“The day They Sold Alaska”

Press, Volume CXI, Issue 32562, 23 March 1971, Page 4

“The day They Sold Alaska”

“The Day They Sold Alaska,” a 8.8. C. documentary on the discoverey of oil there, has been purchased by the N.Z.B.C. and is likely to attract considerable attention when it is presented. Up for public auction in Anchorage, Alaska, late in 1969 were half a million acres of Arctic wilderness. The land was remote, barren and cursed with temperatures 90deg. below. And yet to this sale came the world’s tycoons, eager to spend—literally—millions, to get a foothold in the tundra.

For oil—oil in vast quantities—had just been discovered at a depth of three miles. Three companies were in on the original find—one of them British Petroleum. And under the hammer that day were tracts of land in the back garden of the new Eldorado.

For one day Anchorage, Alaska, U.S.A., was the centre of the world. No-one had seen anything like it since the great gold rush of the nineties. In a small downtown municipal hall, there took place the greatest sale on earth. Individual bids were bigger than national monthly trading surpluses, the total raised was bigger than a national debt. So much money was there—actually there on that day—that it looked for a while as if the American financial machine

might run down for lack of lubrication. It was inconceivable that such a strike, such a sale, on such a scale should not father a weird and wonderful offspring. There was industrial spying on a large scale, overnight fortunes, death by misadventure. There was a historic voyage through the North West Passage—proved viable after 500 years of failure—which could upset the world’s trading patterns. There began a pipeline, 800 miles long, that must traverse mountains, and the Yukon river—the largest private undertaking ever attempted. It caused men to study how high a caribou can jump, and to ask again who the land really belonged to. For notices had begun to appear with the words “Eskimo Power” on them, and the Eskimos had briefed * A RB.C. crew followed the events of Alaska’s extraordinary autumn. They were on board the S.S. Manhattan in the Arctic; among the oil rigs, caribou and grizzlies of Alaska’s North Slope; in the northernmost Eskimo town of Barrow and the remotest Eskimo community in the Anaktuvuk Pass. They were at Fairbanks, where the roustabouts make whoopee—and in Anchorage, at the greatest auction sale bn earth.