The Wikiness

“I enlisted in the Marines when I was 17, and when I got back from Vietnam two years later, I was an E5 Sergeant, 19 years old. It was 1970. And I couldn’t buy a beer.”

Our white-bearded, energetic driver smiled at his reminiscence. “The age was 21. Well, here in the state of Alaska, we do things differently. The outside is trying to kill us, so we make the most of our time. So, what I did was, I wrote down on a tablet for my representative – he lives just over there – what my problem was, and he read it and took it down to Juneau. And sure enough, they lowered it to 19 for me!

“Wow!”

“And then my friend Chris down the road wasn’t able to get his marijuana because of Richard Nixon’s War on Drugs. Well, he wrote down on his representative’s tablet, and by 1975, it was legal to possess up to four ounces.”

“Where I come from,” I said, “there’s a lot of red and blue back and forth, a lot of tribal hatred separating people and disturbing our peace. How is it in Alaska?”

“Well, this here’s Trump country,” he said. “But when your truck has slipped off the side of the road, nobody cares who you voted for in the last election. There’ll be 2-3 cars stopped to try and help. We all need each other to get by in this place.”

It must not hurt Alaskans’ feelings about their government that by living there, they’re entitled to a share of the Alaska Permanent Fund, set up in 1975 to manage the state’s oil revenue and ensure that residents benefit directly from the state’s natural resource wealth. In 2025, each of the 733,000 or so residents, including children and legal aliens, got $1,312.

They’re also kind to seniors, exempting those over 65 from sales tax, property taxes, and license fees. Imagine receiving anything from your state’s management. Hard to do in a state that has the most taxing bodies of any in the nation (8,000)!

Alaska has always welcomed and celebrated the lone hustler, the enterprising individuals (trappers, hunters, prospectors) willing to go to extremes for their fortunes. Most of the thousands of men who rushed to the Klondike gold streams went broke or worse. But their flinty spirit of determined ruralism could still be found on a Fairbanks mural, a quotation from “the Ballad of Hard Luck Jones”: “We’d sooner die by fang or by claw,/ in the bowels of a frozen hell,/ than to spend another lovely day/ where the city slickers dwell.”  

Here’s a story from Alaska’s past that our Fairbanks hotel shared: 

In April, 1902, E.A. Hensely struck it rich on Baker Creek, which was located near Manley Hot Springs. The Dawson City newspaper reported that he was “fairly shoveling out the gold.” Mr. Hensley had been driven to the creek in a frantic effort to get away from his wife, Kitty, whom he left behind in the “interest of domestic tranquility.”

According to The Fairbanks Igloos of the Pioneers of Alaska,  soon after his lucky find was published, Kitty Hensley left to join him, and according to a later report, they agreed to “enjoy the rich Baker Creek claim together.”