Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

Native families living on Little Diomede had long paddled less than three miles over to Big Diomede to trade, socialize, and even marry. Cape Prince of Wales was, after all, a much more grueling and hazardous journey of almost twenty-five miles across open water in the opposite direction. The international boundary meant very little and the concept of passports even less. Then, during the summer of 1948, Soviet soldiers imprisoned a party of eighteen Little Diomede residents who had visited the big island to trade as per their long custom. The group was held for fifty-two days and grilled extensively about Alaskan defenses before being released. Such summer outings came to an end. The cold war was heating up.20

Once again, hundreds of millions of dollars in military spending began to pour into the territory. Construction was under way on Eielson Air Force Base southeast of Fairbanks. Named after aviation pioneer Carl Ben Eielson and built to handle long-range bombers, it was then the largest airfield in the world. Reconstruction efforts were also under way at key World War II facilities, including Fort Richardson and Elmendorf Air Force Base near Anchorage; Fort Greely near Big Delta (named for Arctic explorer Adolphus W. Greely and not newspaperman Horace); and major bases on Kodiak, Adak, and Shemya Islands.21

By 1949, the U.S. Air Force was worried that the Soviets’ own long-range bombers based across the Bering Strait on the Chukotsk Peninsula could theoretically attack nuclear and other strategic sites in the Northwest, including the Hanford, Washington, atomic bomb plant and Grand Coulee Dam. In August in response to the threat, the air force announced that it was moving the Boeing aircraft plant from Seattle to Wichita, Kansas, to keep it out of harm’s way. The announcement raised an immediate and thunderous public outcry in the Northwest. Boeing was Seattle’s largest employer. Not only would 25,000 jobs be lost, but at least twice that number of spouses and children would likely also be affected.

By Gruening’s own account, he was outraged at such logic. And what would happen, Gruening demanded, when the Soviets developed a bomber, as they surely would, that was capable of flying 3,600 miles? The air force representatives did not have a ready answer, but Gruening—never one to take a backseat—did. He proposed that rather than move the Boeing plant, the far better option was to strengthen Alaskan defenses with a comprehensive radar network capable of early detection of aggressor bombers. Squadrons of jet interceptors based in the territory could then be scrambled to shoot them down long before they crossed Alaska, let alone reached Seattle. If that was done, Gruening concluded with no lack of certitude, the only way for Russian bombers to attack Seattle successfully was by making a wide detour around the Aleutians. Secretary Symington and General Wolfe left the hearing red-faced, but a few days later the air force reversed its decision on the move.

The Boeing plant would stay in Seattle. The Seattle Chamber of Commerce sent Mrs. Gruening a dozen roses and profusely thanked the governor for his shrewd examination of the issue. If there was ever anything that the chamber could do for Gruening in return, he was told, just ask. Sure, replied Gruening unabashedly. Support Alaska statehood. That set the Seattle group squirming, and its polite reply was that the group couldn’t adopt such a resolution because it involved a political issue. Alaska eventually became a state, but to the very end the Seattle Chamber of Commerce never endorsed its statehood efforts—the only major chamber of commerce on the West Coast that did not do so.22

During the early 1960s, the construction of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban Missile Crisis only heightened tensions along Alaska’s defense perimeter. In the end it was a standoff, but the Cold War’s impact on Alaska was long-lasting. The military dollars that poured into the territory because of it during the 1950s and early 1960s were the financial underpinnings of Alaska’s economy prior to the major oil discoveries.

Alaska’s long battle for statehood was unique among the other thirty-seven states that were not members of the original thirteen colonies. One obvious distinction was its geographic separation, but that was also the case with Hawaii. What really set Alaska’s experience apart was its very low population, enormously high percentage of federal lands, and lack of any provisions made over the years—dictatorial or otherwise—for resolving Alaska Native land ownership claims.

Generally, newspapers in the territory were opposed to statehood, in part because they were controlled by absentee interests that favored the freer wheeling and dealing available under Alaska’s territorial status. The major exception to this was the Anchorage Daily Times. Its publisher, Robert B. Atwood, and his wife, Evangeline, were always strong voices for statehood. President Harry Truman also turned out to be a strong proponent of statehood for Alaska and for Hawaii, too. Truman plugged Hawaii statehood in his 1946 State of the Union address and urged that “similar action be taken with respect to Alaska as soon as it is certain that this is the desire of the people of that great Territory.”29

Alaskans declared that desire in November when they voted 9,630 to 6,822 for statehood, roughly 58 percent to 42 percent. It was hardly an overwhelming mandate, but critics of statehood looked beyond the percentages to the total number of votes themselves. How could a territory cast less than 17,000 votes in a general election—less than the population of Reno, Nevada—and still hope to become a state? Alaska’s entire population in 1940 was only 72,524. Nevada itself, the least populous state in the 1940 census, had a population of 110,247. That didn’t sit too well with some folks, especially U.S. senators from the more populous states who were concerned about diluting their influence in the world’s most exclusive club. Meanwhile, a Gallup Poll found 64 percent of the American public as a whole in favor of Alaska’s admission as a state and only 12 percent against it. The remaining quarter was undecided.30

Meanwhile, down in the nation’s capital, Alaska’s territorial delegates had been promoting various statehood measures for some years. In addition to the concern of low population, chief among the issues of any statehood debate was the question of how much land from the public domain would be granted to the new state. The federal government owned 99.8 percent of Alaska’s vast territory, a much higher percentage than in any other would-be state over the years. Even in some of the more expansive western states, the public domain had been reduced by massive railroad land grants prior to statehood. That was not the case in Alaska.

In 1947, the House Committee on Public Lands held hearings on a statehood bill and it passed the committee, but no floor action was taken. President Truman stuck by his Alaskan commitments, however, and sent a 1948 message to Congress devoted wholly to urging it to grant Alaska statehood. On March 3, 1950, the House of Representatives passed an Alaska statehood bill with a vote of 186 to 146. Now Alaska statehood was in the hands of the exclusive club of the U.S. Senate.

The Senate version of the bill, however, called for the new state to select 21.4 million acres (about 6 percent of the total) from anywhere on the public domain, providing the selections did not interfere with existing reservations, such as national parks, forests, and military installations. Title to the mineral rights under those lands—assuming there had been no earlier conveyance of them—was also to pass to the new state. This measure died because a coalition led by southern senators blocked both the Alaska and Hawaii bills from coming to the floor for a vote. As Governor Talmadge had said, some folks didn’t like the idea of new states diluting their votes. The most important point to come out of the 1950 session, however, was that the idea of selecting lands—as opposed to section allotments per township—was now firmly embedded in the statehood debate.

But Alaskans were getting antsy and some more than a little cranky about the lack of real progress. After all, such political machinations were likely to drag on for years. When no positive action occurred during the 1955 session, Alaskans took matters into their own hands and by a near unanimous vote in the territorial legislature—there was one dissenter on the House side—passed a bill that called for the election of delegates to a constitutional convention. Held at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks beginning in November 1955, and blessed by Ernest Gruening’s exhaustive keynote address titled “Let Us End American Colonialism,” the convention of fifty-five delegates labored seventy-five days to draft a state constitution. The convention also resurrected an interesting political ploy from America’s past.

On April 24, 1956, Alaskan voters approved both the new constitution and the Alaska-Tennessee Plan to elect two “senators” and one “representative” at the fall general election. The winners were William Egan, a Valdez businessman and early supporter of statehood legislation, and Ernest Gruening as “senators,” and Ralph J. Rivers, a Fairbanks attorney and former mayor, as “representative.” All three were Democrats. Bob Bartlett supported the plan and kept his official seat as Alaska’s territorial delegate, no doubt figuring that statehood was worth the risk of losing his job.

The statehood bills that were introduced into the House and Senate in 1957 recognized Alaska’s new constitution and thus were “admission” bills, rather than “enabling” bills meant to start a territory on the legal road to statehood. The distinction may seem arcane to all except bookish legal scholars, but the practical result was that the legislation was streamlined—less to argue about. Alaska was growing so rapidly—its inhabitants would almost double from 128,643 in 1950 to 226,167 in 1960—that population was no longer much of an issue. That left federal land grants and Native claims as the big issues.

The House committee version called for 182 million acres to be selected by the new state from the public domain within a twenty-five-year period. The Senate version was similar except that its number was 103 million-plus acres. Then Bartlett was approached with four amendments to the House version. Decrease the land grant acreage to the Senate’s number; hold a statehood referendum; permit federal regulation of Alaska’s maritime commerce with the other states to continue; and, oh, by the way, let the federal government retain jurisdiction over Alaska’s game and fish interests. Wasn’t the last one where so much of this had started in the first place?

Bartlett agreed to the first three amendments, and with Speaker Sam Rayburn’s belated blessing, the Alaska Statehood Bill passed the House on May 26, 1958, by a vote of 210 to 166. By now, President Eisenhower was also giving the matter his unqualified endorsement. Over in the Senate, majority leader Lyndon Johnson grudgingly decided that he, too, would go along with Mr. Sam. After some last-minute maneuverings that saw the bill’s Senate floor manager, Henry M. “Scoop” Jackson of Washington, adopt the House version wholesale, the Senate approved Alaska statehood on June 30 by a vote of 64 to 2...

At an August primary election in Alaska, the statehood referendum handily passed with 83.5 percent in favor. In November, William Egan was elected governor and Ralph Rivers the state’s lone congressman. Bob Bartlett was elected to one of the Senate seats in a cakewalk, but Ernest Gruening fa...

On January 3, 1959, President Eisenhower signed the proclamation officially making Alaska the forty-ninth state. The road to statehood had been long and rocky, but considering the land grant situation alone, the wait had been well worth it. Almost 28 percent of the new state’s land—103,350,000 acres—was now slated for state ownership. But what about the issue of Native land claims? On that thorny debate, all sides had taken a bye. The concept of Native land claims had been recognized in the statehood legislation, but the specifics were left to be resolved in the future.

Oil is not new to Alaska. In fact, by some estimates it has been underground there roughly 300 million years, even before the North American and Pacific plates began their steady though belabored advance northward from near the equator. Alaska Natives utilized oil seeps in various ways since prehistoric times. Russians discovered seeps near Chinitna Bay on the western shores of Cook Inlet in the early 1800s. Similar seeps in the Baku region of the Caucasus had long nurtured a fledgling bitumen industry, producing a substance roughly akin to asphalt that had been used to strengthen mud bricks as far back as the ancient Sumerians. The Russians were too far from home and commercial markets to develop the resource, however, and much like the yellow gold, this black gold was neglected for a time.

In the early 1950s, Atwood, his father-in-law, Elmer E. Rasmuson, who was president of the Bank of Alaska, and about thirty others pooled some funds and began buying leases on the Kenai Peninsula. With much of Alaska still unreserved federal land, it was incredibly easy to do so. All that was required under the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920 to secure a three-year lease on federal land was the payment of a onetime fee—then twenty-five cents per acre. Standard leases covered 2,560 acres, or four square miles. Atwood and his partners were convinced that if they acquired a large enough block of leases, they could persuade an oil company to drill an exploratory hole.

When Cook Inlet production peaked at over 220,000 barrels a day later that year, in a mere decade Alaska had gone from zero oil production to become the eighth-ranking oil-producing state in the United States. The Cook Inlet basin alone was estimated to hold reserves of 1.5 billion barrels of oil and 5 trillion cubic feet of gas. The revenue from this bonanza gave the fledgling state of Alaska a solid financial boost.

But just as countless hard-rock miners could testify, reserves in the ground were one thing, dollars in the bank after delivery to smelter or refinery were quite another. By one count, by 1968 the oil industry’s total investment in Alaska was approaching half a billion dollars, out of which it had seen a return of only fifty cents on the dollar. “Eighth largest oil-producing state” made for good chamber of commerce talk, but as bore1hole pressures on million-dollar wells declined, payout was frequently some years down the road.

earthquakes. Here, the grating forces of the Pacific and North American plates have long caused the earth to rumble, shake, and otherwise adjust itself. The town of Valdez, some forty miles east of Unakwik Inlet, has recorded dozens of major earthquakes and numerous minor ones since records were begun in 1898. By some counts, one out of every ten of the world’s earthquakes occurs in Alaska. But no one was prepared for the fury that was unleashed this March evening.

At 5:36 P.M., something snapped along the fault lines beneath the waters of Unakwik Inlet. The resultant shock waves spread in all directions—heaving islands upward, sucking lakes dry, and violently shaking ridgelines and valleys. For three to four minutes the rumbling continued. Registering between 8.4 and 8.7 on the Richter scale, Alaska’s Good Friday earthquake was the most powerful seismic event ever recorded in North America.

From the quake’s epicenter in Prince William Sound, major destruction spread across more than 100,000 square miles. The earthquake was felt throughout an area greater than 500,000 square miles—roughly twice the size of Texas. The change in the landscape was mind-boggling. Some areas in southeastern Prince William Sound rose as much as thirty-eight feet. In the northwest, land dropped an average of two to three feet, flooding beaches...

By one calculation, the earthquake unleashed 200,000 megatons of energy—more than 2,000 times the power of the mightiest nuclear bomb then in U.S. arsenals. Most folks were simply too shocked to reason beyond immediate fears for their own safety and that of their loved ones.

As bad as the earthquake was, it could have been worse. A total of 115 Alaskans died, and 4,500 were left homeless throughout the state. Another 16 people drowned in tsunamis along the Oregon and California coasts. But the fact that the quake struck on a holiday, and at an hour when many were at home, no doubt eased the death toll. Crowded schools and downtown areas, particularly in Anchorage, might have resulted in many more deaths.

While these operations went on east of Umiat, BP also conducted seismic surveys closer to the coast around the Colville River delta and eastward to Prudhoe Bay. In September 1964, BP petitioned the state of Alaska to put its newly selected state lands in these areas up for lease. By the end of the year, the state held its first sale of North Slope leases. It decided, however, to offer only the area around the Colville River and, for the moment, exclude those lands around Prudhoe Bay. BP and Sinclair jointly leased 318,000 acres at the sale for an average of less than six dollars an acre. There wasn’t much competition.

Six months later, the state added the Prudhoe Bay acreage to another lease sale. Sinclair, discouraged by the results with BP near Umiat, decided not to acquire any additional acreage. This left BP alone to protect its earlier lease positions against new bidding interest from Richfield Oil, Atlantic Refining, and Humble Oil.

As the press beat a path to its corporate door, Atlantic Richfield spoon-fed them the numbers. Yes, a new test between 9,500 feet and 9,800 feet had flowed 1.3 million cubic feet of gas a day and almost 1,200 barrels of oil. No mention was made of Keasler’s 22-million-cubic-feet figure or the 40 million cubic feet recorded after that. Finally, on June 25, 1968, ARCO announced that Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 had indeed produced natural gas at 40 million cubic feet a day and crude oil at up to 2,415 barrels a day. It also confirmed that Sag River State No. 1, drilled with the Canadian rig that BP had relinquished on the Colville, had also found oil in the same formation and at the same depth seven miles away. Engineers and accountants whipped out their slide rules and did the math. If that indeed was all one field, it meant a heck of a lot of oil. Fairbanks and the rest of Alaska went wild. No one had seen anything like it since the day the steamer Portland docked in Seattle with “a ton of gold.” Only this time, the gold was black.

The compelling challenge was somehow to transport at least 2 million barrels of oil a day from Prudhoe Bay and to start doing so as quickly as possible. Reserves in the ground were a fine thing, but they had to be pumped and delivered before they became money in the bank. Even before Prudhoe Bay State No. 1 hit, BP and ARCO-Humble engineers had pondered how they would get North Slope crude to market. Tankers loading right offshore were certainly an immediate answer, and given the ever-increasing tonnage, two ships per day might be able to handle the load.

That kind of talk was music to some ears. Because the archaic Jones Act still required shipments between U.S. ports to be in U.S.-built ships, American shipyards sensed a building boom for tankers. But there were also problems with the tanker plan. The continental shelf extends for miles and miles off the North Slope coast into the Beaufort Sea and renders the waters off Prudhoe Bay relatively shallow. Huge tankers drawing fifty or more feet of water when loaded would have to take on their cargo perhaps as far as twenty-five miles off shore. This would require an underwater pipeline and a floating loading dock that would sit at the unyielding mercy of the Arctic winds and ice. Some proposed to anchor the tankers in the deeper mouth of the Mackenzie and simply pipe the crude 300 miles eastward along the coast.

When the ship made port in New York on November 12, two conclusions were obvious: The Manhattan couldn’t have made the trip without icebreaker escorts, and no voyages would be possible during the dead of winter. In 1970, the Manhattan returned to the Arctic for further trials, but Humble soon ended its charter and the vessel went back to carrying grain. She remains the first and last commercial ship to sail the Northwest Passage.

All told, Humble spent about $50 million on this early tanker experiment, but supertankers loading directly on the Arctic coast weren’t the only alternatives to a pipeline being discussed. For a short time, Boeing promoted a giant air tanker version of its jumbo 747. Let’s just fly the oil out. Others suggested a fleet of 900-foot-long nuclear submarines, literally filled with oil. Still others proposed extending the Alaska Railroad north from Fairbanks and shipping the oil south in tank cars. All of these forms had limited capacity and incurred substantial transportation costs. Finally, there was cartoonist Mark Wheeler from Ketchikan who showed a bucket brigade of Alaskans stretching from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez. Thus, a pipeline remained the favorite and seemed to make the most economic sense. But whether it would run south to Valdez or east into Canada and directly to Midwest markets was still a matter of heated debate.5

In 1989, the Alaska Marine Highway moved its southern terminal north from Seattle to Bellingham, just south of the Canadian border. The move eliminated cruising through the congested waters of Puget Sound and docking in downtown Seattle and cut as much as ten hours off the run to Ketchikan. From Bellingham, it was a straight shot out into the Strait of Georgia past Vancouver and north.

One well-meaning, though somewhat misguided, attempt to do so was the Native Allotment Act of 1906. Each Native head of household was allowed to select a 160-acre homestead on nonmineral-bearing ground. The key problem with the act was that 160-acre homesteads might be fine for farmers, but they were hardly conducive to a traditional hunter-gatherer culture. Why should anyone be confined to 160 acres when for generations his ancestors had been using all of the land? Besides, even if Alaska Natives had been inclined toward farming, the homestead process was not very successful in Alaska even among its white population.

The first significant meeting to discuss Native land issues was held in Fairbanks in July 1915 at the invitation of Alaska’s territorial delegate, James Wickersham. Fourteen Athabascan representatives, including six Tanana chiefs, asked Wickersham how they could protect their lands throughout the interior from increasing encroachment by whites. One of two ways, Wickersham told the gathering: File for homesteads under the 1906 act or ask the government to create reservations. Neither course was palatable to the assembled chiefs.12

That same year, the newly created Alaska territorial legislature took the then extraordinary step of passing a law that established a process whereby Natives could become U.S. citizens. Whether or not the territory actually had the legal right to grant U.S. citizenship is highly questionable, but the passage of the law showed the newfound political power of the Alaska Native Brotherhood. Formed in Sitka in 1912 by nine Tlingit and one Tsimshian, this group was the first organization of Alaska Natives to mobilize and attempt to affect change within the American legal system. The Alaska Native Brotherhood quickly recognized that the first step in any land claims process was citizenship. Without citizenship, Alaska Natives had no legal standing, and thus any other guarantees that they might receive were unenforceable. Only a few Natives became citizens under the territorial act, and it was never challenged constitutionally, in large measure because Congress soon erased all citizenship questions by passing the Citizenship Act of 1924.

While the Tlingit-Haida lawsuit was slowly working its way through the courts, Congress proposed another solution by extending the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 to Alaska. This act provided for the creation of reservations under the same dubious reservation system that existed in the rest of the country. Like so many proposed solutions to the Native land claims issue, the reservation concept was controversial. Non-Natives feared that large areas of land would be locked up and made inaccessible. Natives, wary of the legacy of the reservation system in the lower forty-eight, feared confinement in small areas without adequate resources, particularly for hunting and fishing.

Nonetheless, between 1941 and 1946 seven reservations were created throughout Alaska by mutual consent—Native petition and government approval. The largest included the villages of Venetie and Arctic Village in the upper Yukon drainage and totaled some 1.4 million acres. The smallest was the village of Unalakleet on Norton Sound with 870 acres. Three villages voted to reject reservation designations. By 1950, however, eighty other villages had submitted petitions to the secretary of the interior requesting reservations exceeding 100 million acres, more than a quarter of the territory. Clearly, the reservation process wasn’t going to work.14

The first major conflict between Alaska Natives and the regulatory powers of the new state of Alaska and the federal government began innocently enough. One day in 1960, state representative John Nusungingya, an Inupiat Eskimo of Barrow, went duck hunting for food just as Eskimos had done for centuries. He was promptly arrested by federal game wardens for shooting ducks out of a hunting season established by an international migratory bird treaty. Two days later, 138 other Inupiat went out, shot ducks in protest, and then presented themselves to the game wardens for arrest. While charges against all parties were eventually dropped, the incident characterized the difference—and frequent conflict—between the traditional “subsistence” way of life of most Alaska Natives and the regulatory nature of the “white” system.16 This difference had always existed, but it would be central to the resolution of Native land claims during the 1960s and continue to influence governmental land management decisions to the present day.

When Hensley’s task force reported its recommendations in January 1968, they fell into three key areas: first, that 40 million acres be awarded to Alaska Natives in fee simple (absolute ownership) and not in trust as under the reservation system; second, that cash payments from 10 percent of the income produced from the sale or lease of certain oil and gas rights up to $65 million be awarded; and finally, that the land and cash settlements be allocated to and paid through business corporations to be organized by region. The dicey question of whether the Native land selections would be made before, after, or coincidentally with state selections was not addressed. While there would be numerous versions and much cantankerous debate before a final bill was passed, the basic components of land and dollars distributed to collective corporations rather than to individual Natives would survive the process.

Udall’s would-be successor as secretary of the interior was none other than Alaska governor Walter J. Hickel. Even before his nomination was confirmed, Hickel boasted that he could undo anything that Udall had done during his final weeks. That proved a mistake. As his nomination came under fire from environmental groups, Hickel desperately looked around for support from any and all corners, including that of the Alaska Federation of Natives, which not surprisingly had withheld its endorsement. The end result of several weeks of intense negotiations was that Hickel promised to keep the land freeze in effect for two years or until the Native claims were settled, whichever occurred first, in exchange for the AFN’s endorsement of his nomination.

In the spring of 1969, a bill wound its way out of Jackson’s committee that would have given Alaska Natives $1 billion and about 10 million acres of land. It also proposed one regional corporation on the Arctic Slope, and two statewide corporations to oversee social programs and investments. When it passed the Senate in July by a vote of 76 to 8, Senator Ted Stevens urged Alaska Natives to take it and run—all the way over to the House. But they didn’t. The strongest objections were over the amount of land. Ten million acres, they said, wasn’t enough.

Certainly, the AFN and other Native groups had gained significant political clout in Alaska during the 1960s. And, thanks in part to Walter Hickel’s high-profile confirmation hearings, the cause of Native land claims had considerable support at the national level. But it was the even greater political clout of the oil companies champing at the bit to transport oil out of Prudhoe Bay that finally cut through the legislative morass and pushed two similar bills out of the House and Senate. At their core was a settlement of 40 million acres of land in fee simple and almost $1 billion.28

One writer called the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act “a complex settlement of a complex situation.” That was putting it mildly. In essence, the final bill provided for 40 million acres and $962.4 million to be distributed among twelve regional corporations largely on the basis of population. In exchange, it extinguished all historic aboriginal land titles, all aboriginal hunting and fishing rights, and all previously created reservations, except the Tsimshian reserve on Annette Island. With extinguishment of these aboriginal claims, Alaska Natives obtained fee title to more land than was in the entire Native American reservation system in the lower forty-eight.

Perhaps journalist Mary Clay Berry offered the simplest, yet clearest, perspective on the long, long road to the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act. “Despite its flaws,” Berry wrote, “this settlement was an extraordinary agreement in view of the United States’ traditional way of settling its Indian problems.”34 Indeed, it was. But there was also a little matter of a last-minute addition to the act, a requirement stuck in subparagraph (d)(2) of Section 17 that Congress receive recommendations for setting aside certain parks, wildlife refuges, wild and scenic rivers, and forests that were deemed in the national interest. In the end, subparagraph “d-2” would throw almost as much controversy over Alaska’s public lands in the next decade as the Native land claims had in the previous one. But first there was a pipeline to build.

Spurred on by the Arab oil embargo and resulting fuel shortages, Congress at last decided to take legislative action. The crucial moment came on July 17, 1973, when the U.S. Senate voted on an amendment offered by Alaska’s Mike Gravel to declare that the ponderous requirements of NEPA had been met and simply to authorize the construction of the pipeline. The outcome of the vote was a 49-to-49 tie. For the first time in four years, Vice President Spiro Agnew, then only weeks away from resigning his office, cast the deciding vote in favor of the pipeline.

Before the pipeline was completed, upwards of 70,000 men and women could say that they had had some hand in its construction. At the peak, 20,000 workers were directly employed by Alyeska and its subcontractors at one time. The biggest concentration was at the terminal in Valdez, where the construction of dock facilities, storage tanks, a ballast treatment system, control center, and the pipeline itself down from Thompson Pass kept as many as 4,000 workers busy.