In just 5 days and 20 some hours, theaters everywhere will be crowded with people to see Indiana Jones and The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. With the release only a few days away, I figured that I would post a couple of blogs looking back at the fictional life of Henry Walton Jones, Jr. and the very real word in which his character lives. As you read through this you will see the names of many historical figures. Next to these names is a bracket with a bit of info. I encourage you to look these names up and learn more about the interesting people that Indy ran into during his many adventures.
I started this look back yesterday by profiling Indy's life from his birth in 1899 to his young teenage years in 1914. Today we pick back up in 1915.
Sometime in 1915 or early 1916, Indy and his father have left Utah and moved back to Princeton. By February 1916, Jones was working as a soda jerk and going to the local high school. The prom was approaching, and he hoped to get a nice car to drive his prom date in. The engine was broke on the car he borrowed, so he took it to Thomas Edison (1847-1941: an American inventor who developed the phonograph and the long lasting light bulb), who offered to fix it for free. However, Indy soon uncovered a plot by the Germans to steal some secret plans Edison had been working on for a new motor. Indy and girlfriend Nancy Stratemeyer were eventually able to locate the plans and trace them to Edison's assistant, who was then taken to jail. In an expression of his gratitude, Edison loaned Indy a Bugati, which Indy then took Nancy to the prom in.
In March, school was let out for spring break, so Indy and his father took a train to New Mexico to visit family members. Once at their destination, Indy and his cousin Frank secretly hitched a ride south across the border to "see the senoritas". Caught in a border clash with Mexican revolutionaries, and impulsively trying to get back a screaming woman's stolen dresses, Indy took off on horse back after the receding marauders. Hopelessly outnumbered and outmatched, Indy was captured and almost shot; however, at the last moment he was released by Pancho Villa (1878-1923: a Mexican Revolutionary general).
He joined this army of revolutionaries, playing a part in the Mexican Revolution of 1916. It is during this time that he met a Belgian man named Remy Baudouin, and the two quickly became friends. After learning the truths about revolution and warfare, and becoming disillusioned, Indy decided to join Remy in heading for the Great War (World War I) in Europe, a war he felt had to be fought. After settling a score with an old enemy, Demetrios, and recovering an Egyptian artifact that had been lost to Howard Carter and Indy during his first archaeological adventure in 1908 (see yesterdays post), Indy and Remy left Mexico in April, departing from Veracruz for Europe and war. (While Indy heads to Europe, Indiana-the family dog-dies.)After a brief stopover in Ireland in time to witness 1916's Easter Rising (a rebellion staged in Ireland in Easter Week), and engage in fisticuffs with future Irish Prime Minister Sean Lemass (1899-1971), Indy and Remy reached London, England and the recruiting office of the Belgian Army (as this was not only Remy's country of birth, but the only army that wouldn't ask awkward questions about age) in May. Enlisting under the pseudonym Henri Defense, Indy, along with Remy, settled in to wait for their call-up papers. Indy spent this time falling in love with the young suffragette Vicky Prentiss, but his proposal was rebuffed and, heartbroken, Indy joined a newly-married Remy at the train station to head for Le Havre, France and basic training.
After seeing action first at Flanders, France, where all their superior officers were wiped out, Indy and Remy were sent to join with French troops at the Somme (France) in August. Here, Indy and Remy were subjected fully to the horrors and pressures of trench warfare, and were engaged in several pushes, a gas attack and the terror of German flamethrowers. Mistrust was rife in Indy's unit, but after some initial difficulties the unit pulled together enough to take their target. Victory did not last long as German reinforcements were quick to swamp the combined French/Belgian defense and Indy was swiftly captured while most of his unit was killed. Remy vanished in the confusion, apparently hit.
Indy was sent to a prison camp, where he joined an escape attempt already in progress. However, he was quickly recaptured and moved to a maximum security prison at Dusterstadt. After many escape attempts Indy, with the help of Charles De Gaulle (1890-1970: 18th President of the French Republic), broke free and, after a brief flirtation with the idea of heading home to America and continuing high school, rejoined what was left of his unit, including a recovering Remy, who Indy was happy to see still alive.
In an effort to get out of the trenches, Indy joined a courier unit attached to French High Command in September. When forced to deliver orders that would result in the pointless death of thousands of his fellow soldiers at Verdun (France), Indy sabotaged his own bike, thereby postponing the massacre, at least for a week or so. This action got Indy fired from courier duty and thrown back to the trenches, rejoining Remy.
While on leave in Paris in October, Indy engaged in a tumultuous sexual affair with Mata Hari (1876-1917: a Dutch exotic dancer and courtesan who was executed by firing squad for espionage during World War I), a first for young Indy. While it ended badly, Mata advised Indy to request a transfer to the somewhat tamer fight in East Africa. Indy followed her advice and, with Remy in tow, arrived on the African continent in November 1916.
Indy was promoted to lieutenant, and assigned to a unit near Lake Victoria (Africa). Indy's ego and haste, however, led to the two getting lost in transit, and while trying to get back to their unit and avoiding a court martial, Indy managed to get caught up with a team of old men under British Command, the 25th Royal Fusiliers. Here Indy was tricked into helping destroy a giant cannon mounted on a train and also fooled into kidnapping the German military genius Paul Emil von Lettow-Vorbeck (1870-1964), whom they were eventually compelled to release.Jones and Remy finally managed to make it to Lake Victoria and join their new unit. During October, Indy and Remy join what Indy believed to be a fight for the indigenous population against the German aggressors. Indy quickly became a skilled, talented and rather vicious officer. During one charge, he disobeyed direct orders, continuing the charge despite an order to retreat. Because of Indy's quick thinking, however, the battle was won and he was subsequently promoted to captain, much to the chagrin of Major Boucher, his direct superior. His unit's next mission was to march across the Congo to retrieve a weapons shipment that ran aground in West Africa. The unit set off, and traveled through Christmas 1916 and into the first weeks of 1917. Unfortunately, the entire unit became seriously ill, and only a fraction of the unit survived. With the death of Major Boucher, Indy assumed command. However Indy had come to realize that this fight in Africa was between White men, fighting for African land, and began to wonder what he was doing there. Devastatingly at the units destination they were denied extra troops for the journey back and, still feverish and exhausted, Indy and a dozen men headed back onto the river.
Indy and his men promptly fell to the fever, but luckily were rescued by the doctor and humanitarian Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965), a German who ran a hospital in the jungle. Indy initially distrusted Schweitzer due to his nationality, but soon saw reason. From Schweitzer Indy learned lessons that would turn his life around: up until meeting Schweitzer, Indy thought he was becoming a man that would demand respect, a military man whose life revolved around orders and discipline. Schweitzer taught Indy a reverence for life and he and Remy pledged themselves to ending the war and the bloodshed.
To that end Indy and Remy joined the Belgian secret service before forging their own transfer to the far more efficient French secret service. The two were split up, Remy being sent to Brussels to become the French contact with the Belgian resistance, known as the White Lady. Indy was shuffled around to various fronts and missions, as French intelligence initially knew not what to do with him. After a brief sojourn as a reconnaissance photographer with the American volunteers of the Lafayette Escadrille, Indy was assigned a series of courier missions, such as a defection plea letter for the aircraft designer Anthony Fokker (1890-1939), and a desperate attempt for a separate peace with Austria. Indy then spent a few months in St. Petersburg, Russia in the Analyst Department, and he and his friends there become caught up in the Bolshevik revolution.
A promotion to military intelligence saw Indy back in Western Europe, and then as the main French agent in Cairo (Egypt), where his skills were brought to bear by his old friend T.E. 'Ned' Lawrence in the liberation of Beersheba in Palestine. Later, while in Italy, Indy struck up a rivalry with Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961: an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist) for the affections of a beautiful Italian girl, who eventually married someone else, leaving Indy and Ernie with a lasting friendship.
As the war drew to a close, Indy saw missions in Eastern Europe. At one point, he was engaged to Molly, an American school teacher in Istanbul. Tragically, however, she was killed by a bullet meant for Jones. Indy's depression was somewhat lifted by his reunion with Remy; and the war's end found the two on assignment in the trenches to arrest an Indian officer. This snowballed into a post-war quest for Alexander the Great's lost diamond, the "Treasure of the Peacock's Eye" (a quest that would continue for over 15 years). The adventure took them from Alexandria to India and on to the South China Seas. However, after an illuminating run in with the Polish anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski (1884-1942), Indy realized that finding the diamond would have very little impact on his future plans, which was to finally start studying as an archaeologist. In fact, by continuing this wild search, he was only delaying what he had wanted since the age of nine. So he and Remy parted ways, with Remy's obsession with the Peacock's Eye leading him to unknown ends.
Indy headed home, but before he reached Le Harve for the homeward voyage he was brought on to work as a translator at the Paris Peace Conference, where his disillusionment with the war and politics became complete. He saw not only the seeds of a second world war, but also a war in Vietnam and every conflict in the Middle East for years to come. Indy was finally ready, after four years, to head home.
Indy's homecoming found his father emotionally unmoved. Henry Sr. acted as though nothing had transpired. This seeming lack of emotionality did not, however, outlast Indy's declaration that he would not be studying in Princeton, as his father had wished, but rather in Chicago. Indy left his father cold, and would not speak to him again for years.
At the University of Chicago and under the tutelage of Professor Abner Ravenwood, Jones studied archeology alongside Harold Oxley. During his off-campus hours, Indy waited tables at Colosimo's Restaurant, and frequented jazz bars with his reluctant roommate Eliot Ness (1903-1957) and jazz clarinetist Sidney Bechet (1897-1959). With Ness and Ernest Hemingway, Indy investigated the murder of his boss, nearly ending up a victim of Chicago's nascent mob families.
During the summer of 1920, Indy earned money for his tuition in New York theaters and back west in Hollywood where Indy took a job working for Carl Laemmle (1867-1939), head of Universal pictures. There while trying to get Erich Von Stronhiem to finish his film he encountered Irving Thalberg (1899-1936: an American film producer during the early years of motion pictures), Jack Warner (1892-1978: the President of Warner Brothers), and John Ford (1894-1973: an American film director famous for both his westerns such as Stagecoach and The Searchers and adaptations of such classic 20th-century American novels as The Grapes of Wrath).
As the 1920s come around, we find Indiana Jones much different than when we left him yesterday. While traveling around in the midst of World War I, Indy has experienced alot. Now we leave him as a student of archeology at the University of Chicago under the tutelage of Professor Abner Ravenwood.
Tomorrow we will take a look at Indy's life from the years of 1921 until around the summer of 1935.
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