Chapter 1
“I have found my country, the one I was born to know and love.”
The accounts vary in content and the dates are not entirely clear, but in either 1899 or 1900 two young men briefly met at the central monastery in Urga, as Ulaanbaatar was then known. One was a prominent lama known as the eighth Jebtsundamba, who 11 years later would lead the Mongolian quest for freedom from the Qing Empire, emerging as the “Holy King” or “Bogd Khan” (1869–1924) of a newly independent state. The other was a young mining engineer from California named Herbert Hoover (1874–1965) who, 28 years later, would become the 31st president of the United States.
Hoover was working in China at the time. Part of his job involved taking long trips into the countryside by horseback, exploring for possible mineral wealth. In the first volume of his memoirs, published many years later under the title Years of Adventure, Hoover recalled: “One of these horseback journeys reached as far as Urga, the Mongol capital in the Gobi Desert…. The monotony of that trip was enlivened by a call on the Hutuktu Lama—a Living Buddha—through the introduction of a Swedish engineer who was building a telegraph line connecting Peking with Russia and the influence of his friend the Russian consul.”
Hoover was still in his late 20s while the future Bogd Khan had only recently turned 30. According to Hoover’s account, he arrived at Gandan Monastery to find the Living Buddha “riding a bicycle madly around the inner court.” Few other details are available about the meeting that followed between the two future heads of state. However, Hoover does report that the young lama entertained his visitors “with a phonograph supplied with Russian records.”
There are no records to indicate what the Mongolians thought of their brash and opinionated visitor. The brief meeting did, however, both reflect and foreshadow important aspects of the increasing number of encounters between Americans and Mongolians during those early years. For Americans, Mongolia represented an ancient civilization as well as an exotic destination, far removed from their day-to-day experience. For Mongolians, newly introduced inventions from Europe and North America such as bicycles, telegraph lines, and record players represented the wave of the future, precursors to new technology that during the coming years would become more widespread and eventually change the face of Mongolia forever.
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Herbert Hoover was not the first American citizen to visit the capital of Mongolia. In the preceding decades, other adventurous compatriots crossed the Gobi Desert to see the area then labeled on maps as “Outer Mongolia.” For some, the trip to Urga was part of a much longer journey, one that started in China and ended in Siberia.
The Mongolian National Archives contain evidence of these early visitors that includes an intriguing collection of ornate and colorful “travel passes” provided to various foreign visitors, allowing them to “transit” Mongolia. These documents date to the mid-nineteenth century, a time when first Europeans and then Americans began to travel the globe in growing numbers. One of these travel passes, written in Mongolian using a phonetic Manchu script, was given to a visitor explicitly identified as an “American.” The travel pass is dated 1862, a time when Abraham Lincoln presided over a deeply divided United States that had only recently embarked on a protracted and bloody civil war that threatened its very existence. While the pass provided authorization to transit Mongolia, it also noted that no bribes should be solicited or collected at any point along the way. A facsimile copy of this 1862 travel pass is now part of the Tibetan and Mongolian collection at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., a gift from the Mongolian National Archives donated in January 2012 to help commemorate 25 years of US-Mongolia diplomatic relations.
The document also very possibly marks the launch of the first people-to-people ties involving nationals of both countries. According to the text, the American visitor was named either “Mr. Felosi” or “Mr. Pelosi,” and his traveling companion was from France. According to a subsequent report from the Mongolian border post at the Siberian border to supervisors back in Urga, the two travelers, accompanied by a Mongolian guide, were seen to arrive on camels and were at first thought to be from Russia.
A few years later, an American with a much more detailed surviving historical record—the journalist and travel writer Thomas W. Knox (1835–96)—traveled by horse and cart from Peking to Kyatka, following the old tea route that continued for another 3,000 miles to St. Petersburg. The author of 45 books, Knox wrote a 12-page account of his travels in an article entitled “A Journey through Mongolia” that was later published in the August 1868 issue of Galaxy magazine.
Born in New Hampshire, Knox gained his reputation as a controversial Civil War correspondent for the New York Herald, writing reports that angered both General Grant and General Sherman, two of the leading Union commanders of the war. His reporting from the Civil War was later published to considerable acclaim under the title Camp-Fire and Cotton-Field. Not long after the Civil War, Knox embarked on a round-the-world tour, including a memorable journey across China, Mongolia, and Russia that he later described in his best-selling book, Overland through Asia. Subsequently, he wrote about his travels in the Middle East in a volume entitled Baksheesh. Still later, he launched a highly successful series of adventure books for boys set in some of the most remote regions of the world.
According to Knox’s Mongolia travelogue in Galaxy magazine, it was only in 1859 that the Chinese finally authorized foreigners to traverse the region on their way to Siberia, a trip that up until that point he describes as “about as feasible” as a journey to “the South Pole.”
Knox’s expressed admiration for the Mongolians he encountered during his travels, while also noting, “They are proud of tracing their ancestry to the soldiers that marched with Genghis Khan.” He must have shared some of his experience in the American Civil War with his Mongolian traveling companions, noting at one point that “around their fires at night no stories are more eagerly heard than those of war, and he who can relate the most wonderful traditions of daring deeds may be certain of admiration and applause.”
Knox’s descriptions also provide fascinating glimpses of Mongolia as it used to be. At one point, he notes, “The country opens into a series of plains and gentle swells, not unlike the rolling prairies of Kansas and Nebraska.” He observed trains of oxcarts along the way, some stretching for a mile or more. He also noted that “boiled mutton” was the “staple dish” of Mongolia, served “unaccompanied with capers or any other kind of sauce or seasoning,” instead simply handed over “all dripping and steaming.”
Fording the Tuul River just before entering Urga, Knox indicated that the camels had to be persuaded to cross “with clubs,” having an “instinctive dread” of water, especially deep and flowing water. Recalling the eastern approaches to what is now Ulaanbaatar, he first described a small Chinese settlement (an old Taoist temple from that time still survives), followed by “large houses” occupied by Russians (near what is today the Orthodox Church and what was once the Russian Consulate). Finally reaching the city, he noted that it “is not laid out in streets like most Chinese towns; its by-ways and high-ways are narrow and crooked and form a network very puzzling to a stranger.”
Looking back nearly 150 years later, Knox’s few comments on the geopolitical situation in Mongolia seem highly prescient. For example, he characterized China’s hold on Outer Mongolia as “not very strong,” adding that the Mongolians seemed “indifferent to their rulers and ready at any decent provocation to throw off their yoke.” He also suggested that Czarist Russia already had “an eye upon Mongolia” and was even then contemplating “taking it under the powerful protection of the double-headed eagle.”
During subsequent decades, travel to Mongolia, while still an adventure, became more commonplace. Certainly, by the later part of the second half of the nineteenth century, a small but growing number of Americans from an increasingly wealthy United States began to find their way to Mongolia, whether as adventurers, missionaries, or merchants. These early contacts in turn eventually involved other American visitors, including both diplomats and tourists.
By the early 1900s, visitors from the United States were becoming much more frequent. Indeed, the name American Denj—an area of contemporary Ulaanbaatar just off Peace Avenue and near the Hotel Kempinski that was once known for the American businesses that congregated there—probably dates back at least 100 years. According to some accounts, these early American business executives imported Mongolia’s very first car, a Model T Ford. Also, the first silent films ever seen in Mongolia were very possibly shown in the American Denj.
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US diplomat and former ambassador to Russia, China, and the Ottoman Empire William Woodville Rockhill (1854–1914) was another early American traveler to Mongolia who left a written record behind. He passed through Urga at the conclusion of his ambassadorship to the Ottoman Empire and only a year before he died suddenly of a heart attack in Hawaii. Traveling with his wife via the Trans-Siberian railway in 1913, he took a weeklong detour to visit Outer Mongolia.
Among other things, Rockhill noted a strong desire on the part of Mongolians for “complete independence.” He placed Mongolia’s population at that time at 700,000—down considerably from the three million that his research suggested had lived in Mongolia during the mid-seventeenth century. Describing life in Mongolia’s capital city just prior to the start of World War I, he commented that “trade prospered, order prevailed and the people were satisfied.”
It is very likely that Rockhill was the first American diplomat to speak Tibetan as well as Mongolian, having visited both Tibet and Inner Mongolia in 1888–89 during a leave of absence from his assignment as a junior diplomat at the US legation in Peking. A scholar as well as a diplomat, he published a number of books and articles about his experiences, including Land of the Lamas and Diary of a Journey through Tibet and Mongolia. Rockhill donated his entire collection of 6,000 books on China, Tibet, and Mongolia to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., which is now the repository of one of the world’s largest collections of written material related to Mongolia.
In a poignant footnote, the holdings of the Library of Congress also include a small diary maintained by a young diplomat—Thomas W. Haskins (1879–1908)—who accompanied Rockhill on at least one of his several trips to eastern China. The diary, presented to the Library of Congress as a gift in 2011 by relatives of Thomas Haskins, contains a brief description of a meeting involving Rockhill, Haskins, and the 13th Dalai Lama that took place in Wutaishan in June 1908. Less than a month later, Haskins—not yet 30 years old—passed away following a sudden illness, leaving a young widow to mourn his death.
Rockhill’s own impressions of Mongolia during the early years of the twentieth century were not entirely positive. For example, he declared Urga a dirty city and was pessimistic about the country’s economic prospects. That said, he also described Mongolians as “easy-going” and concluded that Mongolians had “good grounds” for striving for independence.
Rockhill’s visit to Urga in 1913 was followed seven years later by that of another American diplomat, Charles Eberhardt (1871–1965). However, what distinguished Consul Eberhardt’s five-day pioneering journey in 1920 is that he came under official State Department auspices, met with senior Mongolian officials, and returned with a strong recommendation to open what would have been the first official US diplomatic presence in Ulaanbaatar.
His recommendation reflected the fact that an increasing number of American citizens were living and working in Mongolia. Increasing American interest was evident as well, especially on the commercial front. For its part, Mongolia’s early quest for independence included a concerted effort to reach out to other countries, among them the United States. Partly associated with the quest on the part of some Mongolians for “modernization,” some Mongolians at the time even advocated the adoption of a Latin alphabet for their language.
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Strangely enough, an American steamship built in New Jersey and launched in 1903 as the SS Mongolia also helped introduce the land of Genghis Khan into the American consciousness during the first decades of the twentieth century. Built for the Pacific Mail Steamship Company, the Mongolia for several years connected the western United States with Asia, bringing passengers in both directions, along with her sister ship, the SS Manchuria. A 13,000-ton vessel, the Mongolia was relatively large and accommodated more than 1,600 passengers, 350 of them in first-class luxury and 1,300 in steerage. During those years, the passenger lists from the Mongolia included intending Chinese emigrants who booked a one-way passage across the Pacific to California.
The Mongolia, by then already past her prime, was sold in August 1915 to the Atlantic Transport Line and quickly became a fixture on the sea route between New York and London. When Germany announced a submarine blockade around the United Kingdom, the Mongolia was armed with three six-inch deck guns as a form of self-defense. According to some accounts, it was the Mongolia that fired the first American shot when the United States entered World War I on the side of Britain and France, taking aim at a German U-boat in the North Atlantic and possibly sinking it. Another incident, widely reportedly across the United States at the time, was the death of two female nurses, Edith Ayers of Ohio and Helen Wood of Illinois, accidentally killed when a propellant cap exploded during a firing demonstration, sending shrapnel in every direction.
For most of the war, the SS Mongolia—now bearing the military appellation USS Mongolia—served as a troop ship, carrying thousands of American soldiers to Europe to join the fighting. After an armistice was signed in November 1918, the USS Mongolia continued its troop ship role, carrying thousands of battle-hardened veterans back to the United States to rejoin their families.
The Mongolia’s remaining career was much less memorable. For a time, she sailed between New York and Hamburg. Later, she was put on the route from New York to San Francisco, passing through the Panama Canal. In 1929, both the Mongolia and the Manchuria were bought by the Dollar Steamship Lines and renamed as the President Fillmore and President Johnson, an odd choice considering that Millard Fillmore and Andrew Johnson rank among the two least distinguished presidents in American history. In 1940 the Mongolia was sold and renamed again, this time as the Panamanian. Six years later, she ended her life as scrap in a wrecker’s yard in Shanghai.
How did the Mongolia and her sister ship the Manchuria get their names? Almost certainly, they were named to reflect exotic and remote parts of the globe at the start of what became the “American Century,” as part of a possibly unconscious attempt to begin to imprint the names of strange and distant places more firmly into the minds of the American imagination. There was logic, too, in selecting a specifically Asian place name, given the fact that the Mongolia was initially built to cross the Pacific and connect Asia with North America.
In retrospect, it is the role played by the Mongolia in ferrying Asian migrants across the Pacific to the western United States during the early 1900s that seems especially poignant. The fact that the Mongolia later engaged with a German U-boat, possibly fired the first American shots of World War I, featured in headlines across the United States following the accidental deaths of two war nurses, and was used to transport many thousands of young soldiers to the battlefront only adds to the interest. Mongolia may be a land-locked country—yet it also became the name for an American steamship from the “golden age” of steam travel, sailing for years across first the Pacific and then the Atlantic, regularly reminding tens of thousands of passengers over a period of many years about the distant land of Genghis Khan.
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Of all the foreigners with ties to the United States to encounter Mongolia and write about it during the early part of the twentieth century, perhaps none is more fascinating or knew more about Mongolia than Frans August Larson (1870–1957), sometimes known as the “Duke of Mongolia.” Born in poverty in rural Sweden, he was orphaned at the age of nine. Possibly viewing missionary service as a means of escape as well as a way to see the world, Larson joined a foreign mission society and was assigned to northern China in the late 1890s.
Larson learned Mongolian quickly and became adept at making friends, qualities that proved immensely important in 1900 when he led a group of 22 Swedish and American missionaries into the Gobi Desert, across Mongolia, and on to Siberia to escape the violence of the Boxer Rebellion then raging across many parts of China. The group that he rescued included his American wife and fellow missionary Mary Rogers and their two young children. Later, Larson became the first Christian and Missionary Alliance representative in Mongolia.
Larson’s remarkable 1,000-mile journey across the Gobi Desert, through Mongolia, and on into Siberia in 1900 was only one milestone in a life of high adventure, one that saw him traverse the Gobi no less than 36 times on camel, horse, and even bicycle. He ultimately focused on business and politics more than missionary work, though his wife Mary continued working for the church throughout her life.
Larson’s linguistic skills proved invaluable, and visiting diplomats typically sought his views on major issues of the day. Most notably, he helped organize the logistics for much better-known explorers such as the American Roy Chapman Andrews and the Swede Sven Hedin. He also knew many of the leading Mongolian personalities of the early 1900s, including the Bogd Khan and many of his ministers. Larson’s first memoir—entitled Duke of Mongolia—reflects a deep admiration, respect, and affection for Mongolia. He describes himself as “fortunate” to have had the opportunity to “learn their language, their mode of living, their happiness, their sorrow and, so often, their sudden death.”
Larson himself lived in both Inner and Outer Mongolia for nearly half a century, leaving only in 1939 when he was almost 70 years old and the threat of a second world war was already looming. Subsequently, he moved to the United States, where he lived through much of the 1940s and 1950s, first running a chicken farm in Alabama and then spending the remaining years of his remarkable life as a housing developer in California, interrupted only briefly by interludes in Sweden and Canada.
According to Larson’s granddaughter Barbara Sitzman, memories of Mongolia figured prominently throughout Larson’s retirement. “My childhood was sprinkled with real life adventure stories of wolves, Chinese bandits, kumiss (fermented mare’s milk) and wild horse races,” she recalled many years later. In her account, Larson’s love of Mongolia was also reflected in two other activities that he enjoyed until the end of his long and eventful life: first, he routinely picked the winning horses at his local racetrack in California; and, second, he kept the family television tuned to wrestling shows.
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Larson’s knowledge of Mongolia proved enormously helpful to Roy Chapman Andrews (1884–1960), perhaps the most well-known American to interact with Mongolia in the decades prior to the establishment of formal diplomatic relations. “I have found my country,” Andrews wrote after his first trip to Urga in 1918, “the one I was born to know and love.” As for Urga, Andrews called it “the most fascinating city I have found in all my wanderings.”
A larger-than-life figure, Roy Chapman Andrews, according to some accounts, was one of the inspirations for “Indiana Jones,” the fictitious adventurer and explorer who launched an entire movie series. Andrews is best known today for his expeditions to the Gobi Desert during the 1920s, explorations that discovered new varieties of dinosaurs and demonstrated for the first time that dinosaurs hatched from eggs.
Born in Wisconsin, Andrews dreamed of a life of adventure from an early age. After attending Beloit College, he traveled to New York, where he worked as a janitor at the American Museum of Natural History because no other jobs were available. Sometime later, he managed to join the crew of two scientific expeditions, one focused on the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) and another involving exploration in the Arctic.
Several years later, Andrews began planning his first Gobi expedition, using Dodge cars to explore regions west of Beijing. Between 1922 and 1925, he mounted four expeditions to the Gobi and returned again for a final visit in 1930. “The Flaming Cliffs,” one of the most evocative sites in the various expeditions that Andrews launched, is today on every tourist itinerary to Mongolia’s South Gobi province, featuring bright red rock formations and stunning sunsets against the vast expanse of the Gobi that are as memorable and inspiring as when Andrews first observed them nearly a century ago. The books he wrote, such as Across Mongolian Plains and The New Conquest of Central Asia, continue to offer insights for those interested in the way that foreigners viewed Mongolia during the 1920s.
Andrews reached the height of his popularity in the United States during the 1920s and 1930s. A flamboyant and effective self-promoter, he became an especially well-known figure as a result of his contributions to National Geographic and his lecture tours. His accounts of his adventures in the Gobi Desert brought exotic sights and different perspectives into homes, schools, and libraries across depression-era America.
The perspective among Mongolian authorities at the time was much more mixed, fed partly by the suspicion with which all things American were viewed among Mongolians in leadership positions and, most especially, by their Soviet patrons. Some expressed concern that he was a “spy,” and others that he was simply robbing Mongolia of important aspects of its archaeological heritage. Viewed decades later, his written comments on both Mongolia and China very much reflect the tenor of the times, including a tendency toward broad characterizations and sweeping judgments that strike most present-day readers as little more than racist stereotyping.
Yet the photographs taken on his various expeditions, as well as the written descriptions that he left behind, help document a part of Mongolia as it used to be, providing fleeting insights into a way of life that was on the verge of disappearing forever. More recently, contemporary Mongolians have been intrigued by the photographs, which resonate especially among those seeking to retrieve something of Mongolia’s lost past. Indeed, as one of several events organized in 2012 to mark the 25th anniversary of US-Mongolia diplomatic relations, one Mongolian television station visited the American Museum of Natural History in New York and produced a documentary focused entirely on Andrews and his various expeditions. At least one of the several books written by Andrews about his experiences in Mongolia—On the Trail of Ancient Man—was in 2010 translated and published in Mongolian.
Although Roy Chapman Andrews ranks as the best known among those Americans who traveled to Mongolia during the 1920s, he is by no means the only one. For example, General Joseph Stillwell (1883–1946), later a four-star general famous for his role in both China and Burma during World War II, was one of an increasing number of Americans to travel to Urga to see the sights of what was then regarded as an exotic as well as exceptionally remote part of the world.
Similarly, the prolific travel writer Harry Franck (1881–1962) drove from Kalgan in China to Ude in Siberia in 1922, passing through Urga en route. He later chronicled his travels in a volume entitled Wandering in Northern China. At about the same time, Janet Elliott Wulsin (1894–1963) from New York was in the middle of a four-year series of journeys through China, Mongolia, and Tibet along with her husband Frederick, an anthropologist. An account of their travels was later published in National Geographic in 1926.
Born into a wealthy New York family, Janet Wulsin had served in France as a Red Cross nurse during World War I. She met her future husband Frederick Wulsin, a Harvard University graduate from Ohio, in Paris. Apparently inspired by the example of Roy Chapman Andrews, they mounted their own expedition to China, Tibet, and Outer Mongolia. The couple later divorced and it was only after Janet Wulsin’s death that her daughter Mabel Cabot, discovering her mother’s letters and diaries, published a fascinating book called Vanished Kingdoms: A Woman Explorer in Tibet, China and Mongolia, 1921–1925. The striking hand-colored photographs taken by Janet and Frederick Wulsin are maintained in the archives of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum, providing a series of brilliant and highly informative early images from across the region.
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By the late 1920s, Mongolia was firmly part of the Soviet orbit, and the brief yet intense series of early American encounters with Mongolia already appeared to be receding into history. However, even during this period there was at least one notable meeting, this time involving US vice president Henry Wallace (1888–1965).
Regarded as one of the outstanding progressive intellectuals of his day, Wallace displayed a keen interest in Eastern religions. For a time he fell under the spell of the Russian-American artist, writer, and mystic Nicholas Roerich (1874–1947), who had lived in a small log cabin in Ulaanbaatar during 1926–27. Remarkably, Roerich’s log cabin still survives—located just off Peace Avenue east of Sukhbaatar Square, it was turned into a small museum in 2009. It also serves as one of the few remaining architectural examples from the time when the buildings of Ulaanbataar were mostly made of wood and built in a Russian style.
Wallace’s early ties with Nicholas Roerich were later seen as a source of potential embarrassment, especially in 1948, when he ran for president. Decades earlier, Wallace had opened his awe-struck letters to Roerich with the remarkable phrase “Dear Guru,” an indication of the respect he had held for Roerich at the time. Later, as secretary of agriculture, Wallace provided direct support to Roerich’s controversial and ultimately unsuccessful expedition to China, Manchuria, and Mongolia in the 1930s to search for drought-resistant grasses.
Almost certainly, Wallace would have recalled these earlier connections with Mongolia when he briefly visited Ulaanbaatar in early July 1944 at the end of a long journey that also included China, Siberia, and Soviet Central Asia. On arrival at Ulaanbaatar Airport, he was met by Marshal Choibalsan and many thousands of ordinary and no doubt curious Mongolians who had never seen an American before. At the time, the entire population of Ulaanbaatar did not yet exceed 100,000, while the entire population of Mongolia was estimated at around 1.5 million.
During his brief visit to Mongolia, Wallace was entertained by a folk opera, slept in a ger (what the Russians call a yurt), was presented with a deel (traditional Mongolian clothing), and visited two herder families. He also attended several pre-Naadam events, in anticipation of Mongolia’s annual cultural festival, and was shown some of the “classic” sites featured in most tours of Ulaanbaatar to this day, including the Bogd Khan’s winter palace. He was also given a pair of riding boots as well as a bow and arrows—and a selection of Mongolian stamps to pass on to President Franklin Roosevelt, an avid stamp collector. While originally scheduled to stay in Ulaanbaatar for just one night, Wallace ended up having to stay for two, spending an extra day in Mongolia after his flight to Chita in Siberia was turned back because of bad weather.
Although not entirely supported by the historical record, some Mongolians credit Wallace’s apparent interest in wanting to see Gandan Monastery as a useful gesture in restoring some measure of respect for Buddhism and perhaps even “saving” the landmark monastery at a time when hundreds of other monasteries had been destroyed and religion was being actively suppressed across the country. Even today, there are Mongolians who claim that Wallace’s desire to see Gandan Monastery might have helped spare it from destruction, as was the fate of so many other Mongolian monasteries throughout the darker years of the Soviet period.
In reality, Wallace sometimes referred to Buddhism in Mongolia in less than flattering terms. For example, at one point in a travelogue published after his return to the United States under the title Soviet Asia Mission, he noted appreciatively that Mongolia had been “freed of the monkish control of pasture land.” His comments on Mongolian lamas occasionally took on a negative tone, at one point referring to them as a “robust though shiftless lot.”
Wallace was accompanied on his 1944 trip to Ulaanbaatar by Owen Lattimore (1900–89), an American scholar and foreign policy advisor who was regarded as one of the first great American specialists to study, research, and write on Mongolia. Born in the United States but partly raised in China, where his parents taught English at a local university, he worked variously as a journalist, editor, researcher, scholar, and businessman. Lattimore traveled extensively across East and Central Asia and spoke both Chinese and Mongolian. A prolific writer, he authored many books, including The Desert Road to Turkestan, High Tartary, The Mongols of Manchuria, Mongol Journeys, and Nomads and Commissars: Mongolia Revisited.
During the 1950s, Lattimore was accused of being overly sympathetic to the Soviet Union and Communist China. As a result, he faced a grueling attack in Congress led by Senator Joseph McCarthy. He subsequently moved to England and in 1963 became the first professor of Chinese studies at the University of Leeds. While at Leeds, he maintained and even deepened his strong interest in Mongolia, which he visited regularly throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1967, Lattimore also became the first American—indeed, the first Westerner—to be elected to the Mongolian Academy of Science.
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While the 1960s are typically viewed as a period in which there was virtually no contact between the United States and Mongolia, a handful of intrepid tourists and an even smaller number of prominent Americans continued to make their way to what Vice President Wallace had described during his own travels as “one of the most remote regions of the world.” Perhaps most notably, the well-known New York Times journalist Harrison Salisbury (1908–93) visited Mongolia in 1959. He was followed not long afterwards by US Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas (1898–1980) who subsequently wrote up his impressions of the Mongolian steppe in an article for National Geographic under the title “Journey to Outer Mongolia,” published in 1962. Douglas also wrote an article for the New York Times making the case for US recognition of Mongolia as an independent state.
Several notable academics, some of them emigrants to the United States from other countries, kept the study of Mongolia alive in the United States during the Cold War period, despite the fact that the United States had not yet recognized Mongolia as an independent state. These include Nicholas Poppe (1897–1991) at the University of Washington; Francis Cleaves (1911–95) and Joseph Fletcher (1934–84) at Harvard University; Denis Sinor (1916–2011) and Gombojab Hangin (1921–89) at Indiana University; and Henry Schwarz (1928–) at Western Washington University.
In the absence of any official political or economic ties, it was the work, dedication, and commitment of these and other academics that maintained and even expanded interest and knowledge about Mongolia in a number of colleges and universities across the United States. Some schools—including Indiana, the University of California at Berkeley, Brigham Young, Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, and Western Washington—even offered Mongolian language courses on occasion. In addition, they supported Mongolian-related research, sometimes funded by the US Office of Education or the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Founded in 1961 and located at Indiana University, the Mongolia Society also represented an important early effort on the part of American academics and others to maintain interest, support research, and publish material on Mongolia, making it available to a larger English-speaking audience. Headed by Alicia Campi at the time, the Mongolia Society celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2011. Its various publications—including Mongolian Survey and Mongolian Studies: Journal of the Mongolia Society—remain important sources of information in English about Mongolia, both past and present.
Despite these and other efforts, Mongolia remained a strange and exotic place for most Americans throughout the Cold War period. More usually, when “Outer Mongolia” was mentioned at all during the 1950s and even well into the 1960s and 1970s, it was as a very distant place, as remote and far removed from the United States as it was possible to imagine.