Promised Land

(See Cover)

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.

Now Alaska has 27 major airports, 20 big secondary landing strips, 43 radio ranges, 46 weather observation stations. There are 582 commercial airplanes registered within the Territory--there had been only 99 in 1940, 157 in 1945. More important, many are efficient, multiengined aircraft. The bush pilot is still making medicine with his light plane, still landing passengers and freight in improbable corners of the country. But the DC-3 and the DC-4 do the big business, droning unconcernedly over mountains which early flyers had crossed only with the aid of rabbits' feet and gilded baby shoes.

The Outside is only a few hours away from almost any Alaskan town. Pan American Airways flies daily schedules north from Seattle. Anchorage is only 17 hours from New York City by Northwest Airlines. When Northwest begins its Oriental service (July 15) over the Aleutians-Great Circle route, Tokyo, Shanghai and Manila will be almost as near. A new line is projected. Chinese National Aviation Corp., a Pan American affiliate, hopes to fly its planes into Alaska.

But the biggest boom is in military construction. Across Bering Strait, Russia, from which the U.S. bought Alaska for $7,200,000 in 1867, is only 52 miles away. Arctic and Pacific defense looms large in U.S. military thinking, and Alaska looms large in both. As Alaska-based B-29s, with lipstick-red wings and tails (easily seen in case of forced landings on the polar icecap), fly routine missions over the North Pole, the Army & Navy are pumping men and millions of dollars into the Territory. At Mile 26 on the Richardson Highway near Fairbanks, the Army is rushing construction of one of the world's biggest airfields--a super super-bomber base with three-mile runways. The Army is building a spur rail line to serve the base, is pouring concrete barracks at Elmendorf Field, improving Ladd Field, repairing installations at Nome. At Adak and Attu in the Aleutians, the Navy is spending $14 million on construction.

The Government's rickety but strategically important Alaska Railroad, the one all-weather link (470 miles) between Seward on the coast and Fairbanks in the interior, is being completely reconstructed. By 1952 its roadbed will be rebuilt, its rails and ancient rolling stock will be replaced, its narrow cuts (in which 106 moose had fatal head-on collisions with locomotives last winter) will be widened, its capacity for freight and passengers increased eight to ten times.

Alaska's Best Friend. These huge construction jobs mean huge payrolls; into Fairbanks alone last week Pan American was flying 2,500 laborers, cat skinners, carpenters. Alaskans drink an ironic toast: "Here's to Joe Stalin--Alaska's best friend," and speculate endlessly on rumors of similar activity in Siberia. For Uncle Joe is filling up the icebox.

All the Territory's towns are crowded, but areas of military construction blend the fever of the '98 gold rush with the Los Angeles boom of the 1920s. Since 1940, the population of dusty, mountain-rimmed Anchorage has swollen from 3,500 to 14,000. Indians, construction workers, farmers, soldiers, flyers, women in dungarees and muddy boots, women in mink coats and platform shoes, jostle on its mile-long main street, crowd its 66 saloons and liquor stores.

The old gold camp of Fairbanks in the interior also enjoys a boomlet. Most of its streets are lanes of thick dust; a third of its homes are sagging log cabins; caribou wander disconsolately in its outskirts. But 7,500 people have jammed in where 3,500 lived before, and more are coming every day.

Fairbanks is wide open. Gambling flourishes in back rooms. Nobody in Fairbanks was surprised at the arrival of an air express package marked simply: "One magnet, dice, and electrical attachments." Alaska still views the old-fashioned brothel with sympathetic tolerance. Fairbanks authorities have sternly resisted attempts to close down blonde Big Babe, and the rest of the girls who keep open house along the "line." Alaskan liquor stores sell a clear, malevolent fluid called Spirits of Peoria, a 190-proof potion calculated to make the mildest man click his heels and bay like a malemute.

But, despite its reckless attitudes, its raw wildernesses, its enormous distances, Alaska is also a country of homes, automobiles, electric stoves, housewives, grocery clerks, schools. It has two golf courses, a college (the University of Alaska at Fairbanks), and 14 chambers of commerce. The old order and the new clash; Alaska is racked by growing pains, wild adolescent dreams, horrible adolescent doubts, stirring memories, confusion and controversy.

The Governor. To Alaskans who pine for the old order, and to those who long for something new, one man symbolizes the Territory's turbulent stirrings. Throughout his 7 1/2 years in office, chunky, jug-eared Dr. Ernest Gruening, 60, Alaska's New Dealish Territorial Governor, has been an advocate of change and a figure of controversy. He has been during most of his career.

Governor Gruening (pronounced greening) was born (1887) in New York City. His father, Dr. Emil Gruening, a famous physician, wanted his only son to be a doctor. At Connecticut's Hotchkiss School, and later at Harvard, Ernest Gruening had agreed wholeheartedly. But during three years at Harvard Medical School he developed an overwhelming curiosity about social and political developments and an itch to become a newspaperman.

During his senior year, young Gruening got a temporary job on William Randolph Hearst's Boston American, stayed for a year. To please his father, he took his M.D. degree, but he returned, immediately, to journalism. To the perplexity of his fellow reporters, all of whom thought it would be wonderful to be a rich doctor, Gruening preferred writing editorials for the Boston Herald at $27 a week.

After a fight with Boston's notorious Mayor Curley, Gruening was forced to resign as managing editor of the Boston Traveller. Then he edited the failing Boston Journal. Later he went to Manhattan to find out what was the matter with Frank Munsey's New York Sun. His findings were not appreciated; he decided that Munsey was causing all the trouble.

In 1914 Gruening took time out to marry Dorothy Elizabeth Smith of Norwood, Mass. Of their three sons one, Ernest, is dead.

After brief service in World War I, Gruening became publisher of New York City's Spanish language daily, La Prensa, developed a deep interest in Latin America. As managing editor of the liberal Nation, he clamored for recognition of Mexico's revolutionary Obregon government, railed against dollar diplomacy, U.S. intervention in Latin American affairs, later wrote Mexico and Its Heritage.

In 1933 Franklin Roosevelt called Gruening to the White House, greeted him with a grin, cried (although they had never met) : "Where have you been keeping yourself? I understand you know a lot about Cuba. Tell me what we ought to do."

Gruening told him. Roosevelt disregarded the advice, but the next year Gruening was appointed director of the Department of the Interior's Division of Territories and Island Possessions, became a vigorous and vocal New Dealer, began a fascinated study of Alaska and its problems.

In 1939 Roosevelt appointed him Territorial Governor. Alaska took the appointment with steady nerves. The Juneau Chamber of Commerce had the Governor in to lunch. He attended a gathering of Indians at Wrangell's Alaska Native Brotherhood Hall, responded politely when one Chief Shakes made him a member of the Tlingit Tribe and renamed him Kitchnahshch (meaning unknown to Governor Gruening). He shipped in dozens of watercolors by WPA artists to brighten the buff walls of the big, old-fashioned governor's mansion, picked a hot desert scene with violet clouds to hang beside his lace-canopied, four-poster bed.

Wild Williwaw. But the era of good feeling ended almost at once in the howl of Alaska's biggest, longest political storm. After World War I, the Territory had suffered a slow decline. Its population had dwindled, and did not begin to rise again until the 1930s. Its lopsided economy was tied almost completely to fish and gold--a salmon industry owned in Seattle and a gold industry owned in the East. Alaska had been administered chiefly from dusty Washington pigeonholes by bureaucrats who had never seen a skate of halibut gear or a dredge's tailing pile.

Dr. Gruening went on the warpath. He cried that Alaska, victimized by absentee government, was being gutted by an absentee industry served by seasonal labor. He urged the Territory to claim a bigger share of the wealth taken from its resources. He asked Alaskans to set up a general territorial property tax, corporate net income tax, a personal income tax which would tap the salaries of 12,000 migrant fish and cannery workers and thousands of other laborers who took their salaries to Seattle each autumn. He deplored the fact that Alaskans could not vote for a U.S. President, could not send Senators and a Congressman to Washington to fight their battles. He argued for statehood--and the abolition of his own job.

To the Seattle salmon interests, and to the gold industry, this meant war. To many a plain Alaskan, it sounded like poppycock dished up by a theorizing carpetbagger from the thrice-damned Department of the Interior. Men who had come to Alaska to grab what they could--and who had remained because the country grew on them, and the Outside seemed cramped and artificial--could see no particular sin in big profits by big companies. Sourdoughs who had made their stake and settled down were against new taxes. Many an Alaskan who had "mushed" dog teams and helped beat back the teeming wilderness rankled at advice--even good advice--from an outsider.

Gruening was unabashed. After legislative sessions in which his tax programs were blocked by minority groups, he issued stinging rebukes, named names and pulled no punches. He shouted that the salmon and mining interests were "unpatriotic and unenlightened." He encouraged the campaigns of territorial candidates who favored his program. His enemies called him a Communist, a dictator. Twice, legislative minorities asked the President to fire him. All over Alaska the words, "What do you think of the Governor?" were a fighting question.

Gruening refused to compromise --often against the advice of his friends. In a sense, this was bad politics. After 7 1/2 years the major points of his legislative program have not yet been adopted. He has made unnecessary enemies. But his bullheaded insistence on a new and more independent Alaska has also won him friends. Governor Gruening has given many a citizen of the Territory an insight into issues he had never considered before. Alaska's 3-to-2 vote for statehood, last fall, was also a vote for Gruening.

Congress is in no hurry to speak up on the subject of Alaska's admission to the Union (TIME, May 5). But Alaska has taken the first, and most important, step toward statehood.

Old Problems. Alaska is still beset by old, grave problems. In an area twice as big as Texas, a fifth as big as the U.S., there are still, even with its boom expansion, only 90,000 people. Of these, 30,000 are tuberculous Indians. Alaska is not one but several countries: the mild, humid southeastern coastal Panhandle, where it rains about 364 days a year; the barren, fogbound reaches of the Aleutian Islands ; the interior Yukon watershed with its searing summer sun and its Montana-like winters; the desolate wastes of the Arctic, where the soil thaws to swamp in summer, but is white, frozen and sterile during the long polar night.*

Despite the airplane, Alaska is still far from markets, still burdened with exorbitant freight rates. It is still at the mercy of shipping tie-ups, like last fall's three-month waterfront strike. Alaskans com plain, as they have for years, about service from the monopolistic Alaska Steam ship Co. But Alaska's chief problem is distance (Alaska needs roads -- the air plane is simply an expensive substitute for them), and the fact that vessels which come north loaded go south empty, with no industries to give them cargo.

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-c- a quart, fresh eggs $1.25 a dozen. A hamburger costs 65-c-, 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.

*Eskimos call summer the "season of inferior sledding."

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