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By Root 3151 0

Harding, accompanied by three members of his cabinet—Herbert Hoover (State), Henry Wallace (Agriculture), and Hubert Work (Interior)—and others in the administration, went aboard the SS Henderson, steaming northward from Tacoma, Washington. Harding would be the first U.S. president to visit the Alaska territory. Excitement ran high in the territory because on February 27, by Executive Order No. 3797-A, Harding had withdrawn 23 million acres, extending from the Arctic Ocean to the Brooks Range, as Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4. Although the Naval Petroleum Reserve was too remote to be drilled, there were reports of oil seepage, and Harding was encouraging private companies to make claims there.5

The Harding party arrived in Seward on July 13. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner called it “The Glory of the Coming.” The first lady, Florence Harding, had also come on the tour, and the rumor mill was full of speculation that Harding was trying to mend a break caused by his adultery. Following World War I the Republican Party had started encouraging non-Native settlement in Alaska, and now Harding immediately started preaching the doctrine of prosperity to Alaskans. After a rally in Anchorage, he headed out to inspect the Chicaloon coalfields. Starting in 1914, Alaska’s coalfields had been placed in public entry—a low bid would get an entrepreneur a lease for extraction. A gouging of Alaska was under way, particularly in the coal seams just north of Mount McKinley. Bored by the grand scenery, not even stopping to hear a bird trill when he visited the national park, Harding seemed indifferent to the blue skies and green woods of Alaska. No meetings with game or forest wardens were included in the itinerary. Even when a moose crossed the road, Harding yawned. Complaints from fishermen that the coal and timber industries were polluting the Gulf of Alaska fell on deaf ears. Harding never had any burning curiosity about the natural world. Talking to handpicked audiences, he implied that he wanted to hear the kaboom of dynamite across the last frontier. Someday Ketchikan would be bigger than Seattle and Fairbanks, a new Minneapolis at the top of the world. On July 15, Harding played the part of an engineer on a railroad run from Wasilla to Willow. And then he drove a golden spike with a maul at Nenana, a new railroad hub to symbolize the completion of the 470-mile line connecting Seward and Fairbanks.6

President Harding missed two hammer blows in driving the gold spike; but this event was actually a high accomplishment compared with his folly regarding his wardrobe. Listening to Admiral Hugh Rodman, a supposed climatologist, Harding told his entourage to wear heavy wool sweaters, parkas, galoshes, gloves—the whole array of winter clothing—even though it was mid-July. The temperature hit ninety-five degrees, and some members of Harding’s party collapsed from heat prostration and dehydration. Knowing nothing about Alaska except the profitability of drilling, timbering, and mining had its downside. Meanwhile, reports reached Harding, as he crossed Prince William Sound in a naval ship, that many of his “Ohio gang”—cronies who used a green house on K Street in Washington, D.C., as their headquarters—were being indicted. This was unsettling to the president.7

Nevertheless, Harding pressed on with his Alaskan junket. What he hoped to convey in Alaska was his desire for mechanized progress in this last frontier. No longer were a pick and shovel needed to look for gold. Technology had turned the search into a corporate endeavor complete with large-scale machines and hydraulic mining techniques.8 There was still wilderness to be conquered—lots of it. Harding, serving as a mouthpiece for big business, also announced his plan to take a ride on the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, owned by the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate. This seemed a deliberate insult to Pinchot, who was now governor of Pennsylvania but who remained an ardent opponent of the syndicate and its development efforts in Alaska. As it turned out, the ride was canceled at the last