The WPA Guide to Alaska: The Last Frontier State

By Federal Writers' Project

During the 1930s in the United States, the Works Progress Administration developed the Federal Writers’ Project to support writers and artists while making a national effort to document the country’s shared history and culture. The American Guide series consists of individual guides to each of the states. Little-known authorsmany of whom would later become celebrated literary figureswere commissioned to write these important books. John Steinbeck, Saul Bellow, Zora Neale Hurston, and Ralph Ellison are among the more than 6,000 writers, editors, historians, and researchers who documented this celebration of local histories. Photographs, drawings, driving tours, detailed descriptions of towns, and rich cultural details exhibit each state’s unique flavor.

The WPA Guide the Alaskan Territory takes the reader on a journey across the Land of the Midnight Sun, from the North Slope to the Aleutian Islands. First published in 1939, the guide reports on all the things that make this soon-to-be state unique: the influence of Alaska’s indigenous peoples, the thriving fishing industry, and the distinctive flora and fauna.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trinity University Press
• Release date: Oct 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9781595342003

Book preview

PART I

THE GREAT LAND

1. ALASKA COMES OF AGE

IN ALASKA, north of time, two utterly dissimilar eras dwell together at the same moment. A world of streamlined industrial techniques exists side by side with ancient cultures, in a country so old as to be brand new, where the physical process of creation is still going on. Many times a day scenes illustrate this double time-world. A plane circles down and comes to rest beside a skin kayak, its design unchanged for a thousand years. A Tlingit Indian carves his family tree with an adze on a forty-foot totem pole—but works on the line in a cannery buzzing with the best of modern automatic machinery. Along the benchlands near Fairbanks great gold dredges nuzzle into the gravel and disturb the bones of dinosaurs, trapped and buried here millions of years ago—monsters strikingly resembling the dredges in size and shape.

An hour’s summer flight north of Juneau, Alaska’s bustling little capital city, leads to a world in which time has hardly yet begun. A stop is made at Strawberry Point to deliver the mail and taste Alaska strawberries. As Strawberry Point falls between the silver shoes of the pontoons, something that looks like cotton-stuffing from a torn comforter begins to unroll overhead—fog, the dread of pilots in the north. The plane skims lower and lower. Finally it alights to chug along the surface of the water, dodging baby icebergs that begin to drift from the ice walls in Glacier Bay. At last, by a series of leaps in the air and scuttlings along the water, the plane penetrates an inlet, blocked by a wall of utter white crevassed with rifts of violent blue—a glacier.

Suddenly summer is done. A cold wind blows from the back door of creation. The plane, its passengers in shoes and hats, the sharp smell of gasoline, the taste of strawberries warm from the sun—all these cease to be. They cannot be; it would be an incredible anachronism for them to be. Yet on the moraine, almost against the ice, is the tent of a prospector for gold, and from it runs a red-haired girl in riding breeches with a packet of camera film.

Of this place John Muir wrote a generation ago, One learns that the world, though made, is yet being made, that mountains long conceived are now being born, channels traced for coming rivers, basins hollowed for lakes; that moraine is being ground and outspread for coming plants—coarse boulders and gravel for forests, finer soil for grasses and flowers—while the finest part of the grist, seen hastening out to sea in the draining streams, is being stored away in darkness and builded particle on particle, cementing and crystallizing, to make the mountains and valleys and plains of other predestined landscapes, to be followed by still others in endless rhythm and beauty.

Being present toward the beginning rather than toward the end of a phase of the life-process is a new sensation for most of us sons and daughters of industrial civilization. Alaskans feel that sensation every few years when in the Interior or to westward the Great Land suddenly wrinkles its hide and the needle of the seismograph at the University of Alaska swings to register an earthquake. A smoking volcano in the Aleutians becomes ominously clear, and ash and superheated gases burst out of monster vents, as at Katmai, where there took place in 1912 what geographers believe to be the greatest volcanic eruption in recorded history. Or in the glacier country a few million tons of ice recede, hills and valleys are uncovered, for the first time in thousands of years the sun warms the earth, a spruce seed falls, and the process of life begins.

A feeling of awe can hardly fail to be experienced in some degree by the most hardened traveler in Alaska. Even an unromantic scientist, Robert F. Griggs, who directed a National Geographic expedition to the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, wrote, The sensation of wonder and admiration which came first to all soon gave way to one of stupefaction. The magnitude of the phenomena simply overcame us. . . . For the first few days we were simply overawed. For a while we simply could not think or act in the ordinary way. At night I would curse myself, as I lay in my blankets, and make a list of the things I wanted to do the next day; but when morning came I could not move myself to action. I could only look and gape. The members of this expedition, trained scientists, suffered acutely from the impact of this tremendous natural commotion upon their civilized minds; one at least experienced complete nervous exhaustion. A large factor in my feelings, frankly confessed the leader of the expedition, was plain fear.

Some such feeling overwhelmed even that matter-of-fact eighteenth-century seaman, Lemuel Gulliver, when on the seventeenth day of June, 1703, he was shipwrecked on the Alaska coast. Even in 1939 it still seems appropriate that Gulliver should have found in this land men as tall as an ordinary spire-steeple, taking ten yards to a stride, speaking many degrees louder than a speaking-trumpet in voices so high in the air that it sounded like thunder. Another world-traveler, Baron Munchausen, attempted to laugh off the appalling size of these regions with a stale exaggeration or two.

Physiographers since Gulliver’s and Munchausen’s day have attempted to scale down the sheer size of nature’s undertakings in Alaska by homely devices. They have amused themselves by setting the Brobdingnagians of our day—our tall buildings—side by side with its ice pinnacles; by drawing a plan of the city of Washington full size on an inconsiderable portion of Columbia glacier; by dropping, one by one, every building in Manhattan, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and other boroughs of New York City, into the crater of Katmai, leaving it still unfilled. Agriculturists have pointed out that little Matanuska Valley could supply enough vegetables for the entire population of Alaska and a generation unborn. Forestry experts state that new timber growth could supply annually one-quarter of the total requirements of the United States in newsprint.

But such statistics are only a kind of whistling in the dark. Every honest person, who penetrates Glacier Bay, or looks up at the face of Columbia Glacier, or gazes into the heart of the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, or wonders at the wreathed summit of Smoking Moses, or sees for the first time the double silver summit of Mt. McKinley still sunlit at ten-thirty at night, experiences fear. That fear is something more than mere awe at size. It is the sense of two worlds of time coexistent—the knowledge that five thousand years of civilization are a day in the life of such a land as this. It is the sudden realization that while Jeremiahs howl in the streets of our capitals, lamenting the imminent fall of western civilization, here in the Great Land, not a hundred hours’ traveling time from our great cities, it is the morning and the evening of the first day.

The time-traveler might journey in 1939 west beyond the westernmost city in continental United States to Goodnews Bay, Alaska.

In 1937, Platinum was Alaska’s newest boom town with a population of forty-eight white men and two white women. On a sandspit were perched two long, single-story trading posts, one of which contained the post office. Beyond was a spanking new roadhouse, the most imposing structure of the settlement, with its dining room and kitchen on the first floor and its sleeping room crowded with cots on the second. Between the post office and the roadhouse were corrugated iron sheds, two shacks in which beer was sold, and a flock of white tents huddling on wooden floors. Smudge on the horizon marked the position of the freighter Laporte, laden with two thousand tons—500,000 dollars’ worth—of dredge, fast on a sand bar. She was ultimately floated off, just in time to miss a storm that would have scuttled her.

In the roadhouse, waiting for the Laporte to pull off the bar, the total male white population of Platinum talked shop. Fifty-cent gravel, thirty-cent gravel. Postelthwaite of New Zealand. Lae, in New Guiana, where four 1,200-ton dredges and two hydroelectric plants were freighted in over the mountains by plane. The Lena and Amur rivers in USSR, where American engineers installed five gold dredges for the Ural Platinum Trust and showed the Russians how to run ’em. Arguments waxed over yardage, power, gasoline consumption. An engineer in the uniform of that breed the world over—leather boots, khaki breeches, red kerchief—pulled out his pocket slide rule to prove a point. The others agreed or disagreed violently, pouring out instances, figures, facts from their personal knowledge of mining learned all over the world. In the late summer of 1937 there was set up in this tiny settlement the latest in mining dredges. Its buckets, each a ton’s weight, began scooping a yard of gravel at a time. The gravel moved down the hopper into the screen, the coarse tailings traveled up the belt to be piled behind the dredge as it inched its snout along, and the pay dirt moved to the washing table, there to settle down along the riffles—platinum!

Fifty paces from the roadhouse toward the beach, living in a world five thousand years before this new world of slide rules and half-million-dollar dredges, was a tiny village of Eskimos. Their huts were holes dug in the ground, surmounted with a driftwood frame covered with flattened gasoline tins or skins, or perhaps with white man’s canvas. Their walrus-skin boats rested upside down on the beach. Their dogs, half-starved because it was summer when beasts can do no work, strained at their leashes and howled at the racks of sun-dried salmon beyond their reach. The men were away fishing, and the village contained only old men, women, children, and cripples. The women made grass baskets to trade at the store for tins of white man’s food or yards of gingham, biding the time when their men would return from the canneries with food, blankets, and silver dollars. Although dependent upon the white man, this village touched the white man’s civilization but slightly. And although many of these Eskimos had never seen an automobile, and certainly none of them a horse, even the children hardly looked up when a plane roared down.

Few other corners of the modern industrial world have seen the application, on so large a scale, of the latest discoveries of science to the age-old occupation of mining. All over Alaska monstrous dredges are pushing their snouts forward, leaving behind mile upon mile of tailings: on the flats of Nome, at Circle, at Flat, at Deadwood, at Ruby, near Fairbanks, where students from the University of Alaska watch beside the hydraulickers for the bones of prehistoric creatures. Many of the original gold prospectors of the Klondike are dead; others have survived the revolution in mining methods; still others are lively old sourdoughs in the Pioneer’s Home at Sitka. Their dance halls are deserted, their Klondike Annies respectably aged, their pokes of gold dust spent. Their old stamping grounds are being reworked by modern methods.

Mining today is an affair of mathematics, of finance, of the latest in engineering skill. Cautious men behind polished desks in San Francisco figure out in advance the amount of metal to a cubic yard, the number of yards washed a day, the cost of each operation. They have no need of grubstakes. Before they have made the initial investment they know, as well as any solid businessmen can know, what their profit will be.

Alaska’s greatest and most profitable industry, fishing, has retained some of the color and flamboyance lost when individual placer mining was replaced by mechanized dredging. During the brief salmon season fishermen pour into southeastern Alaska and Bristol Bay, not only from other parts of Alaska, but from the entire Pacific coast. Preachers, schoolteachers, clerks, old men and young children leave their customary occupations to set gill nets and rush their catch to the canneries. Relatively high earnings for this brief period are not uncommon, and a yarn is current in Alaska about a prisoner in the Dillingham jailhouse who, setting his gill nets not far from the jail, cleared $826 for the season. The calm shallow waters of Bristol Bay suddenly become alive with a fleet of ocean-going steamers, long since retired from transoceanic service, and now used to transport, shelter, and feed thousands of seasonal fishermen brought from the Pacific Coast.

The farming and grazing land in Alaska is as extensive as the farming areas of all the North Atlantic states as far south as Virginia. Grains, such as rye, wheat, oats, and barley, are successfully grown in the Interior, away from the wet coastal area, and hardy vegetables can be grown almost anywhere, even within the Arctic Circle. Alaska potatoes not long ago took first prize at a State fair in Minnesota. Yet there are only about 1,000 farmers in Alaska—this, in spite of the fact that Alaskans consume annually farm produce imported from the States valued at almost four million dollars. Although it was one of the earliest activities of civilized man, farming was the last to be undertaken thus far north of time—not for lack of rich farming land, but for lack of transportation and marketing facilities.

Not only for farmers is transportation the crucial factor in the future development of Alaska. It is of prime concern to the miners in the Interior, the fishermen in southeastern Alaska, Bristol Bay, and along the Aleutians, the merchants in the principal cities, the fur farmers all over the territory, the lonely Eskimo reindeer herders, the sheep herders in Umnak, farther west than Honolulu—to every Alaskan, in fact, who has a stake in the country. One of the unfortunate historical facts concerning the Great Land is that from its first sighting by Vitus Bering in 1741 to its most recent gold rush the psychology of its development has been that of the exploiter rather than that of the permanent resident whose future is bound up with the future of the country.

There are, to be sure, nearly six hundred miles of railroad operating the year round in Alaska, including the government owned and operated Alaska Railroad; approximately 2,300 miles of automobile highway; 1,650 miles of grubbed and cleared sled roads; and 7,250 miles of trail. Much use is made of waterways, especially along the Yukon and Tanana rivers, in the salt-water channels and inlets of southeastern Alaska, in Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, along the Aleutians, and in Bristol Bay—all these, except the last, open the year round. About forty commercial companies operate approximately one hundred planes the year round, making use of approximately 100 landing fields, public and private, as well as inlets, sounds, and improvised landing places on sand bars, glaciers, and snow fields in winter. Three American and two Canadian steamship companies provide freight and passenger transportation to Alaska from the Pacific Coast. Yet these means of transportation, adequate for a pioneer country concerned mainly with the development of natural resources, are pitifully slight for a land with such a capacity for development as Alaska.

The combined area of Sweden and Norway is about equal to the area of Alaska, and their latitudes are roughly equivalent. Yet Sweden and Norway support a population more than one hundred fifty times the population of Alaska today. The temperate zone of Alaska, said President Harding in an address at Seattle in July, 1923, "is an area near three times that of Finland. Its climate is milder and more equable. Its forests and fisheries exceed those of Finland. Its coal deposits are among the world’s greatest, while Finland has no coal. Its wealth in gold has scarcely been scratched. Finland has no gold. There is copper in Finland, but there is a thousand times as much in Alaska. Two of Europe’s great cities, Christiania (Oslo) and Petrograd (Leningrad), are situated farther north than the richest and most populated part of Alaska. Stockholm, the ‘Venice of the North’ with 400,000 population, is in the same latitude as Juneau. Glasgow, one of the world’s greatest workshops, with over a million inhabitants, if translated in its own latitude to the Pacific coast of America, would be the metropolis of Alaska. Copenhagen, with 600,000 population, is in almost exactly the same latitude as Wrangell, Alaska. Helsingfors, the capital of Finland, on the extreme south of the country, would be an interior city of Alaska, yet it is one of the fine cities of Europe. This study of latitude and location seems likely to help in projecting a picture of the future Alaska. The climate in Alaska as to temperature is no more severe on the coast than in the greater part of our northern mainland. The extreme colds are often no more trying than in Washington,