“A Creek, a Hill, & a Forty: The Early Years of Alaska’s Matanuska Colony, seen through a colonist’s letters home–Margaret Miller’s Story”
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By Ray Bonnell; Pingo Press, 2024; 264 pages; $19.95.
It seems impossible now, but there was a time when the United States government would undertake large-scale public projects to assist ordinary Americans in times of crisis. Particularly during the Great Depression. And one of them had a profound impact on Alaska’s history and led to the creation of the still-existent town of Palmer.
Many Alaskans know the story. In 1935, the federal government moved 203 families from the Upper Midwest to the Matanuska Valley to build an agricultural community that would give them gainful employment while providing Alaskans with much needed produce, dairy products and meats. Known as the Matanuska Valley Colony, the project had mixed results, but it did lead to a permanent settlement in the region where descendants of some of the original colonists still live.
Margaret Miller was one of those first colonists. She, her husband Neil, and their three daughters were from Wisconsin and among the families chosen for the project. In 1935 they left their home, traveled across the country, boarded a ship in Seattle and headed north. And Miller began writing letters and keeping records about her family’s experiences, hoping to write a book.
It was never published, until now. Fairbanks artist and author Ray Bonnell, known in the Interior for a long-running column in the Daily News-Miner that featured his intricate sketches and brief histories of historic buildings throughout Alaska, is married to Miller’s granddaughter. Miller’s descendants still have her letters and writings, and in “A Creek, a Hill, & a Forty,” Bonnell has edited them into a cohesive narrative that offers readers an intimate glimpse into what life was like for those who came north to create a community from the ground up and build new lives.
“Margaret, trained as a teacher, was an erudite and accomplished writer,” Bonnell tells us in his preface. And he’s right. Miller’s narrative is engaging, lively and informative. With an economy of words and well-rounded observational skills, she tells how she and her husband carved a home out of unsettled land and sank roots into the soil.
Nearly the entirety of the book covers the first year of the colony. It opens aboard the ship north in the spring of 1935, a less than auspicious journey of crowded conditions and widespread seasickness. “All in all, our voyage to Alaska was horrendous,” she writes.
Upon reaching their destination, things didn’t immediately improve. Colonists, initially housed in wall tents, were bedeviled by bugs, dust, heavy rains and more. Miller lists some of the woes her family faced, but is always quick to point to others experiencing worse difficulties.
Over the summer of 1935, lots were parceled out, land was cleared, and houses and barns erected. A community center was built, and the rudiments of a town began taking form. The colony was big news in the rest of the country, and a steady stream of reporters and politicians tramped through. After initial glowing reports on the colony, media coverage grew more critical, and once-charitable public and political opinions became decidedly mixed.
Within the colony, some of the residents began turning around and heading home for a variety of reasons. For some it was homesickness, but others were frustrated by the sometimes spotty handling of the community’s affairs and needs by the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corp., which oversaw the project. Some complaints were justified, as Miller acknowledges. But over time she grows less patient with those who complained and, in her view, weren’t pulling their weight.
Winter arrived, but that year it was unusually mild, with temperatures even in January often above freezing. Neil, a teacher by trade, was hired by the local school and also drove the bus, an arduous task with the dirt roads turning to deep mud. The season also brought trials and tragedies. A smallpox outbreak led to quarantines that fortunately kept it from spreading. The first deaths occurred when a fire broke out in a house and a mother and child were lost.
Thanksgiving and Christmas were makeshift events. Far from their families back home, the colonists had to find community among themselves in their celebrations, an experience familiar to contemporary Alaskans who moved here from afar. By the new year, 40 families had left. And the exodus continued, with departures averaging two families a week.
New people were being allowed in by late winter, a tacit admission by the Alaska Rural Rehabilitation Corp. that they needed to maintain the necessary population. Houses were being vacated, farms were going idle. Alaskans already in the territory were given some of those places on the assumption that they were more likely to remain.
With spring came renewed hope. The town had rapidly come together with a post office, shops, schools, churches and other basics. In May, to mark one year since it was founded, the first Colony Days celebration was held. Despite a steady outflow of the original colonists, a community had been established. For Miller, who had no intention of giving up and leaving, the sense of accomplishment was strong.
“To think that exactly a year before we had pulled into Palmer for the first time — so hungry, and so tired, and so anxious to get into our own place, cook a cup of coffee our way, and sleep in our own beds,” she writes. After detailing the many deprivations her family and fellow settlers had endured during those early days, and what they had been accomplished in just twelve short months, she proclaims herself, “proud of the small, I think important, part I played in the city’s growth during that first year in the Matanuska Valley.” To this she adds, “I looked with eagerness at the next year and the years that would follow … My over-riding ambition during that first year had been to tough it out and become a sourdough. I had accomplished that.”
This valuable book lets readers know how it happened, and offers insight into a unique chapter in Alaska’s history from one who lived through it.
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