Word: landed
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...gave them no cause for rejoicing: a bleak wilderness surrounded by stern, snowcapped mountains, and in the wilderness a dismal tent city sprawling in the mud under a dour sky. This was the Matanuska Valley, 50 miles northeast of Anchorage, in south-central Alaska. This was the promised land-promised by the wide-eyed Federal Emergency Relief Administration to depression-ridden, red-blooded American families who wanted to leave home and make their way, in fine old American tradition, against the wilderness. This was May 11, 1935, a day of heartbreak...
...were a long nightmare; a wheat crop failed because of a poor choice of seed. Some settlers had to stay in tents during the long dark winter. Slowly, their number dwindled (537 left in the first four years) leaving the strong and the dogged, who bought up the abandoned land. Gradually the birthrate climbed, the bulldozers and the plows and the buildings moved into the wilderness...
...change came in 1938 when the Department of the Interior took over and gave the farmers greater control of their own affairs. Slowly, they began to make the land pay, and by 1940, when the U.S. began its big Alaskan defense buildup and servicemen created a sudden demand for fresh produce and dairy products, the Matanuskans were on their...
...valley was growing faster than the wildest dreamers had hoped, seemed destined to be even more prosperous under statehood, since growing Alaska still imports about 90% of all its food. For the 40 or so original Matanuska colonists-out of the original 900-who had looked for the promised land and found hard work, the promise suddenly seemed close at hand...
With the impetus of victory, De Gaulle plans to fly this week to Algeria, the riven land which destroyed the Fourth Republic and which, its division unresolved, is the Fifth's biggest problem...