Alaska's Place in the West: From the Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness

Abstract

Alaska's Place in the West: From the Last Frontier to the Last Great Wilderness Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2010. xi + 186 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, and index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-1748-7.Reviewed by Keith A. Sculle, ksculle@gmail.com, Independent Scholar, Sherman, IL 62684An environmental historian cannot necessarily be expected to treat material culture where this journal is concerned. Roxanne Willis, nonetheless, has some interesting things to say about Alaska that will engage this journal's readers interested in a precautionary tale of the pitfalls from economic developments taken without understanding Alaska's special cultural and physical circumstances. Alaska should not be subsumed in the American West.Willis, who is not from Alaska, narrates five "stories," (as she types them), that this reviewer understands to be well-known to Alaskans. She accomplished her assignment in an introduction, five chapters, and an epilogue. Willis tips off readers about her deepest motives in her dedication wherein she declares in part that it is "For everyone who has fallen in love with Alaska" (p. v).Perception of Alaska as ripe for exploitation induced the first narrative, namely, plans to introduce reindeer into western Alaska to feed the Eskimos. Presbyterian missionary, Reverend Sheldon Jackson believed the Eskimos were starving and to find a food source for them was fundamental to the acculturation program he was attempting to launch. With support from Christians who took sympathy upon the Indians throughout the United States and people of the budding Progressive movement who believed capitalism had reduced the Eskimos to their plight, Jackson introduced a reindeer herd in 1891. Over the twenty-year span through which Willis extends the reindeer introduction, development for profit eventually took the lead, but by the 1950s, nature reigned on the landscape; for overgrazing and an increase in the wolf population due to more reindeer available for food reduced the reindeer population considerably. Eventually, raising reindeer also succumbed to cultural circumstances among the Eskimos. They received reindeer herding as an economic option according to their own cultural considerations and reindeer were raised or not as they saw fit. Reindeer as an industry, Willis declares, failed because the complexities of Alaska's life and land outstripped the simplistic perceptions introduced from "Outside." It never could be analogous to cattle raising in the West.Alaska has always been pressed to yield the sustenance for a large population. Russians had never penetrated farther inland than roughly 100 miles east from Norton Sound and Americans no farther than Fairbanks enticed by the short-lived gold rush. If the American investment in its purchase a third of a century earlier were to yield profit, people would have to be drawn to live permanently in Alaska. Roosevelt's New Deal seized hold of an opportunity to develop the Matanuska Valley north of Anchorage, little more than a railroad center begun as late as 1915, for an agricultural and dairy center. It was also believed possible to aid impoverished Americans from Michigan's, Minnesota's, and Wisconsin's northern counties to achieve the valley's full potential, when, in 1935, 201 families were resettled there. Federal funds built things such as a general store and warehouses - all novel architectural installments. About seventy-four percent of the original settlers and their replacements stayed. Potatoes, cabbage, strawberries, and small grains; but not corn, tomatoes, cucumbers, and squash; were found to thrive.Matanuska Colony satisfied American's faith in the frontier West that hardworking pioneers rendered arable and productive from wilderness. Intrigued by the failure to foresee that Alaskan agriculture would be difficult, Willis finds the answer "deep within America's cultural geography and Alaska's place in it" (p. …