east from the Urals all the way to the Pacific Ocean in 1697, completing the Russian version of “manifest destiny” a full century and a half before the United States did. Their legacy was a system of remote outposts where Russian fur traders and missionaries interacted with dozens of aboriginal groups. It took gold discoveries to bring new rushes of people to the Yukon and Alaska. Some remained after, commingling with the existing aboriginal population to grub out frontier lives as miners, trappers, and small farmers. That was pretty much how the situation remained, until the Second Wave.
If expansions of early settlement were shaped by climate, terrain, and gold, in the twentieth century they were shaped by politics and war. Two major transformations happened that altered huge areas of the Northern Rim forever. The first was Joseph Stalin’s decision to grow the Gulag, a vast network of thousands of forced-labor work camps and exile towns across Russia between 1929 and 1953. The second was the decision of the U.S. Army to invade western Canada during the depths of World War II.
The Second Wave: Stalin’s Plan and the U.S. Occupation of Canada
Even before Japan’s December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, the United States was worrying about how to defend Alaska. It was impossibly remote, reachable only by ships or air, with no road connecting it to the rest of the country. Meanwhile, Hitler’s armies were devouring Europe, and Japan’s advance across Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands seemed unstoppable. From Washington, the view of the entire northwestern corner of North America—not just Alaska but western Canada as well—was of a broad soft flank, completely vulnerable to an overland invasion by Japan.
Bases were thrown up in Anchorage, Fairbanks, and the Aleutian Islands and several thousand troops rushed to them. After Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, American fears went into overdrive and a deal was struck between Washington and Ottawa: Canada would allow the U.S. Army to develop her frontier and connect it to Alaska, so long as everything was turned over to her after the war. The U.S. military-industrial machine swung into gear and selected its beachhead, a sleepy Canadian farm town called Dawson Creek, at the end of a minor western spur line for Northern Alberta Railways.
In March 1942 the residents of Dawson Creek got the shock of their lives. The train arrived, but instead of bringing the expected dry goods and furniture, it was loaded with heavy equipment and work crews of the U.S. Army. They had come to carve a fifteen-hundred-mile-long emergency road through uncharted wilderness—through British Columbia and the Yukon, connecting Dawson Creek all the way to Fairbanks—in under a year.
Canada’s government watched from Ottawa as the U.S. Army opened up her western frontier. Forty thousand American soldiers and civilian contractors poured into a vast wilderness of forest and bog, a place with no roads and hardly any settlements. It was home to fewer than five thousand Canadians, mostly aboriginal hunter- gatherers.
Dawson Creek became the gateway of what would eventually be called the Alaska Highway. To ferry supplies, dozens of new airfields were cut into the wilderness to form the Northwest Staging Route, later used to shuttle some ten thousand American-built airplanes—painted with the Soviet red star—to Alaska, where they were handed over to Russian pilots.397 Another six-hundred-mile road and pipeline were built to bring crude oil south from fields at Norman Wells. Yet another road was built to link the new highway to the Alaskan port of Haines. The old gold rush town of Whitehorse had a new population explosion and sprouted pipelines running north and south. A telephone network was built, together with new shipping facilities along the Mackenzie River. Through immense manpower and treasure, the United States had opened up another country’s wilderness and connected Alaska by road to the rest of the continent.398
The same thing was going on elsewhere in the Northern Rim. A major airport and base were built in Keflavik, Iceland, and more than thirty thousand troops kept there during and after the war. That facility is now Iceland’s international airport. Another built at Sondre Stromfjord is now Greenland’s international airport; the American-built road there is now the longest in the country. Another airport in northern Greenland (Thule Air Base) is still retained by the U.S. military and is now the northernmost air base for the United States.
The close of World War II changed only the enemy, not the construction projects. Three chains of remote “distant early warning” (DEW) radar stations were strung through Alaska, Canada, and Greenland to deter Soviet bombers. A joint U.S.-Canada base was built at Fort Churchill, Manitoba, and another at Frobisher Bay (now Iqaluit). More than sixty thousand troops were stationed in Alaskan bases that are maintained there to this day. By the end of the Cold War, the American military had built a first skeleton of roads, airports, and outposts throughout the northern high latitudes, leaving an indelible template still shaping the region today.
Stalin’s Gulag
America’s northern investments during World War II and the Cold War were purely military.399 But Joseph Stalin’s underlying purpose for building the Gulag ran far deeper. It was more than just a convenient way to punish criminals and silence political dissidents—it was a deliberate decision to industrialize the Soviet Union using the slave labor of his own people. It intended to advance certain socialist ideologies, like asserting man’s triumph over nature and
The use of prison camps in Russia dates to the tsars, but Stalin took it to a whole new level. By the 1930s he had established camps throughout all twelve Russian time zones. By the program’s peak in the early 1950s, the total camp population had swelled to 2.5 million prisoners. Nearly five hundred complexes were built, comprising thousands of individual camps, each holding a few hundred to thousands of people.400 Many were condemned for minor crimes. Over the course of the program perhaps eighteen million are believed to have passed through the camps; another six million were banished to live near them in exile.
Stalin’s Gulag is one of the darkest chapters in Russian history.401 Its atrocities include uncounted deaths from starvation, exposure, exhaustion, and even outright murder. Thousands of projects were blazed into the wilderness without supplies, a plan, or competence. Many were ultimately abandoned. But as a blunt tool to force massive industrialization and resettlement of Siberia, the program was a resounding success.
A large fraction of this giant captive labor force was aimed directly at the heart of the frozen frontier. Prisoners blasted mines and cut forests. They built roads, bridges, railroads, and factories. The Soviet Union proceeded to industrialize on the backs of these workers and the iron, coal, and timber they produced. If they survived their sentences, many prisoners were forbidden to return home. Millions of exiles and prisoners’ family members instead moved into the growing towns and cities near the camps. Factory towns grew huge, attracting further subsidies and emigration programs from Moscow. Even after Stalin’s death and the dismantling of the Gulag system in 1953, these subsidies continued. By the 1980s there were gigantic industrial cities scattered across some of the coldest terrain on Earth: Novosibirsk, Omsk, Yekaterinburg, Khabarovsk, Chelyabinsk, Krasnoyarsk, Noril’sk, Irkutsk, Bratsk, Tomsk, Vorkuta, Magadan. . . . At staggering cost in blood and treasure, Mother Russia had urbanized Siberia.
Contrasting Patterns of Settlement
The decision of Soviet planners to relocate millions of people and force the growth of giant cities across her coldest, most remote terrain has created one of the most fascinating contrasts in human settlement found on Earth.
On a world map or globe Norway, Sweden, and Finland
