Coming into the Country (19 page)

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Authors: John McPhee

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Harris had been educated—Girard College, Philadelphia. Juneau had avoided school. He had fished and hunted, and projected himself into later life able only to write a little French. Harris had a large nose and lenticular eye sockets and a certain look—in the wings of the mustache, perhaps—of the schemingly disenchanted. Juneau—slim, sad-eyed Juneau, lip hair tumbling, crown hair short and flat—appeared to be a Yonne Valley farmer, an eel fisherman, the mayor of an embarrassed village, a waiter in a one-fork brasserie. Actually, he was born near Quebec and raised in Wisconsin, where his uncle, Solomon Juneau, built the first cabin in what is now Milwaukee but did not have the honor of seeing his name transferred to the town. In July, 1880, Harris and Juneau set out from Sitka Harbor with three months' provisions. Following a northeasterly route, they panned streams here and there but came up with only “light prospects”—some float quartz and colors of gold, but not enough for a profitable claim. They had several Auks with them, who were guiding for one dollar, a few hardtacks, and a cup of seal oil per day. The Auks took Harris and Juneau to Auk Village, and the two prospectors then spent three weeks in a condition—even by the standards of the Indians who would tell the story—of total bibacity. The Indians of the archipelago distilled a drink they called
hoochinoo.
They were adding its first syllable to the American language, with the help of Harris and Juneau. The prospectors paid with equipment and grub, and to buy more drink, and squaw-pleasures as well, they gave up more food, more equipment, until, scarcely a month out of Sitka, their three months' supplies were all but gone. Moreover, they lost their boat. It floated away with the tide in mid-binge. So, having no alternative, they decided to return to Sitka. They paid the tribe a rifle to take them home. But first the Indians took them down Gastineau Channel to a small anchorage near the mouth of a stream.
Its water ran white over ledges of rock and down through the cleavage of two sheer mountains—mountainsides stiff with big Sitka spruce, rising on up to avalanchine balds with declivities so steep that brooks fell down them in veils. When you look up from the streets of Juneau, that is what you see, for Juneau is compacted where the mountains touch, and the mountains loom behind the town in shades of green with snow-covered summits and alpine ice. The channel, Gastineau, is deep-water and blue, three-quarters of a mile wide, nineteen miles long, mountainsided all the way. Big white ships come up the channel to the town. In the opposite direction, sometimes, travel the Taku winds—off Taku Glacier, some thousands of feet above—winds so fierce and flattening that in 1880 it was on some days impossible to build a fire, and tents were not up long before they blew away. A pedestrian today in Juneau, head down and charging, can be stopped for no gain by the wind. There are railings along the streets by which senators and representatives can haul themselves to work. In recent years, a succession of wind gauges were placed on a ridge above the town. They could measure velocities up to two hundred miles per hour. They did not survive. The Taku winds tore them apart after driving their indicators to the end of the scale. The weather is not always, or even generally, so bad; but under its influence the town took shape, and so Juneau is a tight community of adjacent buildings and narrow European streets, adhering to its mountainsides and fronting the salt water.
There is a characteristic, too, of frequent rain. It rains in Juneau about two hundred and twenty days a year. Clouds hang like bunting on the mountains. Many sidewalks of the town are covered with permanent roofs that are cantilevered from building sides and held in place by coupled rods. Houses go unpainted, because it is so hard to find an appropriate time to paint them. Old-timers, eating halibut cheeks in the City Cafe, talk about putting a dome over Juneau. Rain does not fall around the clock, however, and the weather will shift with
tonic swiftness, the gray above the channel brightening to cotton and tearing apart to show blue sky, with tilted shafts of sunlight coming through, a rainbow forming.
There is no permafrost in Juneau. It is six hundred miles from the Arctic Circle. The temperature in winter seldom goes below zero, and in summer it holds under eighty. Out past the airport are forested bays that suggest Washington, Oregon, northern California, with the difference that the Mendenhall Glacier approaches them—all blue ice and powdered rock, like a huge white earth-fill dam. In streams near the glacier run cutthroat trout and Dolly Vardens two feet long. When the king salmon come into nearby waters they weigh as much as eighty pounds.
Juneau, bright at night from across the channel, is dense and galactic under the dark shapes of the mountains. From the same perspective in the day—with its ships at wharfside, its small-craft anchorage, its buildings all crowded before an uprising wilderness—it is a pocket city in a setting as wondrous as the setting of a city could ever be. Juneau is Alaskan, and American, and it has its oil-storage tanks in the heart of town. It holds its own in junk and crud. Gold Creek, the rushing stream that was named by Harris and Juneau, now runs through town in a concrete trough, a large storm sewer. The State Capitol is a six-story yellow brick-and-limestone building with big windows of the sort that are opened with a pole. In appearance, it is an abandoned junior high school. The governor's mansion is Southern and decadent, tired in its innards. On the edge of town is the abandoned mine—abandoned during the Second World War—of the Alaska-Juneau Gold Mining Company, a flooded ruin now, fronting the mountain like the façade of a theatre that has long since played its last show. From Calhoun Avenue to Willoughby Avenue, old wooden steps go far down the cliffside and around the new State Office Building, which soars into the air and goes down the hill, too. People approaching the building on the uphill side
walk in on the eighth floor—into a high atrium of light and space, of glass-walled, unpartitioned offices that look down into the interior as well as out upon the mountains and the channel. A sign on the ground floor says, “POSITIVELY NO DOGS.” SO much for old Alaska.
After the United States bought the territory from Russia, Juneau was the first city to be founded there. Juneau was also the first city in Alaska to be founded in result of a discovery of gold.
Through the cleft in the mountains, the two prospectors went up the stream a mile and more, panning. They found promising color in their pans, and in the creek bed “very good float gold quartz.” And, having done that and no more, they left. Back to Sitka went Richard Harris and Joe Juneau. They had staked no claims. They had gone only a short way upstream. They had only guessed at the gold beyond. Hungry, hung over, out of hooch and barter, they—prospectors!—had found the underbrush forbidding, the going too tough, so they had taken with them a hundred pounds of the river quartz and departed.
Chief Kowee, amazed, saw his chances for a hundred blankets going straight down the channel with these fools. So he chased after them to Sitka and complained to the mining engineer that Harris and Juneau had not been inclined to follow him far enough upstream, and he laid on the table some rich gold quartz as an example of what was there. Pilz arranged the grubstake for another expedition, and he paid for a canoe. For prospectors, now, in the fall, with the season running short, he had to use whatever he could find, and the pickings were limited to Harris and Juneau. After naming the canoe the Alaska Chief of Gold Creek, they started out in mid-September from Sitka.
Chief Kowee made extremely sure this time that they found the proper gold. En route, they prospected a stream or two that they had prospected before, apparently not remembering
where they had been. But the guiding Indians firmly led them on to the small anchorage in Gastineau Channel near the stream they had named Gold Creek. This time they went for the headwaters, and the brush was indeed so dense that to get around it they went up a gulch—calling it Snowslide Gulch—and on up the mountainside to a commanding view of an El Dorado. It was a stream-sculptured dish of ground into which long eras of erosion—glacial, fluvial, ice-spall erosion—had (from the mineralized mountains) poured a deep filling of gravels of gold. “I broke some with a hammer and Juneau and myself could hardly believe our eyes. We knew it was gold, but so much and not in particles, streaks running through the rock and little lumps as large as peas or beans.” (These quotations are from “The Founding of Juneau,” a careful history by R. N. De Armond which was published in 1967 by the Gastineau Channel Centennial Association.) In days that followed, claims were staked in the names of Juneau and Harris and their assorted grubstakers, backers, and creditors. Harris called a meeting—consisting of himself, Juneau, and three Indians—to formalize a code of local laws, the usual procedure under the Mining Act of 1872. Harris took the power job—district recorder—and two hundred square miles around the discovery was designated the Harris Mining District. Then, beside Gastineau Channel, a townsite of a hundred and sixty acres was staked and claimed. The name given the town was Harrisburgh. Pressed, at a later date, for his reasons for choosing that name, Harris said he wished to honor the state of Pennsylvania. Five bona-fide miners—not two miners and three Indians—were by custom required for the approval of a code of laws; and as the gold rush developed in Harrisburgh other miners quickly challenged Harris's power and, in the process, relieved the town of his name. The honor was transferred to Juneau. In a dispute about overlapping claims, the new Alaska court system a few years later deprived Harris of nearly all his property in and around the town. He eventually died in a sanatorium in
Oregon, his way there paid by friends. Juneau died in Dawson, in Yukon Territory, after a lifetime in the wild, always, but perhaps not primarily, in search of gold. It was his wish to be buried in Juneau, and four hundred dollars was raised there to bring the body south. In 1900, the year after he died, the town became the capital of Alaska.
 
 
 
The man who caused the initiative to select a new capital for Alaska to be placed on the 1974 ballot—the man who took up the idea and organized a group of volunteer workers and collected signatures and raised money and administered the entire successful procedure—was named, as it happens, Harris. He was not a descendant of the eponymous Harris of Harrisburgh. He had found his own lode in Anchorage in the nineteen-forties when he quit as a deliveryman for a dry-cleaning company and, with another driver, borrowed something over three thousand dollars and started the Alaska Cleaners, 610 Fireweed, Anchorage—a hanging-clothes forest, wherein someone presses a button and twenty miles of garments begin to move. Frank Harris is a lean man, bald, gentle in voice, with long jaws, an English face. He was elected to the Alaska State Senate in 1966, defeated in 1968. The urge to move the capital came over him during those two years. Sessions began in January and ran on at least three months (of late they have been extending through June), and Harris in Juneau developed what he called “a complete feeling of isolation—stuck there.” He found Juneau “a dilapidated city, buildings unpainted, streets dirty, sidewalks crumbling,” and could not imagine “people having pride in a state capital in such condition.” He lived in a big concrete coop that was painted pink—the Mendenhall Apartments. The wind blew so hard it seemed to come through the paint. He covered his windows with sheets and masking
tape, and, even so, he could not stay warm. “The Capitol Building was cold, too, if you could get to it, leaning into the Taku wind. The rain didn't bother me. I come from Oregon. I could not imagine how any place could be so isolated. People couldn't get at you. You were in a cage. You talked to the hard lobbyists every day. Every day the same people. What was going on there needed more airing.” So he sponsored a bill to move the capital. The day he introduced it, the news went out over the radio, and when he went to have lunch in the Baranof Hotel a waitress refused to serve him. In the State Affairs Committee, a legislator from Juneau killed the bill. Each of the three times that a capital-move initiative has appeared on the Alaska ballot, it has been as a result of a people's petition. “The legislature could do it,” Harris has explained, “but they don't have the guts.”
In Minnesota, when a bill was introduced to move the capital from St. Paul to St. Peter, Joe Rolette, legislator and fur trader, disappeared with the bill itself until the legislature adjourned. In Nevada, when the count was shaping up as close, one delegate shot another, and Carson City became the capital by a single vote.
Harris, in his effort, was taking up an idea that had come from nowhere so concentratedly as from Robert Atwood, of the Anchorage
Times.
All through the statehood years, Atwood had been writing columns advocating that the capital be moved. Atwood had, in Harris's words, “always been
ve-he-
ment on the subject.” When initiatives made the ballot in 1960 and again in 1962, Juneau taxed property owners to raise money to fight and defeat them. Twelve years went by, during which oil was discovered at Prudhoe Bay, in Arctic Alaska. Money was on the way. In the same period, the population of the Anchorage Bowl a great deal more than doubled. “Fairbanks and Juneau and the bush always combined and defeated the previous initiatives,” Harris told me one day at the cleaners. “But now we had the votes.”

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