Alaska (147 page)

'Absolutely!' one of the hunters agreed, while the third, a man connected with the insurance of cargoes bound for Alaska, said: 'In a hundred years an area like this would never be able to support itself.'

The banker, who had fought in Italy in World War II, said: 'The important thing to remember is not dollars and cents. They can be negotiated. It's the military posture of our nation. We need Alaska up here as our forward shield. It should really be under the control of our military.'

Each of the three hunters had seen service during the war, but none had served anywhere near Alaska; however, each had strong opinions about the proper defense for the arctic.

'The great danger is Soviet Russia. People make a lot of the fact that at the two little Diomede Islands, one American, one Russian, communism is only a mile and a half from our democracy. That's insignificant, good propaganda but not much else.

However, from the real Siberia to the real Alaska at one important spot is only sixty miles, and that's a real danger.'

The insurance man said: 'No way Alaska could defend itself if the Russkies decided to come over,' and the banker asked: 'What is the population of the place?' and the insurance man replied: 'I looked it up. Federal census 1940

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showed a total population of seventy-two thousand. Single suburbs of Los Angeles have more than that,' and the banker concluded: 'Alaska is best seen as a basket case. It'll always need our help, and to give it statehood would be a criminal miscarriage.'

Nate, busy stowing gear while this conversation progressed, finally felt obligated to break in: 'We defended ourselves pretty well against the Japanese.'

'Wait a minute!' the third hunter protested. 'I was serving on Guadalcanal, and we were scared out of our minds when the Japanese captured your Aleutian Islands so easily. They had a real pincer movement going, South Pacific, North Pacific.'

'We drove them off, didn't we?'

The man from Guadalcanal, thinking that Nate meant the Alaskans alone had defeated the Japanese, said: 'You and about fifty thousand mainland troops to help,' and Nate laughed: 'Me and that fox farmer who scouted the islands didn't have much stateside help.'

The phrase fox farmer

derailed the conversation because the Seattle men had to know what it meant. So Nate spent about half an hour explaining how, on the empty Aleutians, men like Ben Krickel leased entire islands, stocking them with one type of fox, 'maybe silver, they bring the most, or blue, they thrive pretty well, or plain red or even a pretty light gray.'

He told how the Krickels, father and daughter, had harvested the blue foxes of Lapak Island and shipped them off to the dealer in St. Louis, and then he added: 'My brother-in-law became an officer in the Air Corps. He married Krickel's daughter.'

The insurance man was captivated by this story, and exclaimed with the kind of bubbling enthusiasm which enabled him to get close to people he was trying to sell policies: 'I'll be damned! Two marriages in your family, and in each, one person's a standard Minnesotan, the other, half Indian. Isn't that something?'

'I'm half Indian. Sandy Krickel's half Aleut.'

'Just by looking, can you tell one from the other?'

For the first time in this conversation Nate broke into a laugh: 'Me? I can tell an Aleut from an Indian at a hundred yards. But when I act up, Sandy says she can smell an Indian at a hundred and fifty. Not too much love lost among the various natives.'

'But they all have trouble with the white man?' the banker asked, and Nate evaded the question: 'You know, there's about half a dozen different kinds of Eskimos, too.

And a Yup'ik won't take too kindly to an Inupiat.'

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'Which is which?' the insurance man asked, and Nate said: 'Inupiat is north along the Arctic Ocean, Yup'ik is south along the Bering Sea. I prefer the Yup'iks, but they would both like to beat up on me, if they thought they could get away with it.'

'Which they can't?' the insurance man asked, and Nate said: 'Three of them coming at me together might.'

The banker looked up from the bed he was making: 'So with all those differences, you certainly don't want statehood, do you?'

'I do,' Nate said firmly, and the banker asked: 'With only seventy thousand population,'

and Nate said: 'Like with me barroom-fighting Eskimos, up here one man counts double, or maybe triple.'

THE PERSON IN MATANUSKA WHO TOOK THE FIGHT FOR statehood most seriously was Missy Peckham, the feisty seventy-five-year-old who had remained at Matanuska because so many of her friends now lived there. Partly because no one else in the region seemed eligible, the territorial governor had made her the local representative to a Statehood Committee whose job it would be to organize local support for statehood and to represent Alaskan aspirations at meetings in the Lower Forty-eight. For many, such an appointment was a kind of local honor involving no work and not much commitment, but for Missy it became the consuming passion in the remaining years of her life. For she had learned while climbing Chinook Pass or battling for justice at Nome that self-government was not a matter of population size or tax base or conformance to rigid rules, but rather the degree of fire in the human heart. And hers was ablaze, for she had witnessed at close quarters the zeal with which the Matanuska settlers had built a new world for themselves, and she had watched as ardent men constructed their highway through the wilderness. She knew that the people of Alaska were ready for statehood, and that their courage had established their eligibility.

So, taking her assignment seriously, she began to make herself Alaska's civilian authority on one small but important aspect of the problem: the salmon industry.

She had never actually worked in a salmon cannery, but her long residence in Juneau had placed her in touch with some dozen operations like Totem Cannery on Taku Inlet, and from her experiences with both the Seattle owners of such places and the men who worked in them, she had a solid founding in the economics of this crucial industry.

When she put her data together 894

she was able to present a sickening portrait of an indefensible situation, as she did in her first impassioned presentation at a mass meeting in Anchorage: 'The facts are these. The canneries have always been owned by rich men in Seattle, only rarely if ever by anyone in Alaska. By remaining in cahoots with powerful interests in Washington, they've always avoided paying taxes to our government in Alaska. They import workers into our areas for the summer months but pay no taxes on their salaries.

Oh yes! They do pay five dollars a head, five dollars, to a kind of school tax, but not nearly what they should pay for stealing one of our most valuable natural resources.

'What burns me up, and ought to burn you up, is the fact that with their fish traps and fish wheels they're destroying our salmon. In the state of Washington and in Canada they don't allow that wanton killing. So their salmon are increasing year by year. Ours are dying. Because the federal authorities have always been under the control of the Seattle interests, never under ours. Because we aren't a state, we have no senators or congressmen to fight for us.'

She spoke that first time for about fifteen minutes, making a tremendous impression because of the authority with which she had assembled the facts which condemned the present situation; later, when concerned experts began to feed her even more specifics, her standard salmon speech ran about twenty-five minutes, serving as what one admiring advocate of statehood termed 'our barn-burning speech,' but at the height of her popularity a slight, battling woman with a most lively manner of speech one of the experts warned: 'Missy, your talk is all facts and figures. If we send you to the Lower Forty-eight, you'll have to inject more human interest.' Since she had never worked on a salmon boat or in a fishery, she was at a disadvantage, but by accident she received help from a source she could never have anticipated. One evening when she spoke in Anchorage, where the agitation for statehood was growing, she noticed in the audience a handsomely dressed woman in her late forties who leaned forward to follow acutely each of the charges Missy was making. Her presence was perplexing, since Missy could not determine what her race might be: she was certainly not Caucasian, but she was also neither an Eskimo nor an Athapascan: She's probably an Aleut. With those eyes.

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At the end of the rally the strange woman did not depart with the others, but stood aside as several men and women surged forward to congratulate Missy on her stirring speech. And when the hall was nearly empty, the woman came forward, smiled warmly, and extended her hand: 'We used to meet in Juneau, Mrs. Peckham. I was Tammy Ting, Tammy Venn now.'

'You're Ah Ting's little girl? Sam Bigears' granddaughter?'

'I am. Ah Ting and Sam thought very highly of you, Mrs. Peckham.'

'Miss.' Suddenly, as if caught stealing cookies, she clapped her hand over her mouth and grinned: 'Did I say anything awful tonight? About the Venns, I mean?'

And then Tammy said something which would cement the friendship between the two: 'Nothing that I don't say. I'm a strong advocate of statehood, Miss Peckham.'

Missy stared at her, saw the lovely Chinese-Tlingit shadows which gave her face such a provocative expression, and suddenly leaned upward and kissed her. 'I think we better talk,' Missy said, and they returned to Tammy's hotel, where they discussed salmon and canneries and Ah Ting's and Sam Bigears' relations to both. 'It's always confused me,' Tammy said, 'but in English my father's name should have been expressed as Ting Ah. He was Mr. Ah, but he always went by Mr. Ting. So did I. I asked him about this one day, and he sneered: ”Mr. Ah this, Mr. Ah that. Sounds if you're sneezing.

Mr. Ting, sharp, businesslike.”'

'He was certainly businesslike,' Missy said. 'Tell me what it was like at the cannery,'

and the tales which Ah Ting and Sam Bigears had related to their families required hours to unfold. Thereafter, Missy's harangue on salmon took on a most personal touch, with stories of the visit of her old lover Will Kirby to Taku Inlet to try to persuade the Seattle owners to give the salmon a better chance to survive, and the dramatic sinking of the

Montreal Queen.

In fact, Missy's talk became one of the highlights in Alaska's drive toward statehood, for listeners went home and told their neighbors: 'You ought to hear the Peckham woman. She knows what for.'

The highlight of her personal campaign, insofar as salmon were concerned, came at a big meeting in Seattle, where it was essential to enlist the support of Senators Magnuson and Jackson. She telephoned Tammy Venn as soon as she got off the plane: 'Tammy, this is most important. I want to make a good impression and I need your advice.' She was astounded when Tammy answered: 'You'll have no trouble.

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I'm going to speak right after you. I'll cover for any mistakes you make.'

'You're going to speak in favor of statehood? In Seattle?'

'I certainly am.'

'Bless you.'

The two women, appearing toward the end of the program the tough little social worker, the suave Chinese-Tlingit member of Seattle's high society created a sensation, a powerful opening barrage for the statehood debate. The local papers, of course, featured the fact that Tammy Venn was the daughter-in-law of Thomas Venn, president of Ross & Raglan and an inveterate opponent of statehood for a backward area like Alaska, where so many of the Venn interests centered. Next morning, when reporters reached Venn for his reaction to Tammy's bombshell statement, he said austerely: 'My daughter-in-law speaks for herself, but since she left Alaska at a fairly early age, she has not been able to follow recent developments there.'

However, when the same reporters tracked down Malcolm Venn, he said: 'You mean, my wife came out publicly for statehood?' When they chorused 'Yes' he said: 'She's as loony as a bedbug. I'll have to speak to her about this.' Then he laughed: 'Have you ever tried to argue her out of anything?' When asked specifically: 'Then you're against statehood for Alaska?' he said seriously: 'I sure am. That wonderful area was meant to remain a wilderness. With seventy thousand population, it couldn't run a town council, let alone a state.'

Next morning the papers carried Tammy's rebuttal: 'I always suspected my husband knew very little about the place where I was born. The 1950 census figures show that we have 128,643 citizens, and I'm sure I'll convince him by the end of this month that we're entitled to statehood.' But that weekend the papers displayed a good-natured shot of Tom and Lydia Venn, accompanied by Malcolm, standing off to one side while saucy-looking Tammy posed with a banner that Missy Peckham had given her: STATEHOOD

NOW.

The banter in the newspaper produced a most surprising denouement: a fifty-year-old businessman in a blue-serge suit and highly polished black shoes came to Missy's hotel and introduced himself as Oliver Rowntree, in the freight-forwarding business in San Francisco and here in Seattle on some railroad negotiations important to the entire Pacific Coast. He was obviously surprised to see that it was such an elderly woman who was kicking up this fuss about statehood, but quickly got to his point: 'I'm with you a hundred percent, Miss Peckham. I have no position in government and no authority to wield, but I do have a lifetime of information, 897

and it galls me to watch people like Ross & Raglan conspire with the railroads to deny Alaska statehood.'

'Why should you be concerned? Other than as a sensible citizen?'

'I was born in Alaska. Anchorage. I watched my father try to operate a grocery story there. One of the best, equal to anything in the Outside, as we called it then.'

'Lower Forty-eight now.'

'I do a lot of work with Hawaii. Out there they call it the Mainland. And it's my experience with them that has made me so bitter about Alaska. I want to see the people up your way get a fair break, at last.'

'You're doing this for your father, aren't you?'

'I suppose I am. I saw the way he had to struggle to earn a buck because his neck was in a noose. Came to Oregon where the laws were sensible, had no trouble at all in building the best grocery north of San Francisco, died a wealthy man with a chain of eight moderate-sized stores, each one a bonanza.