On that first meeting the moose came within a few feet of the girl before halting.
There was a long inspection by the moose, which had bad eyes, and a wealth of sniffing, then with an inquisitiveness that startled the girl, she came forward to smell more acutely; and once more the wonderful legend that woodsmen believed, and to which Flossie certainly subscribed, came true: 'Pop, this moose knew, from one smell, that I wasn't afraid. Maybe she could even smell that I had been playing with the bear, but she came right up to me. I think she knew I was her friend.'
Flossie had barely delivered this Matanuska version of the old legend when her father grabbed for his rifle, shouting: 'Where is it?' and when Flossie realized that he intended shooting her moose, she screamed: 'No!'
Her father was so surprised by this violent reaction that he fell back a step, dropped his hand from the door latch, and said quietly: 'But, Flossie, a moose has the kind of meat we can sell. We need ...'
Again she screamed, the anguished cry of a girl who had grown to love all the animals that shared the edge of the glacier with her. She was one with the bear and knew that with patience she could tame this great moose, ten times her weight and half again as tall at the shoulders. Throwing herself in front of the door, she forbade her father to leave the house with his rifle, and after a tense moment when he considered lifting her aside, he surrendered. Allowing her to take the rifle from him, he grumbled: 'When you go to bed hungry, don't blame me,' and she replied: 'There are others up in the mountains,' and he said: 'But if'n he walks right up to our cabin, he wants to be shot. He's entitled to it.'
'It's a she,' Flossie said, and in the days that followed she met with the moose at various locations, and always the huge beast smelled assiduously until she was satisfied that this human being was the one she could trust. On about the seventh visit, Flossie tied a large piece of white ribbon to the hair behind the moose's huge left ear, and she spread word through the school and as much of the town as she could reach that the moose up by the glacier with the white ribbon was tame and belonged to Flossie Flatch.
Unfortunately, the white cloth flopping near her eye irritated the moose so much that by next evening when she came to visit, it had been rubbed off on a spruce branch.
However, she approached Flossie with obvious affection and allowed the girl to tie another ribbon far back on her left flank, and this remained in place long enough for the Matanuska people to become familiar with the story of the pet animal.
Mildred the Moose posed certain problems, because when she appeared at the Flatch cabin she expected to be fed, and her appetite was insatiable: carrots, cabbage, lettuce, potatoes, celery, she took all of them in her big mouth, curling her immense upper lip over them and causing them to disappear down her capacious throat as if she were a magician. However, even if the expected meal turned out to be too meager, she did not display bad temper, and her friendly presence around the cabin made the place seem even more a part of Matanuska's natural wonder.
Flossie was distressed, therefore, when at school she heard from the Atkinson children a constant wailing about the hardships in the valley and protests against the federal government for having brought families into this barren wilderness. When Flossie rebuked the four Atkinsons for their lack of an adventurous spirit, they told her harshly that she was stupid to be playing with a bear and moose when the rest of Matanuska was suffering because the government was not living up to its promise of caring for the immigrants.
When Flossie told her parents of this, her father became quite angry: 'Them Atkinsons, when they lived in Robbin they didn't have a pot to pee in. Now they're puttin' on airs.' Hilda reprimanded him for speaking that way before his children, but he repeated his disgust at people who were offered a new start in life and then complained about little inconveniences.
He had a right to judge, because none of the newcomers had worked harder or longer to establish himself in Matanuska. He had built his own house on land that he had selected for his special purposes and, refusing to farm, he had devised a score of imaginative ways to earn his living. He carpentered for others, helped butcher, plowed fields with either horses or tractors provided by the owners, and drove into Anchorage with other men's cars to pick up important orders of medicine or tools. And he even worked now and then at the graveled Palmer Airstrip, helping to take wheels off airplanes and put on skis for winter travel into camps located in the high mountains. But most of all he hunted, bringing back to his cabin the carcasses of moose and bear and an Alaskan deer that natives called caribou, which he sold throughout the district.
One night when he returned with a quarter of a moose dragging behind him in the snow, Hilda said: 'We're expected at a meeting tonight. Harold Atkinson's makin' a formal protest or somethin',' and when she forced Elmer to accompany her into town, they sat in rigid silence as they listened to the Atkinsons and three or four other couples grumbling about every aspect of life in Matanuska. To hear their litany of disappointments was to realize how differently people could interpret the same conditions. 'At every point,' Harold Atkinson was lamenting, 'we've been defrauded by our government. No roads, no proper school, no agricultural help, no marketing plan for the crops we do grow, and no money in the bank which we can borrow.'
Missy and Matt, hearing these picayune complaints, could not restrain themselves, and in the absence of the senior camp officials, who had done a fairly good job so far, even though all schedules did seem to lag, they took the floor, standing together as they had done so often during their Alaskan years. 'Everything you say is true, Mr. Atkinson, but none of it has to do with the starting of a new town here in Matanuska.
And to tell you the truth, it doesn't have to do with getting your family on a solid footing. I think things are ten times better here than they were in Dawson City in 1898 or Nome in 1900, and that's where Alaska got started.'
'This ain't 1898. It's 1937,' John Krull shouted from the rear. 'And what we got to put up with is a disgrace.'
This outraged Matt Murphy, who in his seventieth year saw all situations from a broad perspective. Avoiding any mention of his own heroics in conditions fifty times worse than what the Matanuska settlers were experiencing, he told in lilting voice of the starvation hardships that had driven his people from Ireland during the great famines, and concluded by rebuking the Atkinsons:
'You have a right to complain about things promised but not delivered, but to blame the whole operation makes no sense.'
He succeeded only in so infuriating the protesters that the meeting broke up in a kind of fracas, and at the close of the next week the Flatches learned that the Atkinsons, Krulls and three other families had left Matanuska, abandoning everything, and were heading back to the Lower Forty-eight. Not long thereafter the settlement was flooded with newspaper clippings mailed by friends who said: 'It must be pure hell trying to live in a socialist settlement where everything has gone wrong.' One well-intentioned farmer who wrote to the Flatches said: 'I suppose we'll be seeing you back here one of these days. When you arrive, look me up. Things are a lot better in Minnesota than when you left and I'll be able to find you a real good farm at a bargain.'
What irritated those like the Flatches who stayed in Matanuska, and government people like the Murphys who were doing their best to make the huge experiment work, was the fact that one conservative newspaper after another, across the entire United States, picked up the complaints of the 'go-backs,' as they were called, and castigated both the Matanuska people and the Roosevelt administrators who had devised the program as communists who were introducing alien procedures into honest American patterns.
By 1937 and '38, recovery from the Great Depression was so solidly under way that people forgot what conditions had been only a few years before, and scores of newspapers and magazines used the supposed failure of Matanuska as proof that socialism never worked.
If there were two human beings in all America less vulnerable to the charge of socialism than Missy Peckham and Elmer
Flatch, they were not known to the general public. These two had, in the great tradition of American individualists, pioneered with pennies in their pockets, triumphed over enormous odds, and accomplished wonders in their own quiet way. In Matanuska they were doing the same. Missy, at the apex of her rambunctious life, was helping a new generation of adventurers establish a society in which families would own their own farms, sell their own produce, and educate their children to do the same. Elmer, having worked in Alaska as few men ever work anywhere, had watched as his forty governmental acres had grown to more than three hundred, and although some people had laughed at him when he had said at the beginning that he wanted to be a kind of guide to rich men who wanted 'to shoot theirself a moose,' by dint of making himself locally famous as the best hunter in Alaska, he had patiently attracted to himself exactly the type of big-city hunter who wanted to be shown the tricks that he had mastered. As the hunting season of 1938 approached, he was in such demand that he suggested to his wife: 'Why don't you serve meals to these hungry coyotes?' and people in places like Los Angeles and Denver began to talk about Elmer and Hilda Flatch.
And when one of his clients brought with him four clippings about the communist community sponsored by the government in Alaska, he felt that he must rise in defense of Matanuska, so with help from Missy Peckham he drafted a letter, which was mimeographed and mailed to some thirty Lower Forty-eight newspapers. The opening paragraph set the tone:
I read in your paper the other day that we people in Matanuska are all communists, and since I don't know much about Russia, maybe it's true. But I want to tell you how we communists up here spend the day. We get up at seven, each family on the plot of land it owns privately, and some of us milk the cows we own and others open the stores they paid for with their own hard work, and our kids go to the school we support with taxes, and at the end of the week we gather up our produce and ship it off to Anchorage to a private wholesaler who cheats us like hell out of what we think we ought to get, but when times get tight, we borrow money from that wholesaler against our next crop.
The next paragraph explained what the Matanuska 'communists' did with their spare time, and mention was made of Flossie and her pet animals and Irishman Carmody at the airport who had saved his money to make a down payment on a 1927 plane which he was using as a cargo carrier to serve the gold mines way back in the hills. The mines were owned, Elmer said, by private prospectors, some of whom had been searching fruitlessly for fifty years.
It was the final paragraph that was so widely quoted in the running debate on the practicality of Matanuska; because of that first barrage of adverse comment by men like Harold Atkinson, most readers in the Lower Forty-eight considered the experiment a dismal failure. Of Atkinson and his fellow 'go-backs,' Elmer and Missy said:
We know that when Columbus set out to discover America and ran into trouble, many of his crew advised him to turn back. When settlers headed for Oregon and California hit the great empty Plains and the hostile Indians, lots of them turned back. And whenever anything of importance has been tried on this earth, the fainthearted have turned back. How many goldminers in 1898 took one look at the Chilkoot Pass and turned back? Those who persevered found gold and built a new land. We're building a new land up here, and ten years from now Matanuska will be a thriving valley filled with big farms and healthy people and kids who wouldn't want to live anywhere else. Watch the workers and see. Don't listen to the 'go-backs.'
While Elmer was busy drafting his defense of Matanuska, LeRoy was having an exhilarating time in Palmer, where in the last days of his nineteenth year he was being introduced to two of the most exciting experiences a young man could have: girls and airplanes.
He first met Lizzie Carmody at a grocery store, where her red hair and Irish smile so captivated him that he furtively followed her home, discovering that she lived in a shack at the edge of the large flattened field which served as Palmer Airstrip. In the days that followed he learned that her father, Jake Carmody, owned one of the planes that serviced the mines tucked away in various canyons of the nearby Talkeetna Mountains. It was a small plane famous in aviation history, a Piper J-3, dubbed the Cub, with wings sprouting from above the pilot's head and in this instance an improvised enclosure for the cabin in which another person could sit. Its insides had been pretty well torn out so as to accommodate the maximum amount of freight for the trips into the mountains.
For some three weeks LeRoy could not decipher whether he hung around the Palmer strip to see 'Lizzie Carmody or her father's airplane, but toward the end of that period, the latter won out. 'What kind of plane is this?' he asked one day as he sidled up to Carmody, and the Irishman said: 'A 1927 Survivor,' and when LeRoy asked what kind that was, Carmody showed the various dents and tears which symbolized his life as an Alaskan bush pilot:
'It's a Piper Cub that's learned to survive. That long scar, landin' in a spruce tree in a fog. This'n, landin' on a riverbank that turned out to be mud when I thought it was gravel. The big tear in the side, a spare dynamo busted loose from in back of my head when I landed too fast on a lake up in the hills.' The Cub showed so much damage that LeRoy said: 'It looks like flyin' is mostly tryin' to land,' and Carmody clapped him on the back: 'Son, you just learned all there is to know about aviation. Any damned fool can get a plane up in the air. Trick is to get it down.'
'Have you ever been in real danger?' LeRoy asked, and the bush pilot gave no reply; he simply pointed once again to the eight or nine heavy scars, each one of which represented a close brush with death. Awed, LeRoy said: 'You must be brave."
'Nope. Just careful.' This seemed so contradictory, considering the condition of the Cub, that LeRoy had to ask: 'How can you be careful if you've had so many accidents?' and Carmody burst into laughter: 'Son, you really cut down to the quick. I am careful.
I'm very careful never to crash before seein' a way to walk out alive. Any landin' is the right one if you walk away.'
'This plane's a wreck,' LeRoy said. 'Why don't you fix it up?'
'It still flies. Anyway, I carry mostly freight.' He studied his battered antique and said: 'I think I've about had Alaska. I'm plannin' on buyin' a Cessna four-seater and doin' my flyin' in California, or some other place Outside.'
'Where's Outside?'
Carmody laughed: 'You newcomers call down there the Lower Forty-eight. Us born here call it Outside.'
'What will you do with this one? If you do buy a new plane.'
'Lookey here,' Carmody said, pointing to a bolt. 'When I'm through, I pull that bolt and whoosh! the whole thing falls apart.'
One day when Carmody was satisfied that LeRoy was a decent lad with a sincere interest in both Lizzie and airplanes, he asked, as he was about to climb down after a freight run into the mines: 'Son, you ever been up in an airplane?'
'No, sir.'
'Jump in,' and in his bare-bones Cub, Carmody took LeRoy on the kind of flight that can reorder a young man's perceptions. Rising slowly from the little dirt strip, he flew north along the front of the snow-covered Talkeetna Mountains, allowing his passenger to peer into lovely canyons that would normally have been hidden: 'You've never seen Alaska till you see it from the air.' Then he cruised over the gleaming Matanuska Glacier, then westward deep into the glens of the soaring Chugaches: 'You couldn't survive in Alaska without an airplane. They were made for each other.'
As they returned homeward LeRoy shouted: 'Over there! That's our place!' and Carmody dive-bombed the cabin three times before Hilda appeared at the door, apron over her hands, and looked up to see her son screaming past, his blond head sticking out from the plane window.
ELMER'S IMPASSIONED DEFENSE OF MATANUSKA BROUGHT a flood of letters from the Lower Forty-eight, sixty percent containing messages of encouragement, the rest condemning him as a communist. Missy Peckham, who handled the mail for the Flatches, burned the latter and paraded the endorsements through the valley, winning applause for Elmer, but it was short-lived because of a sad affair which reminded t
he immigrants of the nature of life in any frontier settlement. Matt Murphy, delighted by the attention given him because of his adventures in old-time Alaska, often spent his days at the Flatch cabin, helping them build a wing in which hunters could sleep overnight, or staking out a path to the glacier that overhung the valley. He found special joy in sharing with Flossie her work with animals, and whereas her grizzly resented his presence and sometimes growled at him, Mildred the Moose saw in him one more friend and would sometimes walk considerable distances with him, nudging him along with her nose.
One day she had guided him toward the shore of the Knik River, and he told Flossie:
'I think she wants us to go see the George Lakes,' and with only this shadowy suggestion the old Irishman organized an expedition to one of the treasures of Alaska.
As the four Flatches and the Murphys crossed the icy Knik with their lunch baskets and climbed its left bank toward the snout of Knik Glacier, Matt utilized the rest periods for a description of what they were going to see: 'Way up there a closed-in valley. It ought to flow directly into the Knik, but the wall of the glacier blocks it off, so the backed up water forms a chain of three beautiful lakes, Upper, Inner and Lower Lake George. And there they stay locked up all through the cold weather, because the frozen glacier serves as a stopper.'
At this point the climbers resumed their progress to the prominence from which they would be able to look down upon the marvel that Murphy had promised them, but at the next halt he explained what would be happening one of these days: 'When warm weather gets here, the ice in the glacier barrier, it sort of melts. Water in the three lakes, now really one big lake more than a hundred and fifty feet deep, tremendous pressure you can be sure, it begins to seep right through the glacier wall and weaken it. Finally, one day in July the time comes when the pressure from the lake grows so intense, bang! the lake breaks through, the walls of the glacier explode, and you have a gorge six hundred feet wide and more than six hundred feet deep.'