Alaska (131 page)

This exciting day came relatively late in the settlement at Matanuska. The land had to be surveyed, parceled into reasonable holdings, and made available by the building of rough roads, but when all was in readiness, Mr. Sjodin and his three superiors announced that the lottery was ready to 798

take place as planned. That afternoon Elmer Flatch went quietly to Tent Number 7

to consult with the man whose performance in getting the Minnesotans to Matanuska had been so exemplary.

'I'd like your advice, Mr. Sjodin.'

'That's what I'm here for,' and before Elmer could speak further, Sjodin said with great warmth: 'Remember that morning I met you. You and your son had just shot a deer. You were sharing it with the Vickaryous family. And now you're all up here in Alaska. Quite wonderful, isn't it?'

'Never figured it would happen,”Flatch said, 'but now Hilda and me, we got to choose our land. What do you advise?'

With an unusual gift for perceiving personal situations, a skill developed while serving as student manager of the football team at North Dakota State and later as county agricultural agent in Minnesota, Sjodin recognized that Elmer Flatch probably had desires and plans somewhat different from the other settlers, and he intended to respect them: 'Now, before I can advise you, Mr. Flatch, you must share with me your honest statement of what it is you hope to accomplish here in Alaska.'

'Well, like all the others . . .'

'I don't mean all the others. I mean you.'

For almost a full minute Elmer stared at the floor, his tense knuckles clasped under his chin, wondering if he could level with this Swede. Finally, acknowledging that he must confide in someone, he said slowly: 'We won't be movin' never again, Mr.

Sjodin. This'n is it.'

'Glad to hear you say that. Now tell me the best that you can hope for, and let's see if it's possible.'

'I'm fed up to my ass with farminr. It's a fool's paradise.'

'Not to a born farmerlike my father, or me. But for you, maybe yes. Go ahead.'

'I'm a hunter. I'm a rifleman. I want me a place near the woods. I want me a runnin'

stream. I want to be close to where there's moose and bear and deer. But mostly I do want a runnin' stream.'

Before responding to this defensible ambition, Sjodin asked: 'But how will you earn a living? A wife and three children?'

'Two.'

'How?'

Again Flatch fell silent, then he said tentatively: 'I'll work for others.'

'What kind of work?'

'Any kind. I can do most any kind of work. Build houses, 799

work on the roads.' And then came the most difficult revelation, the one at which Mr. Sjodin might laugh: 'Maybe I could sort of guide rich people who want to shoot theirself a moose.' Quickly he added: 'I can use a gun, you know.'

Nils Sjodin leaned back and thought of all the immigrants he had known, those daring men and women who had left Europe to brave the blizzards of the northern United States, and it occurred to him that almost every good one had been driven by some intensely personal image of what he or she could accomplish in a new world. They had not drifted into the snowbanks of the north; they had come impelled by great visions, noble aspirations, and although most of them fell short of their dreams, they would, through the years, be astonished at how many of those dreams had been realized. To Sjodin, Elmer Flatch's dream made sense.

'There's a couple of spots far out I've seen during surveying, I wouldn't mind having one of them for myself. But I have to stay near where the town's going to be. For you, with what you have in mind, perfect.'

He borrowed the staff car, a Ford truck, and with Flatch at his side, crossed the Matanuska River, which ran through the heart of the valley before joining the Knik, and after a long ride over almost nonexistent roads, they came to an enclosed valley protected by a magnificent mountain to the south, Pioneer Peak, more than six thousand feet high, with much higher mountains to the west. The kind of stream that Flatch longed for cut through the area: 'It's called Dog Creek. Flows out of a beautiful lake up there in the hills, Dog Lake. And up this way, in easy hiking distance, the great Knik Glacier. They tell me it's something to see when the lakes formed by the glacier break through their dam in summer.'

'Any sites here?'

'About a dozen. Good ones, that is.'

'Any taken?'

'Nobody wants them. Too far out. That's why you can get one without going through the lottery.'

As they were strolling about, along the banks of Dog Creek a moose came exploring to see what kind of creature had come into its terrain, this strange shiny object whose sides flashed sun signals. Preoccupied with the truck, it did not see the two men some distance away, so for perhaps six or eight minutes it nosed about, then majestically strolled back toward the hills.

'I'll take this one,' Flatch said, indicating the surveyed site at the confluence.

'I don't want you to do that, Mr. Flatch,' Sjodin said.

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'When the creek and the river are both high, you'll have flooding. Look at those twigs in the trees.' And after Flatch inspected more closely, he asked: 'The water gets that high?' and Sjodin assured him that the records said it did.

So with the Swede's help, Elmer identified a site on the right bank of Dog Creek, facing Pioneer Peak, which seemed about to topple down upon it, with great glaciers, brown bears and wandering moose nearby. It was a spot of supreme natural beauty, one that any hunter would aspire to, and it was far enough from where the new town would be to provide privacy for decades to come. When he and Sjodin marked off the corners with their piles of rocks, Flatch had forty acres of a new life, arranged by the federal government, which would postpone any mortgage reduction for four years and then extend the payments over thirty years at the rate of three percent per annum.

It was frontiersmanship on the grand scale, and all it required of the nine hundred and three settlers was hard work, the construction of some kind of economy, and the ability to withstand the Alaskan winter at 61.5°N, about the same latitude as southern Greenland.

AS ALWAYS IN A PIONEER SETTLEMENT, THE HEAVIEST

burden fell upon the women, and when Elmer Flatch eschewed a chance for one of the attractive lots near the center of town the ones that would be invaluable within a few years selecting instead the romantic one near the glacier, his wife realized that the task of holding her family together while a cabin was being built and the children established in school would be hers, and like many of the other immigrant women, she was finding the job even more onerous than she had expected. Her husband was a true frontiersman, always ready to cut a new batch of logs or help a distant neighbor who was cutting his. Problems were exacerbated by the fact that those who drew the good sites in town were having their new homes built for them by government carpenters as part of the three-thousand-dollar deal; stubborn outriders like Elmer Flatch had to build their own.

Marketing posed a special problem for Hilda, because one of those geographical accidents occurred which not even brilliant men can anticipate and over which they have no control. Since the settlement was in Matanuska Valley, the newcomers assumed that whatever town grew up to serve them would be called by that name, but a short distance to the north there already existed the trivial town of Palmer. It had but one asset: the Alaska Railroad had a station there and, as had happened so often before throughout the United

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States, it was the railroad, not the town fathers, that decided where civilization would center.

So, despite the fact that a village called Matanuska did take root, Palmer became the local metropolis. But it was far from the Flatch place and it would not be easy to get the doctor or the deliveryman to travel such a distance, especially since no reliable road would reach the Flatches for a long time. But Elmer insisted: 'This is where I want to be,' and he left it to Hilda to make adjustments. However, when one of the army emergency tents was erected on their plot, with a double lining to ward off the bitter winds sweeping down from the glacier, and she had a wood fire burning in her little iron stove, she found life quite tolerable and worked like a Belgian draft horse helping her husband clear the ground and level it for their cabin, which he swore to have under roof by the first heavy snow.

Sometimes at the end of an especially long day, Hilda would sit on a wobbly chair outside the tent, too tired even to worry about supper, and at such times she was tempted to complain, but she refrained out of respect for the other members of her family, all of whom declared repeatedly that 'this is sure a lot better than Thief River Falls.' But one day when everything went wrong, she was overcome by a sense of dismay and she couldn't help wondering if the Flatches were ever going to have a family home, and as she perched on her stool she decided that when Elmer and LeRoy returned from whatever they were doing certainly they weren't doing any work on the house she would give them an ultimatum: 'No more foolin' around. No more helpin'

others till we get our own place finished.'

But her resolve vanished when at dusk her two men came roaring down from the mountains east of the campsite with astonishing news: 'Hey, Mom! We got a moose!'

Knowing that this signified assured food for a long time to come, she cried: 'LeRoy, I'm so proud of you.'

'You don't know the best, Mom. We got two!'

'Yep,' Elmer said as he marched proudly into camp with much the same stride that Roman generals adopted when they came home triumphant from having put down rebels along the borders of the empire. 'I got a big one up by the ice. But LeRoy, he got one half again as big. This boy can hunt!'

With this vigorous news, everything stopped, and Hilda assumed command: 'Flossie, you run down to the Vasanojas', see if they'll let us borry the horse tomorrow. LeRoy, run to the Kirsches', see if Adolf'11 help us butcher tomorrow. I'm goin' in to those people with the six children, ain't been eatin'

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too well. If they'll help bring down the meat. . . Elmer, how far away are the two animals?'

He told her they were about three miles up toward the glacier, and for just a moment he considered that it might be proper for him to run down to the family with six kids, rather than his wife, but then he rationalized to himself: I been out chasin'

moose all day, and she's probably not been doin' nothin' much. Let her go. Off she went to share the good news with her neighbors, and as she hurried westward, following the course of the Knik River, she thought: It's gonna be all right. If Elmer can do his huntin', we're gonna eat and he's gonna be happy.

The women like Hilda who labored so strenuously in building Matanuska, which grew more habitable every week, were aided considerably by an extraordinary old settler in Alaska, a woman of the widest experience who had been assigned by the Alaskan government to represent its interests in the new settlement. She was in her early sixties, white-haired, smallish and with an energy that staggered even proven workers like Hilda Flatch. Her name was Melissa Peckham but she was known as Missy, and in introducing her around the valley, Sjodin told each of the families two relevant facts: 'She don't need the job. Made a pile in the gold fields back in the nineties.

And she's workin' for nothin', so don't throw your weight around, because she can knock any of you flat, and will.'

Missy was one of those women, the immigrant wives discovered, who could face up to any problem without flinching. She controlled a small sum of money provided by the territorial government which she used in dire emergencies and a somewhat larger sum which she provided from her own savings. She took up quarters in Tent Number 7 and made herself an invaluable aide to Mr. Sjodin, but what she did best was ride a horse, which she had bought with her own money, out to the edges of the settlement, where she worked with women like Mrs. Flatch and the mother down the line who had six children.

It was also she who organized the Matanuska Lending Library, gathering from all the homes that would participate books no longer in use and placing them in a tent with a fifteen-year-old girl in charge. She helped churches get title to corner lots and then aided them in starting their rude buildings, but the women of Matanuska remarked that she did not attend any of the church services, and a rumor started that Missy had never been married to the Irishman with whom she lived and who helped her in her charities.

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Two clergymen were delegated to visit with the Murphys, as they were called, and Missy answered their questions forthrightly: 'I escaped Chicago during the bad years.

I had no husband, but that's beside the point. On the gold fields at Dawson, I met Matthew there, and his story is twice as interesting as mine. But that's another point. He was married in faraway Ireland. Left his wife. Never went back. We worked together in Nome and Juneau, we have a daughter, and we've been very happy.'

The Presbyterian minister was appalled by her story, but the Baptist, a man hardened in the oil fields of Oklahoma, was tantalized by her frequent reference to the dramatic history of Mr. Murphy, and when he made inquiries he learned that this Irishman had not only spent two winters on the Mackenzie River route but had then helped the miner John Klope find one of the great treasures at Dawson, after which he had bicycled bicycled, mind you from Dawson to Nome, more than a thousand miles in the dead of winter. The minister, 'who had been having some trouble with his parishioners who complained that they had to draw water by means of a large wooden crank that pulled a heavy bucket up from a considerable depth, had told them: 'All right!

Use a shallower well and die of typhoid fever.'

Fed up with their self-pity, he went to Missy Peckham and asked: 'Would your husband ... I mean, would Mr. Murphy . . . would he consent to telling our church about the Mackenzie River and the bicycle ride?'

'If you get him started, you'll not stop him,' Missy said, and that was how Matthew Murphy of Dawson, Nome and Juneau happened to speak one autumn night at the Matanuska Baptist Church. He said: 'We're all immigrants, aren't we?' and when his listeners nodded, a kind of strength came into his voice, nearly seventy years old, and an unaccustomed straightness to his back. He spoke of those exciting days at Edmonton when so many launched forth to conquer the gold fields, and he ticked off the hundreds who failed for one reason or another: 'If they went by land, they never made it. If they tried horseback, every horse was dead within five weeks. If they went up the easy rivers, they got lost in swamps. And if they did what we did .