In Alaska: Homesteading

By William E. Smith

"You know, we were all strangers that I morning," recalled Carol Sik, 47, as she leafed through an album of yellowing newspaper clippings. She was sitting with her husband Marino, 57, in the airy living room of their log house on the west bank of the Susitna River, about 100 miles north of Anchorage on the way to Fairbanks. The morning she refers to was March 5, 1959, when Carol, a wan, pretty girl of 22, left Detroit with her lean, plain-spoken husband and their eight-month-old daughter Lindy Lou for a new life. Their companions were some 35 other city folk, most of them from the Detroit area, who set out in a caravan of cars, pickup trucks and house trailers to take up land in Alaska.

As such, they were among the last of America's homesteaders, joining a tradition of pioneers who for a century had been building log cabins and clearing a little of the remaining wilderness in exchange for 160 acres of free federal land. For Carol and Marino, it seemed a risk worth taking. "Nothing belonged to us in Detroit," Carol recalls. "We had a trailer on a lot that belonged to somebody else. Marino was a repairman for the gas company in the daytime and a policeman at a drive-in at night, and I never saw him." Like the others, the Siks had no idea what they were getting into. Tires went flat, pickup trucks broke down, and trailers skidded dangerously down icy slopes.

They reached Anchorage at the end of March, tired, sick, a bit frightened and almost broke. The town literally rolled out a red carpet for them, but many Alaskans were openly skeptical of the group's prospects. "I'll give you three months!" one man shouted, which led Editor Bob Atwood to note in the Anchorage Times that "many of today's skeptics received the same reception when they arrived."

The Fifty-Niners pressed on to the Kenai Peninsula, their original destination, only to discover that good unclaimed land there was hard to come by. Then they heard about the west bank of the Susitna: rich, available farmland, with a marvelous view--on clear days--of Mount McKinley and the Alaska Range. There was a hitch: there were no roads into the area and no bridges. In winter you could walk across the frozen river; in summer you could take a boat. But during the spring breakup and the autumn freeze-up the only way you could cross the Susitna was to hire Bush Pilot Don Sheldon to fly you from Talkeetna on the eastern bank over to Old Homesteader Shorty Bradley's pasture on the western side. The land-office man in Anchorage warned them, "That river is a real bear cat."

Nonetheless, the main group chose the Susitna. On the gray afternoon of April 29, they ignored the warnings of townspeople in Talkeetna that the spring breakup was imminent, and began to cross the mile-wide river. They pushed and pulled their overloaded house trailers across. At times the water above the ice reached their knees. But by late afternoon they had hauled their trailers ashore on the west bank.

They had filed for homesteads along an old mining road, about six miles from the river. All summer they chopped spruce and birch trees, pulled stumps, dug wells, fought off bears, baked bread and canned moose and porcupine meat. They planted a garden on a cleared acre of land lent by Shorty Bradley, who had trapped and hunted in the area off and on since 1939. Marino Sik cleared two acres and built a barn, and worked late into the cold autumn nights to finish a log lean-to for his trailer. He was sick of trying to work communally, he said, telling the others, "You ask me for help, I'll give it to you. But it's between us, man to man."

By winter there were only 13 Fifty-Niners left on the Susitna, and what a winter they had. On Christmas Eve, Steve Pankiewicz's mare Ruby, a Percheron draft horse, fell 20 ft. into a well. All night long the men worked to dig the horse out of the frozen gravel, and by 4 a.m. they were finished. They earned Shorty's grudging admiration. "Those people did something nobody ever did before in this country," he allowed. "They got a horse in a well and got it out alive." Later that winter Bertha Donaldson fell ill and had to be evacuated by Bush Pilot Sheldon. Soon she. was back, not knowing that her illness, Hodgkin's disease, would some day cause her to leave Alaska and would eventually take her life. In the early spring she wrote in her journal, "I've never seen such a March in my life. The only thing I heard yesterday was a robin. Sometimes I sit on a stump and listen to the silence."

Shorty always used to say, "We've got the land and the climate, and this is river bottom. This land will be worth something some day." He was right, of course, and to a degree that might have surprised him. Sometime in the mid-1960s, the Fifty-Niners learned that their homesteads lay smack in the middle of the proposed right-of-way of a new federal highway between Anchorage and Fairbanks. The Government subsequently bought their land cheap ($100 an acre for cleared land, $75 for uncleared) but in so doing it changed their lives. By the time the road reached their area in 1967, Shorty Bradley had been dead a year and buried beside his private airfield. "We had a terrible time digging the grave because of the time of year," Marino recalls.

When the Fifty-Niners arrived, there were only seven or eight people on the west side of the Susitna. Today the Siks figure there are about 1,500, stretched over a wide area, and there is a town, or rather a cluster of highway businesses, a post office, a police station, a school and four churches, known as Trapper Creek. "We thought of calling it Bradleyville," says Carol. "We thought of Little Michigan. But that idea was dropped right away. After all, this is Alaska, not Michigan. But most of us lived on Trapper Creek, so that's the name we settled on." Despite Shorty's prediction, very little of the land is currently under cultivation. A fitting symbol of the valley's present development is a sign half a mile down the road: DEVONSHIRE SUBDIVISION. TWO-TO FIVE-ACRE TRACTS. 10% DOWN.

After doing odd jobs at first, Marino Sik worked for the state highway department for twelve years. In 1971, with so much traffic passing their door every day, he and Carol started a highway business that included a grocery, Laundromat and showers. They sold it in 1977, tired of working 18-hour days. A few months later, just as they were finishing their new three-bedroom house, they again got wanderlust. With their daughter and the two boys who had been born in Alaska, they moved to Las Vegas, where Marino ran a gas station. "We wanted to show our kids there was something more than just Trapper Creek," says Carol. They stayed three years, then moved back to the homestead. Today Marino is a mechanic, with as much highway work as he can handle, and he and Carol run a back-door videotape-rental business. Of their original 160 acres, the Siks still own 80, which they think is worth around $5,000 an acre.

In a sense, the Siks are the only members of the original caravan still in the valley. Bob Watkins is there, but he flew from Detroit to Alaska in 1959 instead of making the long highway trip. Others drifted away, happy to sell their land for a good price. Would the Siks ever leave?

"Oh, I don't know," says Carol. "Marino keeps complaining about the winters, but I don't know where we'd go."

When were the hardest times? "Probably that first winter," says Carol. "But actually, those were also some of the best times. We didn't have any money, but neither did our neighbors, and we had a lot of good times together." No, she says, she doesn't think any of the Fifty-Niners ever regretted the decision to move to Alaska.

"Even those who had to leave, for one reason or another, thought of it as one of the highlights of their lives."

A visitor remarks that nobody seems to worry about bears any more. "That's true," says Marino."They're not the problem they used to be. I went out the other night with a youngster who was visiting us and tried to find one. I couldn't do it, and finally I gave up and just showed him some tracks."

--By William E. Smith