Gold Rush 1941

Fire, flood and boom all swept Alaska last week. The fire swept through Seward, southern terminus of the Alaska Railroad. The blaze started in the Second Chance Barber Shop, raged for eight hours, destroyed half the town (pop. 949). Army officers set up emergency kitchens, found shelter for the homeless. In the rest of Alaska, men were fighting not fire but water.

It rains hard on bleak Unalaska Island.

Day in, day out, rain lashes in from the Bering Sea. It rains so hard in Yakutat that fresh concrete is ruined before it has a chance to set. Farther south, parts of Annette Island are a subarctic swampland, where plank roads have to be shored up on pilings driven into the muck.

In Yakutat, where the Army is constructing an air base, it rained so constantly that they had to lay concrete runways under a tent--a 600-ft.-long marquee which they rolled along the site as the concrete finally dried, hardened. On the muskeg moss plains of Annette they filled in foundations for runways with rock dynamited out of distant quarries and hauled laboriously over the mucky wasteland.

Into Dutch Harbor, in ships from Seattle, poured men looking for the good money being paid labor. They worked until the glacial rains soaked into their livers, then fled south again. Standing labor report from Unalaska Island: one crew going, one crew working but not liking it, one crew coming. They kept arriving, unprepared, ignorant of the rigors they had to face. Army & Navy men stayed because they had to.

Under these conditions in Yakutat, Kodiak, Sitka, Anchorage, from Annette out along Alaska's trunklike Aleutian Islands to Dutch Harbor in Unalaska, men were desperately at work excavating, blasting rock, building a string of fortifications. When the big job was done, the U.S. would have a 2,000-mile flagstone path toward Asia and a natural rampart bristling with man-made ramparts.

Prices hit moderate boom levels: $3.50 a night for a bathless room in Kodiak's lone hotel; $20 a month for a tar-paper shack; $65 a month for an unfurnished, one-room, kitchenette and bath apartment in Fairbanks; 10-c- for laundering a handkerchief; 50-c- for a bottle of milk in Nome, where there was one lone cow for the entire populace.

The Bank of Kodiak boasted a 314% increase in deposits in nine months. Kodiak's weekly newspaper advertised six transfer companies, six cab companies, six restaurants, nine liquor stores and bars, one laundry. How long the boom would last no one would predict. But in Kodiak, only 600 miles from the Arctic Circle, Coca-Cola hopefully erected a bottling works.

Since the defense program began, more than $133,000,000 in Federal funds have been poured into the territory which William Seward bought for $7,200,000. Before projects already under way are completed, the U.S. will have spent an estimated $400,000,000. With all that gold in the hills, men would keep on braving Alaska's icy rigors.

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