The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [153]
Margaret “Mardy” Thomas was born on August 18, 1902, in Seattle, and she would always maintain a strong identification with the Puget Sound area. She rented her first apartment near Pioneer Square, where lumberjacks skidded logs down Yesler Way into the bay, and would always remember the thunderous rumble. When Mardy was still a baby, however, her family moved to Juneau, Alaska: a community crowded on a slender strip of land between Douglas Sound and mountains that seemed to rise straight out of downtown. No roads connected the city to the world at large—visitors sailed or steamed into the harbor. Many of Mardy’s earliest memories were of the gorgeous, thickly forested Juneau mountainsides, which catapulted up from the dark blue waters of the Gastineau Channel. Atop these sheer mountains was the famous Juneau ice field, an immense frozen ice mass from which dozens of bluish glaciers flowed, so that this spirited, prosperous seaport village was never drought-stricken. The Victorian mansions on Seventh Street attested to the fortunes made in Juneau during the gold boom.
Juneau was also the major fishing center of the Panhandle. Salmon and halibut were thick in the waters surrounding the city. Close by, bald eagles built stick nests in the spruce and circled overhead in their continual hunt for prey. All told, Juneau was a fine place to grow up in at the turn of the twentieth century, the foremost city of Alaska. “Juneau, on the mainland opposite the Douglas Island mills, is quite a village, well supplied with stores, churches, etc.,” Muir wrote in Travels in Alaska in 1915. “A dance-house in which Indians are supposed to show native dances of all sorts is perhaps the best-patronized of all the places of amusement.” However, Muir went on to note that the forests on Douglas Island were being “rapidly nibbled away” by “a large mill of 240 stamps.”2
An eloquent photograph of Mardy at age four and a half, with a bright white bow in her curly brown hair, posed leaning on her right hand, shows the sparkle she would never lose. Just a month after this studio photo was taken, Mardy’s parents divorced. Bruised by the savage quarrels and by her husband’s betrayal, Mardy’s mother, Minnie, left Alaska and went back to Seattle, taking Mardy with her. It seemed that Alaska would no longer be a factor in Mardy’s life.
But then Minnie married a well-known, well-paid attorney named Louis B. Gillette, who in 1911 was assigned by a federal court to be assistant U.S. attorney in the Fairbanks office. Congress had finally given Alaska its own civil and criminal codes, just as President Theodore Roosevelt had urged. A reform-minded conservationist, Gillette was responsible for bringing the rule of law to the last frontier, imposing federal standards regarding land claims, big-game poaching, and so on. Fairbanks was a rough-and-tumble outpost when Mardy’s family arrived—they had left civilization behind in Seattle. The imposing Masonic Temple in Fairbanks couldn’t disguise the essential character of the town. Every muddy lane reminded visitors that there was little indoor plumbing. Townspeople relied on well water, and mail arrived—if it arrived—by boat and dogsled. Thomas Edison’s inventions had barely penetrated Fairbanks, although one three-story skyscraper had been wired for electricity. The local hero was Walter Harper, a Native sled driver, who climbed 20,320-foot Mount McKinley in 1913: he was the first to reach the summit.3
To get from Seattle to coastal Skagway, Alaska, and then to Fairbanks was a three-week ordeal involving five different modes of transportation. Because Alaska was practically roadless, river travel was the only reliable transport. More than 4,000 miles of Alaska’s waterways were navigable by steamers. Mardy remembered a huge crowd gathered at