Happy birthday Alaska Railroad, Shem Pete

Perhaps no place in Alaska is a region’s story more intertwined with the Alaska Railroad than here in the Mat-Su Borough. Communities like Knik, Wasilla, Sutton, Matanuska, Susitna Station and Talkeetna all directly trace their existence — or extinction — to the railroad.

Before the railroad, Knik was a major hub for ships bound to deliver their cargo as far into Cook Inlet as they dared. From their Goose Bay anchorage, smaller crafts lightered the freight to shore near Knik, where it was offloaded and transported over a system of trails and wagon roads that connected the community to the mines at Hatcher Pass and beyond.

Before the railroad, Susitna Station also was a bustling community with shops and as many as 700 residents. Sutton didn’t exist before 1915 when the railroad settled on its route.

By 1919, city lots had been sold in Talkeetna and Wasilla and the towns of Knik and Susitna Station where shuffling into history.

Nothing remains of Susitna Station, established at the confluence of the Yentna and Susitna rivers about 45 miles south of Talkeetna. Long before a man named Nagely set up a trading post there in the early 1900s to supply miners and trappers, a Dena’ina village — called Tsat’ukeg — occupied the same site.

But the railroad’s selection of Talkeetna as a campsite for workers pushed Nagley to move. By 1922, he had built a trading post in Talkeetna at the corner of Main and B streets.

Monday is the 90th anniversary of President Warren G. Harding’s ceremonial placing of the golden spike in Nenana on July 15, 1923. And thanks to the CIRI shareholder calendar, we know that was the day after Shem Pete’s 23rd birthday, July 14, 1900.

Some of Pete’s vast knowledge of Southcentral Alaska was collected and preserved by University of Alaska professors James Kari and James A. Fall in the nearly 400-page book “Shem Pete’s Alaska: The Territory of the Upper Cook Inlet Dena’ina.” The book bears witness to the richness of the Alaska Native cultures that existed here before the first newcomer tanned a hide, mined coal or plucked a golden nugget from an icy stream.

“Because the Dena’ina and other Alaska Native peoples kept no written records, oral traditions in the form of stories, songs and place names, for example, were a major source of knowledge and instruction for the young and old alike,” according to the book’s introduction.

Without question, the railroad wrote important chapters in our local history. With the coming Port MacKenzie rail extension, more chapters remain to be penned. But it is impossible to overstate the gift given by traditional leaders like Pete who helped preserve some of the priceless oral traditions that are the ancient underpinnings of life in Alaska.

So here’s to the Alaska Railroad and Pete, two characters in our great Alaska story.