Alaska (123 page)

It was an emotional reunion, one in which Matt Murphy participated as eagerly as the other three. They had known heady days, vast disappointments. Then, in due course, the name of Marvin Hoxey came up, and Matt and Missy revealed the whole sickening story in such lurid detail that Kirby had to ask: 'Tom, how can you do business with such a man?' and Tom could only reply: 'I don't. The company does.'

'And you feel you have to be loyal to the company?'

'I do.'

Kirby said nothing, for he felt that he had to be loyal to 746

the Mounted Police, and he knew the pressures that any kind of loyalty can exert.

In his case the pressures were legitimate, those of the Canadian government; in Tom's case, illegitimate, as everything associated with Marvin Hoxey had to be. But thoughtful men acknowledged pressure, good or bad, and responded to it in different ways.

But now the conversation turned to the purpose of the Canadian visit, with Missy showing herself to be more than passively interested in the salmon fisheries, and gradually the facts unfolded: 'That's part of the reason Matt and I came down here.

I don't mean salmon. I mean the rights of native people.'

'What do you mean by that?' Kirby asked, and she explained: 'Will, wherever we've been, Canada or Alaska, we've seen natives getting the bad deal. You ought to see Nome.'

*I can imagine.'

'And it seemed to Matt and me, seeing that we came from what you might call native Irish and native American stock ... well, it seemed to us that we ought to be on the side of the natives. We ought to help them look after themselves better than they're doing now.'

Aware that he might be speaking against his own interests, Tom said impulsively: 'Isn't that somethin'! When Lars Skjellerup was down here a few weeks ago, he was pleading with the government for native schools. He said almost the same thing you did, Missy.'

'What do you mean?' Kirby asked as he turned to face the woman to whom he had once been so deeply attached. Now they met as mature adults, each striving to make his world a more orderly place.

Encouraged by his smile, Missy for the first time voiced in public the principles which would guide the remainder of her life: 'I see an Alaska which is not dominated by rich men in Seattle. I want an Alaska which has self-rule, its own laws, its own freedoms.'

Here she became almost vehement: 'Do you know that Matt and I can't buy land in Juneau?

Why? Because the Alaska government hasn't been allowed to pass land laws, and the United States government won't.'

She passed from this grievance, one which infuriated all Alaskans, since it inhibited normal civic growth, to the broader canvas: 'We have been looking into the same problems you've come here to study, Kirby.' She stopped there, and Kirby asked: 'And what have you two concluded?' and she said: 'That all the salmon in these waters should be devoted to the welfare of Alaska, not to businessmen in Seattle.'

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Kirby laughed and pointed to Tom: 'She's speaking about you.'

'No, I mean it. More than thirty canneries like Tom's operated this summer, I've found, and not one of them leaves a penny behind for us Alaskans.' Prior to that statement she had spoken of Alaskans as they, as if she wanted to protect their rights, but now, subtly, she had herself become an Alaskan, and so she would remain.

At the end of her animated discourse, Kirby asked: 'Does this make you and your old friend Tom enemies?' and she said: 'If he continues to work for Seattle businessmen, political enemies, yes,' and before anyone could respond, Kirby turned to beckon to Sir Thomas Washburn, saying: 'Sir Thomas, you ought to listen to this lady,' and when the chairman of the commission did, he was astounded at how close her opinions were to his: 'Young woman, you've quite a head on your shoulders.'

'I fought these battles in Chicago. Among the hopeless, but never without hope.'

They spoke for a long time, together, as if the others were not there, and the more they revealed of their aspirations the more clearly Tom Venn saw that they could attain what they wanted only at the expense of his employer, Malcolm Ross. Finally, somewhat provoked, he broke in: 'Sir Thomas, with your position and all that, how can you feel the way you do?' and the Canadian gentleman laughed: 'My father ran a little store in Saskatchewan. He would have applauded what this young woman is saying, because he used to tell me the same things.' And he turned abruptly away from Tom to resume his discussion with Missy.

TOM HAD LOOKED FORWARD TO SPENDING CHRISTMAS

with the Rosses, and renewing his friendship with Lydia. But though she greeted him warmly, he soon found that she was deeply involved with a rather polished young man of twenty-two named Horace whom she had met at the university. She seemed not to be actually engaged to him, but she had obligated herself to attend quite a few holiday functions with him. By no means did she cut Tom off, but she was so busy that he often found himself alone with her parents or with other older members of the firm.

From them he learned how profitable the 1905 season had been, how generously the United States Congress had treated the Seattle interests, and how well the plans for the new cannery at Ketchikan were progressing. He learned that he would definitely be in charge of its construction, starting in 748

mid-January, and he surprised them with the information that he was planning to buy a home in Juneau. When they asked why, in voices intended to dissuade him, he said: 'I like the town. It has great character and the setting is almost as good as Seattle's.

Besides, it's now the capital.'

A vice-president of R&R said: 'But if you work for us, you have to move around a good deal. We have a lot more canneries in the planning stage, and you're our expert on making them work,' and Tom said: 'I want the job, but I also want a home,' and he reminded them of how the normal cannery year went: 'Two months preparation, three months working like a dog, one month to close down, and six months to live. I don't want to spend those six months locked up on some remote spot at the edge of the woods.'

'You're right,' the vice-president admitted. 'And I suppose that pretty soon you'll want to get married. Your wife will probably think the way you do.'

The mention of marriage caused an uneasy gap in the conversation, and later that night when the other guests had gone, Mrs. Ross went out of her way to assure Tom that Lydia still thought highly of him and he must excuse her near-rudeness in spending so much time with Horace and so little with him. When she said: 'It's to be expected, the excitement of college and all that,' he told her: 'I understand.'

But this winter there were few walks to the hill with Lydia, and practically no extended conversations on even trivial matters, let alone important ones. His disappointment led to two conclusions: I've never met a woman more sensible than Mrs. Ross. If she's a sample of what Lydia will be at her age . . . mmmmm! and It looks as if Lydia has moved on to a different level. He did not try to pin down what that level might be or what the obvious difference consisted of, but he had a strong feeling that he had lost her, and not even the gay festivities of a Seattle Christmas Eve or the warm celebrations of the day itself modified his conclusions. He was out of place and he knew it.

Cutting short his vacation, he offered the excuse that he had to get back to Juneau to prepare for the move to Ketchikan, and when he departed, the older Rosses noted without surprise that this time their daughter did not kiss him goodbye.

When he returned to Juneau he encountered the contradiction to which Missy had referred in their meeting with Captain Kirby: Alaska had almost unlimited land, but the four southern towns of Juneau, Sitka, Ketchikan and Wrangell existed in such a pinched condition, clinging to a mere foothold on the edge of the ocean, that they gave the impression

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of meanness and certainly a lack of spaciousness. In fact, usable land was so scarce and precious in Juneau that Tom was unable to find either a house already built or land on which to build, and although he liked the town and considered the mountains which edged it into the sea picturesque, he began to despair of ever finding a place there in which to live.

But since Juneau had a population of only sixteen hundred many times bigger than either Ketchikan or Wrangell, both of which had far less than a thousand he was constantly meeting old acquaintances when he was in town, and gradually they found for him a small selection of available houses. They also kept him advised of what was happening in the capital, and when with Missy's help Tom finally decided on a house being vacated by a sea captain, he was ready to make a down payment, but Sam Bigears protested vigorously: 'Tom! More better you look back of house?' and when he and Sam explored that area with some care, Tom saw what his friend was warning against, for the land rose precipitously, almost in the form of a cliff. Now, this was common in Juneau, where some of the streets leading in from the sea were not ordinary streets but wooden stairs climbing straight up. Indeed, to live in Juneau one had better have strong legs, because climbing up and down was a part of daily existence.

At first Tom was not worried about the steepness of the rise, but then Sam pointed to the serious problem. Down a ravine, whose end pointed directly at the house Tom was considering buying, loomed a bank of snow so huge that it could be expected at some time or other to launch an avalanche that might bury the house. 'Look over there,'

Sam cautioned. 'Used to be house, but last year snow let loose. Poof! No more house.

Same happen here, maybe.'

Some days after this meeting with Bigears, Nancy appeared in Juneau, eighteen years old and ready to finish her schooling. She was one of the very few Indian children who had progressed so far, and her teachers, one of whom Tom met at the hotel, said that she was a precious find: 'Most of the Indians drop out in the seventh or eighth grade, but Nancy has unusual abilities. She can sing with the best and she knows the old Indian dances, but she can also write acceptable papers and she has almost a hunger to know American history and how Alaska came to be what it is.' When Tom questioned another teacher, the man said: 'I'm the only man in the school, bar the principal, and I don't have much patience with these Indians. I want my kids to study, to make something of themselves, and almost no Indians respond to such discipline, so I pretty much ignore them. But 750

this Nancy Bigears, she's as good as any of the white boys, maybe better. She ought to go to college.'

So Tom began to see her again, and on a totally different basis from before. She was now a town girl, dressing and acting like the other students, except that she had a powerful new sense of her capacities. She was studying American history and applying all its lessons to Alaska, and one day as she spoke of the injustices her land suffered, Tom said; 'You ought to meet my friend Missy. She's older but her ideas are a lot like yours.'

So one January day he invited them both to lunch, and they lingered over their meal so long that darkness descended over the mountains and Gastineau Channel was shrouded before they finished. They spoke of Eskimo and Tlingit tradition, of the difficulties brought by' the ways of the white man, of land ownership, and of all the problems that rose to the surface if one lived very long in towns like Nome and Juneau. The two women did most of the talking, and what they said infuriated Tom occasionally, for they made men like him out to be the villains, and this he could not accept.

Once in his anger he voiced for the first time the attitude that he and most white men like him espoused: 'Time's wasting. Work's to be done. Maybe the Eskimo up in Barrow can adhere to the old ways. But the Indians elsewhere, all of them, had better enter the twentieth century, and fast.'

'And what, pray, do you mean by that?' Missy asked contentiously, and he was not loath to explain: 'There aren't many real Americans in Alaska yet, white men and women I mean, but the future of this land, believe me, is to become another Oregon, another Idaho. Indians should receive every consideration and certainly title to their lands, but they have no option but to enter the mainstream, forget their tribal customs, and beat us at our own games.' Then, taking Nancy's hands, he said: 'And this young lady is the one with the capacity to lead the way for her people.'

'I second that!' Missy said enthusiastically, and Tom added: 'Mr. Wetherill told me the other day that Nancy was so good in her studies, she should go to college next year. California or Washington, or even back east. Now, what do you think of that?'

He was astonished at what Missy thought: 'Tom, that's the wrong answer! Nancy does not need college any more than I did. Her job is to stay here in Alaska, make a place for herself, show others how to adjust. She could become the greatest woman in Alaska, and don't you and Mr. Wetherill send her off to the States to be ruined.'

Tom was prepared to argue that his approach was the one 751

that would save the Indians, but he was prevented from voicing his opinion when Sam Bigears came to the hotel looking for his daughter: 'Some people are coming over to Harry's, and they want you to help.' Obediently she rose, thanked Tom for the lunch and Missy for her support, and when she was gone, Missy said: 'It will always be like that, I'm afraid. There will be a party somewhere, and that comes first.'

And then, as they sat in the shadows, for the dining room was not yet open for the evening meal, she said quietly: 'I suppose you know, Tom?'

'That you and she are right? I don't know that at all.'

'No. That you're in love with her.'

Shocked at hearing these words spoken so openly, Tom sat silent, his thoughts in turmoil. A picture of Lydia Ross dismissing him so lightly came to his mind, then Nancy Bigears brimming with excitement here in Juneau, and he recalled the afternoons with her beside the family totem and along the path beside the Pleiades, and the morning she had taken him in her canoe across Taku Inlet to walk upon the emerald ice of Pleiades Glacier, and he realized that Missy was right.