Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

Gruening, of course, wasn’t the only one to beckon the swarm of servicemen who would soon call Alaska their home. Later in 1944, the Department of the Interior, which still had nonmilitary responsibility for Alaska in its Division of Territories and Island Possessions, published a guide for those interested in Alaska that dealt mostly with land settlement issues. This was followed in 1945 by a general information bulletin on the territory. The publication was supposed to sort fact from fiction, but to those who had spent time in muddy foxholes or stoking coal boilers on angry seas, its warnings about difficulties sounded more like calls to adventure. In its foreword, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes came across almost like a newspaper editor in some mining boomtown when he went on and on about the opportunities of “our last big land frontier.” Early in 1946, Ickes even raised the issue of settling refugees from wartorn Europe in Alaska in an article titled “Let’s Open Up Alaska!”4