On King...On you huskies!

on
Today, 150 years ago, we took possession of Alaska...bought for a pittance of $7.2 million in the great Seward's Folly purchase.  Well, a century and a half ago, we moved in.

 My kids and grand kids always hate it when I start a sentence "When I was a kid...". Eyes roll. Exits are sought out. Fingers twitch.  But when I was a kid, we weren't blessed with Facebook, digital cameras or vast collections of images on Picassa. We were stuck with good words painting an image in our mind's eye and not that we suffered from it in the least, places that we saw there were only as crystal clear as the words that described them.

That dog sled race, the Iditarod, hit our Weekly Reader about the time we were discovering the magic of an atlas so we as a group traced the trail.  Sgt. Preston was a hit on TV and radio and we all felt akin to Preston, his dog King, the Call of the Wild and a TV show called the Alaskans (just after Maverick on Sunday night).

McGarth, Alaska courtesy of the Webcam
One of the towns on that dog race (Seward to Nome) is McGarth, population about 400 or so. It was named after a Mountie or someone in law enforcement named (of course) McGarth and in the first decade or the last century (110 years ago) prospered as the gold prospectors went up the Kuskokwim River as far as you could be flatboat and then traipsed overland to Ophir where the gold was.

McGarth got flooded sometime back and by 1907 was safe fixed on the other side of the river. It isn't a hoot and a holler of a metropolis. Nearly 3/4ths of the inhabitants are native Americans. The population density is less than 1 per square mile and men out number women by a few percent. That's about it. 
Hotel McGarth
 
The Espresso Bar in Downtown McGarth
McGarth does have an espresso bar located in the hotel and I suspect that when the sleds mush through town, it comes alive and the bar literally perks into a scene.  I'm not making fun. Not at all.  This is hardy land - far more than I'm up for or capable of - so hats off.

I'm putting McGarth on my bucket list.  But for now I'll wonder in through my mind's eye, up that main street cross from the river, draw an espresso, neat, and wait for St. Preston.