At the turn of the century with reports of innumerable mineral resources and a limitless agricultural potential surfacing, this little-known U.S. possession suddenly grabbed the world’s attention. As pioneers and settlers rushed into the frontier and returned during this period, Alaskans founded many of today’s cities (including the two largest, Anchorage and Fairbanks), birthed a structure of highway and railroad transportation, and established a judicial system and a rudimentary form of self-government, which led to statehood a half-century later.

All this activity took place during the Progressive Age in American politics. It was a time of social and economic reform, when Congress and federal agencies recognized the need to regulate large corporate trusts, manage extraction of natural resources, ensure some level of fairness for consumers and workers, and build much-needed infrastructure projects. At the heart of the Progressive movement was the conviction that a strong federal government could be the agent of change, because government was the only entity with power sufficient to produce broad reforms.

The swelling Alaska population benefited from the Progressive movement in a number of ways. By 1900, Congress had enacted criminal and civil codes and appointed judges to serve each of the Alaska territory’s three newly established judicial districts. In 1906, a new federal law allowed Alaska residents to elect a delegate to represent them in the U.S. House of Representatives. And in 1912, Congress responded to Alaskans’ demands for self-government by creating an elected territorial legislature.

But the greatest of all Progressive Age accomplishments for Alaska was passage of the Alaska Railroad Act in 1914.

The act provided $35 million to build and operate a railroad from an unspecified tidewater port into the Alaskan interior. President Woodrow Wilson viewed Alaska as a storehouse that should be unlocked, and a railroad was, in his words, the means of “thrusting in the key to the storehouse and throwing back the lock and opening the door.”

It was significant that it was the federal government, and not private sector enterprise, that did this job. At the time Railroad Act passed, Progressives nationwide were at war with the monopolizing power of corporate trusts.

In Alaska, two of the biggest business entities in the world had combined to form an enterprise that controlled nearly every sector of the economy. The Morgan-Guggenheim Alaska Syndicate, owned by New York financier J. P. Morgan along with the international Guggenheim mining company, dominated the mineral extraction and transportation infrastructure in most of the territory. The syndicate sent teams of lobbyists to Washington to block efforts to build a government railroad, which would interfere with its monopoly on transportation. The syndicate was—as James Wickersham, Alaska’s non-voting delegate to Congress, described it—the “overshadowing evil” that darkened the prospects of every struggling pioneer in the new and developing territory.

“Which shall it be?” Wickersham thundered from the floor of the US House of Representatives in arguing for the Alaska Railroad Act. “Shall the government or the Guggenheims control Alaska?”

The answer from a Progressive-minded Congress and White House was clear: it would not be the Guggenheims.

Never before in the history of the westward movement of Americans had Congress stepped in to build a transportation system where private enterprise could likely have provided comparable service. Moreover, the railroad was quite explicitly an expression of the country’s anti-trust, anti-monopoly mood.

Progressives saw Alaska as a wide-open place where their ideals could be put into practice, a model of the democracy they wanted. It would open vast areas of mineral and agricultural wealth, creating jobs and opportunities for the working public; it would demonstrate the Progressive conviction that government at its best was an agent for progress and improvement in people’s lives; and it would make a statement of the strength of federal regulatory control in the era of popular reaction against the workings of corporate trusts. It would operate in a place where the giant Alaska Syndicate threatened to monopolize every sector of the economy.

Of course, Progressive-age politics was not the singular reason why Alaska was developed. The opportunities to be had in this northern frontier were exciting enough on their own to attract multitudes of pioneers, settlers, and entrepreneurs. Infrastructure would surely have been built even without the benefits of Progressivism’s considerable influence.

Alaskans were not always happy about the federal government’s investment—or lack thereof. During the Progressive Era they complained endlessly about what they perceived as neglect and ill-treatment at the hands of the federal government. “Think of it!” a Skagway newspaper cried in 1906. “Here we are a people denied the right of self-government, taxed without representation.” The editor concluded that Alaska lived under “a system compared with which the government of the American colonies under George III was broad and liberal.”

Alaskans in that moment had good reasons for their outrage: The territory’s vast coal deposits remained off-limits to mining, and hundreds of workers sat idle for eight years starting in 1906 as Congress failed to pass legislation providing for a fair leasing system on federal coal lands. This was only one example of government delays and red tape that infuriated residents of the North.

Such treatment led Alaskans to feelings of abuse and what amounted to a split personality in regard to their relationship with the federal government. They decried the lack of assistance where they saw a need while at the same time they wanted the government off their backs, leaving them free to develop the resources without interference.

Federal help did come to Alaska, but it arrived piecemeal over the course of decades. Over time, the government responded with many projects and benefits that enriched Alaska. These included highways, national parks, systems of public education and health care, and military bases, to name just a few. From today’s point of view, we can see that Alaska as a territory and a state has been enriched far more than neglected or abused by the federal government.

By 1916, Progressivism had run its course, though in its 20 years of life it had accomplished much in the way of social, political, and economic reform. Its legacy includes antitrust legislation, regulation of interstate commerce, child labor laws, direct election of U.S. senators, conservation of natural resources, and a movement toward women’s suffrage. The forces underlying all these advances were a commitment to the rights of the masses and a belief in the power of the federal government to effect change.

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Codfish fever got its start in the years following the discovery of gold in central California in 1848, when San Francisco grew quickly from a sleepy hamlet into a thriving commercial center. Many of those who migrated to California during the Gold Rush were from western Europe. For them, salted cod was a dietary staple.

With their big, sad eyes and lack of distinguishing features, cod have a somewhat homely appearance. Pacific cod reach maturity at an age of 4 or 5 years, at which time the fish ranges in length from about 20 to 23 inches. Older, exceptional specimens can be 6 feet long and weigh up to about 85 pounds.

Nutritionally, cod flesh is high in protein and very low in fat. In addition to being simple to produce (salted cod is simply cod that has been preserved by salting and drying), the food has a long shelf life and is easily transportable. Prior to cooking, the fish is freshened—rehydrated and desalted—by soaking it in cold, fresh water. When cooked, the flesh of cod is white, flakes well and has a mild, slightly sweet flavor that lends itself to a variety of preparations.

Initially, East Coast merchants supplied Californians with salted Atlantic cod shipped via the Isthmus of Panama or Cape Horn. But this was a long, expensive journey for the fish, and California entrepreneurs recognized an opportunity to replace Atlantic cod with Pacific cod.

It was one Captain Mathew Turner, an opportunistic merchant, who pioneered the U.S. Pacific cod fishery.

In 1857, Turner sailed the 120-ton brig Timandra from San Francisco, carrying cargo for the Russian port of Nicolaevsk. It was early in the season, and ice on the river where the port was located kept Turner waiting for three weeks in the Okhotsk Sea. During the wait, the Timandra’s crew, as a pastime, began fishing with handlines over the side of the ship. The men were surprised at the abundance of codfish they encountered. Turner himself had never previously seen codfish—the Pacific variety is virtually identical to its Atlantic cousin—but he was aware of their market value.

In 1863, Turner made another trading voyage to Russia. This time, he provisioned the Timandra with fishing gear and 25 tons of salt, planning to catch codfish on the return voyage. The trip was a success; the Timandra returned to San Francisco laden with 30 tons of salted cod—the first-ever cargo of salted cod from the Pacific fishing grounds to be landed on the U.S. West Coast. The fish were air dried on Yerba Buena Island, in San Francisco, then sold locally for 14 cents per pound—about $4 per pound in today’s dollars.

Captain Turner’s success inspired others, and in 1865, six small schooners that had been built for New England fisheries sailed around Cape Horn and then set off from San Francisco to the Okhotsk Sea fishing grounds.

Turner himself chose to prospect nearer home. In late March, he sailed for Alaska on the 45-ton schooner Porpoise and about a month later arrived at the Shumagin Islands, which are along the southern shore of the Alaska Peninsula. The fishing was good, but Turner feared the market would be glutted when the Okhotsk Sea fleet returned, so he departed for San Francisco before filling his vessel to capacity. The Porpoise arrived home in early July—well before the Okhotsk Sea fleet—with 30 tons of salted cod. It was the first-ever delivery of codfish from Alaska.

The prospects of the codfish industry sparked a lot of interest, and it seemed for a while that anyone in San Francisco who could get their hands on a boat—even a marginally suitable boat—entered the cod-fishing trade. Among them was a junk-and-secondhand-goods dealer who started in the business with the brig Glencoe: “Like everything else that old John had, the vessel was poor, the salt was poor, and the fish were, of course, yellow or sour, dried up or slimy, but they went onto the market and helped damn Pacific codfish,” explained C. P. Overton, of San Francisco’s Union Fish Company, in 1906.

Another colorful character was Nick Bichard, who was born in Great Britain but amassed a fortune in the Civil War and dispatched a motley array of ships to catch cod. In Overton’s words, Bichard was a “large, swarthy man, erratic in speech and action, mixing codfish, coal, lumber, and junk, keeping most of his books in his head, he never knew what his cargoes cost him or what they sold for.” Eventually, the vagaries of the codfish industry absorbed all his money, ships, and considerable properties, and he died almost penniless.

Codfish fever was in full swing. The next spring, March 1866, 18 vessels, each carrying from three to six dories and a crew of 10 to 18 men, departed San Francisco for the northern fishing grounds. In all, the vessels caught 706,200 cod, with a salted weight of 1,614 tons. Notably, a portion of the catch—255 tons—was caught in Alaska, on grounds discovered by vessels en route to the Okhotsk Sea, and the best catches came from the vicinity of the Shumagin Islands, which quickly became the center of the industry as fewer and fewer of the San Francisco fishermen bothered traveling to the Okhotsk Sea.

Unfortunately, few of the new entrants into the business knew anything about catching or, very importantly, properly curing the fish. Later, C. P. Overton described the early years of his city’s codfish industry in less-than-flattering terms:

[The Californians] were a rough and ready people and when they went into the codfish business they went in on the same plan. Any old vessel would do, any kind of salt would do, any sort of tanks or butts [barrels] in any sort of shed would do. The fish were carelessly cured with stained and dirty salt; they were kept in leaky butts or were even piled up on the floor in dry salt, exposed to the air and not in pickle [brine] at all … Under such conditions the finest kind of codfish are necessarily turned out yellow, hard, sour, tough, everything that is bad and such undesirable goods naturally are salable only to camps and among the poorest and least fastidious consumers.

Within just a few years, however, the trade began to be professionalized. The earliest fish merchants were, according to Overton, “two enterprising Yankees of the old school” who had gained their first experience in the codfish trade by selling salted cod on commission, and who would do “anything else that promised a dollar.” They bought salted fish, dried them, and sold cod liver oil and other products.

Cod fishermen with cod on Gus Sojberg’s dock in Unga, Alaska. Courtesy of Peggy Arness.

In 1867, the year the U.S. purchased Alaska from Russia, the first permanent business on the West Coast devoted exclusively to the fish trade opened. San Francisco businessman Thomas W. McCollam saw an opportunity in conducting a codfish business “on the most approved methods” and bought his first cargo of salted cod. The following year, McCollam journeyed to New England, where he purchased the fishing schooners Wild Gazelle, Flying Mist, and Rippling Wave. The three vessels departed for San Francisco, but the Rippling Wave was lost while transiting the Strait of Magellan. McCollam sent his remaining two boats to the Shumagin Islands, where the fish were abundant, and he then set about establishing a permanent fishing station on the islands. In 1876, he purchased a hunting camp, complete with several buildings and a wharf, at Pirate Cove, a picturesque and well-sheltered harbor at the north end of Popof Island, and converted the camp into Alaska’s first codfish shore station.

Originally manned by a company agent and about eight fishermen, Pirate Cove would gradually become the largest and most important codfish station in Alaska. Fishermen lived at the station and handlined for cod from dories (one man to a boat) in nearby waters, leaving the station very early in the morning and returning early in the afternoon to dress and salt their catch. Periodically a transporter from San Francisco would bring salt and other supplies and carry away a cargo of salted fish.

Back in San Francisco, McCollam searched for a place to cure his fish. He first started doing so north of the city, in Sausalito, but then moved his operation to a site near the mouth of Redwood City Creek, about 30 miles south of San Francisco, where he constructed wharves, storehouses, and flake (curing) yards. The flake yards were covered with lattice-like outdoor drying racks—known in the trade as flakes or flakeboards—that were used to dry fish during sunny weather. By 1876, McCollam had moved his operation to Belvedere Island, on Richardson Bay, about five miles north of San Francisco. The facility, called Pescada Landing, included wharves, fish houses, and nearly 14,000 square feet of flake yards. The main building was two stories high, with tanks that each held 12 tons of fish on the ground floor. In the 1880s and ’90s, McCollam merged with other companies, and together they formed the Union Fish Company in 1898.

Union Fish Co.’s codfish station in Pirate Cove, Popof Island, Alaska, dated May 1913. Courtesy of John N. Cobb photographs, University of Washington Collections.

But survival in the cod business required more than just Yankee savvy; it also demanded the ability to survive booms and busts. Production codfish in Alaska in the 19th century peaked in 1883 with a catch of 1,720,000 fish, followed by a period of reduced production that lasted almost two decades. Codfish fever, at that point, had run its course. In 1892, J. W. Collins, head of the U.S. Fish Commission’s Division of Fisheries, wrote its epitaph:

[F]or some years, the season of exceptional success was often the cause of disaster. Large profits generally created a temporary ‘boom.’ Firms or individuals hastened to engage in the fishery … Too often the products could scarcely be sold at any price because of the excess of supply over demand. The result was necessarily disastrous, and those who had hastened to engage in an enterprise because others had been “lucky” usually abandoned it with the utmost precipitation, leaving the field only to those whose “luck” or experience enabled them to succeed under conditions that ruined or discouraged their competitors.

Collins attributed the decline to market conditions (exacerbated by the inconsistent quality of salted codfish produced on the Pacific Coast), keen competition from East Coast producers, and the “tendency for capital to seek investment of the more promising salmon fisheries of Alaska.” And there was no lack of codfish. Collins wrote that the fishing grounds were “believed capable of furnishing an unlimited amount of cod.” This statement was clearly an exaggeration, but cod were definitely available in more-than-sufficient quantities to supply the California market.

Codfish fever may have faded, but the traditional Alaska salted-codfish industry persisted—and for some years thrived—after the fever was long-forgotten. In 1950, the Puget Sound-based Pacific Coast Codfish Company’s wooden sailing schooner C. A. Thayer made its final cod-fishing trip to Alaska, ending what some people refer to as Alaska’s salt-cod era. By that time, refrigerators had become common in American homes, and fresh and frozen cod had largely displaced the salted product.

The National Park Service restored the C. A. Thayer in the early aughts, and it is now moored at the San Francisco Maritime National Historical Park.

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They were aboard the first American commercial jet to land there since the United States and USSR had imposed a Cold War “Ice Curtain” across the Bering Sea some 40 years earlier. Orr, a 26-year-old Siberian Yupik Alaska Native, grew up on the tip of Alaska’s St. Lawrence Island, the mountains of Russia’s Chukotka Peninsula visible on the western horizon. Her family’s shortwave radio sometimes picked up chatter in Russian. “That was the language of spies,” recalled Orr, who imagined Soviet frogmen splashing up on her village’s gravel beach.

The Alaska Airlines’ “Friendship Flight” helped melt the Ice Curtain by reuniting Alaska and Russia Native people separated for four decades. As soon as she made her way into Provideniya’s chaotic airport terminal that day, the first person Orr met was a member of her own St. Lawrence Qiwaghmii clan.

That flight and other headline-grabbing initiatives by citizen-diplomats to help end the Cold War launched decades of perilous but prolific progress. These citizen-led initiatives not only overcame a stalemate; they offered a durable model of grassroots international cooperation that could be useful around the world—and even in these familiar Northern climes, where the warming oceans have renewed geopolitical conflict over control of the Arctic.

The history of people-to-people connections here is an old one. After the Bering Land Bridge disappeared under the icy Bering Sea an estimated 18,000 years ago, indigenous peoples from Asia and North America plied the 55 miles between the Alaska and Russia in walrus-skin boats. These Inupiaq and Yupik people spoke common languages and shared similar subsistence cultures, with coastal residents surviving primarily on fish and marine mammals while interior Natives followed vast herds of reindeer, commonly known in Alaska as caribou.

The strait was the site of international cooperation during World War II, as the United States supplied nearly 8,000 Lend-Lease warplanes to assist the Soviet war effort. But soon after the war, Cold War suspicions froze those gestures of good will. The Soviets forcefully exiled Natives living on their own Big Diomede Island, replacing them with a military surveillance post aimed at Alaska.

In 1948, American FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, with the concurrence of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, decided national security interests outweighed those of the region’s Natives. The United States and USSR suspended a 10-year-old agreement permitting visa-free travel by Natives, replacing it with an Ice Curtain which sealed the border and isolated indigenous families on either side.

Darlene Pungowiyi Orr (left) of Alaska meets distant relatives from the Russian Far East village of Sireniki. Photo Courtesy of Darlene Orr.

For the next 40 years, Alaskans and Soviets eyed each other through rifle scopes and the cockpits of fighter jets. At the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, an Alaska-based U-2 spy plane drifted into Soviet airspace and was nearly shot down by Soviet MiG’s. In 1983, the Soviet military blew up a Korean civilian airliner in this same North Pacific neighborhood, killing all 269 on board.

By the 1980s, the last Alaska Natives to interact with long-lost relatives in the Soviet Far East wanted one final opportunity for reunification before passing from the scene. Their quest coincided with Mikhail Gorbachev’s rise to power. Unlike his predecessors, Gorbachev encouraged interactions with the West, burnishing his image as an enlightened reformist.

But Alaska Natives faced intransigence from their own national government. President Ronald Reagan resisted people-to-people overtures as incompatible with his “peace through strength” foreign policy.

So average Alaskans joined the campaign to reunify Bering Strait Natives. Business and civic promoters also jumped at the prospect of contacts with the mysterious Soviet Union after 40 years of isolation.

A Nome realtor engaged in “balloon diplomacy,” attempting to launch weather balloons across the strait carrying goodie bags and messages of friendship. A Juneau musician led 67 Alaska Natives and other performers singing and dancing their way across the USSR to promote peace.

In 1987, a California endurance athlete swam the 2.5 miles between Alaska’s Little Diomede Island and Russian Big Diomede in 38-degree seas in nothing but a swimsuit, goggles, and cap to highlight Cold War tensions. A medical doctor born to glitterati Hollywood parents returned to his Alaska Native roots to dedicate his career to reuniting Bering Sea Natives by addressing their common health challenges.

These efforts finally won the blessing of both national governments and launched decades of chaotic but often productive interactions in business, culture, science, and education, with thousands of Alaskans and Russians crossing the International Date Line on regular flights by Alaska Airlines and other air carriers. Nearly 60,000 Russians learned western business practices in training centers set up by Alaskans across the Russian Far East. Enticed by Alaska’s guarantee of in-state tuition, more Russian students attended the University of Alaska Anchorage than any other American university.

Alaskans helped form dozens of Russian Rotary Clubs that improved care to elderly pensioners hit hard by the Soviet Union’s 1991 collapse. Alaska and Russia communities rushed to establish sister cities to strengthen civic and commercial ties. And scores of Alaskans and Russians married, settling in each other’s countries and advancing cultural understanding.

Endurance swimmer Lynne Cox approaches a snowy beach on Soviet Big Diomede Island after becoming the first person to swim across the Bering Strait from Alaska’s Little Diomede Island in 1987. Photo by Claire Richardson.

With the dawn of the 21st century, relations cooled across the strait as well as between Moscow and Washington. Russia’s rip-the-bandage-off transition to a market economy under Boris Yeltsin was too chaotic for many U.S. companies. Vladimir Putin’s subsequent rise to power was initially welcomed for stabilizing the economy, but as his regime restricted the operations of international companies and non-profits and infringed on human rights, many westerners ceased their involvement with the country.

Today in the Bering Strait air service is limited and visits are burdened by bureaucracy and high costs, so contacts are rare. Relations between countries at the highest levels also have deteriorated as tit-for-tat sanctions, expulsion of diplomats, and crackdowns on “foreign agents” harken back to the Cold War.

The year 2017 was the 150th anniversary of America’s purchase of Alaska from Russia. At many events marking the occasion, Alaskans said they remained inspired by the vision of William Seward, President Lincoln’s Secretary of State, who consummated the Alaska purchase. Seward, a bold internationalist, believed Alaska could advance a U.S.-Russian relationship and strengthen America’s standing in the world.

Fulfilling Seward’s vision of U.S.-Russia cooperation could start with the natural affinity between citizens of the Far North regardless of national borders. Alaskans and nearby Russians are challenged by common problems—climate, geography, transportation, indifference from our national capitals—for which common solutions can work.

That’s especially the case among the indigenous peoples who struggle on both sides of the strait to preserve traditional languages and culture, combat substance abuse, and scratch out a subsistence way of life endangered by climate change. A 1989 U.S.-Soviet “visa-free” agreement for travel by Alaska and Russia Natives remains in place, but contacts suffer from costly and irregular transportation.

Managing a rapidly changing Arctic is the area of greatest potential cooperation between our countries. Nearly half the world’s Arctic falls within Russia, and the United States is an Arctic nation only because of Alaska. As Russia beefs up its fleet of some 40 ice-breaking vessels and opens scores of mothballed Soviet-era Arctic military bases, the United States and Russia should expand joint efforts for search and rescue, environmentally sound resource development, and scientific research.

Three decades ago, Alaskan and Russian citizen-diplomats melted the formidable Cold War Ice Curtain separating them in the face of significant resistance. Many were branded kooks, communists or worse. Juneau musician Dixie Belcher was summoned to the Alaska legislature to explain her suspected ties to the KGB, while Alaska Gov. Steve Cowper was criticized for cozying up to “reds.”

Darlene Orr was so inspired by that day-long visit to Provideniya that she mastered the Russian language and returned to the Russian Far East 13 times, dedicating her career to researching Native languages and native plants. On one trip, she ignored warnings about visiting restricted areas, dressed herself as an average Russian, and spent a long day on the coast harvesting seaweed and mushrooms.

“It was worth any risk to me to visit the shoreline where my ancestors had walked,” she said.

Inspired with courage and persistence like Darlene Orr, Alaska and Russia citizen-diplomats overcame enormous obstacles to transform history.

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The conservationists’ efforts culminated with the Alaska Lands Act of 1980, the most significant land conservation measure in U.S. history. It protected over 100 million acres of federal lands in Alaska from development, doubled the size of America’s national park and refuge system, and tripled the amount of land officially designated as “wilderness,” America’s most protective status. The Lands Act was generally cheered in the U.S., and Alaskans played key roles in its passage. But the new state’s experience of having so much land—so much wealth—wrested from it by the federal government left most Alaskans resentful and wary. President Obama’s recent proposal to extend wilderness protection to the coastal plain of the Arctic Refuge—at once a prospective oil resource and the richest wildlife habitat and most scenic part of the Refuge—reopens an epic, and repetitive, conservation battle.

It’s a fight I’ve been involved with since the summer of 1989, after my junior year in college, when a buddy and I drove from Florida to Alaska to help clean up the Exxon Valdez oil spill. A year later, I moved to Fairbanks, Alaska to work for the Northern Alaska Environmental Center as a grassroots organizer to help end America’s dependence on fossil fuels by constraining supply (keeping oil from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge from ever going to market) and driving the price of crude to where alternative energy sources could compete. I rolled into Fairbanks the day Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and went straight to work organizing Alaskan preservationists against Alaska’s congressional delegation and the Alaskans who said “it’s our oil”—by which they meant Alaska’s oil to pump and sell. But the Alaskans with whom I worked—on the notion that “this land is our land”—defeated the Alaskan majority, as they had in 1980, by allying with groups like the Sierra Club and the Wilderness Society that could mobilize the national majority of people who wanted wild places protected.

In the political quiet that followed, I explored the Arctic. I soon bought a small wilderness guiding company, which I was able to grow because the Refuge’s pristine vibrancy—and the attention from the political controversy surrounding “The Last Great Wilderness”—made a ready market.

Visitors to the Refuge get silence—some of the lowest ambient noise values on Earth—and clean air that you could imagine rolling down from the North Pole. Only in the Arctic Refuge can you float 100 miles of untrammeled, free-running river from its headwaters into the Arctic Ocean. And somewhere along the way as you acclimate to the 24-hour daylight, your small party can be overrun by caribou. You can spot wolves with bloodied snouts and pendulous bellies cruising the tussocky ground with heads low, ears flat. Or happen upon a polar bear den while walking atop a perennial snowdrift. But only if you accept wilderness on its own summer terms: wind storms that flatten every tent in camp, pooping in a group latrine in horizontal snow, portaging boats and gear over ice floes, or welcoming a snow squall as relief from mosquitoes.

Alaskans who would rather get at what oil may lie beneath the coastal plain point out that the vibrant summer season is the exception in the Arctic Refuge. No one visits during the cold, forbidding eight-month winter so the Refuge should be made to yield something for Alaskans. Most of Alaska’s richest one percent created their wealth from raw materials like timber, fish, minerals, and oil, and most everyone else in the private sector makes a living serving those industries. But oil is king. Ninety percent of Alaska’s state budget is funded by oil. Oil pumped today has to be replaced with new discoveries, and Obama’s intentions cast a dark cloud over future discoveries and Alaska’s future.

Alaska’s winters—particularly in Fairbanks—cause an acute utilitarianism that doesn’t readily recognize non-economic values. Even today, life is a struggle that can seem an unfair contest at minus 40 F. So why would anyone—by enlarging a wilderness area—take an economic possibility off the table?

I know why, because I have had the great privilege of knowing the coastal plain. I also believe President Obama’s proposal to protect the coastal plain is a palliative to his move—also recently announced—to allow oil drilling off the East Coast from Georgia to Virginia. The hand that giveth also taketh away, and most Alaskans will count themselves among the taken as the president allocates America’s wealth in land and water to balance America’s need for oil and its desire for wilderness.

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Decades later, as a historian of science writing a book about the invention of the Fresnel lens and living far away from Alaska, the strange example in the museum took on a new importance. The glittering lenses, which permitted lighthouses to transmit light over longer distances and with more varied patterns, had been some of the first harbingers of my home state’s entrance into the modern world. The first Fresnel lenses had been ordered for Alaska within weeks of the discovery of gold in the Klondike, and the new, lighted shipping lanes linked Alaska to a global market.

As I studied the use of the lenses around the world, I saw this story repeating itself, with the Fresnel heralding a new global connectedness—literal beacons of a modern age. These painstaking, expensive pieces were sent by the thousands to the remotest, most inaccessible corners of the earth.

I got it in my mind that I wanted to visit Cape Spencer, the original location of my childhood lens. This was one of the few Alaskan lighthouses that braved the waters of the open ocean, sitting on the coast of the panhandle in the state’s southeastern corner to mark the spot where ships would turn in to the safer waters of the Inside Passage, an island-protected path down the coast to Washington state.

Photographs of the Cape Spencer lighthouse reveal a structure atop a jagged scrap of rock striking in its desolation, sitting a good ways offshore amid a number of other jagged scraps of rock. With cliffs too steep to land a boat, Cape Spencer’s tenders had to be hauled up in a box attached to a crane. As Coast Guard lore has it, no one ever showed up sober to their year-long tour of duty there. Unmanned by the 1970s, the lighthouse was a particularly lonely example of a technology that has become an icon of loneliness. I wanted to go.

I thought it would not be too hard. I visit my family in Alaska most summers, and my father lived about as close to the spot as humanly possible, in a small town called Gustavus on the inland entrance to Glacier Bay. He also owned both a boat and an airplane. As we loaded the boat to go fishing near the beginning of my visit, I mentioned that it would be cool to go check out Cape Spencer.

“That’s probably not a good idea,” my father replied, with the slight smile Alaskans often resort to when dealing with lower 48-ers who have obviously not yet realized how easily nature can kill you. Lighthouses, after all, are for warning ships away from the dangerous rocks waiting to scuttle them. Moreover, our little boat was no match for the rough waters of the open ocean. We stayed, instead, in the relative refuge of Icy Strait.

He offered to fly me by it in his airplane instead, and added that we could also see the spot close by where a tsunami had leveled trees over a quarter mile up the side of a mountain. I was all in.

Activities in Alaska are always a negotiation with the weather, however, and we found ourselves grounded with rain and zero-visibility cloud cover. A few more days of this, and it was time for me to head back home to Mississippi, lighthouse unseen. Remoteness and inaccessibility had won.

Still, I think of Cape Spencer when asked if I have any favorite lighthouses. Sometimes the places that stick in our minds are the ones we have never visited at all.

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In Seattle, buses transported us to Fort Lawton, where we were billeted while we awaited a troop ship. We spent several days at Lawton housed in ugly tarpapered barracks. Our days were unstructured and therefore long. Some of the guys played poker, and others who looked more studious played cribbage and taught the game, too. Soon I was expertly calling out, “Fifteen two, fifteen four, and a run of three for seven points,” and moving my peg seven places forward on the wood scorekeeper.

On the morning of our departure we stuffed our belongings into our duffel bags, took our leave of the potbellied coal-burning stove that had kept us warm during that cold and rainy Seattle week, and boarded trucks that took us to the U.S.S. Frederick Funston (which had landed American troops at Salerno during World War II). As we walked up the gangplank, I pondered my good fortune in not having to board a ship bound for Korea, where so many of my fellow soldiers were going to lose their lives.

We immediately descended into the bowels of the ship to our assigned bunks—hammocks stacked three or four high (it took a little practice to maneuver one’s body into and out of a hammock). The ship sailed out of Seattle and through the Juan de Fuca Straits on an exquisitely clear day, Mt. Rainier presiding in the distance. At night, the Frederick Funston sailed under wartime conditions, blacked-out. Coming out on deck after sunset was to enter a world of absolute darkness. I heard the water of the ocean but could not see it. The only illumination sparkled in the heavens many light-years above, a wondrous, and humbling, sight.

Three days out of Seattle we docked at the military port of Whittier, Alaska, on Prince William Sound (where the Exxon Valdez caused an oil spill decades later), where we boarded a train that would take us to Fort Richardson, just outside the city of Anchorage some two hours away. That would be my permanent station. We saw moose grazing along the track and got our first glimpse of the snow-capped Chugach mountain range that overlooks Anchorage and Fort Richardson.

Our barracks were Quonset huts with semicircular metal roofs that curved down to form walls. The huts were heated by the same kind of potbellied stoves we had at Fort Lawton. Those stoves, and the fur-lined parkas over our uniforms, were our indispensable allies against the bracing Alaska air. (The coldest it ever got while I was there was 29 degrees below zero. That, the Anchorage newspapers assured us, was a cold spell.)

I put my gear away and lay down to continue reading about C.S. Forester’s Commodore Hornblower and his battles against the French in defense of the interests of the English Crown. Someone asked if I would like to join a group that was going to the PX, the Post Exchange. We stomped over the crinkly snow, led by a fellow soldier with a flashlight. There were no streetlights. There were no streets.

Not long afterwards we moved from the huts into a newly constructed fortress-like, three-story concrete building. Our 50th Army Postal Unit occupied one half of a first-floor wing of the building. In the other half, separated from us by a wide aisle, lived another unit, the 43rd Army Band. Each half was divided into cubicles about 12 feet square into which fit three bunks, two beds per bunk. Six of us used each cubicle. We lived in very close quarters.

The members of the Band lived close to us physically, but they were miles apart culturally. Like musicians everywhere they talked about their gigs, often playing for dances at the Officers’ Club. Still, one lazy Saturday afternoon I did join a group of them in one of their cubicles. One of the band members was trying out the art of hypnosis on a volunteer and telling him that, after coming out of his trance, he must say “Hooray for Hollywood!” every time someone lit a match. The post-hypnotic suggestion worked. Each time somewhat lit a match the volunteer would blurt out “Hooray for Hollywood!” We all found it hilarious, but the subject got angry over being laughed at for reasons he didn’t understand. When the amateur mesmerist tried to break the spell and failed—the subject kept yelling out “Hooray for Hollywood” with every lit match—he began to panic. Fortunately, a more experienced hypnotist came and restored order.

Our new building had a spacious mess hall, a barbershop, a laundry room, and a dry cleaner. One day I went to the dry cleaner with some uniforms, and, as I walked to the counter to set down the clothes, the proprietor, an Eskimo woman, moved to the door, shut and locked it, switched off the lights, and sidled over to me to try to embrace and kiss me. I was not flattered, and got out of there as rapidly as I was able. The Army word for Eskimo women was “clootchie,” a terribly offensive term, but incidents of heavy-handed female-to-male seduction attempts such as the one I experienced were, I learned from my fellow soldiers, common.

On most days we would rise at a leisurely hour, shower and shave, make our beds, police the area, have breakfast in the mess hall, and walk to work. I enjoyed trudging through the snow, especially on days when it was falling heavily, and we padded silently through the hushed world that enveloped us. Only our muffled voices disturbed the still whiteness that blanketed the landscape.

Major Wilson, a dapper man in his late 30s in the mustached style of the actor Ronald Colman, was the officer in charge of our unit. In civilian life Wilson had been a counselor at National Schools, a trade school that was located on Figueroa Boulevard in Los Angeles.

The army allowed for a modicum of individuality, contrary to what you might think. I never wore the droopy matching cap to our fatigues. Many soldiers wore their pant legs loose so that they covered their boots. Others, including me, had the more stylish sense of attaching the bottom of our pant legs to the tops of our boots with rubber bands.

Life became so routine that it was easy to imagine that we were just civilians who worked at a military facility, and this must have come to the attention of higher-ups. For a while, the reins tightened, and Major Wilson was forced to rouse us from our barracks in the early morning for calisthenics and close-order drill. Wilson would stand off to the side, a luxurious camel hair overcoat covering his tailored uniform, gloves on, cap firmly in place, and clearly irritated and bored. After a few weeks of strict Army-style living, we reverted to our more leisurely pace.

Our unit had men from all over the United States. Two were from New York City: Frank LaCara and another we called Nicky. Lars Nelson was an Aleut, born and raised in the Aleutians. Norbert Fleischacker and Paul Buechner were from Minneapolis-St. Paul. Our complaints about the cold amused them. “This isn’t cold,” they’d say. “Minneapolis is cold.” Joe Pinski, “Whitey,” was from Milwaukee. The first thing Whitey did when he awoke in the morning was to reach over to his locker for a cigarette. Vic Rak, from Cleveland, was forever asking me questions, possibly because I was rarely without a book in my hands.

I particularly liked Jim Barthol, from Colton, California. Jim was always cheerful and optimistic, never sloppy or unkempt, and never vulgar in his speech. I often made him laugh, usually because of some malapropism of mine. For instance, when I absent-mindedly referred to the RCA Victor logo—a dog with his ear to the phonograph with the words “His master’s voice”—as “the talking dog,” Jim laughed uncontrollably and told me what a great sense of humor I had.

Our post office was located in the large basement of a large building. On one end was a mail chute though which mail bags were dropped. Canvas sacks containing packages were emptied onto a large sorting table. Airmail came in large, bright-orange sacks. I worked in first-class mail with a San Franciscan named John Hession, who was a good worker but did not sort as rapidly as I did. When company mail clerks from the various military units came in to pick up their daily batch, they’d rib him about the deliberateness of his movements. “Hey, Hession,” they’d call out. “How come you’re so slow and Rodriguez is so fast?” John took it well, as did I.

A movie house provided diversion. It was there I saw Call Me Madam, a musical with Ethel Merman and Donald O’Connor, and the reaction of my fellow soldiers, who booed every time an actor burst into song, portended the end of movie musicals. When the audience is unable to suspend disbelief, the game is over. A few times I accompanied Barthol and a couple of others to the post beer hall. Hank Williams’ “Cold, Cold Heart” and Tony Bennett’s “Because of You” were popular, as was Johnny Ray’s “Cry.”

Anchorage was a thriving town with a population of 12,000, and on occasion we ventured in. Jim Barthol, Vic Rak, John Hession, Joe Sabo, and I went to a restaurant one evening and all ordered steak. The waitress began with me, asking how I preferred my steak, but I had no idea what she meant. After an uncomfortable pause, Jim Barthol, eager to rescue me from embarrassment, broke in and ordered his steak first. He was a class act. The more adventuresome members of the 50th APU patronized an Anchorage nightclub called The Green Lantern. They called it The Green Latrine.

Our unit had three sergeants. One we knew as Rick, a fidgety unsmiling fellow of about 35 with crew-cut blond hair. Rick was above it all, including all of us. He had a curious habit of painting his toenails red. No one ever asked him why. Sergeant Walton, from the South, was easygoing and pleasant. His sleeves were heavy with service stripes that told us he was a veteran of World War II. The third sergeant, Kowalsky, was completely useless. He reported to work on Monday mornings with a hangover, and if we were lucky he would gather himself on some old canvas mailbags and fall asleep.

Another unique character was a private named Bill, whom we all called by his preferred name, “Queenie.” When he was in the mood, Queenie held court on his bunk and played records, his favorites being those of Hilo Hattie with the orchestra of Harry Owens and his Royal Hawaiians. His favorite song went, “The Princess Poo-poo-ly has plenty papaya, she loves to give it away.” We never asked Queenie about his private life. Our rule was “don’t ask, don’t tell.”

Several times during the winter we would bivouac, leaving the warmth and comfort of our barracks to live in the boondocks, simulating our response to an attack by an invading enemy. Field kitchens were set up and food prepared in giant pots. At meal times we lined up, metal eating utensils in hand. After eating we washed them by dipping them in scalding water. We slept in sleeping bags laid on the snow, our rifles nearby at the ready.

During one bivouac we engaged in war games and camouflaged ourselves by donning oversized white winter uniforms, pulling them over our parkas. White hoods obscured our faces, and we wore enormous white boots. Reconnoitering the area we spotted an enemy force some distance away and approached stealthily, satisfied to hear their muffled voices grow louder as they chatted on, seemingly unaware of our approach. Moving closer, we heard more clearly what they were saying: “Wow, what big rabbits!”

In my final Army weeks, time slowed down, but the day of my departure finally arrived. Those of us scheduled for discharge took a train to Whittier, a ship to Seattle, a flight on a scheduled airliner to San Francisco, and a bus to Fort Ord, where I was discharged, with the rank of Corporal, on May 6, 1953. I had served a few days less than two years. In that time, I had taken my first train rides and traveled for the first time by air, by sea, and by Greyhound bus.

The Army forcibly removed me from the unrewarding life I had been living and gave me the opportunity to meet people from every part of the country. A camaraderie exists among Americans who have served in the military, and, while combat veterans rank higher in honors, we ordinary veterans, too, have our place. I’d expected to encounter men very different from me. Instead, I encountered fellow Americans.

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