Molly Rettig - Finding True North: First-Hand Stories of the Booms that Built Modern Alaska

People in the Arctic may have been the first to notice something crazy was happening to the global climate. The air here was getting warmer and the land more moist, new plants were springing up, and animal migrations were changing. It may sound like a familiar story to us, mirroring many of the changes were seeing today. But this was 13,000 years ago, at the end of the last Ice Age, or as my father-in-law would call it, the Pleistocene.

It was also very disruptive to life on the Bering Land Bridge, a massive swath of land connecting Asia and North Americaon a modern map, Siberia and Alaska. As the world warmed, woolly mammoths and small prehistoric horses couldnt survive on the shrubby tundra that now crept across the land, meaning hunters and gatherers couldnt survive there either. Like sand swirling in the wind, the worlds creatures began to stir. The people of Beringia looked for a better place to go.

With melting ice opening new corridors, people traveled east, toward North America, and found themselves in Alaska, an Aleut word for Great Land. These were the First Alaskans, this much we know. Of course, theres a lot we dont know about these ancient people, like how they got here or exactly when they arrived. The journey may have taken hundreds of years, or thousands. Ostensibly, they were searching for food, or climate, or refuge from enemiessomething that would lead toa better life. And while we learn a little bit more with each bone or projectile point thats discovered, there is much well probably never know.

Some of this history lives on, with the Indigenous people of North America and the tribes that span Alaska. Their languages and stories and traditions evolved from these First Peoples. And while they have adapted to modern times, they have also maintained a traditional way of life based on hunting and fishing and a deep connection to the land. The First Alaskans are the ones who cracked the code on how to survive, and thrive, in the harshest environment on earth.

In the long period since then have come the Next Alaskansthose who arrived long after the Bering Land Bridge was submerged under rising seas, but who still found their way here. There were the Russian fur traders who came hunting for sea otters and other rich pelts that were in demand around the world. Then the gold miners and missionaries and soldiers, the restless souls who traveled by foot and train and hand-cobbled boats, over mountain passes and glacial rivers, until they couldnt go any further. These next-comers arrived in waves, driven by major events in world history: The Gold Rush. World War II. The Oil Boom. Events that transformed Alaska and reverberated across the planet. Compared to the hunters and gatherers who preceded them, they had a different approach to living here, carving Alaskas wild spaces into homesteads and frontier towns that looked more like the places theyd come from. But they still shared something in common with their predecessorsthe desire for a better life.

A latecomer to Alaska myself, I didnt arrive until 2010, as one of the many twentysomethings flocking here for adventure. By then most of the rivers and trails could be found on Google Earth, and you could get a good latte and a decent cell signal as far north as Fairbanks. Like those who had come before, I was also searching for something, but it was something not easily defined. I had dreams of making a difference, somehow, of making the world a better place, but no idea how to convert those dreams into action. This streak of idealism had led me to a degree in environmental journalism and all the way to a job at the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, where I covered climate change and wildlife and the rugged Alaska lifestyle. As a new cub reporter, suddenly Iwas writing about oil and gas and mining in one of the worlds great resource economies. I learned about Alaska Native culture, visited villages and fish camps, and talked with whaling captains and tribal leaders and Elders whod grown up in canvas tents and sometimes barely spoke white English.