1 of 3
"If you see a moose, make sure you don't get between it and its calf." This postprandial advice was offered to me by my mother-in-law, who knows something about moose: last spring her newly planted saplings fell victim to one.
"Remember the guy at the University of Alaska who got stomped," added my wife, who herself was once chased by a moose.
So as I headed out into Alaskan suburbia with a deranged dog called Esther in tow, I ruminated not on potential crooks and drive-by shooters but on moose and wolves and bears. For this is Alaska, the Last Frontier.
Never mind the flimsy "communities" that are being founded, even here, on the outskirts of Eagle River. Subdivisions with names such as Park View Terrace and Northwood Park are dissected by streets named Driftwood Bay and Meadow Park, the absence of any bays or meadows anywhere nearby notwithstanding. Fabrications such as these make sense in Southern California, where nature has been paved over for so long the irony of apartment complexes with names like Willow Creek and Forest Hills passes unnoticed. But in Alaska, where wilderness dwarfs even Wal-Mart, the contrivances seem slightly ridiculous, or at least out of place.
Then again, maybe not. Americans have never really considered the frontier a place to be left alone but rather something to be possessed and improved—that is, made profitable. In the words of Robert Hine and John Faragher, "Americans have always had itching feet" that carried them to wherever they thought the grass might be greener. And, as Hine and Faragher make clear in The American West, the same story that played itself out in Kentucky, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina early in the American experience took center stage in Alaska in the nineteenth century.
Urbanites from the "lower forty-eight" still see Alaska as a place to which they can repair to overcome the baleful strains of modernity.com. "I know the accepted wisdom that westering folk are running away from something or making a fresh start, taking a new hold on life," writes Nancy Lord, an Alaskan resident who is herself a refugee from New England. "The truth of this is everywhere in Alaska, from the early goldminers and settlers to today's end-of-the-roaders making one more try at whatever it is they think will bring them success, or happiness, or love."
I suspect that most Americans haven't ever really known what to make of Alaska, where in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries Russians hungry for furs to trade in China battled Aleutian natives, spread Orthodox Christianity, and, less fortunately, introduced dread European diseases that (as everywhere else in the Western hemisphere) devastated the locals. In 1867, the same year four British North American provinces confederated and formed the nation of Canada, that vigorous proponent of American expansionism Secretary of State William Seward orchestrated the purchase of Alaska from the Russians for $7.2 million (about $85 million in today's dollars). Some, believing Alaska a wasteland, called the deal "Seward's Folly."
Hine and Faragher observe that Alaska did not register on "the mental maps" of most Americans "until the discovery of gold"—and later, it might be added, oil. But some, such as Senator Charles Sumner, immediately perceived Alaska as a country rich in resources that would redound to the wealth and strength of the United States. Sumner himself wrote loftily about "pine and fir waiting for the ax." And the bombardments that soon befell the coastal villages of Alaskan Tlingits—who were less than pleased with the arrival of the Americans, and who put that displeasure to work when they destroyed stockades and government buildings—announced that, like the rest of the West, Alaska was under Yankee control.
share this page
RSS Feed
