TERRITORIES: Promised Land

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By boat, plane and car, hundreds of Americans were moving last week toward the last great U.S. frontier—Alaska. Up the Alaska Highway (1,600 miles from Dawson Creek, B.C. to Fairbanks), through some of the world's most majestic mountains and some of the continent's most unpeopled wilderness, jogged 20 families a day. Their earthly goods were strapped to their cars. They were the new pioneers, the hardiest (or, some old Alaska hands said, the most foolhardy) of the thousands of Americans who constantly deluge Alaskan clubs, hotels and chambers of commerce with requests for data about the Territory. Most of them were looking for a home.

What would the new pioneers find? A vast land, raw, primitive and barely scratched by civilization after 80 years of U.S. ownership. A frontier society—easygoing, vigorous, elementally democratic—at its worst unabashedly bad, at its best unaffectedly generous. Opportunity—but at the price of a stiff endurance test. And to beckon the pioneers on, for good or ill, the deceptive promise of an economic boom (begun by the war, protracted by the proximity of Asiatic Russia), and the deceptive intensity of the brief Alaskan summer.

For last week the roar of ice-littered water had died away along most of Alaska's great rivers; the Tanana, the Yukon, the Porcupine, the Kuskokwim foamed ice-free through the hundreds of miles of evergreen wilderness. Even north of "the Circle" the ground had thawed. Hundreds of thousands of obliging salmon ran in Alaska's larch-green coastal waters. The Arctic ice pack would soon move sullenly offshore. The sun stayed in the skies at night, and green things burst into leaf and blossom with hothouse frenzy. Alaska's short, violent summer had begun.

From Point Barrow to Ketchikan—in mining camps, beauty parlors, banks, offices, hangars, in remote villages with names like Tolstoi, Meehan, Kanatak and Nugget—visitors and Alaskans felt a mounting fever. For, after a short winter letdown, the boom was back with the summer.

A gambler's restlessness stirred among the fleet of salmon trollers and purse seiners in Ketchikan, Juneau and Sitka, and at moorings along a thousand miles of hemlock-studded coast. In May this fleet and Alaskan canneries had been strikebound. But the 1947 fishing season could still mean riches. Prices were up, and even last year's niggling pack (3,971,109 cases) had brought a record $59 million.

Despite last winter's slump, a prime lower Yukon mink still brought $35, a prime beaver blanket $40.

Gold was off by 60%. The great Alaska Juneau lode mine was closed. But other forms of gold digging throve. Gold dredges nosed along the pay streak in valleys near Fairbanks. And many an Arctic placer miner would go it with bulldozer and sluice box, gambling for a stake through weeks of mud, mosquitoes and midnight sun.

Air Age. Alaskan aviation was zooming. Thanks to the Army's frantic wartime construction, and to war surplus sales (at which an ex-service flyer could buy a DC-3 for $25,000), aviation had finally come of age. The airplane had long been a versatile beast of burden in roadless Alaska. But as late as 1939 northern flying had been a primitive business with no fields capable of accommodating a modern transport, no directional radio navigation aids, little radio communication.