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The Last Settlers Item Type Thesis Authors Brice, Jennifer Page Download date 08/10/2021 11:33:31 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/11122/8523 INFORMATION TO USERS This manuscript has been reproduced from the microfilm master. UMI films the text directly from the original or copy submitted. Thus, some thesis and dissertation copies are in typewriter face, while others may be from any type of computer printer. The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. Broken or indistinct print, colored or poor quality illustrations and photographs, print bleedthrough, substandard margins, and improper alignment can adversely affect reproduction. In the unlikely event that the author did not send UMI a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if unauthorized copyright material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion. • Oversize materials (e.g., maps, drawings, charts) are reproduced tty sectioning the original, beginning at the upper left-hand comer and continuing from left to right in equal sections with small overlaps. Each original is also photographed in one exposure and is included in reduced form at the back of die book. Photographs included in the original manuscript have been reproduced xerographically in this copy. Higher quality 6" x 9" black and white photographic prints are available for any photographs or illustrations appearing in this copy for an additional charge. Contact UMI directly to order. A Bell & Howell Information Company 300 North Zeeb Road. Ann Arbor. Ml 48106-1346 USA 313/761-4700 800/521-0600 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE LAST SETTLERS A THESIS Presented to the Faculty of the University of Alaska Fairbanks in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS By Jennifer Page Brice, B.A. Fairbanks, Alaska August 1995 © 1995 Jennifer Page Brice Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. UMI Number: 1376796 Copyright 1995 by Brice, Jennifer Page All rights reserved. OMI Microform 1376796 Copyright 1995, by UMI Company. All rights reserved. This microform edition is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code. UMI 300 North Zeeb Road Ann Arbor, MI 48103 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. THE LAST SETTLERS By Jennifer Page Brice RECOMMENDED: Advisory Committee Chair '< 4 * . z-— Department Head APPROVED: J \ j o. iLic* Dean, College of Liberal Arts De3n of the Graduate School g/ fff<r Date Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Abstract The American frontier closed in 1986 without fanfare. Earlier in that decade, the federal government offered up the last 40,000 acres for settlement in two parcels. The first was near Lake Minchumina, in the geographic center of Alaska, and the second was at Slana, near Alaska's eastern border with Canada. The following essays chronicle the daily doings of two communities and, in particular, two families: the Hannans of Deadfish Lake and the Craigs of South Slana. A work of literary journalism, The Last Settlers draws on interviews, historical documents and reminiscences to explore the changing meanings, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, of wilderness and civilization, stewardship and community. Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Table of Contents Preface v I. Deadfish and Dreams (Deadfish Lake) 1 II. Playing Deaf (Slana) 41 III. What Everyone Wants You to Have (Slana) 76 IV. This Land, Our Inheritance (Deadfish Lake) 104 V. Noble Anarchs (Deadfish Lake) 133 VI. The Little of the Righteous (Slana) 155 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. V Preface Summers in the sub-Arctic pass in a purgatory of dusks. Where there is no night, there can be no benediction in sunrise. One regulation among the reams governing air traffic in the North states that legal darkness cannot exist between Memorial Day and Labor Day. A student pilot, however, must prove that she or he can fly in the dark before earning an unrestricted pilot's license. In the dark, one cannot feel one's way among familiar landmarks but must rely instead on secondary sources such as instruments and navigation aids for essential clues about whether the airplane is flying straight and level, or upside down. It takes a rare kind of courage to fly in the dark, the same kind of courage, I believe, as trading everything comfortable and familiar about one's life for a new home in the unknown, uncompromising wilderness. In the summer of 1991, a photographer named Charles Mason and I were invited by an agent of the Bureau of Land Management to fly from Fairbanks, Alaska, to a remote settlement area near Deadfish Lake. The Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. two of us had collaborated often at the Fairbanks newspaper, where we'd both worked in the 1980s. By now, however, Charles was teaching photojournalism at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and I was enrolled in a master's program in creative writing. We thought we might collaborate on a magazine piece about homesteading. That August day in 1991, we chose Deadfish Lake because a slender thread of acquaintanceship connected us to Dennis and Jill Hannan, settlers whom we'd never met. Later, we learned how they, along with the residents of Slana, came to be among the last settlers on federal land anywhere in the country: a clause in the Land Policy and Management Act had ended, in the year 1986, American migration to the frontier. The Hannans and the Craigs have never crossed paths nor are they likely to. A long time ago, they set their compasses to different headings. Dennis and Jill Hannan, with their one-year-old son, staked a swatch of wilderness at Deadfish Lake near the northern boundary of Denali National Park and Preserve, deep in Alaska's interior. Don and Wanda Craig settled in the rough-and-tumble community of Slana, in the foothills of eastern Alaska's Wrangell Mountains, with five of their nine children. Although the frontier has closed forever, it still speaks to our distinctly American fascination with what lies on the other side of civilization, to our New World temptation to re-create ourselves in the forest or on the prairie. History, geography and imagination all converge at the frontier. For the last settlers, the frontier in the 1980s meant freedom, a fresh start, solitude, independence, community, peace, prosperity, happiness. These are lofty concepts, but the vastness of the Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. Alaska wilderness demands a corresponding breadth of spirit from those who would make their home within it. It is not the land but the dream of living on it that spells out the terms of one's existence. Many of the settlers at Slana aspired to the best that both wilderness and civilization could offer, planting satellite dishes beside their potato gardens, for instance. At Deadfish Lake, home and forest have merged so completely as to be virtually indistinguishable. At both places, nearly everyone recounted for us how, within months of staking their land, they sloughed their romanticism and settled down to the reality of living in the wilderness or its near kin. Even the poets among them have had to become consummate pragmatists. To uproot oneself from home to forge a new life on the frontier has long been seen as a radical act of bravery verging on foolhardiness, but not always for the same reasons. The history of American settlement is a history of the American imagination. A century ago, pioneers such as Dennis Hannan's great-great-grandparents by the name of Boone cut a swathe through the western wilderness to make way for railroads and civilization. Five generations later, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, wilderness represents not so much the "uncreated future" (in one historian's words) as the untrammeled past. In some ways, the imperatives of the frontier haven't changed since the California gold rush or, for that matter, since Plymouth Rock. A degree of purposefulness, of self-reflection, arises from the choice to live outside the margins of civilization. But the frontier as geography is fast becoming an anachronism: it refers more often to a concept than to a Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. place, and its frequent enclosure in quotation marks indicates ironic distance. As revisionist historians rightly point out, the world's remaining frontiers are not clean slates but palimpsests on which indigenous peoples have trod for millennia. Now that advertising executives and presidential speech writers have latched onto the term, the frontier's most frequent application is to economics or medicine or Cadillacs or outer space, not geography. What the Wild West, interplanetary shuttles, and settlements in the Alaska wilderness have in common is a place at the edge of what is known. * * * In a recent issue of The New Yorker. I saw advertised a five-star resort, accessible by auto, air or Amtrak, with spacious accommodations, six-course meals, a spa, swimming pools, dancing, golf courses, tennis courts, trout streams, skeet fields, woodland trails "begging" to be explored on foot or on horseback, afternoon tea serenaded by violins. When I was away at college on the East Coast, strangers often asked me what it was like to live in Alaska. Partly because people at cocktail parties aren't interested in the long answer and partly because my experience living elsewhere was limited, I had a hard time responding.

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