The Great Land

Alaska is a corruption of the native word Alyeska that means Great Land.  We have lived here since 1999, but people have called the Great Land home since the age of the Wooly Mammoths, and for all those millennia, as far as we know, there wasn't a single event, a single human drama, significant enough to qualify as History.  That all changed on July 16, 1741.  On that day, Alaska was discovered by white folks.  A bit like Columbus, Vitus Bering did not actually know what he had discovered, but it didn't take others long to figure it out.

The Russian fur traders who took possession of Alaska in the name of the Czar came by sea and never got very far from it.  They liked the islands off the coast of southeastern Alaska and made the trading post at Sitka their capital.

The next great wave of newcomers, the gold seekers, also came by sea.  Some found the shiny stuff close to the sea--Juneau was a mining town and gold put Nome on the map--but most moved inland, to the Yukon Territory of Canada or the interior of Alaska.   Fairbanks, on the banks of the Chena River and for decades Alaska's largest city, was started as a trading post for the miners.

It was not until the late 1940s and early 50s that folks arrived here by land, thanks to a road that had been built in a panic in 1942 in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Known officially since 1943 as the Alaska Highway but commonly still called the Al-Can from its original name, Alaska-Canada Military Highway, it runs from Dawson Creek in British Columbia to Delta Junction in Alaska, a distance of 1390 miles, and was built in only 10 months.  Though improved over the next several years, it was still a very rough, unpaved road when it was finally opened to civilian traffic in 1948.  Despite that, a great many, perhaps even most of those drawn north to Alaska in the early post-war years, came by way of the Alcan in the family car stuffed to overflowing with their kids, their dog (the dog seemed to be a requirement), and all their worldly possessions.

In a few weeks, we will be driving the Al-Can, as well, as it is still the only land link to the Outside--the term Alaskans actually use to denote the rest of the world.  Fortunately for us, it is now completely paved and not nearly the adventure it once was.