The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1941-03-21
CHAPTER XIV

Matanuska was now on the map.
The colonists had arrived.
But that Promised Land, appar-
emily, didn't live up to their expec-
tations. For all they found were UNI
finished roads and harried officials
and lumber piles and an impromptu
city of tents along the valley flats,
army tents in rows as regular as a
a wooden floor and boarded side
walls and a smoke pipe going up
from it's roof.
There was no teaching for the
chalk wrangler yesterday when
word went round that the first train
load of the colonists was on its way
up from Seward, and Katie O'Connell
was hurried over from Toklutna
to look after the women and chill
dren. And since I was detailed to
stand right-hand man to Katie, I
was there to help make boilers Of
coffee and watch the disembarking
of the disheveled and sea-worn
army.
But the note they struck was not
always epic.
i could see women still petulant
over their weeks of homelessness,
surrounded like ship-wrecked sailors
by what they could salvage from
their long-traveled belongings. I
doled out coffee and sandwiches to
toil-hardened tillers of the plains
and drouth-wizened cattle-raisers
from valley farms and Mackinawed
ax-wielders from wooded slopes. I
tried to give them welcoming word
or two as they stared gloomily
about at their Arctic Ell Dorado and
herded their children up to the grub
tables. The fact they were to live
in tents, it was plain, didn't appeal
to them.
It was the young people, to whom
Alaska meant excitement and Mata-
nuska spelled romance, who crowd
ed about the cameras-lanky youths
and laughing girls, not in the Slated
sunbonnets of earlier free-soilers,
but in the sweaters and Stacks of
their own blithe generation. And
there were children, slathers of chill
-dren, with tousled heads and toys
in their hands, staring wide-eyed at
the white peaks of the Talkeetnas
and Justify proclaiming to the world
they were hungry.
"You belong in these parts?" a
ipetulant voice inquired of me as I
refil1ed the coffeepots. I found N.Y.
self confronted by a rotund matri-
arch with a terrace of chins and
eight obstreperous children.
I said that Matanuska was now
my home.
"Can't say you look like a girl
who'd been brought up on whale
blubber," observed my new friend,
who asserted that her name was
Betsy Sebeck. "But them cock-eyed
bureaucrats, Of course, amt got
anything ready. There amt even
water, they tell me, in them two-by-
four tents. And they amt got lamps
when they told us we was to
be steam-heated and Lit by cleo
tricity!" =
"Things will straighten out" I
said as I caught sight of Lander
haranguing group Of grumbling
free-soilers.
"But there amt even, blankets
enough to go round" persisted Bet
sy. "And if don't get at wash
tub before the weeks out them kids
o. mine will have to 60 naked"
The bureaucrats, I discovered,
had declined to bring in piano for
her, had lost two of her trunks, and
were now trying to stow her away
in back-row tent which her man
wouldn't accept. They'd even failed
to stock the Commissary UP proper
ly, she lamented, and that'd mean,
of course, going without grapefruit
and ice cream.
But even in the midst of all that
confusion and complaining I wanted
to cling to the claim there was
something epic about the migration.
That fact came home to me more
than ever when ! stood under an
azure Alaskan sky that arched above
the blue-ravined slopes of mountains
towering up to stately peaks of white
and watched the two hundred fam
lily heads draw lots for their farm
plots. For fate, of course, reposed
in that little wooden box that held
the plot numbers, since few of the
farmsites were already cleared and
fenced and blessed with cabins,
while others were swampy and I'm
broken forest. And as the lucky and
the unlucky crowded about big
map of the valley, to determine the
position and state of their tracts,
there was much cheering and grum-
bling and groaning.
Salaria, deep-bosomed and Indian
brown, drifted up to my table and
viewed the scene with lip curl of
contempt. There she was joined by
Sock-Eye, waiting and watchful for
the first open jeer from one of those
preoccupied cheechakos.
Looks like a potlatch e me-" OBJ
served Salaria. "a potlatch with
Uncle Sam passin' out forty-acre
farms instead O. two-bit knives. And