manhattan. He and Mabel sent their four young children to the best boarding schools money and breeding could command, the boys to Hackley Hall in Tarrytown, New York, and Gwendolen to Miss Porter’s in Farmington, Connecticut.

While it was a life of privilege, it was also a very staid, almost impersonal, one. The Wolfes did not meet at the dinner table and hear of each other’s day in funny and boisterous detail. Mabel was not a warm, natural mother who easily wrapped them in her arms. They barely saw their father. When they did, he never spoke of his own childhood and memories; when they would ask of his parents, their grandparents, Dudley Senior would grow silent and withdraw even further. The children spent most of their young lives with servants and at the age of eight each was shipped off to his or her boarding school.

In May 1908 whatever sense of family they had came crashing down when Dudley Wolfe, Sr., died suddenly. Strangely, although he was the son-in-law of the richest man in New England and the founder of a social and sporting club, his death warranted only the smallest of notices in the general death listings of the
New York Times.
There was no public funeral or formal obituary. He left no will, because he had no money.

After her husband’s death, Mabel Wolfe left New York and resettled in Connecticut, where, with her father’s support, she enrolled the three boys in Pomfret Academy. While each Wolfe boy was a popular classmate and member of the football squad, none excelled academically, particularly young Dudley.

A strong, healthy child with a natural athletic ability, Dudley was far better outdoors than he was in the classroom. Struggle as he might, he could never find the joy in mastering schoolwork that he did in sailing a boat, playing football, or trudging through the woods hunting elk and moose. Like many a child of vast wealth, he lacked the need, and therefore perhaps the drive, to dedicate himself to learning algebra, Latin, or the history of ancient Rome. Instead, he spent untold hours poring over old nautical journals, absorbing every detail that he could find of shipbuilding, sail-making, and the wind and water currents of the North Atlantic.

His brothers, Clifford and Grafton, also struggled to maintain the basic academic standards. Clifford’s social behavior was even worse. Fourteen when his father died, he seemed to instantly follow the course of many rich, undisciplined boys: utter rebellion. Spoiled by his doting mother and full of bravado, Clifford all but thumbed his nose at his grandfather, B. F. Smith, who tried repeatedly to get him to knuckle down. After Clifford was expelled from Pomfret for bad grades and worse behavior, B. F. stepped in and sent him to the Manlius School, hoping the strict military academy in upstate New York would whip the boy into shape. Instead, Clifford burned another bridge with his indifference and unhealthy influence on his younger classmates. After enrolling in and unceremoniously leaving four schools in twelve years, Clifford never graduated from any.

As was the custom for young, wealthy women of the time, after her husband’s death Mabel quickly remarried a solid but rather humorless businessman from a prominent Nebraska family, Joseph Baldrige,
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and moved to Omaha where her father still spent his winters. To his credit, Baldrige took charge of his lack-luster stepsons and with their grandfather gave them fair warning to shape up and improve their studies or face the consequences. Dudley and Grafton struggled academically but fortunately lacked Clifford’s arrogance and sense of entitlement and were therefore supported and urged on by their headmasters. Like Clifford before them, they left Pomfret and were sent to what was by then called the St. John’s School in Manlius. Dudley was a valuable addition to the hockey and track teams, but he and Grafton lasted only a year before being sent on to Phillips Academy
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in Andover, Massachusetts—a forgiving school, it seemed, since the year before the incorrigible Clifford had been thrown out on his ear after a mere five months there, leaving a string of debts his stepfather had to pay.

Dudley entered Phillips Academy in September 1913 and immediately tried out for and got onto the wrestling and football teams. He also pledged to one of Phillips’s oldest secret societies, the PBX or Phi Beta Chi. At the height of the club’s hazing rituals in early December, he began to suffer severe abdominal pains and chronic indigestion. While a “sensitive appendix” was at first suspected, his condition stabilized and the doctors at the school said he was out of danger and recommended he stay until the Christmas break in a few weeks. Mabel saw it otherwise. Having lost her only brother to a burst appendix in 1901,
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she insisted Dudley come home to Omaha immediately. On December 9 he was loaded on the Union Pacific’s Wolverine Express at Boston’s South Station, headed west.

A few days before Christmas the appendix was removed and in mid-January Dudley returned to Phillips and to his new brotherhood in the PBX. Phi Beta Chi employed the usual hazing ceremonies, which involved various kinds of torture for its new pledges, from being routinely punched or paddled across a bare bottom, placed in a coffin and cross-examined, or commanded to stay all night in a cemetery with only a clay pipe and a bag of Lucky Strike tobacco. The faculty at Phillips tried for decades to “crush them out” but the societies thrived and even built large private houses off campus for their meetings.

Though Dudley’s stomach distress had coincidenced with his pledging, he nonetheless survived the hazing, was inducted, and was eager to return to school. Mabel and Joseph weren’t so enthusiastic about his membership and wrote to the headmaster that they feared Dudley’s involvement was “not very conducive to faithful study.” Evidently it wasn’t.

For the next two and a half years, Dudley fought to gain his academic footing, but, like Clifford, his grades went from poor to unacceptable. After he repeatedly failed several subjects, the school threatened to expel him. Unlike his older brother, Dudley wrote a series of earnest letters to the principal, Mr. Alfred Stearns, insisting that he was applying himself and that with proper tutoring he would be able to master the two subjects which particularly dogged him, algebra and German. Signing each, “I am, Respectfully yours,” Dudley tried to impress on Stearns that he was “ready to do everything and anything” to meet the standards of Phillips Academy where he had spent, “believe me, the happiest three years of my life.” Meanwhile, Dudley’s stepfather wrote to Stearns commenting that while he didn’t think Dudley was a “dullard, the boy is in fact very slow.” (One can only hope Baldrige didn’t share his opinions with his stepson.)

In the end the appeals failed; the school reluctantly refused to let Dudley return for the 1916–17 academic year. While Stearns acknowledged that the young man had made every “faithful, conscientious effort,” Dudley utterly failed to meet their scholastic requirements. Writing that he didn’t “know of any boy who has left us in recent years who will carry with him a fuller amount of good will and affection,” Stearns expressed the heartfelt regret of an entire faculty at the school’s losing Dudley.

Defeated and depressed, Dudley returned to Maine for the summer, where he worked at Old Orchard Beach in one of his grandfather’s businesses. Twenty years old, overweight, and miserable, all he could think of, as he watched the tourists walk on the pier, was how to avoid a permanent move to Omaha. He realized his best option was to join the war effort in Europe. After following Mabel and Joseph back to Omaha in the fall, Dudley was turned away from five branches of the US military, each time with his papers stamped “4-F” because of his poor eyesight and flat feet. Finally, and with few options, Dudley set his sights on the French Foreign Legion, a fighting force created for foreign nationals wishing to serve in the French armed forces. A combination of idealistic volunteers and hardened mercenaries, the men of the Legion had fought and died side by side in wars dating back to 1831. It was a perfect solution for Dudley. After he sent letters and telegrams inquiring into how an American could sign up, he discovered that the Legion had a long waiting list and he wouldn’t be able to join for at least a year. Still determined, he applied to the American Red Cross’s ambulance corps, which would at least get him out of Omaha and over to Europe.