ALASKA: Slisco’s Bride

In Alaska everybody who is anybody knows who Martin Slisco is. North of the Arctic Circle 200 miles as the planes fly from Fairbanks toward Point Barrow the roadhouse and store of Martin Slisco queen it over the 48-house settlement of Wiseman, trading and social centre for the 127 whites and Eskimos who live in the gold & game filled 15.000 square miles of the upper Koyukuk River basin. Since 1910 Bachelor Slisco, 53, has lived in Wiseman. Since 1924 he has owned and operated the roadhouse and store, welcoming the dog-mushers, riverboaters and flyers; playing nightly host at phonograph dances where giggling Eskimo “chickens”‘ come to flirt with the sourdoughs; cooking the meals he serves all-comers at the unvarying price of $1.50 per meal; baking 15 loaves of 50¢ bread in his big cookstove thrice a week; swapping supplies for gold at $32 the ounce; introducing to the civilization over which he presides such novelties as moving pictures, electric lights, and a short-wave radio which brings news from Berlin and London but cannot get Seattle.

White wives are scarce in the Koyukuk. Of the two in Wiseman one has quither husband, gone off to the creeks with a prospector. Eskimo wives are not frequently faithful. But the Arctic nights are long and a wife can be mighty useful. Putting on his Chachaqua “outside” clothes, leaving Alaska for the first time in 29 years, Martin Slisco, a U. S. citizen since 1929, went back to his childhood home in Jugoslavia last Christmas. He saw his mother for the first time in 40 years and went with her to the church, bride-hunting. He looked over 30 girls who knew why he had come, but found none he liked. About to return to Alaska, he at last found one Para Krka, 22, the placid, pretty, dark-haired daughter of a pensioned gendarme and his innkeeping wife. “Everything it’s just the way I got it in my mind since I was a youth, only she ain’t quite so tall as I figured,” said Martin Slisco.

He married her, but last March he ar rived in Manhattan, brideless and damning a U. S. Consul in Jugoslavia. “He got to have proof can I support her. I tell him about Wiseman. He no listen. I been to Washington to the State Department. I been to Bob Marshall.* I been to the Alaska Congressman.† I got a lawyer. We telephone Zagreb, Jugoslavia. He cost me $34. We sending telegrams four times. I go to Seattle, get affidavits from seven wholesale houses which sell to me in Wise man how much I buy. I come back to Washington again. I spent already extra thousand dollars. Such a damn fool law. Who the hell he pay make all those proofs when I can’t support her?”

Would Martin Slisco divorce his wife if he finally could not get her out of Jugoslavia? “Divorce? What for? Jugoslavia — he’s a long way from Wiseman. Divorce? No. We just call him quits.”

But this week Martin Slisco’s waiting had a happy ending. Red tape had finally been cut and down the gangplank of the Aquitania when it docked in Manhattan came dark-eyed Para Krka, ready to be installed as queen of the Koyukuk.

*Now chief of Recreation in the U. S. Forest Service, Robert Marshall lived a year in Wiseman, wrote Arctic, Village (TIME, May 15, 1933), which features Martin Slisco. To too Koyukukans mentioned in his book, Author Marshall sent $18 each, the total representing half his proceeds.

†No Congressman but an elected Delegate is Alaska’s Anthony Joseph Dimond in Washington.