Eight stars of gold on a field of blue, Alaska’s flag, may it mean to you.
—MARIE DRAKE, “ALASKA’S FLAG”
Offspring of Victory
Logging the Forests
Cold War Standoff
The Forty-ninth Star
Oil Boom on the Kenai
A New Meaning of Wilderness
Earthquake!
“I have a girl back in Wisconsin. We were in high school together,” a smooth-cheeked youngster in a private’s uniform informed territorial governor Ernest Gruening as the governor met him on one of the roads north of Fort Richardson in 1942. “I like this country,” the private continued. “After the war we’re going to get married, and I’ll bring her up here.”
“There are thousands like him,” Gruening later wrote. “They have come to keep free the freest part of all America,…[and] many of them, their task complete, will stay. They will homestead. They will hew log cabins from the wilderness. And the love of adventure that is in the American’s heart will hold them here.” 1
Ernest Gruening was of the old school that unabashedly waxed poetic in both speech and written word. Poetic visions of America’s next frontier aside, however, the governor was absolutely correct in anticipating the new wave of stalwarts who would descend upon Alaska in the two decades after the end of the Second World War. Some of them had been through hell at Attu and Kiska; others had battled wintry weather as fierce as any Japanese charge. But they liked the land. It grew on them. And they were intent upon returning to it. So, too, were others who had only heard its tales.
With them all would come the rumblings of new industries, bigger cities, and increasing refinements in transportation facilities. These rumblings would have lasting consequences, but the postwar years would also be marked by the military rumblings of a new kind of war, the political rumblings of the fight for statehood, and the geologic rumblings of the land itself.