TERRITORIES: Promised Land

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Nor can Alaska's vast resources be made to produce wealth and new industry overnight. Nevertheless, a beginning has been made. Minneapolis merchants are shipping goods west from Winnipeg on the Canadian National Railroad and laying them down in Prince Rupert, B.C. as cheaply as they could be delivered to Seattle, 570 miles south. The fledgling one-ship Briggs Steamship Corp., operating from $16 million dock installations which the U.S. built at Prince Rupert during the war, is carrying the freight north — 90 miles to Ketchikan, 314 miles to Juneau. Truckers are beginning to run Alaskan freight over the Alaska Highway, gambling on the absence of warehousing and longshoring costs to enable them to beat western sea-rail rates.

Alaska's potential assets are vast: some 80 billion feet of virgin spruce and hemlock stand in its steep coastal forests—enough timber to guarantee a sustained yield of a billion feet a year. Pulp companies with mills closer to markets have ignored the Territory for years. But the coast offers waterpower, cheap logging, cheap transport of logs by inland waterways. Two western financial combines, one in Los Angeles, one in San Francisco, are planning $30 million mills. Both operations will give steady jobs to thousands of men, will mean new towns along the Panhandle.

The most exciting news of the year came from the Navy's Petroleum Reserve Number Four in the Arctic. Texas roughnecks, toiling in the murderous cold at Umiat, 180 miles from Point Barrow, sank a well there. They struck oil—amazing oil which poured like beer and smelled like gasoline. This was only one sample, one test. Some geologists think that a great untapped pool of oil lies under this patch of the Arctic. The Navy made no comment.

Alaska's new pioneers would soon find out that the Territory is no place for a settler who lacks skill or money. Housing is poor in all towns, almost impossible to find, sinfully expensive to build. Building lots in Anchorage sell for $2,000, ancient log cabins in Fairbanks from $3,500 to $5,000, and almost any kind of small frame house from $10,000 to $15,000. Milk costs from 30 to 40¢ a quart, fresh eggs $1.25 a dozen. A hamburger costs 65¢, a bottle of Scotch whiskey $12.50. The price for cleaning and pressing a suit is $2.50. Haircuts cost $1.50. Merchants, builders—and ladies of easy virtue—shrug at all complaints, reply: "It's the freight."

The Government-sponsored Matanuska Valley Colonization Project (130 families) had proved that farming is eminently feasible in Alaska, but not until the U.S. had spent $3,897,000 on building and land clearing. An experienced farmer who pioneered on the million acres of unbroken grassland of the Kenai Peninsula, or the rich Tanana or Matanuska Valleys might make out—but only at the price of hardship like that suffered by early settlers in the Far West.

But hardship does not frighten the migrants who are bringing their families to the promised land. Eyeing them, most sourdoughs have only one comment: "Damned fools." But the old settlers had forgotten one thing—the biggest company of damned fools ever assembled on a wild goose chase came north to struggle up Chilkoot Pass, and brave the terrible cold and the terrible trails in the gold rush of '98. Few found gold, but they founded present-day Alaska.