• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2939 0

bridge” took place in 1910, with officials of the Taft administration smiling alongside Kennecott copper miners. Boomers in towns such as Seward and Cordova celebrated the bridge. Alaska was on the rise! But Rooseveltians were prescient about the foolishness of Alaska’s first “bridge to nowhere.” By 1930, the Copper River and Northwestern Railway had gone bankrupt. Few folks used the expensive train tracks.

In 1910, every Alaskan mining town wanted a road built for its district. Likewise, a priority list was established by a territorial commission to deliver mail more efficiently. The U.S. Signal Corps led the way by connecting Valdez (then the most northerly open port in North America) to Fairbanks (the practical head of navigation on the Tanana River). A 385-mile road linking Valdez to Fairbanks allowed Alaska to become an economy based on exporting natural resources. When Roosevelt left the White House, there were about 770 productive placer mines in Alaska, employing about 4,400 men. Only a few years later, owing to transportation innovations, these numbers had grown dramatically. Coal deposits could be found throughout 12,600 square miles of the territory.

At Copper Mountain, a 250-ton smelter was polluting the air, and long tramways had been built at Niblack, Skowl Arm, Karta Bay, and Hetta Inlet to transport the most valuable ores. On the Seward Peninsula auriferous lode mining was taking place along the Solomon River. The brownish-black coal on the peninsula was lignite, frozen solid. Like peat, it cracked and crumbled on exposure to sun. However, this coal, lowest-ranked in terms of energy, burned readily, leaving chalky ash billowing upward from factory smokestacks. Carbon dioxide emitted from plants using lignite coal was more toxic than that from comparable factories using black coal. Lignite was so combustible that railroad companies, fearing industrial accidents, didn’t like to transport it for long distances.29

Clearly, Alaska wasn’t a worthless icebox, even though its nicknames, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, were “Walrussia,” “Icebergia,” and “Frigidia.”30 It was the next West Virginia: a source of coal, a storehouse of limitless rock fuel ready to be extracted for an economic bonanza. (And probably at the cost of human lives. In 1907 alone 3,242 West Virginian miners perished in mining accidents.) The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle had promoted this notion about coal in the “Great Land” to more than 3.5 million visitors in 1909–1910. Conservationists circa 1910, by contrast, saw Alaska as John Muir had seen it—as “nature’s own reservation”31 where “nothing dollarable is safe.”32 Huge dams or copper and coal mines, these wilderness advocates believed, would kill rivers and destroy the breeding areas of migratory birds. “Conservationists and boosters were united in admiration for the frontier and in agreement on its importance as an ingredient in American culture and history,” the historian Peter A. Coates wrote. “However, they differed, often diametrically, in the ways they expressed affection and how they formulated the best means to ensure the survival of their revered frontier.”33

Writing to his twenty-two-year-old son, Ted, Theodore Roosevelt pined for the Alaska Range, longing to be thrust into a territorial wilderness with ospreys and eagles overhead.34 The distance from Point Hope, Alaska (a spit of land jutting into the Chukchi Sea), to Washington, D.C., was greater, in miles, than that from New York to Senegal. The Colonel loved this kind of remoteness.35 He wanted to be anywhere outdoors in Alaska where there wasn’t a book to sign or a hand to shake. Roosevelt had shipped his sixteen-year-old son, Archie, off to the Black Hills under the watchful eye of Seth Bulloch, a sheriff and forest ranger who was by nature a scoutmaster and who knew how to toughen up boys. Heading out to the University of California–Berkeley, Roosevelt wrote to its president, Benjamin Wheeler, about the difficulties of being overbooked as both father and speaker. Proudly preaching the “new nationalism,