From Cowboy Boots to Mukluks
Six Years in the Territory of Alaska
by
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We begin this story in September 2000, fifty-two years after leaving for our adventure in Alaska with the awareness of how memories fade and get mixed up. To the best of our memories we will tell our story.
During the last semester of our schooling at the Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, now University of Texas at El Paso or UTEP, we received a call from my sister Mary and her husband Lewis Hartzog saying that they were interested in homesteading in the Kenai Peninsula of Alaska and asking if we would think about going with them. They had the money and we had only brawn. We were excited about the prospect and began selling our furniture. The sales went rather quickly and the day we sold our bed, a letter came from Mary Hartzog saying that they had changed their minds and were not going. Mary B was devastated and distraught and called me at the school library and read the letter to me. I was working there for fifty cents an hour. I was not fazed in the least and by the time I got home, I had written the Alaska Native Service in Juneau, the capitol, to inquire about teaching jobs. The Alaska Native Service was under the Department of Interior because at that time Alaska was a Territory, not a state. I majored in English and History and had had no education credits. Mary had majored in English and Spanish and had one course in Theory and Practices of High School education. Mary’s experience was in teaching ballet and mine was in teaching at a gunnery school during World War II.
Before my sister, Mary, married she was teaching English at the college. She had rented a house on Montana Street for thirty–five dollars a month. My brother Bob and I lived with her while we attended the college. Mary and Lew Hartzog married at the end of the fall semester and moved to Colorado. Our plan was to marry after graduation in May but since the house was available, we decided to marry December 23, 1947 and rent the house with Mary’s furniture in it. Bob stayed and lived with us until the end of school.
I was going to school on the GI Bill. After we married my pay went up to sixty-five dollars a month. We managed to live on that plus a wedding gift from Mary’s parents of the money to pay for her last semester. They gave us milk, eggs and meat during the time that we were in school. We rode the bus for ten cents each way.
Graduation was in May 1948. We had one letter from the Department of Education in Juneau giving us all the options of villages. Most were in the Arctic but we did not want to go that far north. Kodiak Island was our first choice. We went to Pine Bluff, Arkansas to be with my family and wait for a reply. While waiting, we housesat next door and took care of a twelve year old boy and his ten year old sister while the parents took a two week vacation. Since there was no reply, we went to El Paso and applied for and signed contracts to teach. Neither of us remembers at what level. The letter did arrive when we got back to Arkansas and the only positions left were in the Arctic. The letter described each village and some of the problems. Cape Prince of Wales was described as a very primitive and somewhat violent village. The people had raided one of the supply boats and looted and killed many of the crew several years earlier and they had the reputation of running teachers away, to the extent that they were denied teachers for several years. Can you believe that we chose that village? However, when the reply came, we were advised to take White Mountain because we had no teaching experience, no education credits and we were very young. Mary was twenty and I was twenty-five. White Mountain was a boarding school of sixty Eskimo and Indian students who were orphaned or abandoned and/or children of single parents. There was a maintenance man whose wife was the secretary. There were also four teachers, a principal teacher, a nurse, a couple who lived in the boy’s dorm and a matron who lived in the girl’s dorm.
White Mountain, population two hundred-forty, is seventy miles east of Nome. It could be reached by bush plane year round or by dog sled in the winter and one supply boat in August each year. This was our village.
The first thing we did was to go to the Army surplus store in Pine Bluff and buy a down jacket for each of us and other things, which we don’t remember.
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About the Book
The intricacies of survival in the arctic did not positively correlate with mastering the intricacies of education.
This young naive couple struck out fearlessly in 1948 unprepared for the isolation and challenges presented in Alaska. Mary performed as doctor and dentist via radio transmissions from a doctor in Kotzebue. She had been to a doctor twice in her life as a young child. Bill without benefit of training operated and repaired light plants, butchered reindeer, hunted bear, ptarmigan, ducks and geese and fished for salmon and trout.
Bill's physical prowess was challenged when he had to race to the ocean to empty the honey bucket before it froze.
One boat a year brought supplies and food to the Arctic villages. From sample lists they picked and chose what to order. How long would it last? They could only guess.
The permafrost on the Seward Peninsula was three hundred and fifty feet deep. Cowboy boots and ballet slippers were traded for mukluks and parkas.
Bill and Mary went to teach. However, their own lives were immeasurably enriched by the resourcefulness and creativity of the Eskimo People.
Alaska has been advertised as the "last frontier". It was in 1948 and still is...in 2002.
About the Author
Bill Brown was a preacher's kid in Missouri and Texas. After serving as a pilot in World War II, he graduated from Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy, now University of Texas at El Paso, with a B.A. in history and a M.A. in education from Peabody College in Tennessee.
Bill and Mary married, graduated and went to Alaska to teach in an Eskimo village. After a career in teaching they have retired in Fredericksburg, Texas.
Mary Brown, a native Texan, graduated from Texas College of Mines and Metallurgy (UTEP). She was pursuing a career in ballet when she met Bill. Another adventure began.
They have three children and eight grandchildren for whom this book is written.