First Year on the Susitna

50DEG above today. Heard a robin for sure this morning. Clear, sunny, fleecy clouds. Planted head lettuce, cucumbers, honeydew melons in flats and tins. Asters pushing up from the soil. Washed today. What a lot of snow-melting it takes.

--Bertha Donaldson's Diary

The days of dazzling brightness were coming at last. From the Susitna River valley, 100 miles north of Anchorage, the settlers could see breathtaking Mount McKinley and the whole Alaska range. Moose tracks appeared in the slushy tops of the frozen lakes, and there were beaver tracks and the tracks of the beaver trappers. Running water broke through the melting surface of the wide, twisting Susitna, and vehicular traffic was warned to keep off. The yawns of spring were cracking the frozen vastnesses of Alaska.

To a few people in the Susitna valley, the last whines of winter had special meaning: it was just a year since 37 pioneers from Michigan--the well-publicized "Fifty-Niners"--arrived in the pioneer country to hack out a new life for themselves (TIME, May 11). Some of their number have gone home discouraged; others have moved to the cities; a few staked out homesteads in other valleys. Along the Susitna remained only 13 undismayed pioneers and their children.

Hi-Fi & an Outhouse. Jerry Donaldson, 47, a onetime Detroit bus driver, and his hardy wife Bertha, built a comfortable (28 ft. by 32 ft.) cabin, fought off hordes of shrews,* are working on a greenhouse, have a hi-fi and TV set ready for use as soon as they can get a generator, and plan soon to build an outhouse. "When we first arrived here," says Bertha Donaldson, "there was just a patch of sunlight along the road. I asked myself, 'Do I really want to do this?' It took a while to adjust. If you don't go through that, you never make it. One thing we're never going to do is owe a cent. We'll go without first. We'll never go back to that way of life again."

Marino Sik, 33, used to be a repairman for a Detroit gas company, has a wife, Carol, and a 20-month-old daughter, has built a three-sided log lean-to that fits snugly against his house trailer. A small generator powers his lights, a washing machine and hair clippers. Short of money last month, Sik worked off some of his winter's food bill by sled-hauling drums of gasoline (at $7.50 apiece) across the river, hopes to save enough money to get ten acres of land bulldozed by year's end (Alaska's homesteading laws require clearance of ten acres by the end of the second year, 20 by the end of the third). "I'd never go back," says Carol Sik, 23. "I don't see anything there worthwhile like I do here. Nothing belonged to us. Here it may take us 30 years to build this all up. But it will amount to something."

Quarrels & Quitters. It is no secret to some oldtimers who inhabit the valley that many of the Fifty-Niners do not get along; there have been quarrels over sharing workloads and group property. A few weeks ago Marino Sik posted his land with no-trespassing signs. Still, the Ray Kulas, the Nick Rubinos, the Donaldsons and the Siks, and a few others are determined to stick it out.

Says Farmer-Trapper "Shorty" Bradley, 59, who came to Alaska in 1921 and has made an avocation of watching the fifty-niners: "One man can come here broke and make a go of it, and another with $50,000 may have to hightail it off. It depends on the man."

* Long-snouted, mouselike mammals. One way to get rid of them: bait a bottle with meat, sink it in the ground. The first shrew will eat the meat, the second shrew will eat the first, the third the second, etc., until the bottle is filled with one very fat shrew. If that doesn't work, get a cat.

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