Word: yakutat
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...food, progressed to bouts of boasting, the potlatch roared to a climax with a prodigious distribution of goods. For a less arrogant, less competitive people, this might have been only a pleasant custom, but for the tribes living an easy life in the mild, rich country between Vancouver and Yakutat Bay, Alaska, the feasts turned into mad giveaway races. Each "gift" was in effect a double dare: to save face, the guest had to reciprocate, usually within a year, with another gift of double the value...
...Bermuda pilot boat, the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Yakutat and a Kindley base crash boat raced out through whitecaps, pulled four survivors (including the steward) from the edge of a circle of burning gasoline 500 yards across; 37 others were drowned or burned to death...
...worst nor'easter of the winter was burying New England in gale-blown snow and raising pure white hell offshore. Blinding snow, 50-ft. waves, and winds up to 90 miles an hour smashed the distressed tanker as the Coast Guard cutter Yakutat and the Navy cargo ship Short Splice hunted her. Just after noon, she broke...
Meanwhile, the Yakutat rescued four men from the Fort Mercer's bow. Thirty miles away, the cutters Eastwind and Acushnet took men off the stern. By the time the storm subsided, 14 men from the broken tankers were lost. Of the four pieces of two ships only the Fort Mercer's stern remained afloat. It was taken into Narragansett Bay with 1,470,000 gallons of oil still in its tanks, the cargo pumped out, and then towed to Brooklyn...
Under these conditions in Yakutat, Kodiak, Sitka, Anchorage, from Annette out along Alaska's trunklike Aleutian Islands to Dutch Harbor in Unalaska, men were desperately at work excavating, blasting rock, building a string of fortifications. When the big job was done, the U.S. would have a 2,000-mile flagstone path toward Asia and a natural rampart bristling with man-made ramparts...