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Last November the fur ship Nanuk, icebound off Cape North, Siberia, radioed for an Alaskan plane to portage about a million dollars worth of furs to Fairbanks for train shipment, and some people aboard to mainland comforts. With winter on the region, oversea flying was unusually risky. Eielson decided to pilot the plane himself rather than foist the job on a subordinate.
He knew Arctic flying better than any other man.* When the U. S. Army flyers made the first air penetration of Alaska (1920)†, he was teaching at Fairbanks High School. Norwegian-blooded, born in North Dakota, school work irked him. He became a flyer.
When Sir George Hubert Wilkins began his three-year long attempt to fly across the Arctic to Europe, Eielson, most experienced pilot of the region, became his pilot. Fairbanks, their base, has since become the base of most Alaskan flying. Point Barrow was their jumping point. In 1927 they made a westerly exploratory tour to north of Wrangel Island. Three times their plane came down on drifting ice. Eielson froze his fingers fixing the motor. At the third alighting they abandoned the plane. For 17 days they walked, jumped and crawled over the floes to Beechey Point, east of Point Barrow. Eielson's endurance and ingenuity during that accident kept his friends from desperation in the present situation. Unless he and Borland were too injured to move they were daily expected to plod in to some station.
There are Eskimo and Tchuktchis Indian villages about every 15 miles along the north Siberian coast where Eielson and Borland presumably floundered. They may be squatting sheltered in a native's snow-drifted skin-&-driftwood house. If so, they did not see or were unable to signal a searching plane which flew from Teller, base of relief operations, to the Nanuk. The plane is still at the ship, held down by dismaying weather, scant fuel.
At Teller, a neat village of ten frame buildings, a group of flannel-shirted, khaki-trousered flyers in fur parkas and mukluks, stomped around in helpless patience last week. What planes they had, light open ones, could not ram through the foggy wind wall. But able help was en route. The Coast Guard cutter Chelan landed three Fairchild cabin planes and Canadian crews at Seward, whence they were shipped by rail to Fairbanks. There the Canadians assembled their planes and flew them towards Teller. They undoubtedly can jump the wall.
Last week also Arctic Explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, Eielson's close friend, asked Secretary of the Interior Ray Lyman Wilbur, "the man I know best in the Cabinet," somehow to ask the Soviets to put their Siberian representatives on the hunt, particularly those at the Wrangel Island meteorological station and on the ships Lipke and Stavropol. It was a ticklish request, for the U. S. and Russia have no diplomatic relations. Secretary Wilbur immediately asked the Soviet Government for aid, through its Washington information bureau. He also sent telegrams to Territorial Governor George Alexander Parks at Juneau, urging him to ask help directly from Soviet stations and ships which might be able to give it. Governor Parks was at Denver, Col. Acting Governor Karl Theile relayed Secretary Wilbur's plea.