A NEW FRONTIER FOR POSTWAR AMERICA
Neuberger, Richard L.
The Sundown Patrol A New Frontier For Postwar America By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER THERE is a line in one of Robert W. Service's famous old ballads about the Yukon River country which says, "I want to...
...A sad commentary on the way we have used Alaska is the fact that there were 30,493 whites in the Territory in 1900, just after the peak of the gold rush...
...They move more slowly when riches must be won with plow and pitchfork, and then those riches will only be in terms of food for all the family's mouths and a few dollars left over...
...The North may be lonely and bleak, yet it enters the blood...
...It may symbolize desolation and homesickness...
...Like ancient Gaul, Alaska is divided into three parts...
...The President mentioned the high state of civilization attained in the Scandinavian countries...
...The jackpine and scrub spruce are stunted and warped...
...Alaska Can Be Developed I have never been to Norway...
...We of the American Army, stationed along the Yukon River, went months at a time without a sip of fresh milk, but Juneau on the seacoast supports two fair-sized dairies...
...The famous 1,630-mile "Alcan" Highway has tied Alaska for the first time to the rest of North America by land...
...Along the Alaskan seacoast grow rich stands of Sitka spruce, the airplane wood...
...Alaska, the President said, is our new frontier...
...This will not continue...
...Thousands of Americans have now fought for their country on Alaskan soil...
...Never before has it been possible for people in Alaska to talk by telephone with people elsewhere on the continent...
...These Americans are tough, stern, and tenacious...
...I served in Alaska nearly two years and I wonder, too...
...The holes for each of the poles had to be blasted in the frozen earth...
...The second part of Alaska is the vast, far-flung interior...
...These economic activities are possible in the cavernous fiords and inlets of the Alaskan seaboard ; they now maintain such places as Juneau, Wran-gell, and Ketchikan...
...It looked small and dingy against the hillside of the steep fiord...
...No longer was it a tiny village...
...And there are broadswales and grasslands whore cows can pasture...
...This time Ketchikan looked different...
...The Sundown Patrol A New Frontier For Postwar America By RICHARD L. NEUBERGER THERE is a line in one of Robert W. Service's famous old ballads about the Yukon River country which says, "I want to go back and I will...
...This country laid its claim to Jack London and Service, and it will claim our nostalgia too...
...In his recent speech at Puget Sound Navy Yard, President Roosevelt pointed to the possibilities of postwar development in Alaska...
...And land that will support dairy herds, will also grow carrots, potatoes, celery, and alfalfa...
...Such Norwegian communities as Bergen and Narvik support diversified undertakings—lumbering, dairies, fishing, mining, some farming...
...I have seen it 50 degrees below or colder for three consecutive weeks without a break...
...He said he was ordering an immediate study of Alaska as a place where war veterans can settle and colonize...
...The prospect of gold on the creek bottoms can stir men as fertile land and fishing schools cannot...
...But the war has demonstrated that Alaska can be developed...
...As compared with Alaska's 39,493 white people in 1940, there were 32,458 natives...
...far from it...
...Soldiers erected a tree of plywood and wire, painted it green and called it the "Attn National Forest...
...Men will rush to Bonanza Creek, to the Mother lode of gold...
...That ended in 1898, the year of the great gold rush...
...Now Gov...
...Their roots can get no grip...
...The Aurora Borealis flickering overhead, the spruce trees loaded with snow, the frozen rivers twisting across the countryside like great white dragons—these are scenes which men do not forget...
...This is the seacoast, the seaboard stretching in a great arc from Seward on Cook Inlet to Ketchikan al the extreme lower tip of Southeastern Alaska...
...It barely moved at all...
...Vegetation has scant chance...
...I drank three chocolate milkshakes in short order...
...But the Army Signal Corps recently paralleled the celebrated highway with the longest open-circuit telephone line in the world...
...Yet the time will come in the lives of us all—¦ whether we are private or general—when we long for these mountains and vast open spaces...
...It may represent to us separation from our loved ones...
...How you view Alaska often depends on one basic question : Are you going or coming...
...It may be lonesome and dreary...
...They were months without fresh milk, without a look at pavement, without girls, without telephones, without fresh fruits, without the comforts commonly associated with civilization...
...What happened in '98 will not happen again...
...The Indians and the Eskimos have always been almost half the population of the Territory...
...I am convinced, that President Roosevelt had in mind when he referred to the postwar settlement opportunities...
...Those five months had been spent up in the measureless solitudes of the Yukon and Mackenzie watersheds...
...Cheechakoes, as the Indians called the newcomers, tramped off the boats at Skagway and Nome, prepared to brave the Arctic in oxfords and wool sweaters...
...The hills and uplands contain many minerals, some of them vital to manufacturing...
...This does not mean that someone can go to Alaska and get rich quick...
...Its neon lights, the girls strolling on its paved sidewalks, the drugstores and soda fountains, the two theatres, the diminutive bus system —these things seemed the epitome of a great metropolitan community...
...Transportation, long the greatest obstacle to the utilization of the Territory, has been advanced more in the past four years than all during the previous history of Alaska, either under Russian or American rule...
...Off shore are the famous Sockeye salmon, halibut, and flounder...
...The soil is thin here...
...Cold, drizzling rain turns the tundra into mud...
...Ernest Gruening can talk from Fairbanks or Anchorage to officials of the Federal Government in far-off Washington, D. C. I do not look for any Oklahoma land rush to engulf Alaska with an immense population boom...
...A great many people are now wondering whether the thousands of American soldiers and sailors who have been serving in Alaska will want to go back with their families after the war is over and carve out homes in the wilderness...
...James A. (Patsy) O'Connor, the U. S. Army Engineer officer, who built the Alaska Highway and the telephone line, said to me, "Dick, many of us may not like Alaska now...
...But there is a third part of Alaska, and it is this part...
...Some of them will want to return...
...During the Winter the temperature often crowds 70 degrees below...
...Its streetlights and neon signs were a pale and pitiful glow compared with the dazzling illumination of Seattle, which we had left three days earlier, "(lolly," I muttered to myself, "so this is one of Alaska's largest towns...
...There are the Aleutians, those bleak and rocky islands where the winds of the Williwaw moan and howl nearly every day in the year...
...It is dark most of the time, too, and men live their lives in gloom from October until April...
...In 1940 there were very few more than that—39,170...
...This is the region that extends northward from Mount McKinley to Fairbanks and on to Point Barrow, on (he shore of the Arctic Ocean...
...Tom Cliffe of the Canadian Pacific boat Princess Louise, which puts in at Skagway, told me that the Norwegian seacoast and that of Alaska are greatly similar...
...When I traveled to Alaska in September of 1942 on the troop transport Aleutian I saw Ketchikan, the first Alaskan port of entry, from the deck...
...But Capt...
...During the half a century between the discovery of gold in the Klondike and the Japanese attack on Kiska and Attu, Alaska virtually stood still from the standpoint of development...
...Weather in the Aleutians can be ceiling zero 24 hours a day...
...O'Connor was right...
...Fog shrouds the Aleutians like a blanket...
...The Army and the Navy have constructed ports, airfields, roads, and docks...
...The Wilderness Breeds A Contrast The next time I saw Ketchikan was five months later...
...In 1940 Alaska, 14 times the size of Iceland, could not match Iceland's population...
...Brig...
...The Alaskan seacoast compares in latitude, climate, and economic opportunities with Norway, Finland, and Sweden...
...It Enters The Blood But I do think that Alaska will be the new frontier, that men who have served there in uniform will return with their families...
...There are few grimmer places to fight or live...
...I now believe that Alaska has room for many Ketchikan.-;, for many small towns tucked into the fiords along the seacoast...
...I ended my Alaskan military service only a few months ago, but already I am sure that Gen...
Vol. 8 • September 1944 • No. 36
