The Great Pipeline Flap

Never had there been such a winter. On the first weekend of spring more than three feet of snow still blanketed the capital. A psychologist gained publicity in late March by predicting that if a thaw didn’t come within days a terrible malaise would engulf the city, raising the suicide rate to a record. The Arctic winds blowing helped remind politicians that Canada has more territory than the populated thin band along the U.S. border. The Mackenzie River basin—a seven-hundred-mile valley running from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean—has become of late the most talked-about area in the country.

The importance of this remote area, which until recently served as little more than mise en scene for Mountie mythmaking, derives from events outside Canadian borders. A little over three years ago Atlantic Richfield announced a major oil find at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. As further wells confirmed the immensity of the discovery, oil companies began planning for a pipeline to carry the oil to Southern Alaska, and orders were placed for giant tankers to complete the transportation to Washington and California.

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Donald Coxe

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Never had there been such a winter. On the first weekend of spring more than three feet of snow still blanketed the capital. A psychologist gained publicity in late March by predicting that if a thaw didn’t come within days a terrible malaise would engulf the city, raising the suicide rate to a record. The Arctic winds blowing helped remind politicians that Canada has more territory than the populated thin band along the U.S. border. The Mackenzie River basin—a seven-hundred-mile valley running from Great Slave Lake to the Arctic Ocean—has become of late the most talked-about area in the country.

The importance of this remote area, which until recently served as little more than mise en scene for Mountie mythmaking, derives from events outside Canadian borders. A little over three years ago Atlantic Richfield announced a major oil find at Prudhoe Bay, Alaska. As further wells confirmed the immensity of the discovery, oil companies began planning for a pipeline to carry the oil to Southern Alaska, and orders were placed for giant tankers to complete the transportation to Washington and California.