Battle for the Last Frontier

In just two weeks, if all goes well, the first oil from the North Slope of Alaska will start flowing into the eight-hundred-mile pipeline to Valdez on the south coast to begin the spill of wealth from the ultimate American treasure-house.

The event dramatizes a great and growing conflict that already has all the drama it needs. For it concerns no less than the carving-up of the last, the richest, and perhaps the most overwhelming frontier of all. Alaska’s 600,000 square miles of mountain and glacier, forest and tundra, lakes and rivers and endless coast, with all that lives among them and rests beneath them, lie open to our disposing as never before. The idea of ordering it for ourselves is almost too great a responsibility, and too great an opportunity, to assume.

NK

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Nicholas King

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House of Representatives

Native American

In just two weeks, if all goes well, the first oil from the North Slope of Alaska will start flowing into the eight-hundred-mile pipeline to Valdez on the south coast to begin the spill of wealth from the ultimate American treasure-house.

The event dramatizes a great and growing conflict that already has all the drama it needs. For it concerns no less than the carving-up of the last, the richest, and perhaps the most overwhelming frontier of all. Alaska’s 600,000 square miles of mountain and glacier, forest and tundra, lakes and rivers and endless coast, with all that lives among them and rests beneath them, lie open to our disposing as never before. The idea of ordering it for ourselves is almost too great a responsibility, and too great an opportunity, to assume.