Hiram Bond - Jack London and The Bonds

Jack London and The Bonds

Judge Bond is chiefly remembered as the basis for the character Judge Miller in Jack London's novel "The Call of the Wild". Judge Bond's sons were Louis Bond and Marshall Bond who were mining engineers educated at Yale and Stanford. The Bonds owned the cabin and tent pitch overlooking Dawson City, in the Northwest Territory where Jack London had lived on a work exchange during the Fall of 1897 and part of the Spring of 1898. The Bond brothers had also owned the sled dogs that London used in Dawson for the Bonds and other of his clients. One of their dogs was the basis for the character Buck.

London visited Marshall Bond at New Park Judge Bond's Ranch in 1901 at Santa Clara which included a plum orchard, vineyard and winery as well pasture for a string of polo ponies. The Call of the Wild begins with a description of the place.

Buck lived at a big house in the sun-kissed Santa Clara Valley. Judge Miller's place, it was called. It stood back from the road, half-hidden among the trees, through which glimpses could be caught of the wide cool veranda that ran around its four sides. The house was approached by graveled driveways which wound about through wide-spreading lawns and under the interlacing boughs of tall poplars. At the rear things were on even a more spacious scale than at the front. There were great stables, where a dozen grooms and boys held forth, rows of vine-clad servants' cottages, an endless and orderly array of outhouses, long grape arbors, green pastures, orchards, and berry patches. Then there was the pumping plant for the artesian well, and the big cement tank where Judge Miller's boys took their morning plunge and kept cool in the hot afternoon