To Alaska by Train

Abstract

To Alaska by Train Ro d n e y Stein er Professor, Department of Geography California State University Long Beach, CA 90840 Presidential address delivered to the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers, Fairbanks, Alaska, September 22,1989. Yousee things; andyou say “Why?” ButI dream things thatnever were; and I say “Why not?” G.B. Shaw, Back to Methuselah T H E CELEBRATION OF HUMAN ATTAINMENTS is more inspiring but less illuminating than the examination of human shortfalls. Our envisioned but unfinished endeavors far outnumber our significant achievements, and they are in sum more diverse. They may tell us much about ourselves and our occupancy of the earth. There are few better examples of ambitious but unfulfilled enterprises than the century-old effort to link Alaska with the conterminous United States by means of an overland railroad. Alone among the long-distance carriers, only pipelines and railroads have yet to bridge the void, and by reaching into the Yukon Territory, the transmission system for natural gas comes the closer of the two. The recordof“northering”by rail is appreciable and involved. To consider only the preponderant odds against a linkup would fail to 7 8 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 52 • 1990 reveal why theprospect for arailroad managed to engage legislatures in both Canada and the United States as recently as the 1970s, or why this prospect continued to generate active Alaskan interest into the 1980s. Nor would it recognize that the North American railroad network has continued to draw closer to Alaska, reducing the unbuilt interval to more inviting dimensions (Figure 1). A chronicle of this undertaking is needed in appraising prospects for the future. It is equally valuable as an account of the processes by which kindred projects are formulated, initiated, and frustrated. Crossing the Bering Strait Public interest in an overland railroad to Alaska was evidenced well before the gold rush era in the north. Early attention focused on the Far East as a destination and on the Bering Strait crossing as both an obstacle and a symbolic goal in itself. Congress in 1886 authorized a study (United States 1961, p. B-2). Its stated aim ofreaching Russia and Japan was inspired in part by construction of the Northern Pacific transcontinental railroad, which would have provided a point of departure for the new line. Another likely stimulus was the emerging prospect for a trans-Siberian railway. In response, Major John Wesley Powell of the United States Geological Survey prepared a report based upon existing information, most notably the ground surveys made twenty years earlier for a Western Union telegraph line from the United States through Alaska and Siberia to Europe (Robb 1968). Powell abstained from making recommendations, confining his report to the citation of three possible routes to Alaska, and no further action appears to have followed. More ambitious even than aroute to theFarEast was the vision put forth by William Gilpin (1890), who proposed that a “cosmopolitan railway” should connect America with Europe by bridging the Strait, with southward extensions through the Americas, eastern Asia, and Africa. Gilpin correctly saw there were no insuperable natural obstacles to reaching the west coast of Alaska from a terminus in his adopted state of Colorado, but he gave scant attention to particulars. STEINER: To Alaska by Train 9 Figure 1. Railroads of northwestern America, including freight-car barge routes on the Pacific Coast. The Skagway-Whitehorse link and the unfinished line to Dease Lake are not now operating. 10 APCG YEARBOOK • VOLUME 52 • 1990 One nagging problem, forexample, was dismissed with the curt claim that “The bridging of the Bering Strait is by no means a difficult achievement.” His book focused instead on the alleged benefits stem­ ming from a gargantuan railroad. These included the creation of a counterforce to the British maritime monopoly and even the world­ wide disbandment of standing armies. Gilpin’s exhortation, though absurd in retrospect, might well have profferedjust the right mixture of imagination, eloquence, and chauvinism needed to carry the day, had the northern gold rushes materialized a decade earlier than they did. Ironically, while interest in a Bering Strait crossing has all but evaporated in recent decades, such advances in technology as the perfection of...