Transcript
Episode 1: Welcome to Fairbanks, Alaska
EMILY CHARASH: Hello, and welcome to my summer in Alaska. This series is about my two-month experience living and studying in Fairbanks, Alaska at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Let me give you some background. So my name's Emily Charash. I'm 22 years old living in New York City. In January, I was sitting in my New York City apartment thinking about what I wanted to do this upcoming summer. I knew I wanted to go somewhere new, meet people, and most importantly, learn new things. As I was doing my research about what could satisfy this, I came across the University of Alaska Fairbanks located in Fairbanks, Alaska. I was scrolling through the course offerings and seeing classes like fly fishing, archeology excavation, and I was like, okay, I'm intrigued. So a couple of months passed and I kept thinking about it. I expressed my interest in taking classes with UAF and we teamed up to make this series so you can get a glimpse into what life is like in the summer, meet some people around Fairbanks and get a feel for what classes are like at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. I wanted an adventure this summer, so I'm excited to share my experience with you. Episode one- Welcome to Fairbank's.
Today's the day I leave for Fairbank's I'm a little nervous. I'm a little excited, not really sure what to expect. So let's go. I took a flight from LaGuardia to Minneapolis. I'm at the airport in Minneapolis, and I'll be taking a flight from here to Fairbanks, and then I'll be there!
FLIGHT ATTENDANT: five hour plus flight to Fairbanks today.
EMILY: Okay. I just got into my apartment in Fairbanks. One bedroom on-campus apartment- Got a nice kitchen, study, bathroom, living room. Apartments in Alaska are definitely more spacious than ones in New York. Very happy with this. I'm going to get some sleep, so I'm ready for the week of exploration ahead.
Okay. This being my first week in Fairbanks, I reached out to some people who could give me the lowdown on what Fairbank's is all about. So I'm going to take you on a day out in Fairbank's talk to the people, see the sites, let's go meet some people from Fairbank's! So we're going to start the week off by talking to DERMOT Cole. I was referred to him multiple times by people around town. He's regarded as the “town historian of Fairbank's”. So let's hear a little bit about the history of Fairbanks.
DERMOT COLE: Fairbanks is an unusual community for many reasons- and its origin is sort of pretty particularly odd. Native people have traveled through this region for thousands of years- the real community of Fairbanks didn't come about until about 120 years ago, which is really fairly recent. A man named E.T Barnett, who was, was actually traveling upriver up on the Yukon River and then he took the Chena river to try and get around some shallow water and rapids. Well, unfortunately, he got stuck. So
E.T. Barnett was the first man who ever found himself stuck in Fairbanks. The captain who owned the sternwheeler said, you know, you got to get off. So they forced Barnett and his wife to unload all their trading goods at the site where FedEx is located.
EMILY: Can you explain a bit more about E.T Barnett?
DERMOT: Yes. Well, he had been banned from the state of Oregon as, as a young man in his twenties and he, you know, conveniently was able to hide. During his early years in Alaska, in addition to being the first mayor and, and the, the sort of founder of the community, he was also, the promoter of one of its first banks, the Washington Alaska bank. And when the bank failed, many of the depositors turned on Barnett and he escaped from the community. It was widely believed among his enemies that criminal behavior had taken place. Now at that time, banks were not regulated at all. So it's impossible to know what was really going on. The bankruptcy proceedings for the Washington Alaska Bank, lasted for more than 20 years with this bank failure, he became really a hated man after he showed up here and became the leading figure of the community. He was basically run out of town less, less than a decade later. My twin brother passed away last December. He was a history professor at the university for many years. His master's thesis at UAF was on what became the of the first books about the early history of Fairbanks.
Barnett showed up here in 1901 so when he was basically kicked off the boat, the following year, Felix, Pedro did discover gold, but it maybe it was not, in sufficient quantities to warrant a stampede. In fact, it wasn't, but Barnett hired a man named Jujiro Wada. So he hired Wada who had been working as a cook on a Steamboat to take a winter trip by dog team from Fairbanks to Dawson to promote this gold strike. It was a land promotion scheme, aided by the natural inclination of newspapers to play things up. Jujiro Wada goes to Dawson. This gold strike is promoted as the biggest thing that's ever happened. And so immediately hundreds of people left Dawson in the winter to come to Fairbank's in search of gold. They like what they had heard. And he told a really convincing story. Well, the problem is- these people all got to Fairbank's late winter and the spring, and there was really nothing going on. There was no gold to be had and it was winter. Wada was nearly lynched.
EMILY: Wow.
DERMOT: And Barnett was the man who put him up to this was really. These Stampeders were really mad. The gold rush really was at its peak until 1910 or so, and then kind of dwindled off after that and really went down almost nothing by the time of World War One.
EMILY: Wow. After the gold rush dies down- what is the transition from gold rush Fairbank's to post gold rush Fairbanks?
DERMOT: The railroad being at the top of that list. And that that was a federal public works project. It was lobbied into existence by, James Wickersham, who was one of the key people in the fight and the founding of Fairbank's. In fact, the town is named Fairbanks because of Judge Wickersham’s appreciation for his hero and mentor-
Charles w Fairbanks, who was an Indiana Senator and a vice-president under Theodore Roosevelt to Curry favor with Fairbanks Wickersham wanted to name a town. He wanted to show how big of a big shot he was in Alaska. Wickersham was the most powerful government official in Alaska.
In the first years of the 20th century, there was no real government. And so as a, as the judge, he exercised a great deal of authority on lots of things. One of the things being the location of his courthouse. He put his courthouse in Fairbanks because Barnett agreed to name the town Fairbanks. Then Wickersham could go to Charles W. Fairbanks and say we've named it down for you. So Wickersham became a booster of Fairbanks. And when he became Alaska's, non-voting delegate to Congress, that's when he began working on these items that really saved the community. One of them was the Alaska railroad. Another one was what was then known as the Alaska territorial college and School of Mines.
EMILY: That was UAF.
DERMOT: Yes. The railroad is at the top of the list because the building of the railroad not only created employment, it also created, for the first time, a way to get access year-round to Fairbanks because, before the railroad, you either traveled in the summer on the rivers. Or most likely didn't travel at all because the only real option was to walk or by dog team or horse-drawn sleigh. But once, once the railroad was built, it changed that entirely because it made Fairbanks easily accessible from the coast. EMILY: Can you describe Fairbanks in its modern setting?
DERMOT: It's not particularly hidebound by tradition here, you know? And so there's a lot of opportunity for people. If they could find the right position for themselves.
EMILY: Thanks to Dermot. Now that I have my bit of history, I want to see what's going on today in Fairbank's. We're going to drive through downtown Fairbanks to get a feel for the diverse institutions and scenes going on in Fairbanks. I pass places like the Ice Museum, all the way to my next destination, the Morris Thompson Cultural Center. Everyone told me you got to go here first to kind of get a gist. And they have a free museum so I was like, okay, obviously I have to go. I sat down with my next guest, Sarah Harriger. This is Sarah Harriger.
SARA HARRIGER: I'm the executive director of the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitor Center. And we are actually here at the Morris Thompson Cultural and Visitor Center in Fairbanks, Alaska. The Morris Thompson Center is a place for gathering discovery, education, and celebration. That's actually our mission statement. We have an exhibit that teaches people about the lifestyles and history of the interior, Alaska. We always say that the Morris Thompson Center is your first stop in Fairbanks, it's a really great place to come. When you arrive here, whether you're visiting or moving to Fairbanks, you can learn all about this part of Alaska from history to what's available. EMILY: What's fun to do in Fairbanks?
SARA: Fairbanks is a really different place in July than it is in say January. I think a really fun thing to do in Fairbanks is to get a coffee. We have possibly more coffee huts than any place I've been in the United States. Excellent, convenient access to coffee at all hours. So grab your coffee, go rent a canoe- there are a couple of places you can do it and float down the Chena from downtown Fairbanks to the pump house- which is a great restaurant where you can hop out and have a drink on the deck, have a meal. It's just a nice, relaxing way to be outside. Obviously, this is a July suggestion, not a January suggestion. A lot of cool music-related activities in this town- we have a lot of different music festivals. A lot of them are grassroots, often free. A lot of people play music with their friends here. It has that vibe, especially in the summers. Another one is the midnight sun festival that's coming up pretty soon. The midnight sun festival is the single biggest gathering in the state of Alaska. It happens under the midnight sun and mid-summer in Fairbanks. It's a really fun time with lots of local vendors, lots of activities performances, and it's just a time for the whole community to come together and kind of blow off some steam and have some fun together. And after such a long winter, it's nice outside with sun for 24 hours a day. It just gives you this energy, how people relate to one another, and what the communal aspects are. We have an interesting community that has a college campus on one side and, uh, you know, a military base on the other side. A lot of people who are drawn here, I think seeking sort of the frontier life, kind of independence. So it has a very eclectic feel to it. At the same time, everybody is dealing with challenges. You know, this is a place where you might break down on the side of the road in the winter and it could be 40 or 50 below zero. If you see somebody broken down on the side of the road, when it's 40 below, you're going to stop and help them. And so I think compared to other places, Fairbanks does still have a little bit more of that community feeling it's more comfortable maybe than in some environments to go ahead and talk with someone you don't know. Another cool thing about Fairbanks is that because of the base and the university, you get people from all over the world. We've got all these wonderful Thai restaurants and you just run into people from everywhere, you know? We have an international feel in a way, but you just get surprised on a pretty regular basis when you find out what these people in Fairbanks are up to. What are their connections outside of this community and what do they bring back to it that you can enjoy here in this beautiful natural place.
EMILY: Thanks to Sarah. After finishing the interview with Sarah, I asked her if she had any recommendations for people that personified the spirit of Fairbank's. Without hesitation, she referred me to my next guest. This is Steve Vick, a local dog musher and founder of Noble Paws. Noble Paws teaches people with disabilities, at-risk youth and veterans, how to run a team of sled dogs.
STEVE VICK: My name is Steve Vick. I run a nonprofit up here in Fairbanks called Noble Paws. Our mission is to teach kids with disabilities, autism, cerebral palsy, down syndrome- those kids come to us and what we do is we just teach them how to run their own team. We teach them how to handle the dogs, harness dogs, line them out so when
we hop on the sleds, they're not overwhelmed. They already know all about the dogs. Now they can figure out like the sled, how to run it, how to stop it, how to get off of it without losing your team.
And eventually, they're running their own team independently, like from start to finish they'll handle harness line out, hop on the sled, run the team, come back and put the dogs away, all on their own.
EMILY: How many dogs do you have in total?
STEVE: We've got around 20. Those are our race dogs that are trained to do a hundred or plus miles every day, they're doing a thousand-mile race, but, but people do it for recreational reasons. They might have a small team of five or six dogs and they just go out on weekends and go five, 10 miles with their dogs. If I could go back in time, this is the one job I'd want. I would want to be part of the mail delivery system that ran mail from Fairbanks to Noam cause they did it by dog team. That was pretty much what they did is they would have their dog teams and they'd have all the mail and they would go to a village by trail. There'd be roadhouses along the way that they could stay in. And those roadhouses would be fitted for dog teams. So there'd be places to tie your dog team. You could feed your dog team. You'd go in and get your own meals, sleep, come back. That's where the serum run came from the village of Noam. This is back in the early 1900s- the village had a Diphtheria outbreak where the kids were living. And the antibiotic was in Anchorage, but they couldn't get to Noam quickly because there were no planes at that time. There's just no way to get it to Noam quickly. And so what they ended up happening is they were able to get to Nenana, which is a village south of here from there. They had that trail, the mail run trail, and that's what they ran. So they ran a dog team. The Diptheria serum went into a dog sled and just a whole rally of dog teams- the whole team just transferred that all the way from Noam to Fairbanks. Fairbanks is known as the mushing capital of the world. And a lot of the best racers come here or are from here. A lot of the best races are here. Like open North American championships is here, the Yukon quest starts and or finishes here and we have some of the greatest trails, like literally from my house, I can go to my neighborhood trails. There's going to be a trail that would connect me to the white mountains once I'm in the white mountains, I can go to Nome or I could go to Canada. I can go on any trail there cause they just kind of all interconnect after a while. It attracts me that I'm outside and with dogs, which I just love dogs. You're in nature. I think it's a great combination. And again, that's kind of part of the program too, is the kids are outside. They're connecting with dogs and they're physically active. That's what attracts me. I wouldn't. Yeah. I couldn't not do this.
EMILY: Thanks to Steve. I finished off my first week in Fairbanks by attending the annual Bob O Q. Correct. Bob O Q - not barbecue. Essentially the Bob O Q is a barbecue, but it's hosted by a guy named Bob. So my classmate invited us to come to this. And my first response was, oh, how much is it? And she goes, oh, there's no entrance fee. Bob puts it on for free every year for the community of Fairbank's. I couldn't believe it. Why would he welcome me and a bunch of people, he doesn't know- I was a little dubious,
but I was like, okay, let's check it out. So we show up and there are tables full of chicken burgers, pasta salads, fruits, desserts, literally everything.
And there's Bob smiling and greeting us as if we had all known each other for years. I asked Bob, how did the barbecue come to be?
BOB: It was started out as a housewarming and then it built into a community event.
EMILY: This was one of the most telling introductions to Fairbanks. Bob is a good example of how much people value their community here. In my first week here, I was welcomed with open arms by total strangers. I had so many genuine conversations with people, I felt cared about listened to, and accepted right off the bat. I'm excited to spend the rest of my summer here in Fairbanks. And I hope you enjoyed the next couple of episodes. This podcast is presented by the University of Alaska Fairbanks, a special thanks to producer Marmian Grimes and Samara Taber. Thank you to everyone at UAF. For more information on the classes that I took, you can check out uaf.edu.