The visitor was Nils Sjodin, from a government office of some kind in Thief River Falls, and he carried with him a remarkable message and the documents to back it up. Seated in the lean-to, with the eight people clustered about him, he said: 'Glad to see you got yourselves a deer. Food's scarce in these parts.'
'Who are you?' Hilda Flatch asked, and he replied: "The bringer of good tidings,' and with that, he slapped upon the wooden table a pile of papers which he invited everyone to inspect. Since farmers in this part of Minnesota respected education, all in the shack were able to read, even young Flossie Flatch, and in the next moments they received first notice of the revolution that was about to engulf them and their neighbors in this northern part of the United States.
'Yep!' Mr. Sjodin said with the enthusiasm of a Methodist minister or a farm-equipment salesman. 'Every word it says here is true. Our government is going to select eight, nine hundred people from areas like this, people really down on their luck through no fault of their own, and we're going to ship you, all expenses paid, to a valley in Alaska ... cabbages weigh sixty pounds each ... never saw anything like it.'
'To what purpose?' Hilda Flatch asked. All her life she had dealt with flimflam artists and she judged Mr. Sjodin to be the next in that engaging parade.
'To start a new life in a new world. To populate a paradise. To build an area of great importance to the United States our new frontier, Alaska.'
'Isn't it all ice up there?' Elmer asked.
Mr. Sjodin had been waiting for just this question. Producing three new publications, he spread them so that all could see, and for the first time in their lives, the Flatches and the Vickaryouses saw the magical word Matanuska. 'Look for yourselves!'
Sjodin said with a pride that would have been appropriate had he owned the area he was about to describe: 'Matanuska Valley. Set down among great mountains. Girt by glaciers that run mysteriously out of the hills. Fertile land. Crops like you never saw before. Look at this man standing beside those cabbages and turnips. Look at this affidavit, signed by an official of the United States government: "I, John Dickerson, U.S. Department of Agriculture, do certify that the man standing beside these vegetables is me and that the vegetables are real and not doctored in any way."' In awe these farmers looked at the produce of this Alaskan valley, then at the crest of glorious snow-capped mountains which enclosed it, then at the sample house erected beside a flowing stream. They were looking at a wonderland, and they knew it.
'What's the catch?' Hilda Flatch asked, and Mr. Sjodin asked everyone to be seated, because he knew that what he was about to say was beyond belief: 'Our government, and I work for it, in agriculture, has decided that it must do something to help you farmers who have been so roughly treated by the Depression. And this is what we're going to do.'
'Who are you?' Mrs. Flatch asked, and he said: 'From a family of farmers just like you. Went to North Dakota State in Fargo. Farmed awhile myself in Minnesota and was tapped by the federals. My present job? To help families like yours move into a new life.'
'You don't even know us,' Hilda Flatch said, and Mr. Sjodin corrected hef politely but sharply: 'I've done a great deal of work on the Flatches and the Vickaryouses.
I know how much you owe on your farms, what you paid for your machinery, what your credit is at the bank, and your general health records. I know you're honest people.
Your neighbors give you good reports, and you're all absolutely dead broke. You know what the grocer in Thief River told me: "I'd give them Flatches the shirt off my back. Honest as the day is long. But I can't give them no more credit."' The men in the two families looked at the floor. 'So you've been selected. I think all of you can count on that.'
'Children too?' Hilda asked, and he said: 'Especially the children. We want kids like yours to be the seed of the great new Alaska.'
Now that he had their attention, he spelled out the details: 'We will carry you to San Francisco on the train, not a penny of expense to you. There we'll place you on a ship to Alaska, not one cent of charge. When you land in Alaska we'll convey you to Matanuska, our charge. There we'll assign you, with you making the choice of location, forty acres. We'll build you a brand-new home and a barn and give you a free supply of seeds and livestock. We'll also build a town center with stores, doctors and a highway to market.'
'You mean,' Elmer asked, 'all this for free?'
'At the beginning, yes. You do not spend a penny. Even the stove comes free. But we do charge against your name three thousand dollars, on which you pay nothing while you're getting started. Beginning in the second year you pay three percent interest on your mortgage. That's ninety dollars a year, and with the way things grow in that valley, you'll be able to pay not only the interest but on the principal too.'
As he finished with a grandiloquent gesture, he smiled at the four Finns, as if he wanted particularly to convince them: 'The federal government has asked us to specialize getting Swedes, Norwegians and Finns, ages twenty-five to forty, farmers with children.
You'd be perfect if you had children.'
'We have seven between us,' one of the Finnish women said, but before Mr. Sjodin could assure her that this pretty well assured the two families of selection, he was diverted by a soft thud behind him, and he turned to find that Elmer Flatch had fainted.
'He ain't had solid food for four days,' Hilda Flatch said. 'Flossie, start somethin'
cookin',' and she asked Mr. Sjodin for help in lifting her bone-skin husband to a bed.
TO THE AMAZEMENT OF THE TWO HUNDRED AND NINETY-nine Minnesota farmers that Mr. Sjodin selected in the winter of 1935 for this bonanza provided by the federal government, he kept every promise he made. A train designated the Alaska Special took them in relative comfort to the Southern Pacific Station in San Francisco, and at various stops local citizens, eager to see the New Pilgrims, crowded the railroad stations with canteens of hot coffee, sandwiches and doughnuts. Newspaper reporters flocked to query the travelers and wrote stories that fell into two distinct categories: either the Minnesota people were daring adventurers thrusting forward into unknown frozen frontiers, or they were shameless participants in another of President Roosevelt's socialist schemes destined to destroy the integrity of America. A few penetrating reporters tried to strike a balance between the two extremes, one woman in Montana writing:
These hardy souls are not plunging blindly into some arctic wasteland where they won't see the sun for six months at a time. This reporter has looked up the climatic conditions at Matanuska and found them to be about the same as northern Maine or southern North Dakota. The valley itself looks a lot like the better parts of Iowa, except that it is surrounded by a chain of beautiful snow-covered peaks. In fact, there is reason to believe that these emigrants are headed for a kind of paradise.
The big question is: Why them and not somebody else? The federal government is handing them all kinds of bonanzas at little or no cost, and the taxpayers of Montana will ultimately have to foot the bill. This reporter could find no justification for heaping this largesse on this particular group of farmers except that they were all from northern states, they were mostly Scandinavian, and they all looked as if they knew how to work. The people of our county who met them at the station wished them well, for they really are launched on a great adventure.
In San Francisco, Mr. Sjodin, as promised, had a ship waiting to carry them north, and even though it proved to be one of the ugliest ships afloat the old army transport St. Mihiel, a slab-sided bucket with deep indentations in the railings fore and aft it did float, it had abundant food, and each family had a place to sleep. In this first shipment of Matanuska settlers, there were no men without wives and almost no families without children. They were a homogeneous lot, these emigrants from an old world in Minnesota to a new life in Alaska: of similar age and similar background, any fifty of the men chosen at random seemed almost indistinguishable. The majority were of medium height, about a hundred and sixty pounds, clean-shaven and capable-look
ing. Their greatest similarity was in dress, for unlike the women, who wore varied clothes, these hardworking men all wore dark suits with trousers and jackets made of the same heavy woolen fabric. They wore shirt and tie, the former invariably white, the latter always of some subdued color, but what set them apart from the people they met in San Francisco and the other towns their train had passed were the workingmen's caps they wore, made of some woven fabric with a stiff brim. In appearance these adventurers were the drabbest group of men ever to have attempted settlement in a new locale: they compared in no way with the conquistadors from Spain who braved their way into Mexico and Peru; they wore none of the variegated clothing that characterized Jamestown in Virginia; nor had they the colorful dress of the Dutch who came to New York, or the handsome austerity of the Pilgrims in Massachusetts. They were men from Middle America venturing forth in that period when clothes were at their supreme dullest, and in their banal similarities neither the men nor the women looked as if they were bound for any great exploration.
However, once the St. Mihiel was under way, radical differences within the group began to surface. A minority of the passengers proved to be ordinary Americans like the Flatches and their friends, the Alexanders of Robbin, the Kirsches of Solway and the Jacksons of Skime, and almost automatically these families clustered together as if to protect themselves from the overbearing Scandinavians: the Kertullas, the Vasanojas and the Vickaryouses.
The Scandinavians were not actually overbearing, they merely seemed that way keeping to themselves, speaking in their native languages, and conducting themselves with the superior air of men and women many of whom had already taken sea voyages in getting to Minnesota. They moved about the St Mihiel with such confidence that they seemed to own it.
Despite this factionalism, which manifested itself in all aspects of the voyage north, the trivial animosities were forgotten when the ship entered Alaskan waters, for then the great mountains which guarded the western shore of the peninsula shone in splendor, and like Vitus Bering two hundred years earlier and James Cook in the 1770s, these newcomers watched in awe as these majestic mountains and their glaciers came down to the Pacific. As Mr. Jackson said to the American group: "This sure ain't Minnesota,' and Mr. Alexander replied: 'Hard to believe there's fields you could farm behind them mountains.' Elmer Flatch, staring at the great masses of rock, told the Kirsches: 'Have we been trapped? There can't be tillable ground in there.'
At Anchorage they were surprised when Mr. Sjodin, who despite his own Scandinavian background maintained good relations with both groups, moved them into the cars of a modern train, 'as fine,' he told them, 'as the Union Pacific.'
They had expected dogsleds, but found themselves in railroad cars much better than the ones in which they had ridden from Minnesota to California. They were further surprised when they saw on the roads paralleling the train tracks a plentiful supply of automobiles that looked the same as the ones they had known in Minnesota. However, young LeRoy Flatch did notice one difference: 'Look how the fenders are all rusted.
Why?' And Mr. Alexander, who knew automobiles, said: 'Salt spray, I'm sure.'
They left Anchorage at nine in the morning for the forty mile run to Matanuska, and during the first three-quarters of the trip they saw nothing that indicated the possibility of farming: uninspiring salt beds lay to the west, forbidding mountains to the east, so that even the hardiest Scandinavians, accustomed to northern terrains, began to despair, while flatlanders like the Flatches and the Jacksons were ready to surrender.
'No man can farm that stuff,' Mr. Jackson said as he surveyed the western plains, devoid of both trees and grass, and Hilda Flatch agreed, and they were further depressed when the train approached the undisciplined Knik River, a mile wide and apparently six inches deep.
But as their car reached the middle of the bridge, young Flossie Flatch, staring to the east, cried: 'Mom, look! Hey, Pop, look!' and the Flatches saw opening before them the kind of prospect European travelers expected when they ventured into the Alps. First there was a nearly circular rim of resplendent mountains, their white caps glistening in the morning sun. Then came the trees, thousands upon thousands of them, hardwood and evergreen alike, a bounty so plentiful it could never be depleted.
And then, to delight the farmers, spread the waiting fields and meadows, thousands of acres ready for the plow.
In their varied tongues the Scandinavians shared their assessments of this valley, and all agreed that they had come upon a wonderland as fine as anything in Norway or Sweden, and the magnitude of the components bedazzled them. One of the Vickaryous men, running back to where the Flatches clustered, gripped Elmer by the arm and cried:
'With land like this, anything!' And he kissed Hilda Flatch, who was astonished by his familiarity.
For about half an hour the train picked its way slowly along the western edge of the valley, allowing the passengers to see one marvel after another, and what pleased the newcomers-especially was the plenitude of little streams cutting their way through the flatlands. 'Everyone can have their farm along a river,' Elmer said, but his wife cautioned: 'And get flooded out when all that snow melts.' Her husband did not hear her, for just then the conductor was shouting: 'Get everything ready. Almost there.'
'Is there any game out there?' Flatch asked him. 'Huntin', I mean?' and the conductor said: 'Anyone can't get hisself a moose or a bear in them hills, he ain't no hunter.
Even my wife's brother Herman got hisself a moose.' So for the remaining moments of the trip to Matanuska, Elmer visualized himself prowling those uplands, so close to the flat fields, on the trail of moose.
When the train finally stopped, at a station called Palmer, it did so in three jolting hiccups, with the cars jamming forward one against the other, followed by a screeching halt. Then onto the wooden platform, much like what would have been found in Minnesota, the immigrants piled out, and one conductor said to another: 'Look! They really are different. Most of 'em have cardboard suitcases.'
From the train station the families looked across an empty field to where an amazing sight awaited them: Tent City, a collection of some half a hundred white military field tents, each with cots and a black stovepipe protruding from the top. 'There it is!' Mr. Sjodin cried enthusiastically. 'Your home till your houses are built.'
When some of the Scandinavians began protesting, Sjodin cried: 'Look! They're fine tents. Your sons in the army use them all the time,' and the Scandinavians replied:
'But not in Alaska,' and Sjodin broke into loud laughter: 'Go up to Fairbanks! You'll find them in tents right now. Stayed in them all winter.'
'Are you living in one of them?' a Swede asked. 'I'll bet you have yourself a real house.'
'Tent Number Seven, right over there,' Sjodin said. 'You'll do a lot of business with me in Number Seven.'
The Flatches and the Jacksons were assigned a tent in the second row back from the road, Number 19, and since each family had a daughter of an age where she should not be sleeping in the same room with boys, they strung a rope down the middle of the tent and suspended sheets from it. On one side slept the four females, on the other side the five males, and similar arrangements prevailed in all the tents occupied by two families. As the groups were sorted out, Mr. Jackson observed: 'Not one case where real Americans are mixed in with the Scandinavians,"and this separation would prevail when it came time to draw lots for the land assignments.
This exciting day came relatively late in the settlement at Matanuska. The land had to be surveyed, parceled into reasonable holdings, and made available by the building of rough roads, but when all was in readiness, Mr. Sjodin and his three superiors announced that the lottery was ready to take place as planned. That afternoon Elmer Flatch went quietly to Tent Number 7 to consult with the man whose performance in getting the Minnesotans to Matanuska had been so exemplary.
'I'd like your advice, Mr. Sjodin.'
'That's what I'm here for,' and before Elmer could speak further, Sjodin sai
d with great warmth: 'Remember that morning I met you. You and your son had just shot a deer. You were sharing it with the Vickaryous family. And now you're all up here in Alaska. Quite wonderful, isn't it?'
'Never figured it would happen,' Flatch said, 'but now Hilda and me, we got to choose our land. What do you advise?'
With an unusual gift for perceiving personal situations, a skill developed while serving as student manager of the football team at North Dakota State and later as county agricultural agent in Minnesota, Sjodin recognized that Elmer Flatch probably had desires and plans somewhat different from the other settlers, and he intended to respect them: 'Now, before I can advise you, Mr. Flatch, you must share with me your honest statement of what it is you hope to accomplish here in Alaska.'
'Well, like all the others ...'
'I don't mean all the others. I mean you.'
For almost a full minute Elmer stared at the floor, his tense knuckles clasped under his chin, wondering if he could level with this Swede. Finally, acknowledging that he must confide in someone, he said slowly: 'We won't be movin' never again, Mr. Sjodin. This'n is it.'
'Glad to hear you say that. Now tell me the best that you can hope for, and let's see if it's possible.'
'I'm fed up to my ass with farminr. It's a fool's paradise.'
'Not to a born farmerlike my father, or me. But for you, maybe yes. Go ahead.'
'I'm a hunter. I'm a rifleman. I want me a place near the woods. I want me a runnin'
stream. I want to be close to where there's moose and bear and deer. But mostly I do want a runnin' stream.'
Before responding to this defensible ambition, Sjodin asked: 'But how will you earn a living? A wife and three children?'