The Hemisphere: The Great Tomorrow Country

IF there is a third world war,” the U.S.’s late great General Henry H. (“Hap”) Arnold once observed, “its strategic center will be the North Pole.” Last week, as the brief northern summer edged into Canada’s high Arctic, Canada and the U.S. were busy pushing their strategic frontiers closer to the North Pole. At Churchill and Frobisher Bay, three hours’ jet flight from the Pole, growling bulldozers lengthened runways to accommodate the Strategic Air Command’s jet tankers. At remote island outposts, stevedoring crews labored through the pale summer nights to put ashore the year’s supply of food, fuel and spare parts for DEW line bases, airfields and weather stations, while skippers checked anxiously for the latest ice reports from the straits to the north.

The stir and bustle touched the North’s civilians too. A record number of government teams explored the geology of the northern islands, world’s biggest archipelago after the East Indies. In the Northwest Territories, construction crews hammered together prefabricated parts for new schools and hospitals; and in the Yukon and along the Mackenzie River, the biggest prospecting rush since ’98 was in full swing, this time with oil as the prize. So many oil-prospecting crews were buzzing about in their helicopters that one oldtimer at Fort Good Hope (N.W.T.) grouched:

“You can find one of them danged bugs behind danged near every bush up here.”

With this new whir of activity, the vast emptiness of the Yukon and Northwest Territories is changing fast. Eskimos whose fathers hunted seals and lived in igloos now drive bulldozers and travel by outboard-powered glass-fiber canoe. One Eskimo, who needed a new hair sight for his rifle, calmly dismantled his $100 wristwatch for a piece of the mainspring. In Inuvik, Indian youths with ducktail haircuts and jeans crouch over a pool table, while their girl friends in ribboned pony tails and candy-striped toreador pants play A Teenager in Love on the jukebox.

Dahlias Like Dinner Plates. Canada’s North—the Yukon and Northwest Territories — covers an area of 1,500,000sq. mi., nearly half as big as the U.S. Geographers define the Arctic as the land north of the tree line—roughly the climatic boundary where the July temperature averages no more than 50°. But the January mean in Whitehorse is 8° warmer than Winnipeg’s, 750 miles to the south; Fort Smith’s all-time high of 103° is 1° higher than New Orleans’. The annual snowfall at Resolute (latitude 75° N.) is less than Boston’s. The summers are brief but bright, and on the North’s few tilled acres, the warming sun, shining 20 hours a day, produces dahlias as big as dinner plates, carrots a foot long. The dry air slows decay. In 1954 the crew of the Canadian icebreaker Labrador found tins of perfectly preserved mutton, figs, and Normandy pippins left on Dealy Island in 1852.

Though in precipitation the North is a desert, it is nevertheless a country of lakes, stoppered against drainage by the underlying frozen earth called permafrost. The land between the lakes turns a vivid green in summer with grass and mosses; on the tundra millions of forget-me-nots and hairy arnica bloom in the warming sunshine; farther south the dirty yellow muskeg may be soft enough to swallow men and machines without a trace. In the eastern Arctic, the land rises high in rocky ridges, barren as the mountains of the moon, yet harboring trapped pools of water that glow with the green of copper ore or the red of iron. Only northern Baffin Island and parts of Ellesmere and Devon Island have permanent icecaps.

Wrapped like a great horseshoe around Hudson Bay lies the Canadian shield, a mass of ancient granite sheltering the free world’s richest assortment of minerals. Only lightly prospected in its northern reaches, the shield has already yielded important finds of copper, gold, uranium, lead, zinc and nickel. In the east, it is the bed of the great iron-ore deposits at Schefferville, which produce 12 million tons of high-grade ore a year, and the deposits at Ungava, which Cleveland’s Cyrus Eaton and Germany’s Alfried Krupp are preparing to develop.

The towns of the North are small, individualistic, and growing. Main centers: ¶ Yellowknife (pop. 3,500), a gold-mining town that has taken on civic clubs, mortgages, and an air of urban respectability along with its nine-hole golf course, where ravens swoop down on balls popped high off the rock traps. It has the North’s only paved streets and its most extensive underground water and sewer system. Boasts Mayor Ted Horton: “The most comfortable last frontier ever known.” ¶ Whitehorse (pop. 6,000), maintenance center for the Alaska Highway, a distribution center for the southern Yukon mining country and terminal point for the North’s only railway—the White Pass and Yukon, running to Skagway, Alaska. ¶ Dawson (pop. 800). center of the Klondike gold rush of ’98 and onetime “Paris of the Northwest,” now enjoying a lively revival as the operating headquarters of Yukon oil prospectors. ¶ Fort Smith (pop. 1,700), where Indians take taxis to government-operated hydrants to get buckets of water. ¶ Frobisher Bay (pop. 1,600), until five years ago a lesser military airstrip, now the government administration center for the eastern Arctic. Its new airport, with a 9,000-ft. runway, is a fueling stop for three airlines (Canadian Pacific, TWA, Pan American) flying the Arctic route between Europe and the North American West Coast; day and night the howling of Eskimo dogs mingles with the roar of engines. The federal government is debating plans to build an experimental “dream city” of twelve-story apartment buildings to house northern administrators, military personnel and their families. ¶ Inuvik (est. 1960 pop. 1,000), 1,500 miles from the North Pole, is being built by the government at a cost of $40 million to serve as administration center for the western Arctic. The new town perches on wood or iron stilts embedded in permafrost, suggesting the nickname “Venice of the North.” Inuvik’s unique system of insulated conduits carrying water and steam to individual houses—the “utilidor” —sets a new standard for domestic convenience in the Far North.

The latest burst of Arctic activity began in 1954, when the U.S. decided to push ahead with the DEW line to provide a radar warning against Soviet bomber attack. U.S. Air Force contractors mounted one of history’s great airlifts. Planes landed on frozen lakes with small tractors to clear runways for bigger planes to follow. From January 1955 to July 1957, 140.000 tons of freight moved north by air; another 320,000 tons moved in by surface ships, Mackenzie River barges, and overland tractor trains.

Coming: Nuclear Heat.To Alvin Hamilton, 47, Canada’s Minister for Northern Affairs, the North is more than a military buffer zone. He argues that the minerals of the North will be needed to ensure Canada’s prosperity and to guarantee strategic materials when the free world’s other sources are exhausted. The residents—the civil servants, the Mounties, the bush pilots—take a wry pride in agreeing with Hamilton. “This is the great tomorrow country.” says Norman Wells Airport Manager John Sutherland.

The oldtimers—those who have been around more than two winters—like to regale the newcomers with tall tales of the North, such as the one about the trapper who aimed a kick at what he thought was his neighbor’s dog one night, connected with the rump of a polar bear. It is a society of rough humor; in-transit passengers at Frobisher blush to see the yellow de Havilland Otter labeled “Arctic Whore.” Housewives soon learn to adjust to the rigors of the North. They fly the family laundry outdoors all winter, taking care not to break the arms and legs off the frozen long underwear. During the long winter nights, families get together like people anywhere to play bridge, drink beer, listen to hi-fi records and talk about the “outside.” At Inuvik, Shirley Semmler, daughter of a storekeeper, water skis on the icy Mackenzie River.

Supply is still the big problem in the North, where everything has to be moved in during the brief (four-to 16-week) shipping season or hauled in expensively by air freight. A housewife in a remote R.C.M.P. station on Baffin Island once watched the midwinter supply plane safely parachute twelve packets to the ground; the 13th smashed heavily when the parachute failed to open. Said she to her husband: “What do you bet that was my china?” It was.

In a typical northern base, it takes 20 tons of material a year to supply one airman or soldier and a little less for a civilian—up to 75% of it fuel. As the population of the North grows, the supply problem increases apace. The scientists may soon beat the problem with a nuclear reactor to provide heat and power for a year on one fueling. The first small portable reactor, now being built by Alco Products, Inc. at Dunkirk, N.Y. for the U.S. Army, is scheduled for installation in the Arctic next year. When it works, the Arctic frontier will indeed push on and on toward the North Pole.