Icebox Bishop

Half the Indians in Alaska are reasonably good Episcopalians now, but when Bishop Peter Trimble Rowe was sent out to convert them the territory was still just "Seward's Icebox" and the natives were more impressed by their totem poles than by the cross.

That was in 1895--a year before the Klondike strike. In all Alaska there were only three Episcopal missions, and to cover his diocese Bishop Rowe had to mush on snowshoes with a dog sled over distances as far as from Seattle to San Francisco, with no sign of life, no vegetation between mission stations. He learned to change his undershirt outdoors at 70DEG below zero, to walk and run as much as 50 miles a day behind his dogs, to build a fire in a blizzard, to pick off wolves too near the camp circle with a rifle.

Next week Bishop Rowe will round out 46 years in the Episcopate. At 85 he is the oldest active bishop in the worldwide Anglican communion. Instead of three struggling stations his diocese includes hospitals, schools and churches scattered over nearly 600,000 square miles of territory; and now he is confirming the children and grandchildren of Indians and Eskimos he converted to Christianity before the turn of the century.

Until he was 75, Bishop Rowe kept on mushing 2,000 miles each winter, and he thinks he has gone "farther than any other man ever traveled in Alaska." Now he goes by plane, train, steamboat and his launch the Pelican, apologetically explaining that he can cover more ground faster that way.

Though his is as wearing a diocese as they come, Bishop Rowe has four times refused easier bishoprics in the States, has outlasted many a younger man in Alaska. Illness laid him low for the first time in his life last August when doctors hustled him south for treatment of a throat tumor. Safely through three months' X-ray treatments but beginning to show his age for the first time, he is still eager to go, plans to head back to Alaska in January and continue right on up to his missions in the Arctic.

No pessimist is Bishop Rowe. "Why it's a picnic, that's what it is, a picnic, compared to the way I used to cover Alaska," said he cheerily last week. Nor is he a backward looker. "The church is more alive and alert today," he observes. "There is an enthusiasm today that did not exist before. . . . The church has a larger world vision."

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