Influenza, I then learned, had raged in Seward, there having been over 350 cases; and smallpox had made a start. But the deaths had been few and it was now well in hand. However, I shunned the hotel. A little cottage was generously put at our disposal and we were soon comfortably settled there with our mail from home spread before us. I left everything of mine at the hotel untouched and we continued to wear our old clothes throughout the stay. At midnight I went with Otto Boehm to pull the dory up above the tide and overturn her, and then continued letter writing until three-thirty A.M.
December first and every day of our stay at Seward was calm and fair. We kept house in our cottage, I continually busy writing and doing up Christmas presents, for a steamer had entered on the thirtieth and was due to leave Sunday night, the first. The people of Seward are friendly without being the slightest bit inquisitive, and they are extremely broad-minded for all that their country is remote from the greater world. I don’t believe that provincialism is an inevitable evil of far-off communities. The Alaskan is alert, enterprising, adventurous. Men stand on their own feet—and why not? The confusing intricacy of modern society is here lacking. The men’s own hands take the pure gold from the rocks; no one is another’s master. It’s a great land—the best by far I have ever known.
What a telltale of reaction from our lonely island life is this roseate vision of the little city of the far northwest! We came in time to see Seward quite differently and, with confidence in Alaska, to believe it to be in no way a typical and true Alaskan town. The “New York of the Pacific,” as it is gloriously acclaimed in the literature of its Chamber of Commerce, numbers its citizens perhaps at half a thousand—the tenacious remnant of the many more who years ago trusted our government to fulfill its promises to really build and operate a railroad into the interior. One’s indignation fires at the recital of the men of Seward’s wrongs,—until you recollect that Seward was built for speculation, not for industry, and that by the chance turn of the wheel many have merely reaped loss instead of profit. There are no resources at that spot to be developed and there is consequently no industry.
Seward is planned for growth and equipped for commerce. Wide avenues and numbered blocks adorn the town-site maps where to the naked eye the land’s a wilderness of stumps and briars. The center of the built-up portion of the town, one street of two blocks’ length, is modern with electric lights and concrete pavements. The stores are wonderfully good; there are two banks and several small hotels, a baker from Ward’s bakery in New York and a French barber from the Hotel Buckingham. There’s a good grammar school, a hospital, and churches of all sorts. There is no public library; apparently one isn’t badly missed. Seward’s a tradesmen’s town and tradesmen’s views prevail,—narrow reactionary thought on modern issues and a trembling concern at the menace of organized labor. A strike of the three newsboys of the Seward paper plunged the poor fool its printer into frantic fear of an I. W. W. plot. But even Seward smiled at the little man’s terror. The worst of Seward is itself; the best is the strong men that by chance are there or that pass through from the great Alaska.
THE WHITTLER
December second was a day for shopping. I bought all manner of Christmas things, things for the tree, things to eat, little presents for Olson—but nothing for Rockwell. He and I must do without presents this Christmas. Then more letters were written. A wood block that I had cut proved, on my seeing a proof of it, to be absolutely worthless.