Ships of all sizes plied the great distances to and from the U. S. west coast. Sailors and passengers alike carried their instruments on board and filled the long hours by singing and playing music from their stateside lives. D. A. Noonan, an officer on the motor ship Northland, composed songs that described his own feelings.
In his publication of two songs under the heading of The Land of the Midnight Sun, he declared that “if you lived in Alaska you wouldn’t care for the gilt and glare of Fifth Avenue,” but instead you would “buy yourself a gas boat, a fish-rod, and a gun;” and that you would play baseball at midnight because “it’s daytime in the night-time” in the merry month of
June.
The Book of Navy Songs published in 1926 offered a collection of typical songs sung by the men and officers of the United States Navy. Two songs included concerned Alaska and The Frozen North:
Away up yonder in the frozen north,
In the land of the Eskimo,
I got stranded on the Sarah Jane,
I don’t care if we never get home again,
For the Queen up there is called “Gum Drop Sue,”
And for me she’s mighty strong,
If and not Of the King's wrong and I'm right
And the fool goes out ‘most ev’ry night,
And the nights are six months long!
The second song is reminiscent of the Revenue Cutters that patrolled the bleak wastes of the Bering Sea to prevent seal poaching, in accordance with the treaty with England:
The Behring Sea Song
Full many a sailor points with pride,
To cruises o’er the ocean wide,
But he is naught compared to me
For I have sailed the Behring Sea.
Columbus and Balboa too,
With Nelson form a salty crew,
But they are fresh to you and me,
They never sailed the Behring Sea.
Old Noah has our great respect,
But yet he was not quite correct,
Instead of Ararat, you know,
He should have touched at Bogoslow.
With breakfast, dine, and sup on fat,
Eat walrus blubber and all that;
Bull seals and whales are our delight,
And Polar bears we love to fight.
Tho’ years you spent on fishing bank,
Trod slaver’s decks and pirates’ plank,
Seen Spanish Main and Crusoe’s Isle,
At you we Arctic heroes smile.
So when you boast of fiercest gale,
That every ocean you did sail,
You cannot salty sailor be,
Until you cruise the Behring Sea.
Just think of all our dreary tracks,
To shield the jaunty seal-skin sacks,
To have old England laugh in glee,
While Yankees guard the Behring Sea.
And when they sound our funeral knell,
They’ll say we’ve had our share of Hell,
And welcome sure in Heav’n we’ll be,
Because we’ve sailed the Behring Sea.
G.P.O. 1942. Song and Service Book for Ship and Field. (Used at Eielson AFB).
Officers of the U.S.R.C. Service. n.d. Below Zero–Songs and Verses from Bering Sea and the Arctic
Trident Society. 1926. The Book of Navy Songs, collected and edited by the Trident Society of the United States Naval Academy at Annapolis, MD; Joseph W. Crosley, arranger (Organist and Choir Master of the U.S. Naval Academy). Garden City and NY: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1926.
The first railroad in Alaska was the 110-mile White Pass and Yukon that serviced the Klondike Gold Rush miners. It took twenty more years until construction began on the Alaska Railroad that started in Anchorage and ran south to the port of Whittier. In 1923 a bridge was built across the Tanana River at Nenana and the tracks could then be stretched to Fairbanks. President Warren G. Harding visited Alaska to drive the golden spike and, for the first time, large areas of the territory were linked as they had never been before. 
Picture of the Harding car at Alaskaland taken on Aug. 3, 2002]
The first airplane in Alaska took off in Fairbanks in 1913 and ten years later the first passenger was flown into town. Airplanes have since been very important to the state, making it possible to import fresh vegetables and flowers, as well as tourists and performers, year-round. As a young boy Fairbanksan Robert Crawford (1899-1960) took part in that first flight. (There was no tachometer and so he helped put a meat scale on the wire attached to the plane’s tail.) At fifteen he had his first published song, My Homeland, was chosen by the “Faithful Pioneers and Trail-Blazers of Alaska” to be their theme song.
In 1939 the same Robert Crawford, pilot, composer, baritone, and conductor, a graduate of Princeton and Julliard, wrote perhaps the most easily recognizable song composed in the middle of the 20th century,
Off We Go into the Wild Blue Yonder: The U.S. Air Corps/Air Force Song
He was responsible also for the 1948 Republican theme song Let’s Send Harry Back to the Farm. It has been said that had Dewey won the presidential election, Crawford would have been appointed territorial governor of Alaska.
Settlers from Scandinavia, the Baltic States, and other European countries began to move to Alaska in the late teens and 20s. One Finn, Shorty Gustafson, who arrived in Palmer when the town was little more than a railway depot for Alaska Railroad’s Matanuska branch, immortalized the area some years later with his song Cheechako.
In May 1935, during both the depth of the Depression and a severe drought in the American Midwest, the Federal Emergency Relief Administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal program selected 202 farming families, more than 1000 people in all, from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, and shipped them up from San Francisco to Seward and then by train to Palmer, to colonize the Matanuska Valley. Starting out in tent-cabins, as had the miners before them, these Dust Bowl refugees cleared the virgin forests, built houses and barns, planted crops, and endured a multitude of first year hardships. By the fall of 1936, the valley’s fertile fields and the long summer days had filled the barns with crops, and those who could not cope with a northern life had been weeded out. Gustafson’s song Cheechako took its title from the Chinook Indian word used to describe newcomers or visitors; especially those who have not spent a winter in Alaska. Alaska and the U.S.A, written in 1923 by Anna E. Snow, a member of one of Juneau’s pioneer theatrical families, described Alaska as a “Golden Land of Promise” where “copper, gold, and silver ore; her platinum and coal, furs and fish and fertile lands, are a perfect farmers’ goal,” was almost a premonition of Gustafson’s song.
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