The nonindigenous Alaskan is an urban dweller. He may affect a red and black checked shirt and jeans, just as a Texan may affect a ten-gallon hat and high-heeled boots, but his wife or the public pressures generally insist that he shave every morning, and as likely as not he wears glasses. In 1950 the professionals and skilled trades occupations of an urban industrial society accounted for 79 percent of the white employed.
The nonindigenous person in southeast Alaska is not a settler in the usual sense, but at most a sojourner in the region ... Even given opportunities for year-round employment at attractive wages, he still exhibits a restless desire to "return home" after a brief spell ... It is difficult for the Ketchikan pulp mill to retain its labor force.
The city had done a good planning job, starting well in advance of the construction of the mill, making plans for new roads, streets and parking space; but its officials were unable to foresee the full impact of the new American motor car. The automobile appears to have become the most prized possession of the highly mobile workers of the United States. So the new Ketchikan resident brought his car along with him just as naturally as he would his family. But there is only a total of twenty-eight miles of narrow roads upon which he can drive out from Ketchikan, and no connection with any main highway system...
After the influx of the new owning workers many of the residents started making down payments on the bright-colored chrome-laden behemoths in response to some hidden prestige status-preserving urge, thus adding to traffic and parking snarls , and the tax burden. Between 1952 and 1958 the city of Ketchikan (with a population of some 10,000) spent more than six and a half million dollars for street work.
Half the cost was shared by the federal government under the Alaska Public Works program; assuming that street and road expansion were provided, no matter what the cost, would this take care of adapting to the environment the oversized, overpowered, low-skull, American automobile? Hardly... It is doubtful, therefore, that any newcomer to the region whose way of life is inextricably bound up with the automobile of today can ever be happy in his new environment, because his automobile cannot adapt to it.
—George Rogers, Arctic Institute of America. From Alaska in Transition, to be published for RFF by The Johns Hopkins Press.
A version of this article appeared in print in the September 1959 issue of Resources magazine.
