CONDITIONS IN ALASKA IN THE WORLD WAR I AND POSTWAR PERIODS The
new park made its debut in an Alaska that still considered
itself an abused colony. From the northerners' viewpoint the
limited powers of their territorial government put them at the
mercy of competing bureaucracies in far-off Washington, D.C. The
bureaucrats' conflicting controls stifled Alaska's development.
Isolated by distance and high-latitude climate from the usual
amenities and choices of economic pursuit, Alaskans depended
almost exclusively on the raw products of land and sea:
minerals, timber, fish, furs, and game. From these products they
derived both sustenance and the cash income for imported
necessities that their limited frontier economy could not
produce. Yet these were the very resources, along with the land
itself, controlled by the distant bureaucrats. In an address
before the Annual Meeting of the American Mining Congress in
1921, Falcon Joslin of Katalla, Alaska, described the lack of
progress and the loss of population in Al