Excerpt from A Guide to Alaska: Last American Frontier

Scarcely more than a generation ago, well within the memory of many living Alaskans, the news was flashed in 1897 over telegraph wires that the steamer Portland had arrived in Seattle with a ton of gold. Immediately a feverish interest was awakened in a little-known and still largely unexplored possession of the United States - Alaska. Names made familiar during the days that followed - Klondike, Chil koot Pass, Yukon Trail, Nome Beach - and the exploits of those con nected with them - are familiar to every school child and have passed into the written and unwritten folklore of the nation.

Even more important, and certainly no less dramatic, is the less known Alaska of today - the Alaska of graveled automobile roads, of airplanes, used as casually by Alaskans as are taxis in continental United States, of giant gold dredges, of great fishing fleets, of farms with the latest in modern equipment, of homes set in frames of flowers and surrounded with vegetable gardens, of large shops, theaters, churches, schools, clubs, newspapers, and America's farthest-north university. Alaska may be the United States' last frontier, but in its application of tomorrow's techniques to present - day mining and agri culture, in its revolutionary use of air transportation, in the energy and inventiveness of its citizens, Alaska deserves no less the name of the United States' foremost frontier. Readers with vague schoolroom ideas of Alaska as a frozen land of ice and snow, the principal occupa tions of whose inhabitants are panning gold and hunting bear, may, as they turn these pages, find themselves deprived of many cherished illusions, but they will be compensated with some of the most sig nificant episodes in the stirring story of America.

I am happy to sponsor this volume, in the hope that it not only will bring to residents of continental United States a renewed interest in their fellow-americans of Alaska, but will encourage them to see with their own eyes Alaska's physical grandeur and its hardly less remark able technological development. The selection of the subject matter, however, and the editing and arrangement of material are the sole responsibility of the writer selected for this task by the Federal Writers' Project of the Works Progress Administration.

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