What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?

In 1964, before he burst into the national conscience as one of America’s premier authors and a withering critic of its culture and politics, Hunter S. Thompson was a 27-year-old who arrived in Ketchum in search of an answer.

That year, Thompson was on assignment for the National Observer, which dispatched him to the Wood River Valley to research the suicide of acclaimed author Ernest Hemingway.

Hemingway, of course, started visiting the valley in the 1930s and 1940s, and bought a home here in 1959 with his wife, Mary.

Hemingway ended his life at that home in 1961, and Thompson wondered why he had chosen Ketchum as the place to die.

Thompson left with more than an answer—he swiped a pair of elk antlers from Hemingway’s house.

On Aug. 5, Thompson’s widow, Anita, ventured to Ketchum to return the elk antlers to a Hemingway family member and tour the home, which is now owned and managed by The Nature Conservancy.

The antlers, which are a mold or are bone covered with a protective coating, didn’t remain for long. Rather, they are bound for New York for a Hemingway collection there, said Jenny Emery-Davidson, executive director of The Community Library of Ketchum.

A friend and editor of Hunter Thompson’s, Douglas Brinkley, had spoken at The Community Library in the spring, Davidson said.

Brinkley related the anecdote of the stolen elk antlers, and is good friends with Anita Thompson, Davidson said.

Some months passed and Anita Thompson reached out, saying she was interested in returning the antlers, Davidson said.

“She and Hunter had talked about bringing them back,” Davidson said. “It caught us by surprise. It is a story that has been passed along for a number of years.”

That resolves an episode between two giants of 20th-century American writing that may have been overlooked by their fans.

Thompson was a fan of Hemingway’s; one of his earliest novels, “The Rum Diary,” paid homage to Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Thompson wrote the novel in 1962, but it wasn’t published until 1998.

Thompson killed himself in 2005 at age 67 in similar fashion to Hemingway—a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

In an interview with Brandon Wenerd, an editor with the website Bro Bible, Anita Thompson said her husband had been “very embarrassed” by stealing the elk antlers.

The antlers hung in the garage at Owl Farm, their home in Woody Creek, Colo., outside Aspen.

Anita Thompson said Hunter had felt it was necessary to return the antlers, after thinking about the collection he would leave behind at Owl Farm after he died.

“He got caught up in the moment,” Anita told Wenerd. “He had so much respect for Hemingway. Hunter started thinking about it more when he realized his place in American literature and history. … That certainly played a role in him wanting to return it. You can’t expect people to behave well in your own home if you have a stolen piece of art.”

Hunter Thompson found the antlers hanging above an entrance to the Hemingway home, he once told Brinkley. Brinkley recalled that conversation in a 2005 article in Rolling Stone magazine, which was published after Thompson’s death.

“So I took them,” Thompson told Brinkley. “Forget running with the bulls or reeling in marlins or slaughtering rhinos. I had Hemingway’s horns, and with that came an immense literary responsibility. … I had broken from the pack, and there was no turning back.”

Immense success as a writer soon followed for Thompson. In 1966, he published “Hell’s Angels,” which recounted his experiences traveling with the Hells Angels motorcycle gang in California years earlier.

The book's style was based on his observations. Thompson hadn’t yet broken the mold of conventional journalism in his “gonzo” style, in which he inserted himself into the stories he was covering. Fueled by drugs, alcohol and counterculture zeal, Thompson shattered the idea of journalists as dispassionate observers, and wrote two books in the gonzo style that would make him famous: “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72.”

In Ketchum in 1964, however, Thompson was still developing as a writer. His article for the National Observer, headlined “What Lured Hemingway to Ketchum?” has a melancholy motif, but his admiration for Hemingway shines through.

It starts with a neighbor’s recollection of Hemingway walking on a road near the end of his life, looking frail and thin. But why Ketchum?

“Anybody who considers himself a writer or even a serious reader cannot help but wonder just what it was about this outback little Idaho village that struck such a responsive chord in America’s most famous writer,” Thompson wrote.

Thompson tried to piece together an answer. He talked with Hemingway friend Chuck Atkinson and a local pianist named Charley Mason, and visited Sun Valley and the Sawtooth Club.

Mason told a story of Hemingway in a local pub called the Tram, drinking with two Cubans, one a doctor and the other a gun-runner Hemingway met in the Spanish Civil War.

“They were blasted on wine the whole time and jabbering in Spanish like revolutionaries,” Mason recalled. “One afternoon when I was there, Hemingway jerked the checkered cloth off the table and he and the other big guy took turns making the little doctor play the bull. They’d whirl and jerk the cloth around—it was a hell of a sight.”

Thompson concluded that Hemingway was an “old, sick and very troubled man” at the end, looking to Ketchum for a refuge that would provide the serenity he knew in earlier years.

“Standing on a corner in the middle of Ketchum it is easy to see the connection Hemingway must have made between this place and those he had known in the good years,” Thompson wrote. “Aside from the brute beauty of the mountains, he must have recognized an atavistic distinctness in the people that piqued his sense of dramatic possibilities. It is a raw and peaceful little village. … Like many another writer, Hemingway did his best work when he felt he was standing on something solid, like an Idaho mountainside, or a sense of conviction.”

Davidson said The Community Library has been working with The Nature Conservancy on the Hemingway Legacy Initiative, which connects some Hemingway sites in the Wood River Valley while preserving some Hemingway items and materials in the library’s Regional History Department.

Davidson said Anita Thompson was interested in how the organizations were working to preserve Hemingway’s legacy in Ketchum, because she is undertaking a similar initiative for her late husband at Owl Farm.

Davidson said the initiatives have to pierce the myths that have permeated the popular perceptions of each writer, and reflect the realities of their works and their lives.

“It was sort of unifying for us—to talk about how Thompson’s legacy should be maintained,” Davidson said. “It just makes that connection all the more palpable. It was really kind of sweet.”

On the tour of the Hemingway Home, Davidson said Anita Thompson talked about the antlers, and imagined where they could have hung in the home.

“We talked about Hunter and Ernest and the legacy that they left behind in their writings,” Davidson said. “We imagined where they were likely to have hung. A circle has been completed. Restitution in the best sense has been made.”

This article was published in the Idaho Mountain Express in August 2016.