Alaska News

1914: Flashback to a different world

1914.

The world went to war. But the fighting between the great powers of Europe was not America's problem. Not yet.

The U.S. was enjoying a wave of prosperity and change. Henry Ford opened his assembly line to make horseless carriages and doubled the wages of his workers. The first passenger paid to take a trip on an airplane. The first ocean-going ships passed through the Panama Canal. "The Perils of Pauline" debuted at movie houses and Charlie Chaplin starred in the first full-length film comedy. A kid named Babe Ruth threw his inaugural pitches for the Boston Red Sox. Young white couples danced the fox trot to the blues of black bandleader W.C. Handy. It was a world their parents could not have imagined.

Not that the country was placid. The governor of Colorado ordered National Guardsmen with machine guns to break up union activity in Ludlow; most of those killed were strikers' families, women, children and the elderly. President Woodrow Wilson sent the Marines to occupy Veracruz, Mexico, as Emilio Zapata and Pancho Villa overran the country. A civilian governor had just replaced General John Pershing in the Philippines toward the end of a bloody uprising that had occupied the U.S. Army since 1911, leading to the deaths of thousands of indigenous Moros.

In another American territory, Alaska, things were quieter. The wild years of the gold rush had yielded to limited self-rule in 1912. The population stood at around 50,000, mostly Natives who did not have the right to vote, though women did. The non-Native population centered in Southeast, where expectations ran high that the panhandle would soon be separated from the rest of the territory and become its own state.

But far to the west of Juneau and Ketchikan, Uncle Sam was building tracks from tidewater to the gold fields in Fairbanks and the Yukon-Tanana river system, the main highway to the Interior. A sparsely settled bench above the mud flats of Knik Arm was selected to be the headquarters of the Alaska Railroad and men desperate for work arrived in droves. They set up tents for shelter and businesses along Ship Creek and created a city made of canvas. The land up the hill south of the camp -- what is now downtown Anchorage -- was willow, birch, spruce and moose pasture.

For most of us, this is history. But for a few Alaskans who were around in 1914, a time of kings and czars, bloodshed and progress, the year saw the beginnings of Anchorage.

Alaska Dispatch News photographer Loren Holmes met some of them. Today we introduce them to you.

Photos: Alaska's centenarians

Mike Dunham

Mike Dunham was a longtime ADN reporter, mainly writing about culture, arts and Alaska history. He worked in radio for 20 years before switching to print. He retired from the ADN in 2017.

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