Alaska (132 page)

. .'

Turning to where the young were sitting, he said: 'Often in life you'll be offered a choice of two routes, the right one and the wrong one, and you may not know which is which. If you choose the wrong one, you can spend a couple years thrashin' around in the wilderness while those who choose right quickly get to their target.'

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A Norwegian man interrupted: 'But Mr. Sjodin said that when you reached the Klondike, you found yourself a fortune.'

'I found nothin'. Of the hundreds who left Edmonton in search of sure gold, not one of us found a red cent. We all failed.'

'But they told us you were rich.'

'A man I worked for found it. Years after I left him broke, he come by our place in Nome and gave both Missy and me a lot of money. I think it was because he was always in love with Missy.'

This was hardly the way the minister had expected the talk to go. Coughing noisily, he said: 'Mr. Murphy, tell us about your bicycle ride.'

'Dead of winter, locked up in Dawson, no money. Had to get to the gold fields in Nome, a thousand miles away. Talked a Canadian storekeeper into sellin' me a bicycle cheap, and he said: ”Hell, you can't ride”if you'll excuse me, sir, but that's what he said. But in less than a week I had the hang of it, and I set out with some tools, spare chain and half a dozen spare spokes, and off I went to the next batch of gold fields no roads, no trails, just the frozen Yukon River. I made about forty miles a day, one day sixty A river tight frozen is better'n a highway. Of course, when great blocks of ice heave up at angles, it ain't so much fun. But the fact is, I made that thousand miles startin' on February twenty-second and arrivin' on March twenty-ninth, as this clippin' from a Nome paper proves.' And out came a yellow sheet which attested to the fact that Matthew Murphy, who had come to Dawson back in 1899, had traversed the entire distance from Dawson to Nome riding only a bicycle in thirty-six or thirty-seven days: 'You figure it out, but remember that the year 1900 which should have been a leap year wasn't. But those of you who live till the year 2000 will have a leap year that time.'

The minister feared that the man was wandering, but realized that was not the case when Murphy continued: 'Now, don't make too much over this bicycle trip. The next year,

1901, more than two hundred and fifty rode the Yukon. Next year a man named Levie made the thousand miles from Point Barrow to Nome in fifteen days. That's more than twice as fast as I traveled. Can you believe it? A bicycle on ice?'

The Murphys became a center of attraction in Matanuska, for when Missy's story was made known, about her sledding down the Chilkoot and braving the rapids on the Yukon system, the pair were recognized as admirable examples of 805

the Alaskan spirit, but the story persisted that Matt had found himself a gold mine on the Klondike so big and rich that it still paid him dividends.

IN 1937, THE SECOND YEAR OF THEIR OCCUPANCY IN THE

cabin, Flossie became the cynosure of the Flatch family. Twelve years old, a handsome child with her father's love of animals, she was sitting at the window one afternoon when she saw a small brown bear come out of the woods leading to the glacier, and when she alerted her family: 'Hey, look at the bear!' her brother grabbed his rifle on the solid Minnesota principle that if anything out there was moving, shoot it.

This time she stopped him, so instead of receiving a bullet through its forehead, this prowling bear came upon a young girl who moved toward it with two potatoes and a head of cabbage.

The bear stopped, studied her suspiciously, turned and lumbered off, but after some minutes, while she remained stationary, it came back. It could smell her, and the potatoes and the cabbage, and the mix was confusing, so again the bear fled. But it was an inquisitive type, and for the third time approached the place with the tantalizing smells. This time, in the middle of the path it was following, there was a raw potato, which it sniffed several times before chewing it to a tasty pulp.

On subsequent days the bear reappeared, always in late afternoon and always on the alert for this fearless child who approached it with things it liked. One day when she offered a head of cabbage it took it, and before the end of the second week of these visits it was obvious that Flossie had tamed a bear, and when the news circulated through the town, various people came to see the miracle. But it was Mr. Murphy who spoke sense: 'Bears can't be trusted. Especially not brown bears.'

'I thought it was a grizzly,' Flossie said, whereupon Mr. Murphy gave a short lecture on one of the peculiarities of Alaskan life: 'If'n a bear up here is found within fifty miles of the ocean, it's called a brown bear. If'n it's more than fifty miles inland, people like to call it a grizzly. Same bear, same habits.'

'I want my bear to be a grizzly,' Flossie said, and Murphy replied: 'Arms of the ocean touch us on all sides, it's got to be a brown.' Then, seeing her disappointment, he added: 'But there is a way of measurin' that would give you fifty miles to the ocean. So you can call it a grizzly. I'll bet you don't know its Latin name. Ursus horribilis.

Sounds terrifyin', don't it?' She shook her head negatively: 'This grizzly is my friend,' and to Murphy's horror, that afternoon when the bear ap-806

peared, Flossie walked out to greet it, sat playing with it, and fed it some more cabbage. It seemed much bigger now than when it had first appeared, and had Murphy come upon it of a sudden along a wooded trail he would have been petrified.

As the year progressed, so did the friendship between the girl and her grizzly, but excitement at this development faded when something even more astonishing occurred at the Flatch cabin. Because of Flossie's constant visits with her bear, she began to sense that a much larger animal was in the region, and late one afternoon as her bear vanished up the trail, she saw coming down in the opposite direction an enormous black figure, and at first she suspected that a really huge grizzly was approaching her, but she had enjoyed such success with the first bear that she supposed she could do the same with this one. But when the animal came closer she saw that it was a moose with a body as big as a truck. It was a female, an immense ungainly creature that moved awkwardly but with a compelling majesty that arrested the attention of anything that saw her, animal or human, and Flossie assumed that when her tame bear encountered this massive creature, it would be the bear that stepped aside, not the moose.

On that first meeting the moose came within a few feet of the girl before halting.

There was a long inspection by the moose, which had bad eyes, and a wealth of sniffing, then with an inquisitiveness that startled the girl, she came forward to smell more acutely; and once more the wonderful legend that woodsmen believed, and to which Flossie certainly subscribed, came true: 'Pop, this moose knew, from one smell, that I wasn't afraid. Maybe she could even smell that I had been playing with the bear, but she came right up to me. I think she knew I was her friend.'

Flossie had barely delivered this Matanuska version of the old legend when her father grabbed for his rifle, shouting: 'Where is it?' and when Flossie realized that he intended shooting her moose, she screamed: 'No!'

Her father was so surprised by this violent reaction that he fell back a step, dropped his hand from the door latch, and said quietly: 'But, Flossie, a moose has the kind of meat we can sell. We need . . .'

Again she screamed, the anguished cry of a girl who had grown to love all the animals that shared the edge of the glacier with her. She was one with the bear and knew that with patience she could tame this great moose, ten times her weight and half again as tall at the shoulders. Throwing herself in front of the door, she forbade her father to leave the house with his rifle, and after a tense moment when he 807

considered lifting her aside, he surrendered. Allowing her to take the rifle from him, he grumbled: 'When you go to bed hungry, don't blame me,' and she replied: 'There are others up in the mountains,' and he said: 'But if'n he walks right up to our cabin, he wants to be shot. He's entitled to it.'

'It's a she,' Flossie said, and in the days that followed she met with the moose at various locations, and always the huge beast smelled assiduously until she was satisfied that this human being was the one she could trust. On about the seventh visit, Flossie tied a large piece of white ribbon to the hair behind the moose's huge left ear, and she spread word through the school and as much of the town as she could reach that the moose up by the glacier with the white ribbon was tame and belonged to Flossie Flatch.

Unfortunately, the white cloth flopping near her eye irritated the moose so much that by next evening when she came to visit, it had been rubbed off on a spruce branch.

However, she approached Flossie with obvious affection and allowed the girl to tie another ribbon far back on her left flank, and this remained in place long enough for the Matanuska people to become familiar with the story of the pet animal.

Mildred the Moose posed certain problems, because when she appeared at the Flatch cabin she expected to be fed, and her appetite was insatiable: carrots, cabbage, lettuce, potatoes, celery, she took all of them in her big mouth, curling her immense upper lip over them and causing them to disappear down her capacious throat as if she were a magician. However, even if the expected meal turned out to be too meager, she did not display bad temper, and her friendly presence around the cabin made the place seem even more a part of Matanuska's natural wonder.

Flossie was distressed, therefore, when at school she heard from the Atkinson children a constant wailing about the hardships in the valley and protests against the federal government for having brought families into this barren wilderness. When Flossie rebuked the four Atkinsons for their lack of an adventurous spirit, they told her harshly that she was stupid to be playing with a bear and moose when the rest of Matanuska was suffering because the government was not living up to its promise of caring for the immigrants.

When Flossie told her parents of this, her father became quite angry: 'Them Atkinsons, when they lived in Robbin they didn't have a pot to pee in. Now they're puttin' on airs.' Hilda reprimanded him for speaking that way before his children, but he repeated his disgust at people who were offered a new start in life and then complained about little

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inconveniences.

He had a right to judge, because none of the newcomers had worked harder or longer to establish himself in Matanuska. He had built his own house on land that he had selected for his special purposes and, refusing to farm, he had devised a score of imaginative ways to earn his living. He carpentered for others, helped butcher, plowed fields with either horses or tractors provided by the owners, and drove into Anchorage with other men's cars to pick up important orders of medicine or tools. And he even worked now and then at the graveled Palmer Airstrip, helping to take wheels off airplanes and put on skis for winter travel into camps located in the high mountains. But most of all he hunted, bringing back to his cabin the carcasses of moose and bear and an Alaskan deer that natives called caribou, which he sold throughout the district.

One night when he returned with a quarter of a moose dragging behind him in the snow, Hilda said: 'We're expected at a meeting tonight. Harold Atkinson's makin' a formal protest or somethin',' and when she forced Elmer to accompany her into town, they sat in rigid silence as they listened to the Atkinsons and three or four other couples grumbling about every aspect of life in Matanuska. To hear their litany of disappointments was to realize how differently people could interpret the same conditions. 'At every point,' Harold Atkinson was lamenting, 'we've been defrauded by our government. No roads, no proper school, no agricultural help, no marketing plan for the crops we do grow, and no money in the bank which we can borrow.'

Missy and Matt, hearing these picayune complaints, could not restrain themselves, and in the absence of the senior camp officials, who had done a fairly good job so far, even though all schedules did seem to lag, they took the floor, standing together as they had done so often during their Alaskan years. 'Everything you say is true, Mr. Atkinson, but none of it has to do with the starting of a new town here in Matanuska.

And to tell you the truth, it doesn't have to do with getting your family on a solid footing. I think things are ten times better here than they were in Dawson City in 1898 or Nome in 1900, and that's where Alaska got started.'

'This ain't 1898. It's 1937,' John Krull shouted from the rear. 'And what we got to put up with is a disgrace.'

This outraged Matt Murphy, who in his seventieth year saw all situations from a broad perspective. Avoiding any mention of his own heroics in conditions fifty times worse than what the Matanuska settlers were experiencing, he told in lilting voice of the starvation hardships that had driven his 809

people from Ireland during the great famines, and concluded by rebuking the Atkinsons: 'You have a right to complain about things promised but not delivered, but to blame the whole operation makes no sense.'

He succeeded only in so infuriating the protesters that the meeting broke up in a kind of fracas, and at the close of the next week the Flatches learned that the Atkinsons, Krulls and three other families had left Matanuska, abandoning everything, and were heading back to the Lower Forty-eight. Not long thereafter the settlement was flooded with newspaper clippings mailed by friends who said: 'It must be pure hell trying to live in a socialist settlement where everything has gone wrong.' One well-intentioned farmer who wrote to the Flatches said: 'I suppose we'll be seeing you back here one of these days. When you arrive, look me up. Things are a lot better in Minnesota than when you left and I'll be able to find you a real good farm at a bargain.'

What irritated those like the Flatches who stayed in Matanuska, and government people like the Murphys who were doing their best to make the huge experiment work, was the fact that one conservative newspaper after another, across the entire United States, picked up the complaints of the 'go-backs,' as they were called, and castigated both the Matanuska people and the Roosevelt administrators who had devised the program as communists who were introducing alien procedures into honest American patterns.