Free The Floor of Heaven by Howard Blum Page B

marauding trading vessels, or even effectively police the muddy streets of Sitka. In the fifteen years since the United States Congress had reluctantly finalized its purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7.2 million, the official policy toward the district had been one of neglect.
    At the time of the sale, feelings had run high in the House and the Senate that Secretary of State William Seward had engineered a frivolous and expensive deal simply to repay a cash-strapped Russia for its support of the North during the Civil War. The sale was loudly dismissed as “Seward’s Folly,” the half-million-square-mile wilderness mocked in congressional debate as “Seward’s Icebox” and “a polar bear garden.” The New York World compared the territory to “a sucked orange,” insisting “It contained nothing of value but furbearing animals, and these had been hunted until they were nearly extinct.” Horace Greeley, in the New York Tribune, grumbled that Alaska was a “burden … not worth taking as a gift.” Similarly, one congressman spoke for many prominent and influential national voices when, brimming with frustration, he ranted, “Why didn’t we give her [Russia] the seven million and tell her to keep her damned colony? It’ll never be of any use to us.” In 1877 the territory had been officially declared the Alaska Customs District, but this deliberately vague designation brought no formalized civil government to the area. There were, it was estimated, 33,000 people, largely Indians and Eskimos, spread throughout a wilderness that was nearly one-third the size of the entire continental United States at the time, and for all practical purposes they lived in a state of lawlessness. It was an unruly and untamed land, and the preoccupied lawmakers in Washington accepted this with a philosophical shrug of disinterest. After all, Alaska was undeniably a distant, frozen, and worthless place. The marines on board the Wachusett had been sent as a token force, and, it was openly acknowledged, they were a slight token at that.
    Yet it was Alaska’s very remoteness, the promise of a vast, virgin, and uncivilized country, that attracted a certain kind of individual. As the Wild West grew civilized, as the vanquished Indian tribes settled with dour resignation on government reservations, as the wheels of steam engines clicked and clacked against the metal tracks that stretched across plains where short generations ago herds of buffalo had thundered, and as homesteaders pounded sturdy fence posts and plowed the rich brown earth, stubborn men flocked to this newly acquired territory. Wanderers, trappers, Indian fighters, cowboys, and lawmen, the very men whose fierce, independent, courageous, and often violent ways had shaped the West, now moved on to another lonely and challenging American outpost. They had succeeded in taming one frontier, only to become victims of their own success. They were heroes who had outlived their usefulness. Their spirits found neither joy or comfort in the routine; and—a curse? a blessing?—they had grown accustomed to the sharp edge of uncertainty that shaped an active, dangerous, self-sufficient life. They wanted to grow old boldly, and in the company of new adventures. And so they packed their saddlebags and, as if driven by some natural instinct, began to migrate. They turned their backs on the towns they’d helped build, on the Main Streets where families now strolled, and journeyed north to the last American wilderness.
    Along with this legion of daring, restless men came the prospectors. These indomitable sorts had tried their luck in the California gold fields; then, hearing news of fresh strikes, they’d hurried off to the mountain mines in Colorado, Nevada, and Idaho; and now, still dreamers of the elusive golden dream, they arrived undaunted in a new big and promising country. Armed with picks, short-stemmed shovels, and gold pans, they believed their luck would at last change, and