Word: susitna
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...know, we were all strangers that I morning," recalled Carol Sik, 47, as she leafed through an album of yellowing newspaper clippings. She was sitting with her husband Marino, 57, in the airy living room of their log house on the west bank of the Susitna River, about 100 miles north of Anchorage on the way to Fairbanks. The morning she refers to was March 5, 1959, when Carol, a wan, pretty girl of 22, left Detroit with her lean, plain-spoken husband and their eight-month-old daughter Lindy Lou for a new life. Their companions were some...
...Fifty-Niners pressed on to the Kenai Peninsula, their original destination, only to discover that good unclaimed land there was hard to come by. Then they heard about the west bank of the Susitna: rich, available farmland, with a marvelous view-on clear days-of Mount McKinley and the Alaska Range. There was a hitch: there were no roads into the area and no bridges. In winter you could walk across the frozen river; in summer you could take a boat. But during the spring breakup and the autumn freeze-up the only way you could cross the Susitna...
Nonetheless, the main group chose the Susitna. On the gray afternoon of April 29, they ignored the warnings of townspeople in Talkeetna that the spring breakup was imminent, and began to cross the mile-wide river. They pushed and pulled their overloaded house trailers across. At times the water above the ice reached their knees. But by late afternoon they had hauled their trailers ashore on the west bank...
...winter there were only 13 Fifty-Niners left on the Susitna, and what a winter they had. On Christmas Eve, Steve Pankiewicz's mare Ruby, a Percheron draft horse, fell 20 ft. into a well. All night long the men worked to dig the horse out of the frozen gravel, and by 4 a.m. they were finished. They earned Shorty's grudging admiration. "Those people did something nobody ever did before in this country," he allowed. "They got a horse in a well and got it out alive." Later that winter Bertha Donaldson fell...
When the Fifty-Niners arrived, there were only seven or eight people on the west side of the Susitna. Today the Siks figure there are about 1,500, stretched over a wide area, and there is a town, or rather a cluster of highway businesses, a post office, a police station, a school and four churches, known as Trapper Creek. "We thought of calling it Bradleyville," says Carol. "We thought of Little Michigan. But that idea was dropped right away. After all, this is Alaska, not Michigan. But most of us lived on Trapper Creek, so that...