Dog Sledding Essay

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The History of the Iditarod Jack London wrote many books, and out of the few that I read, my personal favorite is “The Call of the Wild.” Driving sleds with a team of dogs is an exciting thing. When I went to Canada, I tried it and I had the time of my life. I tell everyone to at least try it once. Sled dogs have been in use since ancient times to get across the frozen tundra, and to get from one place to another in the snow. The use of dogs to pull sleds goes back centuries, but formal dog sled racing dates back to the early 1900s. Jack London was born on January 12th, 1876 in Glen Ellen, California. He was deserted by his father, so he was raised by his mother and stepfather an hour and fifteen minutes away in Oakland, California. At the age of 14, Jack quit school to escape poverty and was on the search for adventure. He explored San Francisco Bay, occasionally stealing oysters or working for the government fish patrol. He went to Japan as a sailor, and saw great conditions of depression, and was eventually arrested for being homeless, well, for wandering from place to place without a permanent home. At the age of 18, Jack became a militant socialist. He educated himself at public libraries from the works of Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Charles Darwin. At the age of 19, Jack London crammed a four-year high school course into one year and then entered the University of California at Berkeley. After a year, he quit school to seek a fortune in the Klondike gold rush of 1897. He returned the next year still poor and was unable to find work so he decided to earn a living as a writer. Jack studied magazines, and then set a daily schedule for himself for producing anecdotes, jokes, sonnets, ballads, adventure stories, or horror stories. He wrote his first book in 1900, called “The Son of the Wolf.” Within 17 years, he produced and completed fifty books of

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