There's a lot of loose talk beginning to circulate,' Tom Venn said after dinner, 'about this crazy idea of statehood for Alaska.' He studied the two young people before him and asked: 'Do you support such nonsense?'
Since his question practically demanded a negative response, the best Sandy Flatch could do was temporize. Vaguely but not passionately in favor of statehood, she voiced an opinion which would be heard much in forthcoming months: 'I wonder if we have a big enough population?'
'We do not!' Venn said firmly. 'How about you, LeRoy?'
Since he still owed the Venns for the two planes and his house, and was dependent upon them for much of the business which kept his one-man company afloat, he, too, deemed it wise to be evasive, but in his case he believed rather strongly in the military judgment he now issued: 'Alaska's principal value to the United States, perhaps its only value, is to be a military shield in the arctic. With our limited resources we could never defend this territory against Asia. And with Russian communism on the march everywhere, they might be coming at us at any moment.'
'You've hit one nail on the head,' Venn said enthusiastically, but then he turned to his wife: 'Tell them the even bigger idea they missed, Lydia,' whereupon she entered the conversation with considerable vigor: 'My father saw it in the old days. I see it now. Alaska will never have the people or the power or the finances to operate as a free state, like the others. It must depend on help from the Lower Forty-eight.'
'And that means what it's always meant,' her husband broke in. 'Seattle. We can assemble the money from the other states. And when we have it, we've always known what to do with it.'
'The point is,' Lydia said persuasively, 'my family, for example, we've always tried to do what's right for Alaska. We look after the people up here as if they were members of our own family. We help educate them. We defend their rights in Congress. And we treat their natives far better than they do themselves.'
For the better part of two hours the two Venns hammered away at the doctrine that had become almost sacred in Seattle: that statehood for Alaska would be wrong for the people of Alaska, wrong for the nation at large, wrong for the natives, wrong for industry, wrong for the general future of the area, and, although Venn never said so openly, not even at home, terribly wrong for Seattle. The two Flatches, who had entered this chance discussion with no strong convictions, left the Venns' house fairly well convinced that statehood was something to be avoided.
THE SECOND FLATCH FAMILY, FORTIFIED BY ITS Education at the university, took the other side in this battle. Flossie Coop had only vague and generally unpleasant memories of Minnesota, even though she had been ten during her last year in that state. 'It was bitter cold,' she told Nate, who had never visited the Outside. 'Much worse than Matanuska. And we never had enough food. And Father had to poach to get us a deer now and then. And I left it with no regrets, none at all.'
'What's your point?'
'So I was what they call disposed to like Alaska. For me it was freedom and enormous vegetables and a glacier right up the valley and a tame moose. It was excitement, and a new world being born, and great neighbors like Matt Murphy and Missy Peckham, and the feeling that you were taking part in history.' She stopped, tears came to her eyes, and she leaned over to kiss her husband: 'And what you did in the war.'
Suddenly embittered, she rose and stalked about the cabin: 'And what my old man did building that road. And the way LeRoy flew his airplanes everywhere in all kinds of weather. People have the nerve to ask me if we're ready for statehood? We were ready the day I stepped off that Sir. Mihiel, and we're a lot readier now.'
Nate Coop did not require his wife's surprising histrionics. Alone he had spied out the enemy on Lapak Island. Sometimes alone he had spied on Adak, Amchitka, Attu and Kiska. He rarely spoke of his adventures and never of the death of Captain Ruggles, one of the finest men he had known, but he did feel that from these experiences, and from his years as a miner in the heart of the territory, he knew something about what Alaska was and what its potential could be. He was for statehood. Men like him and his fatherin-law working on the Alcan Highway and his brother-in-law flying those planes, they had earned statehood and a whole lot more. He rarely entered into the public discussions that were beginning to spring up across the territory, but if questioned, he left no doubt as to his basic opinion: 'I'm for it. We got the brains to run things.'
When peace came to Matanuska it modified the life of the elder Flatches very little.
They continued to live in their original cabin, and even during the time they had to share it with LeRoy and his wife they felt no inconvenience, mainly because each of them was outdoors a great deal. Because Elmer's broken legs did not heal easily or strongly, the old man could not resume his life as a hunting guide for parties of rich men out of Oregon and California, and he was grateful when young Nate volunteered to replace him. There was trouble when they told Flossie of their plans, for she said: 'I want nothing to do with hunters who kill animals,' but Nate said: 'All you have to do is feed them,' and he encouraged her to start a section of the holding in which she kept orphaned animals and those wounded by careless shots.
It was during one of these hunts that Nate first felt emboldened to reveal openly his desire for statehood. He was guiding three well-to-do Seattle sportsmen in the Chugach Mountains; they had wanted to camp out in the old tent-and blanket style, and rarely had he worked with a team which better exemplified the meaning of sportsmanship, for each man carried his full load of gear, each washed dishes in turn, and each chopped wood. They were a notable group, and on the third night, after the work had been done, one of them, a banker who had helped Tom Venn's Ross & Raglan finance recent expansion in Alaska and who had accepted enthusiastically Venn's interpretation of Alaskan history, said to his companions: 'It would be a shame to spoil this wilderness with some expensive nonsense like this statehood folly they're talking about. Keep this as the paradise it is.'
'Absolutely!' one of the hunters agreed, while the third, a man connected with the insurance of cargoes bound for Alaska, said: 'In a hundred years an area like this would never be able to support itself.'
The banker, who had fought in Italy in World War II, said: 'The important thing to remember is not dollars and cents. They can be negotiated. It's the military posture of our nation. We need Alaska up here as our forward shield. It should really be under the control of our military.'
Each of the three hunters had seen service during the war, but none had served anywhere near Alaska; however, each had strong opinions about the proper defense for the arctic.
'The great danger is Soviet Russia. People make a lot of the fact that at the two little Diomede Islands, one American, one Russian, communism is only a mile and a half from our democracy. That's insignificant, good propaganda but not much else.
However, from the real Siberia to the real Alaska at one important spot is only sixty miles, and that's a real danger.'
The insurance man said: 'No way Alaska could defend itself if the Russkies decided to come over,' and the banker asked: 'What is the population of the place?' and the insurance man replied: 'I looked it up. Federal census showed a total population of seventy-two thousand. Single suburbs of Los Angeles have more than that,' and the banker concluded: 'Alaska is best seen as a basket case. It'll always need our help, and to give it statehood would be a criminal miscarriage.'
Nate, busy stowing gear while this conversation progressed, finally felt obligated to break in: 'We defended ourselves pretty well against the Japanese.'
'Wait a minute!' the third hunter protested. 'I was serving on Guadalcanal, and we were scared out of our minds when the Japanese captured your Aleutian Islands so easily. They had a real pincer movement going, South Pacific, North Pacific.'
'We drove them off, didn't we?'
The man from Guadalcanal, thinking that Nate meant the Alaskans alone had defeated the Japanese, said: 'You and about fifty thousand mainland troops to help,' and Nate laughed: 'Me an
d that fox farmer who scouted the islands didn't have much stateside help.'
The phrase fox farmer derailed the conversation because the Seattle men had to know what it meant. So Nate spent about half an hour explaining how, on the empty Aleutians, men like Ben Krickel leased entire islands, stocking them with one type of fox, 'maybe silver, they bring the most, or blue, they thrive pretty well, or plain red or even a pretty light gray.'
He told how the Krickels, father and daughter, had harvested the blue foxes of Lapak Island and shipped them off to the dealer in St. Louis, and then he added: 'My brother-in-law became an officer in the Air Corps. He married Krickel's daughter.'
The insurance man was captivated by this story, and exclaimed with the kind of bubbling enthusiasm which enabled him to get close to people he was trying to sell policies:
'I'll be damned! Two marriages in your family, and in each, one person's a standard Minnesotan, the other, half Indian. Isn't that something?'
'I'm half Indian. Sandy Krickel's half Aleut.'
'Just by looking, can you tell one from the other?'
For the first time in this conversation Nate broke into a laugh: 'Me? I can tell an Aleut from an Indian at a hundred yards. But when I act up, Sandy says she can smell an Indian at a hundred and fifty. Not too much love lost among the various natives.'
'But they all have trouble with the white man?' the banker asked, and Nate evaded the question: 'You know, there's about half a dozen different kinds of Eskimos, too.
And a Yup'ik won't take too kindly to an Inupiat.'
'Which is which?' the insurance man asked, and Nate said: 'Inupiat is north along the Arctic Ocean, Yup'ik is south along the Bering Sea. I prefer the Yup'iks, but they would both like to beat up on me, if they thought they could get away with it.'
'Which they can't?' the insurance man asked, and Nate said: 'Three of them coming at me together might.'
The banker looked up from the bed he was making: 'So with all those differences, you certainly don't want statehood, do you?'
'I do,' Nate said firmly, and the banker asked: 'With only seventy thousand population,' and Nate said: 'Like with me barroom-fighting Eskimos, up here one man counts double, or maybe triple.'
THE PERSON IN MATANUSKA WHO TOOK THE FIGHT FOR statehood most seriously was Missy Peckham, the feisty seventy-five-year-old who had remained at Matanuska because so many of her friends now lived there. Partly because no one else in the region seemed eligible, the territorial governor had made her the local representative to a Statehood Committee whose job it would be to organize local support for statehood and to represent Alaskan aspirations at meetings in the Lower Forty-eight. For many, such an appointment was a kind of local honor involving no work and not much commitment, but for Missy it became the consuming passion in the remaining years of her life. For she had learned while climbing Chinook Pass or battling for justice at Nome that self-government was not a matter of population size or tax base or conformance to rigid rules, but rather the degree of fire in the human heart. And hers was ablaze, for she had witnessed at close quarters the zeal with which the Matanuska settlers had built a new world for themselves, and she had watched as ardent men constructed their highway through the wilderness. She knew that the people of Alaska were ready for statehood, and that their courage had established their eligibility.
So, taking her assignment seriously, she began to make herself Alaska's civilian authority on one small but important aspect of the problem: the salmon industry.
She had never actually worked in a salmon cannery, but her long residence in Juneau had placed her in touch with some dozen operations like Totem Cannery on Taku Inlet, and from her experiences with both the Seattle owners of such places and the men who worked in them, she had a solid founding in the economics of this crucial industry.
When she put her data together she was able to present a sickening portrait of an indefensible situation, as she did in her first impassioned presentation at a mass meeting in Anchorage:
'The facts are these. The canneries have always been owned by rich men in Seattle, only rarely if ever by anyone in Alaska. By remaining in cahoots with powerful interests in Washington, they've always avoided paying taxes to our government in Alaska. They import workers into our areas for the summer months but pay no taxes on their salaries.
Oh yes! They do pay five dollars a head, five dollars, to a kind of school tax, but not nearly what they should pay for stealing one of our most valuable natural resources.
'What burns me up, and ought to burn you up, is the fact that with their fish traps and fish wheels they're destroying our salmon. In the state of Washington and in Canada they don't allow that wanton killing. So their salmon are increasing year by year. Ours are dying. Because the federal authorities have always been under the control of the Seattle interests, never under ours. Because we aren't a state, we have no senators or congressmen to fight for us.'
She spoke that first time for about fifteen minutes, making a tremendous impression because of the authority with which she had assembled the facts which condemned the present situation; later, when concerned experts began to feed her even more specifics, her standard salmon speech ran about twenty-five minutes, serving as what one admiring advocate of statehood termed 'our barn-burning speech,' but at the height of her popularity a slight, battling woman with a most lively manner of speech one of the experts warned: 'Missy, your talk is all facts and figures. If we send you to the Lower Forty-eight, you'll have to inject more human interest.' Since she had never worked on a salmon boat or in a fishery, she was at a disadvantage, but by accident she received help from a source she could never have anticipated. One evening when she spoke in Anchorage, where the agitation for statehood was growing, she noticed in the audience a handsomely dressed woman in her late forties who leaned forward to follow acutely each of the charges Missy was making. Her presence was perplexing, since Missy could not determine what her race might be: she was certainly not Caucasian, but she was also neither an Eskimo nor an Athapascan: She's probably an Aleut. With those eyes.
At the end of the rally the strange woman did not depart with the others, but stood aside as several men and women surged forward to congratulate Missy on her stirring speech. And when the hall was nearly empty, the woman came forward, smiled warmly, and extended her hand: 'We used to meet in Juneau, Mrs. Peckham. I was Tammy Ting, Tammy Venn now.'
'You're Ah Ting's little girl? Sam Bigears' granddaughter?'
'I am. Ah Ting and Sam thought very highly of you, Mrs. Peckham.'
'Miss.' Suddenly, as if caught stealing cookies, she clapped her hand over her mouth and grinned: 'Did I say anything awful tonight? About the Venns, I mean?'
And then Tammy said something which would cement the friendship between the two:
'Nothing that I don't say. I'm a strong advocate of statehood, Miss Peckham.'
Missy stared at her, saw the lovely Chinese-Tlingit shadows which gave her face such a provocative expression, and suddenly leaned upward and kissed her. 'I think we better talk,' Missy said, and they returned to Tammy's hotel, where they discussed salmon and canneries and Ah Ting's and Sam Bigears' relations to both. 'It's always confused me,' Tammy said, 'but in English my father's name should have been expressed as Ting Ah. He was Mr. Ah, but he always went by Mr. Ting. So did I. I asked him about this one day, and he sneered: "Mr. Ah this, Mr. Ah that. Sounds if you're sneezing.
Mr. Ting, sharp, businesslike."'
'He was certainly businesslike,' Missy said. 'Tell me what it was like at the cannery,' and the tales which Ah Ting and Sam Bigears had related to their families required hours to unfold. Thereafter, Missy's harangue on salmon took on a most personal touch, with stories of the visit of her old lover Will Kirby to Taku Inlet to try to persuade the Seattle owners to give the salmon a better chance to survive, and the dramatic sinking of the Montreal Queen.
In fact, Missy's talk became one of the highlights in Alaska's drive toward statehood, for listeners went
home and told their neighbors: 'You ought to hear the Peckham woman. She knows what for.'
The highlight of her personal campaign, insofar as salmon were concerned, came at a big meeting in Seattle, where it was essential to enlist the support of Senators Magnuson and Jackson. She telephoned Tammy Venn as soon as she got off the plane:
'Tammy, this is most important. I want to make a good impression and I need your advice.' She was astounded when Tammy answered: 'You'll have no trouble.
I'm going to speak right after you. I'll cover for any mistakes you make.'
'You're going to speak in favor of statehood? In Seattle?'
'I certainly am.'
'Bless you.'
The two women, appearing toward the end of the program the tough little social worker, the suave Chinese-Tlingit member of Seattle's high society created a sensation, a powerful opening barrage for the statehood debate. The local papers, of course, featured the fact that Tammy Venn was the daughter-in-law of Thomas Venn, president of Ross & Raglan and an inveterate opponent of statehood for a backward area like Alaska, where so many of the Venn interests centered. Next morning, when reporters reached Venn for his reaction to Tammy's bombshell statement, he said austerely: 'My daughter-in-law speaks for herself, but since she left Alaska at a fairly early age, she has not been able to follow recent developments there.'
However, when the same reporters tracked down Malcolm Venn, he said: 'You mean, my wife came out publicly for statehood?' When they chorused 'Yes' he said: 'She's as loony as a bedbug. I'll have to speak to her about this.' Then he laughed: 'Have you ever tried to argue her out of anything?' When asked specifically: 'Then you're against statehood for Alaska?' he said seriously: 'I sure am. That wonderful area was meant to remain a wilderness. With seventy thousand population, it couldn't run a town council, let alone a state.'
Next morning the papers carried Tammy's rebuttal: 'I always suspected my husband knew very little about the place where I was born. The 1950 census figures show that we have 128,643 citizens, and I'm sure I'll convince him by the end of this month that we're entitled to statehood.' But that weekend the papers displayed a good-natured shot of Tom and Lydia Venn, accompanied by Malcolm, standing off to one side while saucy-looking Tammy posed with a banner that Missy Peckham had given her: STATEHOOD NOW.