TERRITORIES: Formal Introduction

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Most Alaskans have never seen a Secretary of the Interior close up, but they can visualize him instantly. He is a thin, watery-blooded, myopic creature who spends most of his time throwing messages from Alaskans into an incinerator, but occasionally he rings up the Army or Navy and gives them a few hundred more square miles of good territorial land.

On the other hand, most Secretaries of the Interior get a feverish feeling that they know too much about Alaska (Harold Ickes was there on his honeymoon, never went back). Alaska's 586,400 square miles are occupied by only 72,524 people, 32,458 of them tuberculosis-ridden natives. It is rich, but its riches do it little good; its basic industries, salmon fishing and canning and gold mining, are owned in absentia. It has more coal than Pennsylvania, endless miles of virgin timber, many waterpower sites, but they cannot be marketed.

"The Lord." Harry Truman's energetic, new 38-year-old Secretary of the Interior Julius A. ("Cap") Krug climbed into a C-54 fortnight ago, set out to get a close-up look at the land none of his predecessors had understood. At his first stop, Fairbanks, the modern hub of the old, interior gold fields, he became aware of the Territory's attitude toward bureaucratic Government. He was greeted by a sign which read: "Welcome Lord of Alaska." But Alaskans soon began to change their tune.

Huge, husky (242 Ibs., 6 ft. 3 in.) Cap Krug looked like an Alaskan himself when he got into a wool shirt. He flew across the Arctic Circle to Point Barrow, ate whale meat, and walked through a litter of walrus heads to duck into native shacks. He surprised his guides by landing two-foot rainbow trout in the Kenai River. He also listened—and listened. Everywhere he went—Fairbanks, Point Barrow, Anchorage, Seward, Juneau, Ketchikan, Sitka, Metla Katla—Alaskans who had always wanted to tell the Secretary of the Interior what they thought of the Government proceeded to do so.

Roads, Restrictions & Rates. Alaskans had scores of grievances. They wanted roads—one overall-clad woman dramatized the request by tramping in to see the Secretary, announcing she had left her tractor mired to the carburetor two miles outside of town. Gold operators complained that the Army hired their help away. Hundreds asked for release of Government lands, an end to restrictions which discourage homesteading. Alaska was in terrible need of hospitals, particularly tuberculosis hospitals. And there was always the subject of high freight rates.

Krug did not always agree. He bluntly asked citizens of Ketchikan to "face reality," said he could get little money from Congress until Alaska got some of its own by local taxation. He was less than enthusiastic about the gold industry, which dredges up gold to be sold to the Government at an artificial $35 an ounce and is then carefully reburied in Treasury vaults.

But before he left the territory, Cap Krug announced the release of 18 million acres of Government land, much of it freed by narrowing the five-mile right-of-way along the Alaska Highway to 300 feet. He also surprised many an old settler by advocating statehood (Alaskans will vote on the question on Oct. 8) and the construction of a railroad through Canada to the "outside."