The Glacier Priest and America’s Last Frontier
On May 1, 1931, Mount Aniakchak, situated on the Alaska Peninsula, erupted. A menacing black mushroom cloud rose nearly four miles into the air. Earthquakes rocked the surrounding area. In nearby Meshik, egg-sized pumice barraged the houses in which frightened families hid. Shafts of lightning lit the dark clouds, producing a “truly fear-inspiring sight.” Ash blanketed the Aleutian region, reaching distances of over 350 miles. Chignik, only sixty miles south of the volcano, was covered in a thick layer of silt. Radio communication in southwest ern Alaska was hampered by the atmospheric pollution. Harbors and waterways were choked with pumice. Wildlife throughout the region was decimated. Explosions, earthquakes, and ash clouds continued throughout the spring.
Into this devastation, Jesuit priest and explorer, Fr. Bernard R. Hubbard, led a team of young college students. As the first humans on the scene, Hubbard and his team captured the eyes and ears of the nation. Americans were spellbound by stories of the young men bravely following their leader-priest into danger. The public was entertained by Hubbard’s humorous encounters with bears, his vivid descriptions and photographs of the desolated landscape, and his team’s near-death experiences with lava pits, earthquakes, and poisonous gas. The Aniakchak exploration secured Hubbard’s fame as the “Glacier Priest” and solidified his connection to Alaska for a generation of Americans. As the national parks historian Katherine Ringsmuth has contended, “The Glacier Priest put the [Aniakchak] Caldera and the entire central Alaska Peninsula on the American map.”
From the late 1920s through the 1950s, Hubbard was arguably the most well-known promoter of Alaska in the world and one of the most recognizable Catholic priests among the American public. In the 1930s, the Glacier Priest lectured to a quarter of a million people a year. In 1937, Literary Digest named him the highest-paid lecturer in the world. “Glacier Priest” appeared on marquees alongside famous adventurers such as Admiral Byrd and Amelia Earhart. His exploits and opinions frequently appeared in national publications such as the New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Washington Post, and the Atlanta Constitution. As the San Jose Mercury Herald proclaimed, “When [Hubbard] takes a trip, Its News!” His Arctic exhibition at the 1939–40 World’s Fair in San Francisco was visited by eight and a half million people and received the award for outstanding exhibition. Throughout his career he wrote three books, took over two hundred thousand photographs, produced a full-length movie with Fox Studios, developed hundreds of short films, published in scientific journals, and was featured on both radio and television programs. A 1959 publication argued that the Glacier Priest’s “name has spelled adventure to a generation of Americans.”
The Glacier Priest’s fame continued for over three decades. He was not a reformer or theologian or leader in the Roman Catholic Church. He was interested in neither ecumenicism nor reform. He was interested in promoting Alaska. And he was willing to promote it to anyone who would listen—Protestant and Catholic alike. He was also an unabashed endorser of American democracy and military power. Much of the anti-Catholicism in America centered on fears of Rome’s supposed authoritarianism and threat to democratic culture. The importance of a nonthreatening, popular priest for the American Protestant majority should not be ignored.
Anthony B. Smith has argued this same case for Bing Crosby’s fictional Father O’Malley in the popular films, Going My Way (1944) and The Bells of St. Mary’s (1945). Smith contends that the movies served as a “popular counter to anxious skeptics who believed Catholicism had no place in American democracy.” Unlike O’Malley, Father Hubbard was a flesh-and-blood priest who entertained and educated over a quarter of a million Americans a year in his lectures. That number increases when we take Hubbard’s films, books, and articles into account. As Raymond Schroth has argued in The American Jesuits, “In the 1940s the one priest, other than the Hollywood film priests, known to most American grammar school students was the one with the airplane who wore furs and had all those dogs.”
Father Hubbard crafted a Glacier Priest persona that was larger than life. It is no wonder that adventure novelists wanted to interview and befriend him. After meeting Father Hubbard, the popular adventure writer Rex Beach wrote, “Of all the picturesque Alaskans I have met, not excluding those legendary fellows of the glamorous gold-rush, none was as arresting, as vital and as colorful as this modern Marquette.” The Alaska novelist Barrett Willoughby was also enamored by Father Hubbard and became a lifelong friend. She published a series of Glacier Priest adventures in the Saturday Evening Post throughout the early 1930s. She described him as “one of the most fearless trailsmen in the North. There was a radiant vitality about his lean, bronzed face, and a spiritual clarity in his brown eyes.” America Magazine declared the Glacier Priest “the world’s most daring explorer.” The Catholic Book Club claimed he “was built of steel and concrete, dauntless and stoic, a rugged, honest man without fear of any kind.” The Young Catholic Messenger produced several Glacier Priest comic books so Catholic children could read the exploits of this priest turned superhero.
The Glacier Priest may have seemed a fictional character come to life, but he was a real man who built his career in the real world. He worked tirelessly to establish himself as the preeminent promoter of the Alaskan territory to the American public. During his career, he became acquaintances and friends with a long list of influential figures. He befriended the exiled Austrian Habsburg family, establishing a lifetime connection to Otto von Habsburg, the crown prince. Under Secretary of War, Robert Patterson, described Hubbard as “a good friend.” Other notable military contacts were Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, Gen. George S. Patton, Adm. Russell R. Waesche, and Gen. Omar N. Bradley. Hubbard met with President Franklin D. Roosevelt at the White House in 1943 and advised the president on postwar Alaska. He lectured and showed his films to government officials, ambassadors, and foreign dignitaries during his frequent stays in Washington, DC. In 1946, he provided a private film screening to Faisal II, king of Iraq, at the palace in Baghdad. During that same trip, Hubbard experienced what he considered the greatest moment in his life, a private audience with Pope Pius XII. By the 1950s, the Glacier Priest had established himself as the greatest living authority on Alaska.
Father Hubbard deserves a place among the notable figures of Alaskan history. Some of his Alaskan contemporaries and even present-day historians appear to dismiss Hubbard as an interloper, not a real Alaskan, who was often misinformed and misguided in his estimation of the actual situation in the northern territory. It is true that Hubbard was often spectacularly wrong in his scientific and political conclusions about Alaska, but he was also spectacularly popular in his promotion of the Far North. Historians have highlighted the work of Hubbard’s contemporaries such as the political efforts of Ernest Gruening or the wilderness advocacy of Bob Marshall. Without detracting from their immense importance, neither of these figures came close to the popular following, audience, or readership of the Glacier Priest.
Hubbard serves as part of the bridge linking early Alaska popularizers such as John Muir and Jack London with Alaskan statehood in the 1950s. Like those of Muir and London, Hubbard’s depictions of Alaska were not always based in fact but on the mythic power of the territory to affect the American imagination. Historians have noted the malleability of words such as wilderness, frontier, and even Alaska. The meanings of these words are shaped by the cultural milieu and the individual attitudes of the persons employing them. By Father Hubbard’s day, Alaska was already viewed as the “last frontier.” Its “wilderness” was viewed as purer; its “nature,” as superior. As Roderick Nash has shown in his classic work, Wilderness and the American Mind, Americans came to believe that “Alaska was real wilderness.”
The Glacier Priest drew on all these old tropes; however, two new developments converged to make his message even more powerful. The first development was the Great Depression, one of the most intense soul-searching periods in American history. The historian Warren Sussman contends there were few if any other decades in the nation’s life so focused on defining what it meant to be American. The Glacier Priest upheld Alaska as central to that definition. The historian Susan Kollin argues that “Alaska functions as a national salvation” and “promises to provide the nation with opportunities for renewal.” It is no surprise that the Glacier Priest’s Alaskan work held such great appeal during the Depression.
The second development was the emergence of new technology. Sussman points out that the 1930s were “a most dramatic era of sound and sight.” Hubbard was at the cutting edge of these developments. While he was a writer, he was more well known as a photographer and filmmaker. He brought Alaska to the American people in new and exciting ways. By combining old themes with new realities, his appeal was immense. His ideas about Alaska may not have been innovative or, perhaps, profound, but they were popular. Based on Hubbard’s popularity alone, he should not be relegated to the shadows of Alaskan history.
Father Bernard Hubbard also deserves a greater place in the history of mid-twentieth-century American Catholicism. Religious historians have long noted the tensions between Catholic and American democratic culture. Anti-Catholicism in the United States has been perennial, with a particularly intense period in the 1920s, at the beginning of Hubbard’s career. From that time through the 1960s, relations improved. Julie Byrne has argued that “by the end of the 1950s, most Catholics saw little conflict between being Catholic and American at the same time, and most Protestants had stopped thinking that way too.” Grant Wacker has called this “wholesale change in Catholic-Protestant relations the single biggest social transformation in twentieth-century America.”
Father Hubbard’s life exemplifies these profound changes in American Catholicism. Born into the context of the nineteenth-century Catholic revival, Hubbard’s childhood was steeped in a Catholic milieu that was often ghettoized from the broader Protestant culture, suspicious of U.S. democratic culture, and disgusted by the excesses of American consumer culture. Cultural adaptation to America was considered anathema, and “Americanism” was considered heresy. By the time of Hubbard’s death in 1962, however, American Catholicism had been transformed. In the struggle against communism, American Catholics had largely adopted the “American way of life,” with its emphasis on prosperity, individual human rights, and separation of church and state. Catholics moved out of the so-called ethnic ghettos and into college classrooms, into the suburbs, into the middle class, and into America’s religious mainstream. Hubbard’s story speaks to this wider story of how American Catholics wrestled with what it meant to be Catholic and American.
As the name “Glacier Priest” suggests, Bernard Hubbard attempted to combine his two roles—adventurer and priest—and his two great loves—Alaska and the Catholic faith—into a coherent vision of America. He believed that the growing consumer culture of the United States was sapping Americans of their religious vitality and pioneering spirit. According to Hubbard, these qualities were still attainable in Alaska and through Catholicism. Catholicism, with its rich devotional life that embraced suffering and dissuaded overindulgence, acted as a corrective to the excesses of consumer culture. Far from being anti-American, Hubbard contended, Catholics might just be the best-qualified citizens to protect and keep the American experiment alive. Similarly, Alaska, portrayed as a new frontier, became a foil for a corrupt civilization. The territory held the promise that Americans had not yet fully lost the qualities that made them great. Catholicism and a frontier spirit were both antidotes to America’s ills. And who best to model this antidote than Hubbard’s Glacier Priest persona?
Hubbard’s life, however, demonstrated the gaps that existed between these myths and reality. While Hubbard preached a life of pioneering toughness and simplicity through a connection to God’s creation, his own life was often dominated by entrepreneurial ventures in filmmaking and lecturing. So too Hubbard’s Alaska. The Glacier Priest’s portrayal of Alaska captured the wonder, self-sufficiency, and adventure of the Far North but often failed to acknowledge the territory’s dependency on absentee capitalists, military development, and American tourism.
These tensions were also apparent in Hubbard’s presentation of Catholicism and in his own religious vocation. Hubbard presented the Glacier Priest and Catholicism as largely untouched by the problems of modern American consumerism, making it the perfect partner to the Alaskan spirit. He may have presented the Glacier Priest as largely untouched by consumerism, but his entire enterprise was increasingly entangled with entertainment and celebrity culture. This created tensions with Hubbard’s religious superiors, who feared for his spiritual well-being. At the same time, the Society of Jesus benefited from the popularity of the Glacier Priest. Consumer culture had spiritual risks, but it could also have economic payoffs. So, like his Alaska, Hubbard’s Catholicism was not so clearly a foil to consumerism as he presented it.
Hubbard’s central message about Alaska, Catholicism, and America never wavered. Alaska was a place of natural abundance where Americans could experience the glories of God’s creation and be saved from the ills of modern, secular society. But Alaska was not a wilderness totally devoid of civilization. Rather, Catholicism provided the right kind of civilization. Indeed, Hubbard contended that Catholicism had been making this contribution to America since the European arrival. It avoided the ill effects of consumerism and promoted the right kind of frontier spirit. Rather than detract from the wilderness spirit, Catholicism made it even greater by highlighting the beauty of God’s creation and inculcating in men and women the kind of values that helped America succeed.
Nevertheless, Hubbard’s Alaska played different roles in the American story in successive decades. In the 1930s, during the Depression, Alaska was meant to remind Americans of their rugged individualism at a time when this image of self-sufficiency was being called into question. Catholic explorers, pioneers, and missionaries embodied these rugged qualities while combining them with Christian piety and a willingness to suffer for Christ as well as for the sake of America.
In the 1940s, Alaska became the great democratic defender against tyrannical Japan, and U.S. soldiers replaced frontiersmen as the American ideal. Like Alaska, Hubbard saw American Catholics as defenders of American democracy, arguing that Catholics throughout American history had contributed to the nation. Just as Catholic explorers, missionaries, and pioneers had willingly suffered as an act of devotion to God while contributing to the American nation, so too Catholic soldiers fought and died for democracy.
In the Cold War era, Alaska, only miles from the Soviet Union, became a place of opportunity, abundance, and freedom in the face of godless, dictatorial communism. Likewise, Catholicism became a great defender of democracy and enemy of communism. The Catholic Church had long provided missionaries, martyrs, pioneers, and explorers. Now the United States needed cold warriors—and Catholicism, according to the Glacier Priest, could supply them. This could be in the form of American soldiers or Catholic chaplains but also healthy, prosperous, patriotic, Catholic families.
With each era, the Glacier Priest persona also changed. During the Great Depression, the Glacier Priest was a rugged outdoorsman, better suited to the rigors of exploration than the problems of modern consumer society. During World War II, the Glacier Priest was transformed into an expert on Alaska who trained soldiers to defend the nation. His criticisms of American business culture waned in favor of his promotion of democracy. During the Cold War, the Glacier Priest became a founding father of sorts, a person who had always seen the potential in Alaska. He was no longer the rugged explorer who highlighted the inaccessibility of Alaska but rather an Alaska booster who promoted the territory as a land of plenty to any person willing to work hard.
Hubbard’s vision of Alaska was ultimately and always a spiritual one. Suffering played a key role in Hubbard’s worldview. While consumerism sapped vitality, suffering in the wilderness and on the frontier could instill virtue and connect one to God. Hardship should not be avoided but embraced. For Fr. Bernard Hubbard, only Christ—embodied in the sacraments of the Roman Catholic Church—could save the individual soul; but Alaska, in some way, might just be the salvation of the American soul.
EDITORIAL NOTE: This article is excerpted from The Glacier Priest: Father Bernard Hubbard and America’s Last Frontier (University of Notre Dame Press, 2025). It is part of an ongoing collaboration with the University of Notre Dame Press. You can read other excerpts from this collaboration here. All rights reserved.