1910s

Leonetto Cappiello has been called “the father of modern advertising” because he broke the norms of poster art. Early advertising tended to look like a painting, too cluttered sometimes. Cappiello often depicted individual figures in motion. In this ski travel poster, he was not afraid to leave the white slope open. It intensified the illusion of speed.

Cappiello was born in Italy but mainly lived and worked in Paris. With no formal art training, he had his first exhibition in 1892. Today, some of his paintings are displayed in the Museo Civio Giovanni Fatori in Livorno. He then worked as a caricaturist for the most popular humor magazines in France, Le Rire, Le Sourire, L’Assiette au Beurre and Femina. In 1896 his first collection of caricatures was published.

From 1900 on, he painted posters that came to revolutionize advertising. This was the era when Paris walls were plastered with posters advertising just about everything. Cappiello realized that he had to distinguish his work from the others. Speed was one of the ingredients of modernization; wasn’t Citius—Fastest—the first of the three goals of the modern Olympics? Altius and Fortius, highest and strongest, came second and third.

This 1929 illustration promotes Superbagnères-Luchon in the French Pyrenees. It has that art deco look in which speed is symbolized by the flying scarf and the swirl of the ski tracks on those vast open snowfields. And how to reach Superbagnères? Look at the top to see the Chemins de Fer du Midi, the railway line that will get you to the palatial hotel.

For those interested in the mechanics of the poster business, look at the bottom left, and you will see the word Devambez. Monsieur Devambez was what can be best described as an agent for poster artists. He would contact clients with whom he would put artists like Cappiello in touch. Cappiello was favored by such big-name businesses as Campari, Pirelli tires, Mistinguett at the Casino de Paris and others. It was a successful arrangement.

And Cappiello’s 1929 ski poster was influential enough to be followed in 1932 by a similar design for the same resort. This time there was one figure, not three. It was by the lesser-known artist R. Sonderer. 

 Justice Served: Jim Thorpe’s 1912 Gold Medals Restored

In my article “Pro vs. Am” (July-August 2022), I discussed the historic conflict between the concepts of amateurism and professionalism in skiing and Olympic sports. The most tragic victim of this conflict was Jim Thorpe, who won two gold medals in the 1912 Olympic Games in the decathlon and pentathlon, two of the most difficult of all sporting events. 

Thorpe dominated the 1912 Olympic Games, with Swedish King Gustav V telling him at the medal ceremonies, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” However, Thorpe had earned $25 a week while playing semi-professional baseball before his Olympic career, and in 1913, he was stripped of both medals by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) under the era’s strict rules governing amateurism. Historians consider this action to be a combination of racism against Thorpe, who was Native American, and a rigid adherence to the idea of amateurism. 

In 1982, the IOC partially restored Thorpe’s 1912 successes by declaring him co-winner of the two medals. But that partial victory is now complete. In July, the IOC announced that Thorpe is now officially recognized as the sole winner of the decathlon and pentathlon at the 1912 Stockholm Games, while the two athletes who received the medals after they were stripped from Thorpe will be recognized as co-silver medalists of their events. When Thorpe died in 1953, the New York Times called him “probably the greatest natural athlete the world had seen in modern times.”

John W. Lundin
Seattle, Washington

Amateur Athletes? Hardly

John Lundin (“Pro vs. Am,” July-August 2022) is right to point out Avery Brundage’s hypocritical stands on amateurism in Olympic competition. But Brundage’s hypocrisy went beyond the unfortunate examples Lundin cites. Even though most Soviet Union and Soviet Bloc Olympians (and other top athletes) were supported by their governments, Brundage saw no problem in their participation in the Olympics. The value of that government support far exceeded the value of prizes or endorsements that led Brundage to disqualify famous athletes such as Karl Schranz. Athletes from the Soviet Union and the states it dominated were often paid by the military or other state institutions without having to do much other than train and compete. Some amateurs!

Ivo Krupka
Former President
Canadian Ski Hall of Fame and Museum
Ottawa, Canad

T-Bar Timeline

I have a correction to make about the Sugarloaf poster in the “Many Gems at Swann’s Winter Auction” (May-June 2022). Those are all T-bars, not chairlifts, on the poster. The poster was created later than 1955. The lower of the tandem T-bars was built in the summer of 1956; the upper T-bar was built the next summer. The lower left T-bar was built later. 

Jean Luce
Carrabassett Valley, Maine

Correction

Due to an editing error, we reported in the July-August issue that Hedda Bernsten and her husband, Tyler Conrad, spend summers in New England. In fact, they live near the ski resort of Hemsedal, Norway, in the winter and in coastal Tønsberg, in the summer.

Otto Barth was a sickly child. To gain strength, he was taken to the mountains at age 16. The same year, he was admitted to the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. Two years later, he teamed up with his artist friend Gustav Jahn for serious mountaineering. He died, probably of lead poisoning from his paints, at age 39.

Turn-of-the-century Vienna rivalled Paris with artistic experimentation. Barth socialized with a group of artists who rebelled against the progressive Secession movement to form the more radical Hagenbund. Going further still, he joined the short-lived Phalanx, which exhibited post-Impressionist and Jugendstil (art nouveau) paintings.

In 1910 Barth won the commission for the poster of the Salzkammergut resort region. The telemarking skier is shown in fine form, and in the correct Norwegian blue outfit. What’s striking is the use of color and shadow, as well as the depiction of snow itself.

The other illustration is the poster turned Werbemarke (advertising stamp) for the Wintersport-Ausstellung, the Winter Sport Exhibition of 1912. The image of a skier descending from the mountains is center stage, again using those hints of shadow. This was an important exhibition, organized by army officer Hermann Czant (Czant was an acolyte of Matthias Zdarsky and trained thousands of Imperial Army skiers), under the patronage of the Grandduchess Zita, who would become the last empress of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The exhibition was divided between the business of winter sports and the physical aspects of the sport itself. The top Vienna sporting goods shop, Mizzi Langer, was represented, as was Staub of Innsbruck. Norway sent representatives, and Norwegian ski outfits and British winter sports clothes dominated. One critic was thankful there were no new bindings (controversy then raged over binding design for Alpine skiing). On the resort side, Semmering showed a model of its ski jump, and there were other displays from Triberg, the Schwarzwald, the Arlberg and Innsbruck. The trail marking from the Erzgeberge was singled out positively.

There was also a good collection of winter posters and some paintings, too. The best of those were by Jahn and Barth. I like to think that the telemarking skier was one on view; it was painted before the year of the exhibition.

How Christian Lund mopped up rivals while making the world’s best-known hickory skis.

Illustration above: Henry Hall (1893-1986), of Ishpeming, Michigan, was just one of many professional ski jumpers who swore by Northland’s hickory skis. After his 1917 world record, he served in World War I, and returned to reclaim the record in 1921, jumping 229.5 feet at Revelstoke, British Columbia.

America’s ski-making industry, as a mass-production enterprise, began along the banks of the upper Mississippi River in Minnesota. Fueled by a ready market of Norwegian immigrants and the availability of high-quality timber, men like jumping champions Mikkel and Torjus Hemmestveit set up workshops to hand-carve dozens, perhaps hundreds, of skis each year. It was Martin Strand, a civil engineer born in Rendalen, Norway, who in 1896 began mass-producing skis using power equipment, in St. Paul. But the signal success was the Northland Ski Manufacturing Co., which grew to be the largest ski-maker in the world, while producing what many considered the best hickory skis available (at least until Thor Groswold began making skis in Denver in 1934).

Northland’s history has for decades been shrouded in a fog of self-promotion by Christian A. Lund, who claimed, inaccurately, to have founded the firm in 1911. That was the story he pitched in the pages of his catalogs and advertising. By midcentury, the brand held iconic status, and fans had no reason to doubt the “official” origin story. The truth was more complex.

A one-page sketch of C.A. Lund’s life in the Northland 50th-anniversary catalog, published in 1961, summarized the company’s version. Titled “The Northland Story,” it includes the citation accompanying Lund’s induction into the Hall of Fame of the National Sporting Goods Association, which reads, in part:

“After coming to the United States (1901), [Lund] founded the Northland Ski Mfg. Co in 1911. The fifty years since have been spent in the development of skiing and ice hockey in this country. . . . His introduction of plastic ski bottoms, metal edged skis, perfected techniques of hickory laminations and other innovations, boosted his company to its present eminence as the world’s largest ski manufacturer... he created a new important segment of the sporting goods industry.”

But a search of archived materials in Minneapolis and St. Paul has changed the accepted narrative of the history of Lund and his ski companies. The real story is full of intrigue, betrayal and four-alarm fires. Northland, in fact, grew out of previous enterprises dating back to Strand’s first workshop in 1896.

For context, understand that between 1840 and 1910, about 250,000 Norwegians and 180,000 Swedes landed in the Minneapolis–St. Paul area. According to Gunnar Thorvaldsen of the Arctic University of Norway, one out of every nine Norwegians left Norway and one out of every 12 Swedes left Sweden during that period. The immigrants lost no time in setting up their own winter sport clubs. The St. Paul Winter Carnival, launched in 1886, was a Scandinavian winter celebration modeled after the Montreal Winter Carnival. The one-week event ended up lasting four and was a showcase for all winter activities, including tobogganing, horse racing on ice, sleigh rides, skating, curling, and, of course, snowshoeing and skiing.

This was the spirit of the place when Martin Strand arrived in 1888, at age 25. He enrolled in the University of Minnesota and worked as a surveyor, then as a civil engineer in Superior, Minnesota. When Fridtjof Nansen’s book On Skis Across Greenland was published in 1890, Norwegian nationalism soared and skiing became an expression of Norwegian pride everywhere, especially for young men like Strand.

In 1892, Strand traveled home for a short visit and may have investigated how Norwegian skis were made. The Panic of 1893 in the U.S. brought economic collapse and a multi-year depression. For Strand, work dried up in Superior, and he returned to Minneapolis to work as a draftsman. He experimented with making skis in his basement, bending the ski tips over a steaming teapot. By 1896 he was selling skis but kept his day job as a draftsman, then later as a civil engineer again.

In 1899, city records list Strand as a ski manufacturer on Cedar Avenue in Minneapolis, but he needed another source of income and sold insurance for New York Life. There he met another salesman, a Wisconsin Swede named Frederick J. Youngquist. In 1905 they set up shop as Strand & Youngquist Manufacturing Co. As their foreman, they hired a young expert carpenter, Ole Sigurd Ellevold, who arrived in Minneapolis in 1901, to supervise manufacture of skis, oars, toboggans and baseball bats.

Little is known regarding the contractual relationship between Strand and Youngquist, but in 1907, Strand was out and Youngquist reorganized the company as the National Boat Oar Manufacturing Company.

Strand bounced back and by 1909 was again listed as a ski and oar manufacturer doing business at 2427 University Avenue, near the campus of the University of Minnesota. Strand was determined not to fail in the ski business. He did well enough to recruit Ellevold as a foreman. Then, on May 29, 1910, a fire consumed the entire plant, including his manufacturing machinery.

Any shop making wooden skis was a fire hazard. The building was full of sawdust, paint and varnish, and lumber and finished skis. Strand and Ellevold rebuilt two miles away, only to lose that building in a second fire. Three decades later, in the July 21, 1940, edition, the New Richmond News (Wisconsin) told Strand’s story:

“Two fires six months apart almost crushed him. Both times his stock was completely destroyed and the machines were ruined. The foreman of his shop [Ellevold] gave him another headache [as Strand explains]. “He knew the second fire almost broke me and he knew it automatically cancelled my lease on the building. I did not know that, but he did and he bid up on the lease so I was forced out.”

Strand, who never gave up, traveled 25 miles to New Richmond, Wisconsin, where the Chamber of Commerce desperately wanted new manufacturing businesses. They offered Strand an unbeatable deal, building him a “fireproof” masonry building. In less than a year (in 1911) Strand was back in business making skis and toboggans. He made inexpensive skis of white pine and jumping skis of hickory. Some years later he would claim to be the largest ski manufacturer in the world.

Ellevold rebuilt the Hampden Avenue factory in 1911, and in 1912 adopted a new company name: The Northland Ski Manufacturing Company, Ole S. Ellevold, President. The first two catalogues featured the young Crown Prince of Norway on the covers.

From across the street, at the Gold Coin Stock Food and Chemical Works, Christian A. Lund watched the new enterprise open with more than passing interest. Lund had arrived in Minneapolis in 1903 and by 1910 was a manager at Gold Coin.

Northland Ski Company had been established with stock values of $50,000 and a maximum liability on debt of $20,000. In 1913, Lund purchased some Northland stock. Two years later, he incorporated the C.A. Lund Company as a shell but continued selling wood finishes for Gold Coin. As a stockholder in Northland, he advised Ellevold on business matters and probably sold him wood preservatives and varnishes.

A block or so down the street from the Northland plant, another Norwegian, Hans Gregg, manufactured wooden farm implements and skis under the Park label. By 1919, Gregg was making high-quality skis for the Dartmouth Cooperative Society in Hanover, New Hampshire. Lund may also have been selling varnishes to Gregg. It was obvious to Lund that the ski business was thriving. He continued investing in Northland stock.

By 1916 Lund owned enough Northland stock to control the company. He resigned from Gold Coin in 1918 and activated his C.A. Lund Company for the sale, and possibly manufacture, of wood preservatives. Ellevold, then 36 years old, left the business and moved to North Dakota, where he took up farming.

Lund grew the Northland brand of skis, bindings and related products, selling to high-end sporting goods and department stores. In 1927 he opened a factory in Hastings, Minnesota, to manufacture Lund-branded skis, snowshoes and toboggans as a cheaper line for hardware and general-merchandise stores.

Aside from aggressive marketing, Northland owed its success to hickory—the hardest wood available for skis (and for ax handles, wheel spokes and the like). Prohibitively expensive for European factories, hickory was a reasonable purchase in Minnesota. Northland bought boatloads, shipped from Louisiana sawmills as planks ready to be carved into skis. Northland’s hickory skis became the first choice of ski jumpers and, after 1930, for Alpine downhillers—at least until challenged, beginning in 1932, by the Groswold Ski Company in Denver.

Then on June 4, 1937, the Woodware Worker’s Union Local 2048 filed suit against Lund, DBA the C.A. Lund Company and Northland. The suit alleged that C.A. Lund et al. had engaged in unfair labor practices, in violation of the National Labor Relations Act at both plants—six charges in all. The trial examiner and the National Labor Relations Board ruled against Lund on all charges. He was ordered to correct violations and make restitution. The incident didn’t turn Lund into a model employer afterward. The union took him back to court in 1939, and again the court ruled against Lund et al.

Meanwhile, in a bid to penetrate the New England market, Lund opened a plant in Laconia, New Hampshire. It was promoted in the New York Times as “the largest ski factory in the world.” Lund’s son, Carl, managed the plant. Lund also hired Walter F. Tubbs to manage the Northland snowshoe line.

In 1945, the Hastings plant burned to the ground, and Lund relocated to the suburb of North St. Paul.

In an era when most ski factories served local markets, the C.A. Lund Company, marketing nationally, produced more skis than any other enterprise in the world. Less aggressive companies couldn’t compete. Martin Strand filed for bankruptcy in 1945 and died two years later. On December 3, 1953, Lund’s old St. Paul plant, the one founded by Strand and rebuilt by Ellevold, burned. Lund strolled a couple of blocks down the road and purchased the Gregg factory, then on the verge of bankruptcy. Within a couple of weeks, Northland skis were shipping from the old Gregg plant.

To be fair, we don’t know if Lund plotted to drive Ole Ellevold out of his own business, or if Lund simply bought him out when Ellevold wanted a farm. We don’t know if Youngquist pushed Strand out of their partnership, or if they parted on friendly terms. Strand did confirm that Ellevold forced him out after the 1910 fires. It is interesting that Lund, with all of his success behind him in 1961, felt the need to exaggerate his own considerable accomplishments at the expense of others.

When Lund died in 1965, the wooden ski was fast going the way of the wooden ship, washed out in an unstoppable tide of change. At the close of that year, his sons, Carl and Ambrose, sensibly sold the Northland Ski Company to Larson Industries, makers of fiberglass boats. In 1968 Larson hired Stein Eriksen to promote a line of glass skis, but it was too late. The last Northlands shipped in 1970. 

Greg Fangel is the proprietor of woodenskis.com in Tofte, Minnesota. Paul Hooge and his wife run the Hooge Haus, a bed-and-breakfast with a ski museum in Crested Butte, Colorado.

Marie Marvingt achieved fame as an aviator, but she was also a pioneering skier and inventor of an early aluminum ski. 

She’s famous in France, but nearly unheard of in North America. Marie Marvingt (1875–1963) was an athletic phenomenon who forged a path for women into mountaineering, martial arts, skiing, cycling, aviation and military service. Combining her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, she invented the concept and technology of the air ambulance, and promoted air-evac services around the world.

(Photo top of page: Marie Marvingt at Chamonix in January 1913. The pants were a practical but daring fashion statement.)

With few exceptions, women of her era who succeeded in alpinism and aviation had the support of their wealthy families or husbands. In fact, Marie never married and had to work for her adventures. Marie’s father, Felix Marvingt, was postmaster of Aurillac, a decidedly middle-class occupation. After 1879 when, at age 52, Felix fled his stifling career as a bureaucrat, the family lived on his pension. A champion swimmer in his youth, Felix was 48 years old at Marie’s birth, and encouraged her to excel in sports—first swimming, then cycling, canoeing, mountaineering and gymnastics. From the age of five, she followed Felix on his swims in the Moselle and on trekking holidays in the Alps. At 15, she trained with the Alphonse Rancy Circus, learning to do acrobatics on horseback. With a preternatural sense of balance, she quickly became a leading equestrienne. Equitation put her in touch with cavalry officers, who dominated the sport. For the rest of her life Marie maintained a close relationship with officers of the French Army.

Marie’s mother, Elisabeth, died in 1889. At age 14, Marie lost any maternal influence Elisabeth may have exerted. Though she dressed fashionably and flirted easily, Marie increasingly devoted herself to sports. While attending the equivalent of high school in Metz in Lorraine, then a part of Germany, she learned archery, riflery, fencing, boxing, tennis, golf, track and field. (And, of course, German.) While studying medicine at the University of Nancy, she earned a reputation as a fierce competitor in all sports, winning against women in swimming and track, and against men in target-shooting. More passionate about sports than about medicine, she settled for a nursing license and supplemented that income as a sports and adventure writer. She sold articles, under the pseudonym Myriel, to dozens of newspapers. Returning to the Alps, she was the first woman to summit many of the high peaks around Chamonix.

Many women rode bicycles, but few entered races. Marie won the Nancy-Bordeaux race (600 miles) in 1904, Nancy-Milan (350 miles) in 1905 and Nancy-Toulouse (560 miles) in 1906.

That year, at age 31, she took up skiing in a serious way. Skiing in France and Italy was largely a military endeavor, as armies focused on frontier defense in the rising tensions with Germany and Austria. Marie set up the first civilian ski school in France, and at the second military ski meet, at Chamonix in 1908, she ran in the first organized cross-country race for women, a three-kilometer sprint. While the army races were covered widely in the French press, reporters paid not much attention to the women’s race. Coached by the Swedish expert Harald Durban-Hansen, Marie and her peers used two poles at a time when the French Army team was still paddling away with a single pole (see “End of the Single Pole,” Skiing History, March-April 2019). She apparently won the race, though no official records survive. Perhaps there were none to begin with. Durban-Hansen also taught her ski-jumping.

In 1909 Marie repeated the win, at the Gérardmer meet. This time, all the women racers showed up in culottes rather than skirts, greatly improving their performance and setting ski fashion forever. The threepeat came at Ballon d’Alsace in 1910. Meanwhile, she won events in skating, luge and bobsleigh.

During the summer of 1908, Marie made bicycling history. At age 33, she tried to enter the Tour de France and was refused—the race would be for men only. That year the race covered 2,800 miles over 14 stages. An average of 200 miles a day on dirt roads with single-speed bikes was punishing even for the strongest cyclists, so organizers allowed a day of rest after each stage. Marie simply cycled each stage on the rest days. She finished handily, while 76 of the 114 male starters dropped out.

In the summers during her ski-racing career, Marie took up aviation. She first piloted a balloon in 1907, and during an October 1909 storm piloted the first east-to-west crossing of the North Sea from Europe to England, nearly drowning herself and her passenger. That year she soloed in an Antoinette, a fiendishly tricky monoplane designed before the standard stick-and-rudder control system was devised.

Like skiing, French aviation was heavily promoted by the French Army. Among Marie’s student-pilot friends was the cavalry and artillery officer Paul-Maurice Écheman. Écheman was also an accomplished skier and skater. The two became constant companions on the flying fields and in the mountains. While Marie set some of the first aviation records for women, Écheman was promoted to captain and put in charge of one of the first French Army airfields. In 1910, Marie had the idea of combining her surgical and piloting skills to create an air ambulance service. With Écheman’s encouragement, she presented the idea to the Army. It was too early, and the War Department wasn’t interested. Écheman died in a solo crash in 1911.

Now 35, Marie continued to set aviation records, which were featured in newspapers around the world. The fame enabled her to earn money flying in exhibitions. In winters, she continued to compete in winter sports. Increasingly she devoted time to developing the medical air-evacuation concept. She organized conferences to promote the idea and raised enough money to order a specially designed Deperdussin monoplane to carry a pilot plus two stretcher patients or a patient and doctor. The company went bankrupt before the plane was delivered; its designer, Louis Béchereau, went on to create the SPAD fighter series of World War I.

When war broke out, Marie went straight to work as a surgical nurse. The Army wouldn’t let her fly military missions, but she became a part-time civilian flight instructor training new Army pilots. After all, she was one of the world’s most experienced aviators, with a sterling reputation. She had completed more than 900 flights without ever seriously damaging an airplane, while more than 15 percent of pilots licensed in 1910 were killed before the war—and that doesn’t include the student pilots who died before being licensed (77 percent of French pilots died during the war). In March, 1915, one of her surgical patients was an injured pilot, and she learned there was no replacement for him in his bombing squadron. She talked her way into the cockpit and flew two bombing missions over a German airfield. She was thus the world’s first female combat pilot. The army turned a blind eye. Officially, she was a nurse. Unofficially, she flew missions as a “scout”—that is, solo reconnaissance in a fighter plane. Then, with the collusion of an infantry lieutenant (and some help from her friend Marshall Foch), she put on a private’s uniform and served in the trenches. After six weeks she was wounded lightly and sent to infirmary. That was the end of her infantry career, but Foch assigned her to the Italian alpine troops fighting Austria in the Dolomites, officially as a combat nurse. It was the perfect job. As a skier and alpinist, for six months she engineered the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the mountain peaks and passes, and skied in food and medical supplies. After that, she spent most of 1916 at the Italian front, ostensibly as a war correspondent. There are big gaps in what is known about her travels, and friends assumed she was working for military intelligence. What with flying, fighting, nursing and spying, at the end of the war Marie earned both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Marie campaigned tirelessly for her medical air-evacuation program, and this, oddly enough, led to the invention of an aluminum ski.

Travelling with French and Italian forces in the Sahara, as both a medical officer and war correspondent, in 1923 she designed aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on sand. That led her to think about skis for herself. Back in France in 1927, she found a metal shop in Nancy that could forge skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She had two pairs made, one pair for sand in the desert. She tested the other pair on snow in Chamonix. The sand skis were certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, but the snow skis failed, compared to ash and hickory. Undamped, they were nearly uncontrollable on firm snow, and as they didn’t absorb wax, could glide in soft snow only in a very narrow temperature range. Nonetheless, her skis represented a start, and French aluminum foundries near the Alps began looking for a way to combine wood-ski performance with aluminum durability—a problem eventually solved in 1947, in the United States.

Marie had many more adventures, including leading early motorized expeditions across the Sahara, first in a modified Fiat truck and later in Citroën six-wheelers. By the early ‘30s her flying ambulance concept was on a roll, and she held many international conferences to promote the concept. She established the Captain Écheman Award for the best-equipped medical aircraft, and launched the first training course for medevac nurses. During World War II she returned to the Red Cross, and was honored after the war for unspecified actions on behalf of the French Resistance.

Into her 80s, Marie was widely honored by the aviation community and French government, but she descended into genteel poverty and died in a hospice, penniless, in 1963, at age 88. 

Seth Masia is the president of ISHA. Sources for this article include Une histoire du ski by Franck Cochoy; Marie Marvingt: Fiancée of Danger, by Marcel Cordier and Rosalie Maggio; “Bride of Danger,” in The Strand Magazine, September 1913; The Culture and Sport of Skiing, by E. John B. Allen; and Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation, by Eileen F. Lebow.

Marie Marvingt achieved fame as an aviator, but she was also a pioneering skier and inventor of an early aluminum ski. 

She’s famous in France, but nearly unheard of in North America. Marie Marvingt (1875–1963) was an athletic phenomenon who forged a path for women into mountaineering, martial arts, skiing, cycling, aviation and military service. Combining her careers as a surgical nurse and military aviator, she invented the concept and technology of the air ambulance, and promoted air-evac services around the world.

(Photo top of page: Marie Marvingt at Chamonix in January 1913. The pants were a practical but daring fashion statement.)

With few exceptions, women of her era who succeeded in alpinism and aviation had the support of their wealthy families or husbands. In fact, Marie never married and had to work for her adventures. Marie’s father, Felix Marvingt, was postmaster of Aurillac, a decidedly middle-class occupation. After 1879 when, at age 52, Felix fled his stifling career as a bureaucrat, the family lived on his pension. A champion swimmer in his youth, Felix was 48 years old at Marie’s birth, and encouraged her to excel in sports—first swimming, then cycling, canoeing, mountaineering and gymnastics. From the age of five, she followed Felix on his swims in the Moselle and on trekking holidays in the Alps. At 15, she trained with the Alphonse Rancy Circus, learning to do acrobatics on horseback. With a preternatural sense of balance, she quickly became a leading equestrienne. Equitation put her in touch with cavalry officers, who dominated the sport. For the rest of her life Marie maintained a close relationship with officers of the French Army.

Marie’s mother, Elisabeth, died in 1889. At age 14, Marie lost any maternal influence Elisabeth may have exerted. Though she dressed fashionably and flirted easily, Marie increasingly devoted herself to sports. While attending the equivalent of high school in Metz in Lorraine, then a part of Germany, she learned archery, riflery, fencing, boxing, tennis, golf, track and field. (And, of course, German.) While studying medicine at the University of Nancy, she earned a reputation as a fierce competitor in all sports, winning against women in swimming and track, and against men in target-shooting. More passionate about sports than about medicine, she settled for a nursing license and supplemented that income as a sports and adventure writer. She sold articles, under the pseudonym Myriel, to dozens of newspapers. Returning to the Alps, she was the first woman to summit many of the high peaks around Chamonix.

Many women rode bicycles, but few entered races. Marie won the Nancy-Bordeaux race (600 miles) in 1904, Nancy-Milan (350 miles) in 1905 and Nancy-Toulouse (560 miles) in 1906.

That year, at age 31, she took up skiing in a serious way. Skiing in France and Italy was largely a military endeavor, as armies focused on frontier defense in the rising tensions with Germany and Austria. Marie set up the first civilian ski school in France, and at the second military ski meet, at Chamonix in 1908, she ran in the first organized cross-country race for women, a three-kilometer sprint. While the army races were covered widely in the French press, reporters paid not much attention to the women’s race. Coached by the Swedish expert Harald Durban-Hansen, Marie and her peers used two poles at a time when the French Army team was still paddling away with a single pole (see “End of the Single Pole,” Skiing History, March-April 2019). She apparently won the race, though no official records survive. Perhaps there were none to begin with. Durban-Hansen also taught her ski-jumping.

In 1909 Marie repeated the win, at the Gérardmer meet. This time, all the women racers showed up in culottes rather than skirts, greatly improving their performance and setting ski fashion forever. The threepeat came at Ballon d’Alsace in 1910. Meanwhile, she won events in skating, luge and bobsleigh.

During the summer of 1908, Marie made bicycling history. At age 33, she tried to enter the Tour de France and was refused—the race would be for men only. That year the race covered 2,800 miles over 14 stages. An average of 200 miles a day on dirt roads with single-speed bikes was punishing even for the strongest cyclists, so organizers allowed a day of rest after each stage. Marie simply cycled each stage on the rest days. She finished handily, while 76 of the 114 male starters dropped out.

In the summers during her ski-racing career, Marie took up aviation. She first piloted a balloon in 1907, and during an October 1909 storm piloted the first east-to-west crossing of the North Sea from Europe to England, nearly drowning herself and her passenger. That year she soloed in an Antoinette, a fiendishly tricky monoplane designed before the standard stick-and-rudder control system was devised.

Like skiing, French aviation was heavily promoted by the French Army. Among Marie’s student-pilot friends was the cavalry and artillery officer Paul-Maurice Écheman. Écheman was also an accomplished skier and skater. The two became constant companions on the flying fields and in the mountains. While Marie set some of the first aviation records for women, Écheman was promoted to captain and put in charge of one of the first French Army airfields. In 1910, Marie had the idea of combining her surgical and piloting skills to create an air ambulance service. With Écheman’s encouragement, she presented the idea to the Army. It was too early, and the War Department wasn’t interested. Écheman died in a solo crash in 1911.

Now 35, Marie continued to set aviation records, which were featured in newspapers around the world. The fame enabled her to earn money flying in exhibitions. In winters, she continued to compete in winter sports. Increasingly she devoted time to developing the medical air-evacuation concept. She organized conferences to promote the idea and raised enough money to order a specially designed Deperdussin monoplane to carry a pilot plus two stretcher patients or a patient and doctor. The company went bankrupt before the plane was delivered; its designer, Louis Béchereau, went on to create the SPAD fighter series of World War I.

When war broke out, Marie went straight to work as a surgical nurse. The Army wouldn’t let her fly military missions, but she became a part-time civilian flight instructor training new Army pilots. After all, she was one of the world’s most experienced aviators, with a sterling reputation. She had completed more than 900 flights without ever seriously damaging an airplane, while more than 15 percent of pilots licensed in 1910 were killed before the war—and that doesn’t include the student pilots who died before being licensed (77 percent of French pilots died during the war). In March, 1915, one of her surgical patients was an injured pilot, and she learned there was no replacement for him in his bombing squadron. She talked her way into the cockpit and flew two bombing missions over a German airfield. She was thus the world’s first female combat pilot. The army turned a blind eye. Officially, she was a nurse. Unofficially, she flew missions as a “scout”—that is, solo reconnaissance in a fighter plane. Then, with the collusion of an infantry lieutenant (and some help from her friend Marshall Foch), she put on a private’s uniform and served in the trenches. After six weeks she was wounded lightly and sent to infirmary. That was the end of her infantry career, but Foch assigned her to the Italian alpine troops fighting Austria in the Dolomites, officially as a combat nurse. It was the perfect job. As a skier and alpinist, for six months she engineered the evacuation of wounded soldiers from the mountain peaks and passes, and skied in food and medical supplies. After that, she spent most of 1916 at the Italian front, ostensibly as a war correspondent. There are big gaps in what is known about her travels, and friends assumed she was working for military intelligence. What with flying, fighting, nursing and spying, at the end of the war Marie earned both the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor.

After the war, Marie campaigned tirelessly for her medical air-evacuation program, and this, oddly enough, led to the invention of an aluminum ski.

Travelling with French and Italian forces in the Sahara, as both a medical officer and war correspondent, in 1923 she designed aluminum skis for an experimental medevac airplane to land on sand. That led her to think about skis for herself. Back in France in 1927, she found a metal shop in Nancy that could forge skis from solid aircraft-grade aluminum alloy. She had two pairs made, one pair for sand in the desert. She tested the other pair on snow in Chamonix. The sand skis were certainly better than walking up dunes in sandals, but the snow skis failed, compared to ash and hickory. Undamped, they were nearly uncontrollable on firm snow, and as they didn’t absorb wax, could glide in soft snow only in a very narrow temperature range. Nonetheless, her skis represented a start, and French aluminum foundries near the Alps began looking for a way to combine wood-ski performance with aluminum durability—a problem eventually solved in 1947, in the United States.

Marie had many more adventures, including leading early motorized expeditions across the Sahara, first in a modified Fiat truck and later in Citroën six-wheelers. By the early ‘30s her flying ambulance concept was on a roll, and she held many international conferences to promote the concept. She established the Captain Écheman Award for the best-equipped medical aircraft, and launched the first training course for medevac nurses. During World War II she returned to the Red Cross, and was honored after the war for unspecified actions on behalf of the French Resistance.

Into her 80s, Marie was widely honored by the aviation community and French government, but she descended into genteel poverty and died in a hospice, penniless, in 1963, at age 88. 

Seth Masia is the president of ISHA. Sources for this article include Une histoire du ski by Franck Cochoy; Marie Marvingt: Fiancée of Danger, by Marcel Cordier and Rosalie Maggio; “Bride of Danger,” in The Strand Magazine, September 1913; The Culture and Sport of Skiing, by E. John B. Allen; and Before Amelia: Women Pilots in the Early Days of Aviation, by Eileen F. Lebow.

From the FIS website:

The International Ski Federation - Fédération Internationale de Ski, Internationaler Ski Verband - is abbreviated in all languages as FIS.

FIS was founded on the 18th of February in 1910 when 22 delegates from 10 countries joined together to form in the International Skiing Commission in Christiania (NOR) and served from 1910 to 1924. The group became formally known as the International Ski Federation on 2nd February 1924 during the first Olympic Winter Games in Chamonix, France with 14 member nations. Today, 123 National Ski Associations comprise the membership of FIS.

Whilst the existence of skiing as means of transport is very ancient, its practice as a sport is relatively recent. It was not developed in Norway until after 1850, when the first races were held around the town of Christiania, which later became the city of Oslo. From 1870 onwards, the Alpine countries were in turn affected by the rapid expansion of skiing as a sport: the first competitions in Germany in 1879, the foundation of the first Swiss Club in 1893 at Glaris initiated by Christoph Iselin. National Ski Associations appeared in turn in Russia (1896), Czechoslovakia (1903), the United States (1904), Austria and Germany (1905) and Norway, Finland and Sweden (1908). From 1910 to 1924, the International Skiing Commission strove to monitor the development of competitive skiing throughout the world. In 1924, at the time of the first Olympic Winter Games, this Commission gave birth to the Federation International de Ski.

For more information on the past International Ski Congresses, see here.

The critical role of skis in 130 years of Arctic exploration and adventure.

By Jeff Blumenfeld

In Part I of this two-part article, author Jeff Blumenfeld explains how skis played a critical role in the early Arctic and polar expeditions of Fridtjof Nansen (Greenland, 1888), Robert E. Peary and Frederick Cook (North Pole, 1909), Roald Amundsen and Robert F. Scott (South Pole, 1911 and 1912). In Part II, to be published in the January-February 2018 issue of Skiing History, Blumenfeld will examine the use of skis in modern-day polar expeditions by Paul Schurke, Will Steger and Richard Weber.

Blumenfeld, an ISHA director, runs Blumenfeld and Associates PR and ExpeditionNews.com in Boulder, Colorado. He is the recipient of the 2017 Bob Gillen Memorial Award from the North American Snowsports Journalists Association, was nominated a Fellow of the Royal Geographic Society, and is chair of the Rocky Mountain chapter of The Explorers Club. No stranger to the polar regions, he’s been to Iceland more than 15 times, traveled on business 184 miles north of the Arctic Circle in Greenland, and chaperoned a high-school student trip to the Antarctic Peninsula. 

Throughout the modern era of polar exploration, skis have played an invaluable role in propelling explorers forward—sometimes with dogsled teams, sometimes without, and more recently, with kites to glide across the polar regions at speeds averaging 7 mph. Modern-day polar explorers including Eric Larsen, Paul Schurke, Will Steger and Richard Weber all continue to use skis today, taking a page right out of history. Were it not for skis, reaching the North and South poles in the early 1900s might have been delayed until years later.

“Stars and Stripes Nailed to the North Pole”

This long-awaited message from American explorer Robert E. Peary (1856–1920) flashed around the globe by cable and telegraph on the afternoon of September 6, 1909. Reaching the North Pole, nicknamed the “Big Nail” in those days, was a three-
century struggle that had taken many lives, and was the Edwardian era’s equivalent of the first manned landing on the moon.

But was Peary first to achieve this expeditionary Holy Grail? To this day, historians aren’t absolutely sure whether Peary was first to the North Pole in 1909, although they are convinced both he and Frederick Cook (1865–1940) came close. Of course, Cook’s credibility wasn’t enhanced by his 1923 conviction for mail fraud, followed by seven years in the U.S. federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Surprisingly, it wasn’t until 1986 that the possibility of reaching the pole without mechanical assistance or resupply was finally confirmed, thanks in part to the use of specially designed skis. That was the year a wiry Minnesotan named Will Steger, a former science teacher then aged 41, launched his 56-day Steger North Pole Expedition, financed by cash and gear from more than 60 companies. The expedition would become the first confirmed, non-mechanized and unsupported dogsled and ski journey to the North Pole, proving it was indeed possible back in the early 1900s to have reached the pole in this manner, regardless of whether Peary or Cook arrived first. 

Dogs are the long-haul truckers of polar exploration. For Steger’s 1986 journey, he relied upon three self-sufficient teams of 12 dogs each—specially bred polar huskies weighing about 90 pounds per dog. The teams faced temperatures as low as minus 68 degrees F, raging storms and surging 60-to-100-feet pressure ridges of ice. 

To keep up with dogs pulling 1,100-pound supply sleds traveling at speeds of up to four miles per hour, team members used Epoke 900 skis, Berwin Bindings, Swix Alulight ski poles and Swix ski wax, according to North to the Pole by Will Steger with Paul Schurke (Times Books/Random House, 1987). In its basic equipment, this mode of travel was not far removed from the early days of polar exploration. 

Norway’s Best Skier Crosses Greenland

Norwegian Fridtjof Nansen (1861–1930), an accomplished skier, skater and ski jumper, carved his name in polar exploration by achieving the first crossing of the Greenland ice cap in 1888, traversing the island on skis. Nansen was something of a Norwegian George Washington, revered as a statesman and humanitarian as well as an explorer. He rejected the complex organization and heavy manpower of other Arctic ventures, and instead planned his expedition for a small party of six on skis, with supplies man-hauled on lightweight sledges. His team included two Sami people, who were known to be expert snow travelers. All of the men had experience living outdoors and were experienced skiers.  

Despite challenges such as treacherous surfaces with many hidden crevasses, violent storms and rain, ascents to 8,900 feet and temperatures dropping to minus 49 degrees F, the 78-day expedition succeeded thanks to the team’s sheer determination and their use of skis. In spring 1889, they returned to a hero’s welcome in Christiania (now Oslo), attracting crowds of between 30,000 to 40,000—one-third of the city’s population. 

Nansen later won international fame after reaching a record “farthest north” latitude of 86°14’ during his North Pole expedition in 1895, sadly falling short of the Big Nail by a mere 200 miles.

Nansen’s Greenland expedition would be repeated and completed, again on skis, 67 years later by the 27-year-old Norwegian Bjorn Staib in 1962. It took Staib and his teammate 31 days to cross the almost 500-mile-wide ice cap. “The skis served them well,” according to a story by John Henry Auran in the November 1965 issue of SKI Magazine. He quotes Staib, “There were steep slopes in the west, but we never knew where the crevasses would be. So we zipped across as fast as possible—sometimes I wished we had slalom skis—and hoped that we were safe and wouldn’t break through.”

Writes Auran, “Skis, always essential for Arctic travel, now became indispensable. Crossing ice that sometimes was only the thickness of plate glass, the skis provided the essential distribution of weight which kept the men from breaking through. And they made speed, the other margin of safety, possible.”

In 1964, Staib would attempt to ski to the North Pole but was turned back 14 days from his goal by poor ice and extreme cold. Nonetheless, he had nothing but praise for the use of skis on the expedition. Their simple Norwegian touring skis with hardwood edges performed without difficulty. 

Says Staib, “Skiing in the Arctic is not like skiing at home. There’s no real variety, there isn’t even any waxing. There is no wax for snow so cold and, anyway, there is no need for it. There are no hills to climb or descend.”

Scott of the Antarctic

Nansen’s techniques of polar travel and his innovations in equipment and clothing influenced a future generation of Arctic and Antarctic explorers, including one whose failure in January 1912 was considered a blow to British national pride on par with the wreck of the Titanic three months later.

British Capt. Robert F. Scott (1868–1912) became a national hero when he set the new “farthest south” record with his expedition to Antarctica aboard the 172-foot RRS Discovery in 1901–1904. Nansen introduced Scott to Norwegian Tryggve Gran, a wealthy expert skier who had been trying to mount his own Antarctic expedition. Scott asked Gran to train his men for a new expedition, an attempt to be first to reach the geographic South Pole, while conducting scientific experiments and collecting data along the way. After all, who better to teach his men? Most Norwegians learned to ski as soon as they could walk. Arriving in Antarctica in early January 1911, Gran was one of the 13 expedition members involved in positioning supply depots needed for the attempt to reach the South Pole later that year. 

Scott found skiing “a most pleasurable and delightful exercise” but was not convinced at first that it would be useful when dragging sledges. He would later find that however inexpert their use of skis was, they greatly increased safety over crevassed areas. 

“With today’s hindsight, when thousands of far better-equipped amateurs know how difficult it is to master skiing as an adult, Scott’s belief that his novices could do so as part of an expedition in which their lives might depend on it seems bizarre,” according to South—The Race to the Pole, published by the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, London (2000). Scott was bitterly disappointed when he arrived at the bottom of the world on January 17, 1912, only to find a tent, a Norwegian flag, and a letter to the King of Norway left more than a month earlier by the Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen (1872–1928), on December 14, 1911. 

Amundsen had kicked off his successful journey to the South Pole by traveling to the continent in the 128-foot Fram, a polar vessel built by Nansen. He averaged about 16 miles a day using a combination of dogs, sledges and skis, on a polar journey of 1,600 miles roundtrip. With Amundsen skiing in the lead, his dogsled drivers cried “halt” and told him that the sledgemeters said they were at the Pole. “God be thanked” was his simple reaction.  

Over a month later, the deity was again invoked, but under less favorable conditions. After Scott reached the South Pole, man-hauling without the benefit of dogs, he famously wrote in his diary, “Great God! This is an awful place and terrible enough for us to have laboured to it without the reward of priority.”

On their way back from the South Pole, Scott’s expedition perished in a blizzard just 11 miles short of their food and fuel cache. A geologist to the very end, Scott and his men were found with a sledge packed with 35 pounds of rock samples and very few supplies.

In November 1912, Gran was part of the 11-man search party that found the tent containing the dead bodies of the Scott party. After collecting the party’s personal belongings, the tent was lowered over the bodies of Scott and his two companions and a 12-foot snow cairn was built over it, topped by a cross made from a pair of skis. The bodies remain entombed in the Antarctic to this day. 

Gran traveled back to the base at Cape Evans wearing Scott’s skis, reasoning that at least Scott’s skis would complete the journey. Today those skis can be seen in an exhibit at The Ski Museum in Holmenkollen, on the outskirts of Oslo, honoring Amundsen’s historic discovery of the South Pole. Scott would most certainly roll over in his grave at the thought of his skis displayed near those of his polar rival. 

Later polar expeditions would go on to combine skis with kites, with snowshoes, and floating sledges. Sometimes they even attracted the attention of world leaders. 

Crans-Montana, Kitzbühel dispute first downhill race

In early April 2011, a commemorative race was held on the ski slopes of Crans-Montana, Switzerland, to mark the 100th anniversary of the first Roberts of Kandahar downhill. Some 260 participants, organized into 60 teams, descended eight miles from the Plaine-Morte to Montana-Violettes, most of them wearing vintage skis and clothing, including retro glacier glasses. In the promotional flyer, event organizers said the race also marked the centennial of the “first official alpine ski race in history.”

This claim is contested by ski historians in Kitzbühel, who produced documents from the Kitzbühel Winter Sports Club, which held a “Ski Race for the Club Master Title” on the Hahnenkamm in April 1906. The timed downhill race covered three kilometers (1.86 miles) with a vertical drop of 624 meters (2,047 feet). It was won by Sebastian Monitzer in eight minutes, one second. “The quoted difference in altitude and route are almost identical to [the course] used for the ladies downhill in the 1940s and 1950s, as well as the Super G of today,” says the club’s letter of rebuttal. “Further ‘pure downhill’ races were held in subsequent years,” including a team downhill in February 1910. –John Fry

Hot Sulphur Springs became a summer resort in 1864, when the baths were first developed. In 1906, the railroad overCoronaPassmade tourism easy.John Peyer, born inZurich, arrived in in June, 1911, and set up as a real-estate sales agent and owner of the Grand Hotel. He soon conceived the idea of turning Hot Sulphur Springs into an American St. Moritz. He organized a wintertime party for the upcoming New Year holiday. There would be skating, tobogganing and a Grand Ball.

On Saturday, Dec. 29, a train pulled out of the North Denver station for the long climb toCoronaPass.Aboard: Holmenkollen champion Carl Howelsen and his skiing buddy Angell Schmidt. After helping to found the Norge Ski Club inChicago, they had moved toDenverand now planned a multi-day holiday ski tour on the western slope.

At noon, the train pulled into Corona Station, at the top of the Continental Divide. Howelsen and Schmidt climbed down, strapped on their skis and began the exhilarating 44-mile run down the west slope of theRockies. They descended 3,100 feet to Fraser, about 16 miles, following close to the railbed because of all the fallen timber in the woods. They langlaufed into Hot Sulphur Springs at about 9 p.m., and found the Grand Ball in progress.

In the morning, Howelsen and Schmidt improvised a ski jump and put on a show. Before the day was out, Peyer began organizing a Winter Carnival for February, and invited the Norwegian pros back. Thereafter, the Hot Sulphur Springs Winter Sports Carnival was an annual event, until WWII. Hundreds of Denverites rode special trains to the event. The following winter, Howelsen settled in Steamboat Springs and with his Norwegian friends got busy teaching skiing – and building jumps — from Denver north and west to the end of the line in Craig. Competitive skiing had arrived inColorado.

http://grandwintercarnival.com