Alaska (128 page)

You get out there and line up the votes.' Then he reached for his telephone and called Marvin Hoxey, telling him to catch a night train. But at midafternoon Tom placed another call: 'Marvin? Tom Venn. Cancel the trip. Malcolm died forty minutes ago.'

THE JONES ACT OF 1920 PASSED WITH ITS THREE Essential provisions in place: no ship of foreign ownership and registry could carry American goods from one American port to another; only ships owned and manned by Americans could do that; the ship itself, even if it was American-owned, had to have been built in the United States by American labor. The future of Seattle was ensured.

The effect of the Jones Act could best be illustrated by what happened to a modest grocery store in Anchorage. Sylvester Rowntree had invested his savings in a new store half again as big as the old one, and by the year 1923 it had again doubled, so that the owner could have profitably ordered, from suppliers across the United States, his goods in cargo lots. But this was not practical, because a custom had evolved whereby goods destined for Alaska had to be handled in curious ways by the railroads and in ways downright insane at the docks in Seattle. Even before Rowntree's cargo was ready for loading onto an R&R vessel he would be forced to pay fifty percent more freightage than if his goods had been destined for some West Coast destination like Portland or Sacramento.

But now provisions of the Jones Act came into play: to use the Seattle docks for shipment to Alaska cost almost twice what the same dock services cost for a shipment, say, to Japan. And when the R&R ship was loaded, the cost-permile of goods to Alaska was much higher than the cost of the same goods being shipped to other American ports by other lines. R&R had a monopoly which exacted a fifty-percent or better surcharge on every item freighted in to Alaska, and the territory had no escape from this imposition, for there were no other avenues by which goods could get in: no highways, no railroads, and as yet no airplanes.

'That damned Jones Act is strangling us,' Sylvester Rowntree wailed, and he was right, for the Act exercised its tyranny in the most unexpected ways. The forests of Alaska could have provided wooden boxes for the Alaskan salmon canneries, but the cost of bringing in American sawmill

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equipment was kept so excessive that it was much cheaper to buy the wood from Oregon than to use trees which stood fifty feet from a cannery, and tariffs kept out non-American.

In the years following passage of the Act, a dozen profitable extractive industries went out of business because of the exorbitant costs imposed by the new rules, and this happened even though scores of Canadian ships stood ready to bring heavy equipment in at reasonable cost and take finished products out at rates that ensured a good profit.

Such discrepancies were explained away by Marvin Hoxey, defending in public the Act which he had engineered, as 'inescapable minor dislocations which can be easily corrected.'

When no attempt was made to rectify them, he told Congress: 'These are nothing more than the minor costs which a remote territory like Alaska must expect to bear if it is to enjoy the privileges of life within the American system.' In-his bid age Hoxey had converted himself into a revered oracle, forever prepared to justify the indecencies to which Alaska was subjected.

What infuriated Alaskans like grocer Rowntree was not the pomposity of Hoxey and the self-serving statements of Thomas Venn, president of Ross & Raglan, but the fact that Hawaii, much farther from San Francisco than Alaska was from Seattle, received its goods at substantially cheaper rates. Rowntree's seventeen-year-old son, Oliver, figured: 'Pop, if a grocer in Honolulu places a hundred-dollar order at the same time you do with a wholesaler in New York, by the time the two orders reach the West Coast docks, his has a total cost of $126, but yours is $147. Dockage fees being so different, by the time his goods get aboard they cost $137, but yours are $163.

And now comes the rotten part. Because R&R rates are the highest in the world, by the time his goods reach Honolulu, they cost $152, while your goods landed in Anchorage cost us $191.'

The boy spent the summer of his senior year conducting similar studies regarding various kinds of in and out shipments, and wherever he looked he found this same terrible discrepancy, so that for his graduating paper in English he composed a fiery essay entitled: 'The Slavery Continues,' in which he drew parallels between the economic servitude under which Alaska now suffered and the governmental chaos of the 1867-97

period. Fortunately for him as it turned out later this lament did not appear in the school journal, but Oliver's father was so proud of his son's insight into Alaskan affairs that he had three unsigned copies made, sending one to the territorial governor, one to Alaska's nonvoting delegate to Congress and one to the Anchorage news-783

paper, which did print it. His arguments played a role in the continuing attack Alaskans made against the cruel provisions of the Jones Act, but nothing was-accomplished because in Seattle, Thomas Venn, increasingly active as head of R&R, and, in Washington, the aged warhorse Marvin Hoxey prevented any revision of the Jones Act or even any orderly discussion of its harmful effect upon Alaska.

Young Oliver Rowntree, nursing his outrage, spent the summer brooding about what he could do to retaliate. And that fall, on his way to the University of Washington in Seattle where he had won a scholarship he evolved a plan. Prom then on, as he traveled back and forth on R&R ships, he began slowly and slyly to sabotage them.

He stole silverware from the dining rooms and quietly pitched it overboard at night.

He jammed pillowcases down toilets. He wrenched fittings off newel posts, messed up documents he came upon, and threw large amounts of salt into any food he could contaminate without being caught. On some trips, if he was lucky, he did up to a hundred dollars' worth of theft and breakage.

Whenever he committed one of his acts of retribution he muttered to himself: 'That's for stealing from my father . . . and the others,' and twice each year he continued his depredations.

When Tom Venn, from his headquarters in Seattle, studied reports of this sabotage he was at first perplexed, and at dinner one night he told his wife: 'Someone is conducting a vicious campaign against us, and we have no way of determining who it is,' but when she studied the records she said immediately: 'Tom, the worst cases seem to appear in autumn down to Seattle, in spring back to Anchorage.'

'And what's the significance of that?'

'Don't you see? Probably some student. Feels a grievance toward our line.'

Grasping at this clue, Tom initiated a study of passengers who sailed on the ships that had been attacked, and his staff came up with the names of eighteen young people who had sailed on at least three of the six affected voyages and seven who had been on all of them.

'I want a full report on each of the eighteen, with special details on those seven,'

Tom ordered, and during the weeks when these were being compiled, Oliver Rowntree was doing some thinking on his own, and he had learned in a math class dealing with the laws of probability that there were many ways by which a shrewd mind could analyze data which seemed at first capricious: Some smart operator could look over the passenger lists and make correlations, and if he was 784

really bright, he could identify four or five likely suspects and then narrow it down intelligently by legwork. Oliver knew that his name would be thrown up by such an approach and what there was in his background which would alert R&R detectives to his being responsible for the sabotage his essay on the evils of the Jones Act: Damn! Anyone reading that would know it was more than an attack on the Jones Act.

It was a blast at Ross & Raglan. And he was glad his father had removed his name from the article.

He was a senior at the university when he completed these deductions: I've been down four trips and back up three. And on each one I've raised hell with something or other. But there must have been others like me who made those same, trips. So the problem is: How can I throw the R&R flatfeet off my trail?

For several anxious weeks in 1924 he plotted diversionary actions, and gradually began to see that the best thing he could do would be to enlist into his conspiracy someone who would commit an act of sabotage the kind he had done on a northward trip when he was not a passenger, while he followed blamelessly on a later ship. But whom to enlist? Whom to trust with such a delicate mission? Because in the act of explanation he would have to reveal his past culpability, and this would place him in jeopardy.

Looking about the university, he came upon several small groups of students whose homes were in Alaska, and naturally these young people came mostly from Anchorage and Fairbanks; he shied away from the former as being too close to his father's store, and felt no harmony with the latter, but there were four students from Juneau, and he felt both a harmony with them as being more his serious type and an assurance that they, at least one of them, would understand his unusual problem. He therefore started to socialize with them, finding them politically concerned because of the way in which Alaskan politics dominated their hometown, and as the spring term drew to a close he judged it expedient to confide in one of the girls.

She was a beautiful young woman, about nineteen, whose origin was difficult to identify.

Her name was one of those alliterative ones popular in the early 1920s, Tammy Ting, which could have made her Chinese, except that she also looked almost completely Indian, so one day after he had spoken to her several times, he asked as they left a student meeting: 'Tammy Ting? What kind of name is that?' and she replied with a frank smile: 'Tammy Bigears Ting.' And she told him about her unusual father' Only Chinese allowed to remain in Alaska after the big expulsion' and her equally 785

distinctive Tlingit grandfather' His family fought the Russians for fifty years and now he fights the government in Washington.' And as she spoke young Rowntree was mesmerized.

'Can I trust you, Tammy? I mean, with something big?' He was older than she, a graduating senior while she was only a sophomore who was thrashing around from one course to another, trying to identify subjects that involved her sympathies: 'My mom came to Washington, back in the ancient days. Only Alaskan native in the university, but she stayed only a few weeks. When I left Juneau she warned me: ”You come home without a degree, I break both your arms.”'

'What a horrible thing to tell a daughter,' Rowntree said, but Tammy corrected him: 'The horrible part, she meant it. Still does.'

Reassured by such frank comment, Oliver decided he could trust this girl of the new Alaska, and before he finished laying his problem before her, she perceived both his predicament and its solution: 'You want me, on a different ship from the one you'll be on, to do everything you'd be doing?' When he nodded, she cried: 'Set me loose! I despise Ross & Raglan, the way they punish Alaska,' and the plot was hatched.

'Three trademarks,' Oliver said, and when he explained about the stolen cutlery, the rip-off of newel posts and the clogging of the toilets, she asked: 'But if you always did the same damage, didn't you realize they'd know it was always the same person?' and he said: 'I wanted them to know.' He hesitated: 'But I never wanted them to catch me. I wanted them to know that people in Alaska despised what they were doing with their rotten Jones Act,' and she said: 'Pop and Mom feel the same way. I'm your girl.'

At this point Oliver Rowntree leaves this part of the narrative. He graduated with honors from the University of Washington in 1925, sailed home to Anchorage on an R&R ship which he did not vandalize, so as to confuse anyone tracking his case, lived at home for the summer of 1925, and then left for a good job in Oregon, where he would marry in 1927 without ever returning to Alaska. His father had told him as he sailed: 'Don't come back, Oliver. The way those bastards in Seattle and D.C. have things rigged against us, it's impossible to earn a decent living up here in Alaska.'

And in 1928 the older Rowntree also moved to Oregon, where, having escaped from the economic tyranny under which Alaska lived, he ran a highly profitable grocery store.

The case of Tammy Ting developed quite differently. On the R&R liner Pride of Seattle, which carried her north at the end of her sophomore year in 1925, she surreptitiously per—

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formed the three acts of sabotage which would earmark the perpetrator as the same one who had been pestering Ross & Raglan for the past four years, plus a couple of inventive and highly costly depredations of her own, but one evening as she was preparing to devastate an expensively carved newel post, a young man came upon her so unexpectedly that she had to dissemble in obvious embarrassment. 'I'm sorry I startled you,' he apologized, and when he looked more closely he saw that she was strikingly beautiful.

'Are you Russian?' he asked, and she said: 'Half Tlingit, half Chinese,' and as she began to explain how this could be, while they walked in the moonlight with the mountains of Canada on their right, he stopped her abruptly: 'Bigears! I've always known about your family. Your mother came to the university, didn't she? Stayed only a couple of weeks. Back at the turn of the century.'

'How do you know that?'

'My grandmother provided your mother with the scholarship she used.'

Tammy stopped, leaned against the ship's railing, and pointed a delicate finger at her young companion: 'Is your name Ross?'

'Malcolm Venn. Named after my grandfather Ross. He founded this line.' After they had discussed for some moments the improbability of such a meeting, young Venn said: 'You won't believe this either. But I'm on this ship as a detective. Some damned fool's been committing sabotage on the Alaska run, and Father sent me north to sort of watch things . . . that is, to report anything suspicious.' Before she could comment, he added: 'We have men like me on all the ships. We'll catch them.'