In Alaska: Homesteading

"You 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 35 other city folk,...

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