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Read more on Ronald Franz

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Read more on Chris's relationship with Jan and Bob

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Read more on Chris's relationship with Jan and Bob

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Read to find out about Chris's relationship with Jan and Bob

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Read to find information on Chris's sister Carine

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Read to find out about Chris's relationship with his father and grandfather

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Read to find out about Chris's relationship with his father and grandfather

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Read to find out about Chris's relationship with his mother Billie

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Read to find out about Chris's relationship with his mother Billie

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Read to find out about Wayne's relationship with Chris (Alex)

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Use the sources to find the answers to the questions and bring this to your first lesson.

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Use the sources to find the answers to the questions and bring this to your first lesson.

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1. How long had Chris been dead before he was found?
2. How do people think that he died?
3. What did Chris die of, according to Jon Krakauer?
4. What evidence does Craig Medred give to say that Chris McCandless was romanticised in the film and book?

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Read an alternative view of Chris McCandless from Alaska Dispatch News

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Thanks to the magic of words -- and words can indeed be magic -- the poacher Chris McCandless was transformed in his afterlife into some sort of poor, admirable romantic soul lost in the wilds of Alaska, and now appears on the verge of becoming some sort of beloved vampire. Given the way things are going, the dead McCandless is sure to live on longer than the live McCandless, who starved to death in Interior Alaska because he wasn't quite successful enough as a poacher.

Alaska moose hunters in August 1992 found the remains of his 67-pound body in a sleeping bag in a deserted bus not far off the George Parks Highway west of Healy. Author Jon Krakauer later immortalized McCandless in the 1996 book "Into the Wild," conspired with director Sean Penn to bring him back to life again in the 2007 movie of the same name, and is now playing the media to resurrect McCandless once more with a new theory as to how the 24-year-old died.

Since Krakauer, the maker of the literary magic and a man who seems interested in nothing in life so much as book sales, wants to revisit his defining character, isn't it about time for a painful and objective public consideration of the real McCandless, given that he has now been dead long enough that no one really needs to play nice about his behaviors preceding his death?

Enough with Krakauer and his mysterious poisons, isn't it about time to wash off the makeup Krakauer put on the corpse of the offspring of a very comfortable American upbringing and take a serious look at the boy-man beneath?

What you find there is not very pretty. It could leave many more than a little troubled that some schools in America actually encourage students to read Krakauer's eulogy to the bum, poacher and thief Chris McCandless as if his behaviors had redeeming value.

McCandless did commit one commendable act in his life: Just before he turned his back on family and old friends, he gave the $24,292 left in his college education fund to Oxfam, a hunger relief organization. Whether this was an act of benevolence or a challenge to his well-to-do family -- at which he was angry for reasons that have never been explained -- no one will ever know.

But it was commendable. Afterward, McCandless's behavior went pretty steadily downhill.

He drove from his Virginia home into a future as a scofflaw. He abandoned his car, according to Krakauer, in the Lake Mead National Recreation Area because he couldn't get it started after a flood and figured that if he asked for help authorities might ask him to explain why the registration was expired, and why he carried no insurance.

Not to mention the questions that might arise as to why he was driving in an area closed to motor vehicles.

McCandless hitchhiked northwest into the Sierra Nevada Mountains where he burglarized a cabin, or as The New Yorker writer Chip Brown put it in so-much-politer terms back in the 1990s, when reporters were glossing over McCandless's warts, he "came upon a cabin stocked with emergency food. He broke in and loaded up his pack."

Brown was one of the first to start backtracking McCandless after moose hunters in August 1992 found the man's emaciated body in the bus where he'd taken up residence as a squatter. It is interesting to go back now and reread Brown's story.

Brown, too, soft-pedaled McCandless's backstory. Don't forget the Golden Rule of the Society of Polite Journalists: Never speak unkindly of the dead. But despite this impediment, Brown didn't romanticize McCandless the way "Into the Wild" later would.

After the burglary in the Sierras, Brown wrote, McCandless "fell in with an itinerant society, a life of temporary camps and plans that never reached more than a week or two into the future." The phrase "itinerant society" refers to folks commonly called "bums" or "street people." They survive on handouts of the governmental or panhandling sort, and often a little thievery.

Eventually, McCandless left them to wander northwest then back to the east where he took an actual job in South Dakota. It didn't last long. McCandless was soon off again, but this time sent a postcard to the man who'd paid him to do odd jobs.

"Tramping is too Easy with all this money," he wrote. "My days were more exciting when I was penniless and had to Forage Around for my next meal ... I've decided that I'm going to live this Life for some time to come."

"This life" to which he refers is panhandling, stealing and freeloading. If "Into the Wild" makes nothing else clear, it documents that McCandless was a first-class freeloader.

From South Dakota, McCandless headed southwest and illegally slipped into Mexico packing a handgun. He then equally illegally re-entered the U.S., still packing heat, only to be caught and jailed. He was let go after his gun was taken away.

Most of this behavior can in many ways be excused by McCandless's youth. A lot of young men are rebellious thrill-seekers prone to bad behavior. I'd have to plead guilty to some of this myself. Just to stay alive, I did a little poaching when I first arrived in Alaska in 1973, though I never wasted anything in my life. And I confess to having abandoned a Volkswagen van along the Alaska Highway in Canada when I was near McCandless's age, and to having taken advantage of more than a few friends, and to getting into a couple Fairbanks bar fights, and to engaging in some bad behaviors involving controlled substances.

Alaska doesn't always attract the best young men, though some of them do grow up to become responsible citizens. And some don't. That a young man like McCandless should pack up and start hitchhiking north to The Last Frontier is an all-too-familiar story.

American frontiers have always had a history of attracting adventurers, oddballs, ne'er-do-wells and misfits, and Alaska is the final extension of the frontier. That is why, for better or worse, it still attracts those that folks here have come to call the "end of the roaders."

McCandless was a classic end-of-the-roader. An Alaska Native man who is pretty sure he gave McCandless a ride north on the Alaska Highway in 1992 remembers him this way:

My aunt and I picked him up hitchhiking when we were coming back from Dot Lake to Fairbanks. He was somewhere near Delta. When I asked him his name he gave us some weird name, was generally strange and did not want to chitchat at all. He was too weird, and after about a half hour on the road with this strange dude we stopped by a general store.

He brought his big backpack in with him, and we ditched him. I never made the connection until I saw a picture of him.

He was so bizarre (my aunt) could barely tolerate him in the car. He was smelly too, and gave no information about himself and distrusted us. It was weird. He was weird ... he had some weird energy.

This description is not exactly out of line with Krakauer's fluffier reference to the quirky McCandless, who worked for a very short time at a McDonald's in Arizona. That was the McCandless who, Krakauer concedes, hated wearing socks, worked too slow and did not shower enough, if at all. Krakauer painted this as somehow endearing.

So, too, McCandless' clear adoption of the "it's-all-about-me" philosophy after that donation to Oxfam. What was actually going on in McCandless' head at that time no one really knows.

"Chris told me he thought he was going to be alone in his life," friend Don Springer told Brown. "He had been drinking a bit, and he got very emotional. It wasn't a cry for help. I think he just wanted to tell somebody."

Or maybe it was a cry for help. Springer was one of the many high-school and college friends with whom McCandless cut off contact after he hit the road. Personally, I think the evidence is there to draw a reasonable conclusion McCandless was suffering from a mental illness: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, take your pick.

That would help explain both his disinterest in socially redeeming behaviors and his comfort with the "itinerant society," as Brown described the people now sometimes referred to simply as "homeless." A fair number of them suffer from mental illness.

Whatever the case, it is clear McCandless's later, major -- and only -- contribution to the society and economy of Alaska was the Fairbanks purchase of a Remington .22-caliber rifle and 400 rounds of ammunition, though no hunting or fishing license.

Granted, those are costly for non-residents, but at the very least he could have illegally claimed residency and obtained the $5 license available to the poor. But he really didn't seem to care about hunting or fishing laws.

As he reportedly told the last man to see him alive, "How I feed myself is none of the government's business. Fuck their stupid rules."

And fuck their stupid rules is what he proceeded to do. He shot a moose, a highly valuable commodity in the Alaska Bush, apparently tried to preserve the flesh by smoking, apparently failed, and obviously let lots of prime meat go to waste.

McCandless's so-called journal of his 133 days in Alaska is so pathetic in the description of anything that it is hard to tell what he did with the moose. Photographs make it clear he shot it, however. He poses wild-eyed with the carcass, as he posed with the carcasses of many of the animals he killed.

The photos would make it appear he wanted to idolize himself as some sort of accomplished hunter. But really? How many people pose with the porcupines they've slaughtered? It's not like killing them requires any skill. Porcupines are stupid, slow-moving animals. A child can easily chase them down and beat them to death with a stick.

Whether McCandless did that or wasted ammo, no one will ever know. Likewise for how much of an effort he put into preserving the moose. Krakauer attributes the waste of that animal to the naivete of a caring, sensitive individual.

"Although McCandless was enough of a realist to know that hunting game was an unavoidable component of living off the land, he had always been ambivalent about killing animals," Krakauer wrote in "Into the Wild."

The funny thing is, only a paragraph before Krakauer wrote this:

"Overjoyed, the proud hunter took a photograph of himself kneeling over his trophy, rifle thrust triumphantly overhead, his features distorted in a rictus of ecstasy and amazement, like some unemployed janitor who'd gone to Reno and won a million-dollar jackpot."

McCandless's ambivalence about killing seems to be mainly one of those things "Into the Wild" pulls out of Thin Air. Ambivalence is nowhere to be found in the McCandless journal, which is sometimes just a nice list of what he's apparently killed:

The diary entries following his return to the bus catalog a bounty of wild meat. May 28: "Gourmet Duck!" June 1: "5 Squirrel." June 2: "Porcupine, Ptarmigan, 4 Squirrel, Grey Bird." June 3: "Another Porcupine! 4 Squirrel, 2 Grey Bird, Ash Bird." June 4: "A THIRD PORCUPINE! Squirrel, Grey Bird." On June 5, he shot a Canada goose as big as a Christmas turkey. Then, on June 9. he bagged the biggest prize of all: "MOOSE!" he recorded in the journal.

The above is Krakauer's description again, just before the author starts describing McCandless's mixed feelings on the subject of killing. What mixed feelings? McCandless looks to be celebrating every kill.

"On the south wall of the bus he wrote, 'All Hail the Dominant Primordial Beast! And Captain Ahab Too!'" Brown noted. What were those last words of Capt. Ahab in "Moby Dick" by Herman Melville?

"...to the last I grapple with thee; from hell's heart I stab at thee; for hate's sake I spit my last breath at thee."

If McCandless ever had mixed feelings about killing things, he appears to have gotten over them by the time he arrived in Alaska. If he still had any, he surely would have put more effort into salvaging that moose. Even if flies contaminated it and maggots appeared, the maggots can be scraped or cut off and the meat dried.

As observed Brown, who had some experience with life in Alaska, "hunters know that it's imperative to dry the meat, and that the smoke is only to keep the flies off while you cut it into thin strips. Even meat blown with flies can be eaten if it's been dried right.

"The waste of the moose," which he had shot out of season, "was one measure of his inexperience," Brown concluded. Krakauer blamed it on "naivete" and reliance "on the advice of hunters he'd consulted in South Dakota, who advised him to smoke his meat, not an easy task under the circumstances."

But what if the real answer was simply that McCandless just didn't care about the moose that much? He had his trophy. He'd lost the meat. But what the hell, he could shoot something else. This would be a view wholly in line with his post-Oxfam life up until then.

His journey wasn't about saving the animals, or helping other people, or about anything at all for that matter but Chris McCandless. He spelled it out loud and clear in the message he carved into a sheet of plywood in the bus:

two years he walks the earth. no phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. ultimate freedom. an extremist. anaesthetic voyager whose home is the road. escaped from atlanta. thou shalt not return, 'cause "the west is the best. and now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. the climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual revolution. ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring him to the great white north. no longer to be poisoned by civilization he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild.

alexander supertramp MAY1992

The spiritual revolutionary who armed himself and marched into the Alaska wilds intent on the climatic battle didn't much cotton to others and their issues, which might help explain three cabins in the vicinity of the bus that were trashed just after his arrival. Brown glosses over the vandalism, saying "much was later made of the deliverance (a Park Service) cabin might have offered; it had been stocked with 25 pounds of rice, and with powdered milk, oat meal, peanut butter, pilot bread, coffee, and tea.

"But that spring, for the first time in memory, someone had broken in and vandalized it. Rangers who discovered the vandalism in July were able to estimate that it had occurred in the spring, from the stage of plant growth under the mattress that had been tossed outside.... Some rangers wondered if he had been the vandal, but the Park Service doesn't want for enemies, and, although Chris had broken into the cabin in the Sierra Nevada to find food, it doesn't seem in his character to have wrecked the place."

It doesn't? The guy is a poacher, a bum and a thief trying to escape into his own little wilderness, and it seems out of character to destroy the other remnants of civilization encroaching on that wilderness? Exactly how many people were in-country west of the Sushana River immediately after the season Alaskans call "break-up," the pending arrival of which is a signal for everyone in the Healy area to retreat from the many winter trails west of that community until summer arrives? If there was someone else temporarily trapped on the west bank of the Sushana just after breakup, why is contact with that person, or sign of that person, not mentioned in McCandless's journal?

Krakauer, all too predictably, goes beyond Brown's assessment of the vandalism to set up another straw dog -- "Into the Wild" is full of them -- to immolate in the name of his heroic character:

"It was completely trashed," Will Forsberg says of his cabin. "Everything that wasn't nailed down had been wrecked. All the lamps were broken and most of the windows. The bedding and mattresses had been pulled outside and thrown in a heap, ceiling boards yanked down, fuel cans were punctured, the wood stove was removed-even a big carpet had been hauled out to rot. And all the food was gone. So the cabins wouldn't have helped Alex much even if he had found them. Or then again, maybe he did."

Forsberg considers McCandless the prime suspect. He believes McCandless blundered upon the cabins after arriving at the bus during the first week of May, flew into a rage over the intrusion of civilization on his precious wilderness experience, and systematically wrecked the buildings. This theory fails to explain, however, why McCandless didn't, then, also trash the bus.

(Steve) Carwile also suspects McCandless. "It's just intuition," he explains, "but I get the feeling he was the kind of guy who might want to 'set the wilderness free.' Destroying the cabins would be a way of doing that. Or maybe it was his intense dislike of the government: He saw the sign on the Park Service cabin identifying it as such, assumed all three cabins were government property, and decided to strike a blow against Big Brother. That certainly seems within the realm of possibility."

The authorities, for their part, don't think McCandless was the vandal. "We really hit a blank on who might have done it," says Ken Kehrer, chief ranger for Denali National Park. "But Chris McCandless isn't considered a suspect by the National Park Service."

Why would he be considered a suspect? He was dead. There's no sense in investigating whether a dead man committed a crime, and if ever there was an agency that practices the policy of never-speak-unkindly-of-the-dead, it is the park service. You could willfully leap to your to death off Mount McKinley and the park service would describe it as tragic accident.

As to the rest of the Krakauer's convoluted logic, he argues there is also "nothing in McCandless's journal or photographs to suggest he went anywhere near the cabins .... And even if he had somehow chanced upon them, it's difficult to imagine him destroying the buildings without boasting of the deed in his diary."

"68 BEAVER DAM. DISASTER. 4 SQUIRREL," reads what is apparently the Day 68 entry. If you're a football fan, it almost feels like there should be a "hut" at the end of those words. And nobody knows what McCandless was doing on all the days unaccounted for in the "diary."

For a man whose résumé up until his arrival in Alaska includes bum and thief, vandal wouldn't seem much of a stretch. And then there is this:

"The Terminal Man," however, just happens to be the name of a Michael Creighton novel, , in which the main character turns into a homicidal maniac. Krakauer claims "The Terminal Man" was among the nine or 10 books later a movie McCandless packed into the bus.

Did McCandless's "74" reference to "Terminal Man" express his belief he'd become the terminal man? Who knows, but when you start to strip away all the romanticized bullshit to get down to the real McCandless, one of Brown's observations from 1993 looks like it could be spot on:

"....When someone who has as strong a will as Chris had dies of starvation, can it not but hint at an impulse for self-destruction?" the writer asked. "Might not more than a flare for grandiosity and drama lie behind (his) apocalyptic postcards, and the masochistic cross-country running, and the asceticism that embraced the difficulties and dangers of hitchhiking and at time seemed bent on refining the spirit at the expense of the body? The anger that drove the renunciation of his family, and animated his views of injustice in distant countries, and fed his aversion to authority of any kind, could well have been directed at himself in the form of inhumanly high standards and stern self-criticism -- in a kind of imploded narcissism."

More than 20 years later, it is richly ironic to think of some self-involved urban Americans, people more detached from nature than any society of humans in history, worshipping the noble, suicidal narcissist, the bum, thief and poacher Chris McCandless.

Contact Craig Medred at craig(at)alaskadispatch.com.

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The beatification of Chris McCandless: From thieving poacher into saint

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Thanks to the magic of words -- and words can indeed be magic -- the poacher Chris McCandless was transformed in his afterlife into some sort of poor, admirable romantic soul lost in the wilds of Alaska, and now appears on the verge of becoming some sort of beloved vampire.

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Your tasks for this week.

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Did John Krakauer solve the mystery of how Chris died? Listen to this interview.

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Read the background from Jon Krakauer on how Chris died. Then listen to the link on the right..

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Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors. Taped to the door was a note scrawled on a page torn from a novel by Nikolai Gogol:

ATTENTION POSSIBLE VISITORS.
S.O.S.
I NEED YOUR HELP. I AM INJURED, NEAR DEATH, AND TOO WEAK TO HIKE OUT OF HERE. I AM ALL ALONE, THIS IS NO JOKE. IN THE NAME OF GOD, PLEASE REMAIN TO SAVE ME. I AM OUT COLLECTING BERRIES CLOSE BY AND SHALL RETURN THIS EVENING. THANK YOU,
CHRIS McCANDLESS
AUGUST ?

From a cryptic diary found among his possessions, it appeared that McCandless had been dead for nineteen days. A driver's license issued eight months before he perished indicated that he was twenty-four years old and weighed a hundred and forty pounds. After his body was flown out of the wilderness, an autopsy determined that it weighed sixty-seven pounds and lacked discernible subcutaneous fat. The probable cause of death, according to the coroner's report, was starvation.

In "Into the Wild," the book I wrote about McCandless's brief, confounding life, I came to a different conclusion. I speculated that he had inadvertently poisoned himself by eating seeds from a plant commonly called wild potato, known to botanists as Hedysarum alpinum. According to my hypothesis, a toxic alkaloid in the seeds weakened McCandless to such a degree that it became impossible for him to hike out to the highway or hunt effectively, leading to starvation. Because Hedysarum alpinum is described as a nontoxic species in both the scientific literature and in popular books about edible plants, my conjecture was met with no small amount of derision, especially in Alaska.

I've received thousands of letters from people who admire McCandless for his rejection of conformity and materialism in order to discover what was authentic and what was not, to test himself, to experience the raw throb of life without a safety net. But I've also received plenty of mail from people who think he was an idiot who came to grief because he was arrogant, woefully unprepared, mentally unbalanced, and possibly suicidal. Most of these detractors believe my book glorifies a senseless death. As the columnist Craig Medred wrote in the Anchorage Daily News in 2007,

"Into the Wild" is a misrepresentation, a sham, a fraud. There, I've finally said what somebody has needed to say for a long time .... Krakauer took a poor misfortunate prone to paranoia, someone who left a note talking about his desire to kill the "false being within," someone who managed to starve to death in a deserted bus not far off the George Parks Highway, and made the guy into a celebrity. Why the author did that should be obvious. He wanted to write a story that would sell.

The debate over why McCandless perished, and the related question of whether he is worthy of admiration, has been smoldering, and occasionally flaring, for more than two decades now. But last December, a writer named Ronald Hamilton posted a paper on the Internet that brings fascinating new facts to the discussion. Hamilton, it turns out, has discovered hitherto unknown evidence that appears to close the book on the cause of McCandless's death.

To appreciate the brilliance of Hamilton's investigative work, some backstory is helpful. The diary and photographs recovered with McCandless's body indicated that, beginning on June 24, 1992, the roots of the Hedysarum alpinum plant became a staple of his daily diet. On July 14th, he started harvesting and eating Hedysarum alpinum seeds as well. One of his photos depicts a one-gallon Ziploc bag stuffed with these seeds. When I visited the bus in July, 1993, wild-potato plants were growing everywhere I looked in the surrounding taiga. I filled a one-gallon bag with more than a pound of seeds in less than thirty minutes.

On July 30th, McCandless wrote in his journal, " EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED. MUCH TROUBLE JUST TO STAND UP. STARVING. GREAT JEOPARDY. " Before this entry, there was nothing in the journal to suggest that he was in dire straits, although his photos show he'd grown alarmingly gaunt. After subsisting for three months on a marginal diet of squirrels, porcupines, small birds, mushrooms, roots, and berries, he'd run up a huge caloric deficit and was teetering on the brink. By adding potato seeds to the menu, he apparently made the mistake that took him down. After July 30th, his physical condition went to hell, and three weeks later he was dead.

When McCandless's body was found in the Alaskan bush, Outside magazine asked me to write about the puzzling circumstances of his demise. Working on a tight deadline, I researched and wrote an eighty-four-hundred-word piece, published in January, 1993. Because the wild potato was universally believed to be safe to eat, in this article I speculated that McCandless had mistakenly consumed the seeds of the wild sweet pea, Hedysarum mackenzii-a plant thought to be toxic, and which is hard to distinguish from Hedysarum alpinum. I attributed his death to this blunder.

As I began expanding my article into a book and had more time to ponder the evidence, however, it struck me as extremely unlikely that he'd failed to tell the two species apart. He wrote his diary on blank pages in the back of an exhaustively researched field guide to the region's edible plants, "Tanaina Plantlore / Dena'ina K'et'una: An Ethnobotany of the Dena'ina Indians of Southcentral Alaska," by Priscilla Russell Kari. In the book, Kari explicitly warns that because wild sweet pea closely resembles wild potato, and "is reported to be poisonous, care should be taken to identify them accurately before attempting to use the wild potato as food." And then she explains precisely how to distinguish the two plants from one another.

It seemed more plausible that McCandless had indeed eaten the roots and seeds of the purportedly nontoxic wild potato rather than the wild sweet pea. So I sent some Hedysarum alpinum seeds I'd collected near the bus to Dr. Thomas Clausen, a professor in the biochemistry department at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, for analysis.

Shortly before my book was published, Clausen and one of his graduate students, Edward Treadwell, conducted a preliminary test that indicated the seeds contained an unidentified alkaloid. Making a rash intuitive leap, in the first edition of "Into the Wild," published in January, 1996, I wrote that this alkaloid was perhaps swainsonine, a toxic agent known to inhibit glycoprotein metabolism in animals, leading to starvation. When Clausen and Treadwell completed their analysis of wild-potato seeds, though, they found no trace of swainsonine or any other alkaloids. "I tore that plant apart," Dr. Clausen explained to Men's Journal in 2007, after also testing the seeds for non-alkaloid compounds. "There were no toxins. No alkaloids. I'd eat it myself."

I was perplexed. Clausen was an esteemed organic chemist, and the results of his analysis seemed irrefutable. But McCandless's July 30th journal entry couldn't have been more explicit: " EXTREMELY WEAK. FAULT OF POT[ATO] SEED. " His certainty about the cause of his failing health gnawed at me. I began sifting through the scientific literature, searching for information that would allow me to reconcile McCandless's adamantly unambiguous statement with Clausen's equally unambiguous test results.

Fast forward to a couple of months ago, when I stumbled upon Ronald Hamilton's paper " The Silent Fire: ODAP and the Death of Christopher McCandless," which Hamilton had posted on a Web site that publishes essays and papers about McCandless. Hamilton's essay offered persuasive new evidence that the wild-potato plant is highly toxic in and of itself, contrary to the assurances of Thomas Clausen and every other expert who has ever weighed in on the subject. The toxic agent in Hedysarum alpinum turns out not to be an alkaloid but, rather, an amino acid, and according to Hamilton it was the chief cause of McCandless's death. His theory validates my conviction that McCandless wasn't as clueless and incompetent as his detractors have made him out to be.

Hamilton is neither a botanist nor a chemist; he's a writer who until recently worked as a bookbinder at the Indiana University of Pennsylvania library. As Hamilton explains it, he became acquainted with the McCandless story in 2002, when he happened upon a copy of "Into the Wild," flipped through its pages, and suddenly thought to himself, I know why this guy died. His hunch derived from his knowledge of Vapniarca, a little-known Second World War concentration camp in what was then German-occupied Ukraine.

"I first learned about Vapniarca through a book whose title I've long forgotten," Hamilton told me. "Only the barest account of Vapniarca appeared in one of its chapters .... But after reading 'Into the Wild,' I was able to track down a manuscript about Vapniarca that has been published online." Later, in Romania, he located the son of a man who served as an administrative official at the camp, who sent Hamilton a trove of documents.

In 1942, as a macabre experiment, an officer at Vapniarca started feeding the Jewish inmates bread made from seeds of the grass pea, Lathyrus sativus, a common legume that has been known since the time of Hippocrates to be toxic. "Very quickly," Hamilton writes in "The Silent Fire,"

a Jewish doctor and inmate at the camp, Dr. Arthur Kessler, understood what this implied, particularly when within months, hundreds of the young male inmates of the camp began limping, and had begun to use sticks as crutches to propel themselves about. In some cases inmates had been rapidly reduced to crawling on their backsides to make their ways through the compound .... Once the inmates had ingested enough of the culprit plant, it was as if a silent fire had been lit within their bodies. There was no turning back from this fire-once kindled, it would burn until the person who had eaten the grasspea would ultimately be crippled .... The more they'd eaten, the worse the consequences-but in any case, once the effects had begun, there was simply no way to reverse them .... The disease is called, simply, neurolathyrism, or more commonly, "lathyrism."...

Kessler, who ... initially recognized the sinister experiment that had been undertaken at Vapniarca, was one of those who escaped death during those terrible times. He retired to Israel once the war had ended and there established a clinic to care for, study, and attempt to treat the numerous victims of lathyrism from Vapniarca, many of whom had also relocated in Israel.

It's been estimated that, in the twentieth century, more than a hundred thousand people worldwide were permanently paralyzed from eating grass pea. The injurious substance in the plant turned out to be a neurotoxin, beta-N-oxalyl-L-alpha-beta diaminoproprionic acid, a compound commonly referred to as beta- ODAP or, more often, just ODAP. Curiously, Hamilton reports, ODAP

affects different people, different sexes, and even different age groups in different ways. It even affects people within those age groups differently .... The one constant about ODAP poisoning, however, very simply put, is this: those who will be hit the hardest are always young men between the ages of 15 and 25 and who are essentially starving or ingesting very limited calories, who have been engaged in heavy physical activity, and who suffer trace-element shortages from meager, unvaried diets.

ODAP was identified in 1964. It brings about paralysis by over-stimulating nerve receptors, causing them to die. As Hamilton explains,

It isn't clear why, but the most vulnerable neurons to this catastrophic breakdown are the ones that regulate leg movement.... And when sufficient neurons die, paralysis sets in.... [The condition] never gets better; it always gets worse. The signals get weaker and weaker until they simply cease altogether. The victim experiences "much trouble just to stand up." Many become rapidly too weak to walk. The only thing left for them to do at that point is to crawl....

After Hamilton read "Into the Wild" and became convinced that ODAP was responsible for McCandless's sad end, he approached Dr. Jonathan Southard, the assistant chair of the chemistry department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and persuaded Southard to have one of his students, Wendy Gruber, test the seeds of both Hedysarum alpinum and Hedysarum mackenzii for ODAP. Upon completion of her tests, in 2004, Gruber determined that ODAP appeared to be present in both species of Hedysarum, but her results were less than conclusive. "To be able to say that ODAP is definitely present in the seeds," she reported, "we would need to use another dimension of analysis, probably by H.P.L.C.-M.S."-high-pressure liquid chromatography. But Gruber possessed neither the expertise nor the resources to analyze the seeds with H.P.L.C., so Hamilton's hypothesis remained unproven.

To establish once and for all whether Hedysarum alpinum is toxic, last month I sent a hundred and fifty grams of freshly collected wild-potato seeds to Avomeen Analytical Services, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, for H.P.L.C. analysis. Dr. Craig Larner, the chemist who conducted the test, determined that the seeds contained .394 per cent beta- ODAP by weight, a concentration well within the levels known to cause lathyrism in humans.

According to Dr. Fernand Lambein, a Belgian scientist who coördinates the Cassava Cyanide Diseases and Neurolathyrism Network, occasional consumption of foodstuffs containing ODAP "as one component of an otherwise balanced diet, bears not any risk of toxicity." Lambein and other experts warn, however, that individuals suffering from malnutrition, stress, and acute hunger are especially sensitive to ODAP, and are thus highly susceptible to the incapacitating effects of lathyrism after ingesting the neurotoxin.

Considering that potentially crippling levels of ODAP are found in wild-potato seeds, and given the symptoms McCandless described and attributed to the wild-potato seeds he ate, there is ample reason to believe that McCandless contracted lathyrism from eating those seeds. As Ronald Hamilton observed, McCandless exactly matched the profile of those most susceptible to ODAP poisoning:

He was a young, thin man in his early 20s, experiencing an extremely meager diet; who was hunting, hiking, climbing, leading life at its physical extremes, and who had begun to eat massive amounts of seeds containing a toxic [amino acid]. A toxin that targets persons exhibiting and experiencing precisely those characteristics and conditions ....

It might be said that Christopher McCandless did indeed starve to death in the Alaskan wild, but this only because he'd been poisoned, and the poison had rendered him too weak to move about, to hunt or forage, and, toward the end, "extremely weak," "too weak to walk out," and, having "much trouble just to stand up." He wasn't truly starving in the most technical sense of that condition. He'd simply become slowly paralyzed. And it wasn't arrogance that had killed him, it was ignorance. Also, it was ignorance which must be forgiven, for the facts underlying his death were to remain unrecognized to all, scientists and lay people alike, literally for decades.

Hamilton's discovery that McCandless perished because he ate toxic seeds is unlikely to persuade many Alaskans to regard McCandless in a more sympathetic light, but it may prevent other backcountry foragers from accidentally poisoning themselves. Had McCandless's guidebook to edible plants warned that Hedysarum alpinum seeds contain a neurotoxin that can cause paralysis, he probably would have walked out of the wild in late August with no more difficulty than when he walked into the wild in April, and would still be alive today. If that were the case, Chris McCandless would now be forty-five years old.
Jon Krakauer's most recent books are "Three Cups of Deceit," "Where Men Win Glory," and "Under the Banner of Heaven." Above: Chris McCandless's final photo, a self-portrait holding his farewell note. Photographs courtesy the family of Chris McCandless.

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Twenty-one years ago this month, on September 6, 1992, the decomposed body of Christopher McCandless was discovered by moose hunters just outside the northern boundary of Denali National Park. He had died inside a rusting bus that served as a makeshift shelter for trappers, dog mushers, and other backcountry visitors.