The history of Anchorage contains many surprises, said Charles Wohlforth, author of "From the Shores of Ship Creek," the "legacy" book of the Anchorage Centennial Celebration.
"Before I started I didn't realize just how tenuous the existence of Anchorage was, or what a fiasco the Alaska Railroad was," he said. "The federal government spent 10 percent of the national budget building it. I was surprised to learn about the controversy over rebuilding after the 1964 earthquake and the role water and sewer utilities played in the unification of the City of Anchorage and the Greater Anchorage Area Borough. The diversity stuff really interested me. I spent a good deal of time talking to demographers. Why did this diversity thing happen? What were the factors? It's something no one has written about in a serious way."
Subtitled "Stories of Anchorage's First 100 Years," the book consists mostly of chapters that each cover one decade and feature a particular person as a kind of key to viewing the developments of the times in which they lived.
"The chapters stand on their own," Wohlforth said. "They can be used individually in classrooms. It's written at a reading level that's accessible to a vast majority of people. It's an attempt to describe the history of Anchorage by focusing on individuals and telling their stories. Just because there's a place doesn't make it interesting. What makes it interesting is the people."
To determine which people would be featured, Wohlforth asked for suggestions from historians and community members. "Some were obvious," he said. "I knew Shem Pete was the best person to focus on for the Dena'ina period. And Andrew Christensen is sort of the father of the town. But I knew nothing about Nellie Brown; I had no idea that this amazing person was part of our history."
Wohlforth said certain themes kept weaving through the book. "One is the dominance of the federal government," he said. "A second theme is that of permanence. When does a city become something that seems permanent? It was a long time in Anchorage's case."
The third recurring motif is the tension between Alaska and the United States. "Is Anchorage part of America? Or part of Alaska?" he asked. "The city kind of forms a bridge between the two. That's always been its function, but it presents a fundamental conflict within the town."
If he had the power to change some aspect of the past, Wohlforth said he would make the Prudhoe Bay oil field "about 75 percent smaller. It would have been better for Alaska if we'd been able to build the state a little bit slower, with more thought and local influence about what we're willing to pay for. We might have been smaller, but we would have avoided some of the huge boom-and-busts."
Anchorage's next 100 years may be just as tenuous as its first century, he suggested. "It depends on resource development and the military," he said. "We have a great little town and it's changing in interesting ways. But if the bottom falls out of the economy, I worry about a shrinking population and shrinking opportunities."