Seward's Icebox

LORD OF ALASKA: BARANOV AND THE RUSSIAN ADVENTURE--Hector Chevigny --Viking ($3).

ALASKA UNDER ARMS--Jean Potter--Macmillan ($2).

These two books reflect the fact that U.S. readers have at last caught up with the continental statesmanship of Lincoln's and Johnson's Secretary of State, William H. Seward, who forced the purchase of Alaska ("Seward's Icebox'') amid the catcalls of the isolationists of 1867. The Japanese in the Aleutians and the new global geography have made the U.S. suddenly conscious that Alaska is nearer Seattle (as a plane flies) than Seattle is near Los Angeles.

Author Chevigny's book is an attempt to let a little midnight sun into the darkness of Alaska's Russian past. Author Potter's book is a report on Alaska's precarious present.

Experienced Empress. Empress Catherine the Great of Russia was born too early to believe that he who controls Alaska may control the Pacific (as Rezanov, founder of the Russian-American Co., believed). When the rich merchants of Siberia pleaded with her to make Alaska a Russian colony, the Empress slapped them down. "England's experience with American colonies," she said dryly, "should be a warning to other nations."

Canny Catherine would furnish "neither men, ships, nor money" for trade with the Alaska region. But she was willing to let the merchants furnish them. So the Siberian sea trader, Grigor Shelekhov, decided (circa 1780) to plant a Russian, colony in North America.

Self-Made Russian. Shelekhov planted his settlement on Kodiak Island--in the lee of the peninsula that breaks into the bits and pieces of the Aleutians. To manage his new colony Shelekhov chose middle-aged Merchant Aleksandr Andrevich Baranov. Baranov was that rarest of Russians, a self-made man. He began as a small trader, worked his way to ownership of a Siberian glass factory. Baranov is the hero of Author Chevigny's impressive history of young Alaska.

Baranov intended to stay five years in the Northwest, long enough to make money out of trading in sea otter furs. He stayed 21.

When he took over the settlement, Baranov was left without a sailing ship. He built his own. He mixed native moss with hot pitch for calking, used mountain ash for hardwood. He set Russians and natives digging for coal and iron, made waterproof paint from whale oil and red ocher. His ship had three masts, two decks. For sails Baranov commandeered tents, trousers, jackets, sewed them into great sheets with seal gut thread.

Raw Rum. Baranov made money for his company from the start. Hundreds of canoes, manned by Aleutian islanders, scoured the shores for sea otter, seals and foxes. At the cost of hundreds of lives, the precious skins found their way to Siberia, were traded to eager Chinese for copper goods, tea, cloth.

Baranov's disciplinary rules were rigid. There was a parade before the flag every Sunday. Gambling was sternly forbidden. Baranov forbade prostitution, encouraged his men to live with the Aleutian girls. Men with venereal disease were banished to the woods to treat themselves with "mercurials dissolved in vodka." Moonshining was also banned, but Baranov himself kept "a vat of crab apples, rye meal, and cranberries fermenting with kvass-yeast. Any man off duty was welcome to as much of the stuff as he could hold." This brew supposedly prevented scurvy, certainly helped morale. Said Washington Irving: "He is continually giving entertainment by way of parade, and if you do not drink raw rum and boiling punch as strong as sulfur he will insult you. . . ."

At last Russian missionaries and naval officers arrived in Alaska. The missionaries hated Baranov for allowing his men to live with Aleutian women, haunted his own "wife" so unmercifully that she threw Baranov's child into the sea. The officers despised Baranov because he was a merchant. Intrigues and revolts were started against him. At last he received the title of Governor and a decoration from the new Emperor, Alexander I.

Baranov longed to go home. "The place," he wrote, "has made me old before my time. . . ." But by then the Russian Government wanted him to stay in Alaska. The writings of Explorers Vancouver and Puget had opened the eyes of his Government. The Northwest became officially Russian and was ruled by Baranov until a few months before his death in 1819. He left behind 24 settlements, "ranging in size from simple hunting stations to New Archangel, whose worth alone was estimated at two million, five hundred thousand rubles."

The phrase "He who controls Alaska may control the Pacific" was revised by famed U.S. General "Billy" Mitchell. "Alaska," said Mitchell, "is the most important strategic place in the world . . . the most central place in the world of aircraft. . . . Whoever holds Alaska will hold the world."

It was with this comment in mind that Jean Potter, a researcher working for FORTUNE, was packed off to Alaska not long before Pearl Harbor.

Miss Potter sailed with a lusty boatload of ditch diggers, carpenters, welders, structural iron workers and cat-operators from Seattle. "There were not many women aboard--only a few school teachers and Army and Navy wives, a prostitute and a giggling 250-pound redhead who had arranged her trip through a matrimonial bureau." Miss Potter "heard one well-soused carpenter tell the purser 'Who the hell wants to go up there anyway?' "

Vast Solitudes. This attitude toward Alaska unfortunately has been so general that "after three-quarters of a century under American rule Alaska has virtually no population . . . less than 73,000--not quite enough to fill the Yale Bowl." Yet Alaska is as broad and nearly as deep as the U.S. A single forest fire may lay waste hundreds of square miles and Alaskans may not even know about it. If and when Japanese parachutists land, there will be few Alaskan guerrilla fighters to battle them Russian style. There are nothing like enough Alaskans to provide the incoming U.S. Army and Navy forces with normal "civilian services" (food, billets). And nothing like enough industry and farming to make Alaska self-sufficient.

About half of Alaska's population consists of Eskimos, Indians and Aleuts. Eskimos and Aleuts are rarely seen south of the Arctic Circle, but the Indians are widely scattered throughout the Territory, live in shacks on the fringes of Main Street towns. The other (white) half lives mainly on canned goods and packaged foods from the States. The whites work at mining and the salmon industries.

High Prices. In Fairbanks, where the streets have only just been paved and plenty of "city" people still live in log cabins, Author Potter found the cost of living more than twice what it is in Washington, D.C. Haircuts cost $1, milk 25-c- a quart. Alaska still votes the Democratic ticket, but to Miss Potter, who favors "planning" and the New Deal, its leading citizens and Democratic bigwigs look like Old Dealers. Most of them object to the higher (Author Potter calls them "modern") taxes urged by Governor Ernest Gruening, a Roosevelt appointee.

But though she finds the tax question a vexed one in Alaska, Miss Potter reports that the Territory is united on the war. Major General Simon Bolivar Buckner of the Alaska Defense Command spoke for Alaskan public opinion when he told her that "We should be called the Alaska Offense Command." Offense will depend heavily on swift completion of the Alaska Highway, now being rushed day & night.

Not Enough Pilots. Author Potter believes that more than 25 years of intensive Japanese espionage in Alaska and its treacherous waters now gives the enemy certain advantages. She notes that the steamer on which she sailed to Alaska was "mysteriously wrecked" not long afterward. Last year "several U.S. transports sank with their cargoes on the Alaska route and at least seven freighters ran on the rocks." This is because the U.S. does not yet have enough pilots familiar with Alaskan waters.

But on the whole, Alaska today is plucky, busy and booming on the $200,000,000 provided for its development and defense--roughly 27 times what the U.S. paid Russia for Alaska two years after our Civil War.

*By the last census. Exclusive of troops, the population is now estimated at 80,000.

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