The Record From the Regions Rosanne Butler, editor Protecting Alaska's Native Population-With Federal Records by Thomas E. Wiltsey Standing next to an abandoned woodframe house near Northeast Point, with the wind moaning and the waves thundering against the rocky shore, knowing that there is nothing beyond except the polar ice cap, one is nearly overwhelmed by the enormity and rawness of Nature.
Nothing grows higher than the tough tundra grass, undulating in the wind like a thick green sea.
At its most benevolent, the environment is forbidding. It is almost impossible to imagine human endeavor, let alone pervasive government activity, in such a place. Yet paradoxically, here in this most marginal of habitable land, Federal agents not only found something to keep themselves busy but controlled perhaps the most tightlymanaged, longest-running government program in the history of the Republic. These wind swept specks of land are the Pribilof Islands, isolated in the vastness of the Bering Sea, linked only in heritage to the Aleutian Islands to the south. It was here that the real joke behind SSeward's Follyw existed, for these five tiny islands are the summer breeding grounds of the northern fur seal.