The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [142]
Like Fortune magazine’s reporter James Agee living among poor Alabama tenant farmers (an experience he recounted in his urgent and timely 1939 masterpiece Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), Marshall hoped to dignify the people of Wiseman in his book Arctic Village. During the Great Depression, some Americans—even some aged southern tenant farmers—dreamed of moving to Alaska in order to survive the economic downturn. Why worry about grocery bills when, in Alaska, you could hunt moose and caribou? Drop a fishing line into any icy stream and reel in salmon, trout, and graylings. In industrial centers such as Cleveland and Pittsburgh, workers were earning 20 to 30 cents an hour; many such cities were also brutally cold in winter. Might as well move to Alaska, where game was plentiful. Although Alaska wasn’t a hub of the New Deal, FDR would soon do a lot to help the territory prosper during hard times.
Marshall returned to Wiseman in 1930 and remained there for more than a year to gather firsthand observations for Arctic Village, making sure that even the most inarticulate resident wouldn’t stay tongue-tied for long. His book depended on everyone’s candor. Marshall was a careful listener. With their high cheekbones and pacific, far-seeing eyes, the Nunamiut Eskimos mesmerized Marshall. Speaking in near whispers, they told him how polar bears swam 200 miles for a fat seal, or why the ptarmigan was the hardiest bird alive (able to endure temperatures of minus fifty degrees Fahrenheit with apparent good cheer). Stories about dogsledding to the abandoned mining town of Coldfoot, once the largest community in Arctic Alaska, were favorites. Like all ghost towns, Coldfoot taught a lesson: that today’s boom is tomorrow’s bust. Marshall strongly believed that Alaska’s natural resources should be developed slowly. His Eskimo friends saw nothing noble about pillaging everything valuable in one big gulp. Alaska’s silver, gold, and copper were the result of aeons of natural processes. Modern man had no right to rape the land in a frenzy of greed and then leave open pits behind. Marshall had picked up a few suitable Eskimo colloquialisms and used them daily. But Inuit was difficult, and therefore Marshall’s speech was never more than three or four broken sentences strung together. Before interviewing village Nunamiuts, Marshall would practice a few lines, eager to prove that he valued their distinctive culture.
Wiseman was a collection of hard-core people. Without roads, travelers had to arrive by either dogsled or a steamship from the village of Bettles. Marshall was, in a sense, the first professional visitor. Less than 5 percent of Alaska’s population lived north of the Yukon River. It was different that far north. Residents all had a sense of being in touch with the base of life. The weather in Wiseman was coldest in January, but the darkest month was December (for thirty days there was no sunlight).
Luckily, Marshall had a lot of good books to keep him company during his twelve and a half months in Wiseman; his taste ranged from potboilers to law books to belles lettres. In his cabin, the complete works of Shakespeare, Plato, and Emerson shared space on the painted bookshelf. New nonfiction titles such as Joseph Wood Krutch’s Modern Temper, George P. Ahern’s Deforested America, and Gaston B. Means’s The Strange Death of President Harding sat on a shelf behind the makeshift Franklin stove. “There is not a trace of the usual chaos of papers, books, magazines, gloves, snowshoe straps, and the like,” Marshall wrote home, “but an immaculately clean oilcloth surface whereon I can spread the work of the moment without having first to shovel clear a simple space on which to set my papers.”25
The artist Thomas Hart