Pioneers Wanted

Canada's vast, undeveloped, underpopulated Arctic area has assumed new importance: sharing the major part of the top of the world with the Soviet Union, it is the Western Hemisphere's first line of defense against transpolar air attack. It is also a potential treasure house of mineral wealth, and a few pioneering Canadians are proving that the good life is possible even in the Far North. Last week Sam Welles, chief of TIME'S Ottawa Bureau, who has just completed an air tour of the strategic western Arctic, filed this report:

Our celery is always wonderful," said Mrs. Mildred Mackenzie, a plump, pleasant housewife. "In midsummer, our delphiniums will grow nine feet high." With matronly zest, she waved round her garden, still deep in snow. "You never tasted vegetables as good as the ones we grow, and you should see our poppies and sweet peas."

The trim house, the well-kept grounds and smartly-dressed Mrs. Mackenzie might well have been in the southern Ontario town of Oakville, where she used to live. But they were just 92 miles from the Arctic Circle, at Norman Wells, where her husband runs a refinery for Imperial Oil. Permafrost, the permanently frozen subsoil of the North, sometimes makes the ground heave under the installations, but cannot stop the refinery from turning out an annual 320,000 barrels of oil products. In July permafrost is also a foot to three feet below Mrs. Mackenzie's garden, but cannot stop her either. "We scatter the seeds," she explained cheerfully, "and when it gets warm enough, they grow."

Spring at 26DEG Below. Though it was technically a spring day in Norman Wells, the temperature was 26DEG below zero. Winter rules for some eight months a year in the top 2,000,000 sq. mi. of the North American continent, an area which is four-fifths in Canada. But the Canadian North is no longer a land fit only for Indians, Eskimos and a few hardy white men. Lots of women like Mrs. Mackenzie, and lots of children have moved into the North in recent years. The schools in Whitehorse, in the Yukon, now have 364 children, equal to half the total population of the town in 1940.

Roads and airplanes, plus mining and the needs of military defense, have made many changes in the North. The war-built Alaska Highway has brought the

Yukon a far broader boom than the Klondike gold rush. The new road to Hay River in the Northwest Territories is an all-weather highway over which truckloads of fresh and frozen trout and whitefish from Great Slave Lake are driven , daily on their way to Chicago and New York, as part of a $2,500,000 fishing industry. Gold at Dawson and Yellowknife, uranium at Port Radium, base metals at Mayo have all built up thriving settlements. Great lead-zinc-silver deposits, lately found at Pine Point, less than 60 miles from the Hay River road, may bring a new smelter city of 15,000 to the N.W.T. within a decade.

The wolflike howls of Huskies still echo through northern hamlets in the long nights. Yet even Aklavik, well above the Arctic Circle, has 20 cars to substitute for dog sleds. Elsewhere in the North there are now nearly 4,000 licensed motor vehicles, though roads are still scattered. Travel to remote areas used to take months. Planes have brought any place in the area within a few hours of Edmonton.

Milkshake: 75-c-. Northern transport comes high. Air express to Coppermine is $1 a pound. Overland freight costs make lumber twice and cement three times as expensive in Whitehorse as in Vancouver. A fresh milkshake costs 75^ in White-horse--15-c- more than a slug of whisky. But earnings are also high and people live well. The muskrat trappers at Fort Mc-Pherson, above the Circle, make enough to build good houses and heat them at 65 below zero with oil they have hauled in at 70-c- a gallon.

While earnings have increased tremendously and population has grown 50% in the past decade, such gains are purely relative and reflect only a tiny fraction of the North's potential. Most of the area still has not been carefully explored. Except for a few pioneers, most Canadians still stick to the narrow population belt along the Canada-U.S. border and regard the Arctic as practically uninhabitable. Fewer than 100,000 people, less than 1% of Canada's 14,000,000 population, live in the top two-thirds of the country. Yellowknife and Whitehorse are still the only Canadian Arctic towns which can boast more than 2,000 people.

Russia, the only other country in the world with an extensive Arctic area, has developed it far more than Canada. More than 5,000,000 people live in Russia's North. Many are slave laborers or forced migrants, but at least ten times as many Russians as Canadians have of their own accord gone to the Arctic. Edmonton, at parallel 53.30, is Canada's most northerly city of 50,000 or more. North of that latitude Russia has more than 50 cities of that size or bigger.

Radar Net. Canada's only major development effort in the Arctic at present is military. The U.S. and Canada are spending jointly about $300 million on a radar net from Alaska to Labrador, most of it located north of the Arctic Circle.

The Canadian government apparently has no plans for any real effort to encourage sizable population shifts northward. Norway, with less than a quarter of Canada's population, is now spending $40 million on the economic development of the Norwegian Arctic. Canada, a far richer country with an Arctic of far richer possibilities, is now spending only about one-tenth that sum on similar economic development. The future of the North is not just a matter of more oil, gold, radar, or uranium; in a very real sense its fulfillment must be based on more celery, more delphiniums, more Mrs. Mackenzies.

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