The Last Great Adventurer

An explorer, a romantic, a soldier, a lover, an
entrepreneur and an expatriate.

By Greg Evans

Based on a true story…


“Nothing behind me, everything ahead of me, as is ever so on the road.”
-Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Sixteen-year old John Loucke leaned his head out the window of the train as the steam hissed and the pistons groaned and began to slowly churn. The day was overcast and warm. He smiled at his mother who was standing in the middle of the platform, her cheeks glistening with tears. But it was a forced smile. Inside he was anxious and excited and a little bit scared.

He was going out on his own for the first time. He was taking the rail to a ship where he would sail across the Atlantic to America to make his fortune. And like so many early immigrants during the dawn of the industrial revolution, he would be making this journey alone.

The scent of burning coal and oil hung thick in the air like some nostalgic memory. A moment in a man’s life that he will relive time and time again sitting on trains in foreign stations, in strange lands, and then that familiar scent hits his nostrils. He reflects back to that day, at the tender of age of sixteen when a boy waved good-bye to his mother for the last time.

As the locomotive pulled out of the station in Zabor, Bohemia, Czech Republic, John strained his neck to see down the platform and watched as the profile of his dear mother faded off into the distance, the view eschewed by tears.

He would never see her again.

The year was 1891. Jesse W. Reno patents the first escalator at Coney Beach. The Wrigley Company is founded in Chicago. Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective Sherlock Holmes appears in The Strand Magazine (London) for the first time. The official opening of the London-Paris telephone system commences.

And young John Loucke sets sail from the mainland of Europe to America, a place where money is to be had with the application of skill and sweat and land as far as the eye can see to be claimed for whoever gets there first.

This journey was actually John’s second time sailing to America. The first was around 1883-84, when he was ten. He had come with his father, John Loucke Sr. and his mother Francesca. And back then they had every intention of building a new life in what they heard was a new and amazing land with opportunity around every silver-plated corner.

They relocated to Omaha, Nebraska where they had relatives already residing. But in only a matter of years, as happened for so many others trying to make good in the new and wild country, it simply wasn’t for the faint of heart. Their euphoria slowly dissipated with the changing of the seasons. Francesca suffered terrible melancholy and homesickness and the family decided to return to Zabor.

But young John’s thirst for adventure and his belief that he could make a life for himself in America never left him, even after returning to Bohemia. Omaha never left his mind. On that June day in 1891 he set sail, most likely from Hamburg, Bremen, or La Havre and we can only imagine his thoughts, standing on the deck of the ship squinting back at the mainland growing smaller and smaller.

It would have been a lot for a young mind to process. Centers for Disease and Prevention- Child Development branch- A Study of Teenagers (15-17 years of age) state that most kids are pretty much through the rocky teen angst and rebellious period by the age of 16. They cause less grief with their parents, are more focused on school and preparing for the future and are better able to give reasons for their own choices.

That analysis is widely debated but it is an exhaustive study that has proven results and can therefore be accepted as viable. By sixteen a young man, of the proper maturity level, which John seemed to have, could be capable of setting off, alone, in search of adventure and glory. He was a young gadabout like arctic explorer Fridtjof Nansen or legendary Chinese adventurer Xuanzang, taking on the world, finding a niche and not only surviving, but succeeding.

Czech newspapers in America were advertising sugarcoated stories, thick and sweet, especially ones with endearing statements like “unlimited land available to anyone with a dream and belly for adventure.” These stories were reprinted in Czech and Austrian newspapers and the people were essentially goaded into believing that money grew on the Great Plains like fields of wheat.

So the Czech immigrants, unlike many other cultures, were primarily middle class people that already had money and societal status but dreamt of climbing the societal ladder even higher by way of a narrowly charted country.

John was intelligent and adventurous. He wasn’t particularly tall but his dreams, if laid out flat, could circle the width of the earth two times over. Above all else he was a romantic, an Indiana Jones without the whip. He would live a wayfarer’s life and not a blade of grass would grow beneath his feet for many years.

Not long after arriving back in Omaha, where he had relatives, he claims to have lived in either a boarding school or a boarding house. He would have taken up some form of menial employment that did little to quell that ramblin’ soul inside him.

The mundane world of day-to-day labor was smothering. John fudged his date of birth by a year to meet the age requirements for enlistment into the United States Army. Back then there was really no way to verify a person’s age so he was mustered into the army and stationed in Helena, Montana.

One sure fire way to assimilate into American society was to join the Army. It was a strategy that had been practiced heavily during the Civil War. Upon mustering out of the Army he would have qualified to obtain naturalization papers.

It was his thirst for adventure and danger that drove him into the army. There is no doubt he heard, and/or read about the exciting clashes between soldiers and Indian warriors. Only six months before he arrived in America, on December 29, 1890 the massacre at Wounded Knee Creek, South Dakota occurred. What happened was essentially a lopsided massacre when 300 primarily old men, women and children were slaughtered during a ghost dance ritual. For a young restless boy though the stories would read like comic books for kids today, real life cowboys and Indians.

Whatever the reason behind his decision, John became a soldier and worked as a clerk in one of the remote outposts in “Indian country.” It was said that in his old age, while retelling this period of time he would state, “I was sent to Montana to fight the Sioux.” It was a dangerous place with threat of an Indian attack at any moment. It was still a remote and hostile landscape that teemed with bears and wolves and disease. There were highway robbers and hustlers and should you run into trouble, you were on your own.

John served his stead in the military and in 1896, in Helena, Lewis and Clark County, Montana he became a naturalized citizen. For the next 8-10 years John’s movements and activities went unrecorded but based on the trajectory of his life, we can assume he spent some or all of those lost years working in or being somehow involved in the gold and silver mining that was prevalent in Montana at the time including Helena where he was residing.

Silver mining in Montana eventually began to wane. The problem was that mining silver is done in what is called, “silver enriched zones,” within silver orebodies. These zones don’t go further down than about 1,000 feet below the surface. After that the ores contain high levels of zinc. The silver that was mined wasn’t allowed to have a zinc percentage higher than 12%. If the ore exceeded that percentage then fines were handed out at fifty cents for every percent containing zinc over 12%. Once the percentage of zinc reached approximately 30% it became financially unfeasible to continue with mining operations.

Mines began to close. Some closed for the reason stated above- because they ran out of silver ore. Another closed because it became too expensive to pump out water. A couple of others closed down when the price of silver fell after President Grover Cleveland repealed the Sherman Silver Purchase Act which was a federal law that required the government to purchase millions of ounces of silver for coinage on a monthly basis. This boosted the economy and lowered the value of the dollar allowing farmers and others with agricultural interests to be able to pay off their debts with cheaper dollars. Mining in Montana had become financially risky.

Somehow John had come to learn of opportunities for work with mines in Mexico. With jobs becoming scarce in and around Montana he packed up his meager belongings and headed south. Around 1906-07 he found himself in a small yet bustling city in the deserts of Western Mexico called Guadalajara. It was a place that was experiencing a boom and small industries were popping up in the area with many owned and operated by European expatriates. New railroad lines made the city accessible to ports on the pacific to the west and the United States to the north. For John it was a romantic quest. He was intent on getting back into the mines. And John had gold fever. It was a whimsical pursuit and one that would nearly cost him his life.

From the time he was a teenager he had an entrepreneurial spirit and was adept at assimilating into those endeavors he followed. But it seemed that throughout his life these business ventures would be tested at every turn with some unforeseen ill-fated bad luck. He worked hard and dreamt even harder but it was that mystical kinetic energy that could go one of two ways. Either luck was on your side or it wasn’t. It is hard to say how many times he unknowingly or impulsively made decisions that would in turn challenge his aspirations, the bad luck, or if they were simply circumstances beyond his control.

In 2001 Nicholas Rescher defined luck as, “The brilliant randomness of everyday life. Luck is a matter of having something good or bad happen that lies outside the horizon of effective foreseeability.” Branch Rickey, former Major League Baseball player for the St. Louis Browns and New York Highlanders, stated, “Luck at its best is the residue of design.” However you may look at it, we either define successful endeavors as good luck and those rotten failures as wretched bad luck.

One day while down in one of his gold mines, an explosion shattered the calm Mexican morning. Desert lizards scattered and workers saw the ripples in their glasses of tequila. Their expressions didn’t change. They knew what had happened…again. It was a gas explosion. The miners clamoured to get out to safety. They knew how quickly the air would be depleted filling their lungs with toxic fumes and carbon dioxide.

John Loucke was one of the men in that mine that day. He too was working his way to the mine entrance when the fumes overwhelmed him. He collapsed onto his hands and knees, disoriented and gasping for air. He knew he had to get to the surface and fresh air but his body wouldn’t obey his mind.

He would have tried to pull himself back to his feet but continuing on would have been nearly impossible. His mind was starved for oxygen and being poisoned. His body then began shutting down. Once he lost consciousness death would soon follow. Just then a strong hand grabbed the collar of his shirt and began dragging him out of the mine. It was one of the men on the work crew. The brave man rescued him just at the moment before all was lost.

It was an act of courage that John would never forget for the rest of his life. Gold mining was proving not to be that yellow brick road he had imagined. In less than a year he would abandon that venture for safer work on a sugar and rubber plantation, far to the east in the jungles. There was stable work with healthy wages to be had on the Isthmus of Tehauntepec.

Once more John Loucke would hit the road.

He took a job at the Plantation Oaxaquena, about a two-hour boat ride up the Coatzacoalcos River from the small town of Jesus Carranza. It was run by the Minnesota based Tabasco Plantation Company, 3,000 acres of fertile soil and perfect growing conditions.

For a year or so he worked steadily on the plantation in the steaming jungle. Political tensions in Mexico were thick as the humidity and the scuttlebutt was that war was imminent. The middle class and poor had had enough of President Porifiro Diaz’s imperious praxis. It was time for him to be deposed.

As the threats passed from menacing grandstanding to violent skirmishes, many were frightfully conscious that the inevitable had arrived. The country was soon to be engaged in actual war and everyone would be affected. The year was 1908 and it was around this period that John Loucke decided to leave the plantation and planned for an extended vacation to one of America’s great natural wonders, Alaska. But he never made it. He traveled west from the Isthmus of Tehauntepec and arrived in Guadalajara taking up residence in an old hotel.

One evening he descended on the town square, the famous Zocalo where every week suitors and inamoratas, dreamers and dandies would gather, men in their finest suits and women in beautiful flowing traditional dresses. And they would dance to the mariachi music of old Mexico. It was at one of these galas, around dusk, under the stars with lanterns glowing that John Loucke lined up on one side of the Zocalo with the men and faced all the women lined up on the other side. It was then he spied through the dry purple air the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

As the music began the men and women slowly moved toward each other. Each participant zeroed in on a partner from across the way and headed toward them. John worked his way toward her. She had a round face and dark hair pulled up. Her dress was expensive and manner graceful. Somehow despite all the other men, he was the one that took her hand.

There was immediate chemistry. He was reserved and handsome, she delicate as a rose, 5’ 4” with hypnotizing grey eyes and red lips. He was intoxicated by her composure and elegance. And they danced the night away. This enchanting woman’s name was Maria and she was on vacation in Guadalajara from the “Pearl of West,” Mazatlan, the exotic coastal city along the shores of the Pacific. Maria was there with a chaperon as was a common practice for the affluent.

She was the daughter of a wealthy tequila baron from a small pueblo located about 28 miles northeast of Mazatlan. She was polished and well taken care of. John learned that she was staying at a hotel near him. Infatuated, he checked out of his hotel and rented a room so he could be in the same hotel that she was staying in. For the next few days they spent time getting to know each other and both fell deeply in love. When it was time for her to return to Mazatlan, the two promised they would write often until they could meet again.

John never did make it to Alaska. Instead he returned to the plantation enchanted by his affections for Maria. The two would write regularly for a full year. The letters no longer exist but one could imagine they were dripping with desire and unified love that not even a thousand miles could splinter.

By 1909 Mexico was engaged in what would turn out to be a long and bloody civil war. It was a revolution and nowhere in Mexico were you really isolated from the violence. It permeated every corner of every region of Mexico.

Countries engulfed in horrible civil war tend to lean in the direction of outright anarchy or dictatorial martial law. The democracy, the civilized ideology disappears and humanity takes over. Kill or be killed. In societies, whether they are entire countries or something as bridled as a prison society, the strong will eventually take from the weaker. A prime example took place in the Georgia-based Civil War prison camp, Andersonville. The Union soldiers were all crammed into this filthy muddy hell and there was simply not enough shelter, food, clean water or space. A gang of thugs known as “The Raiders,” roamed the grounds of the prison taking whatever items, food or space they wanted from the weaker soldiers and anyone that refused was beaten and some were even killed.

With the outset of war John would have known that, the more the war spread throughout the country the harder it would be to reconnect with Maria. He could be killed or she could killed. Anything could happen in the unpredictable theater of war. He made a decision and it would turn out to be the right one.

Once again, John would be on the road. He left the plantation and headed west. But this time it was to go and see the woman he left a year earlier. When the two met up again in Mazatlan it was as if they had never parted. John proposed and Maria accepted. They were married in the San Antonio Church de La Noria  in the pueblo of La Noria. After the service the newly wed couple were whisked away to their honeymoon suite in a carriage drawn by white horses. Guests lined the street and threw silver pieces into the carriage as they passed.

It was a scene out of an old black and white movie. And just the kind of starring role that John Loucke was born to play.

He returned to the plantation and brought along his new wife, Maria. For the next two years they lived and worked hard. They had a wonderful relationship and enjoyed each other’s company. Maria became pregnant with their first child. A daughter named Stella who was born July of 1911. A year and four months later a son, John Robert, would be born.

By now the civil war had metastasized throughout Mexico and lawlessness became a way of life. The Tabasco Plantation Company fell victim to a bandit named Alor and his gang when they began extorting money from the plantation owners, and the loss was well into the thousands of dollars. Just like an old-time Mafia shakedown of neighborhood businesses.

In January of 1914, with no end to the war in sight, John packed up his family and boarded the S.S. Esperanza steam ship in the port of
Veracruz and sailed to New York. They arrived on the 31st of January. The air was crisp and the family was ready to make a new life for
themselves, far away from the beautiful but war-torn land he’d grown to love. They moved into an apartment at 356 W. 23rd Street between bustling 8th and 9th avenues in Chelsea. This was a different America then the wide open skies and rolling hills of the great plains that he first saw upon stepping off that train in Omaha twenty-three years earlier. So much had happened. So much life had been lived and he wasn’t yet 40 years old.

Pretty early on, Maria, accustomed to life on an affluent Hacienda with tons of space, realized that apartment living simply was not for her and the couple purchased an attached home on a quiet tree-lined street at 2045 East 65th Street in the Bensonhurst neighborhood of Brooklyn.

With his mining experience and knowledge John was hired as a purchasing agent for the Gold Fields American Development Company, a subsidiary of the Gold Fields Development Company founded in 1887 in South Africa by Cecil Rhodes and Charles Rudd. They were located at 233 Broadway on the 36th Floor of the Woolworth Building in Manhattan.
An astute businessman and with a passion for mining, within four years of joining the company John moved up the ladder quickly establishing himself as a company director.

With his newfound wealth John was able to purchase a home in the ritzy Glen Ridge, New Jersey neighborhood at 72 Glen Ridge Avenue. Despite his success in the gold mining business and his status within the
company John was a restless soul. The entrepreneurial and adventurous spirit had it’s own beating heart that lived within him. By 1920 John had left Gold Fields and set out on his own to build his own business. He formed an import/export company that would focus on the popular Vitrola music makers of the times.

Business did well and John was able to bring on a partner. He would import the Vitrolas from Mexico and this new partner could take care of the Mexican side of the business while he focused on the United States. In 1921 he would travel down to Mexico to incorporate the business there.

At some point, though details are sketchy, John learned that his partner had double-crossed him and embezzled a large sum of money the company’s money. So much that the company went under. The blow brought
John to his knees. His dreams of having his own company had been wrenched away once again. But this time it was personal. For a proud man like John Loucke, the broken trust and the loss of his lifesavings in a cowardly act of corporate deceit put him over the edge.

John’s mental collapse was swift and debilitating. He became depressed and dissociated with his life. It was said that he would sit on the couch, say nothing and have an almost 1,000-yard stare. He'd literally
gone mad. He would be seen standing by the cupboard eating teaspoons of sugar or sitting on the curb on the side of the road with his head in his hands. His mind couldn’t process what had happened. It was as if someone cut out that passionate heart that had always beat with such electricity and enthusiasm and destroyed it.

Healthline.com defines a nervous or mental breakdown as, “…a period of intense mental distress.”

John was disenchanted with life. Financially he had lost nearly everything. He was forced to pull his children out of school to help pay for expenses but he didn’t give up right away. For the next decade he struggled to find his way. The country fell into the grips of a depression and anyone over the age of forty couldn’t find work.

It was a time of despair for the entire country but for John Loucke battling his own demons and failures it was absolutely suffocating.
His daughter Stella would later reflect on those grim times stating, “In New York City you had to watch where you walked so many bodies were falling out of the sky.”

From word of mouth or an advertisement in one of the local rags John had learned that there was work on the Panama Canal on the Isthmus of Panama, the great waterway cut through a 50-mile stretch of sultry cantankerous jungle and perverse mountains. The pay was good and the adventure was even better. John knew he had to be a part of it.

So he signed up, bid farewell to his family and set out…once again on the road. He was 65 years old. The next time his family would see him, he would be barely alive.

The idea to build a canal in Panama had been thrown around since the early 16th century when in 1534 Charles V King of Spain commissioned a team of engineers to conduct a survey along the coast of the Americas
proposing for a more efficient shipping route between Peru and Spain.

Around 1688 a physician named Thomas Browne suggested the canal be built so there would be easier access to China and the East Indies.

In 1788 Thomas Jefferson proposed that Spain be the one to build it since having to sail around Cape Horn and through the treacherous Drake Passage was perilous and for Spain unavoidable otherwise to reach the coast of Peru.

In 1881, builder of the immensely successful Suez Canal in Egypt, French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps raised enough funds to begin work on his new project. But building a canal through what many would consider, “the belly of hell,” was a challenge that the French engineers were unprepared for. After thirteen years the project was canceled due to excessive cost and a battlefield mortality rate. It was an embarrassing and monumental failure.

In 1904 the United States decided to take up the challenge. And it truly would be a challenge as they faced similar issues to the French. The first engineer assigned to the job, John Findley Wallace resigned after only a year frustrated with the bureaucracy. The man that replaced Findley was a self-educated engineer and builder of the Great Northern Railroad, John Frank Stevens.

One of the biggest problems they faced during construction was disease, mosquito-borne yellow fever and malaria. Yellow fever is
thought to have originated in nonhuman primates in Africa, spread by female mosquitos. It is a virus that resembles influenza and one that humans can build up natural immunity to. Nowadays there are cures and prevention for it though even in 2013, approximately 45,000 people died from the disease.

The first confirmed outbreak of yellow fever was in 1647 in Barbados and then another in 1648 in the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico. The Mayan Indians that contracted it from Spanish conquistadores called the disease “blood vomit.”

Malaria is an infectious disease spread also by female mosquitos. The mosquito bites a person and introduces the disease by injecting
parasites from the mosquito’s saliva into the person’s bloodstream. The parasites travel to the liver where they cultivate and reproduce.
Signs of illness often don’t appear until ten to fifteen days after being infected and the symptoms resemble the flu.

Malaria has been studied and written about for thousands of years. Science ascertains it has been around for hundreds of thousands of
years. Greek physician Hippocrates (460-370 BC) wrote about it. It was so devastating and prevalent in ancient Rome (100 BC – 400 AD) that the population called it, “Roman Fever.”

John Loucke arrived in Panama and began working in some capacity at the Panama Canal. But eventually he contracted Malaria and became deathly ill. Like so many before and after him, his bout of malaria was severe and he nearly perished. Instead John was lucky enough to recover and returned to the United States. He would be so weakened by
the disease that he was unable to walk his daughter Hilda down the aisle on her wedding day.

Malaria and yellow fever were such a burden that John Stevens hired former United States Army physician William C Gorgas to be the new Director of Sanitation. Gorgas began spraying mosquito larva with oil that would kill it. He had mosquito netting constructed and screens put on doors and windows of sleeping quarters, cafeterias and other outbuildings to keep the mosquitos at bay. By the end, thanks to his efforts and ingenious, yet commonsense methods, the outbreaks were
nearly eliminated, but not completely.

John Loucke would never fully recover from his nervous breakdown. He would work a few odd jobs here and there but nothing really stuck. In his eighties he worked as a security guard for a company to eek out a living. He would live the remainder of his life cared for by his wife and children before passing away quietly in 1969.

John Loucke, a Czech peregrine from a small city in the hills of Bohemia lived a life of passion and adventure that began in Omaha, a
city of dreams for so many Czechs, traveling all the way down to the alluring deserts and jungles of Mexico, a country for which his
affections would never diminish. He would marry the beautiful blue-eyed daughter of a wealthy tequila baron and carry her away into
the sunset. He road the highs and swallowed the hard lows before finally being broken. And though he tried to weld that fractured life
back together he was just not quite able to do it. But he never did quit. Despite every blow thrown at him he always kept trying. It was
characteristic that many immigrants brought with them from the old world.

We always hear the term immigration and see the pictures of the people in their suits and shawls with old suitcases and grim expressions. We hear about those that achieved fame or notoriety but rarely do we get a glimpse of the life of an ordinary man. And how unbelievable such a life can be. And there were millions just like him.