Stateside with Rosalea

Stateside with Rosalea: Alaska

When I think of Alaska, I think of dogs. No, not that yappy she-terrier of a former Governor who bites people’s ankles so she can stay the center of attention, but real dogs. Working dogs. Dogs that save people’s lives. Like Balto, the Inuit Siberian Husky who was one of dozens that mushed the Iditarod trail back in 1925 to save the lives of people living in Nome. Today, February 20, 2011, teams will leave Nenana to travel to Nome, replicating the “serum run” as it is known. You can follow the action on their blog here, and track them on SPOT Live here.

Sadly, the tale of the serum run is as much a tale of medical misadventure and bureaucratic bungling as it is about the valiant efforts of the 20 teams who covered 674 miles (1085 km) in five-and-a-half days at a time of a year when the days are short and the nights very long.

In December, 1924, the sole medical practitioner in Nome misdiagnosed the throat problems a young Inuit boy was having as tonsillitis. The boy dies. Another three children die before Dr. Welch finally realizes he is dealing with an outbreak of diphtheria.

There are 8,000 units of diphtheria antitoxin in the hospital in Nome, but Welch is reluctant to administer it because it has expired. The one child he does give it to dies, confirming the doctor’s fears. He had ordered a new batch of serum back in the summertime, but the port at Nome had closed for winter before the health commissioner sent it. Planes are out of the question, so the decision is made to use dog sled teams.

Serum is located in Anchorage, and sent by train to Nenana, where the first of the teams picks it up on January 27. Temperatures during the serum run went as low as -70F (-57C), winds in some places reached 80 mph (129 kph), many of the dogs died, and some of the mushers suffered terrible frostbite. The last team arrived in Nome with the antitoxin on February 2. The lead dog of that team was Balto. The statue of him in NY’s Central Park is dedicated to all the dogs that made the serum run.

At the time of the serum run, Alaska was a territory of the United States. In 1867, Russia had sold it to the US, and the purchased land was known as the Department of Alaska and District of Alaska before becoming a territory. Following the transfer, many elders of the local Tlingit tribe maintained that Castle Hill comprised the only land that Russia was entitled to sell, but native land claims were not addressed until 1971, with the signing of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act.

Alaska became one of the United States on January 3, 1959.

In common parlance, Alaska is usually included in the category known as the Continental United States , but is not one of the Lower 48 or the Contiguous United States. The National Geographic style guide advises using “continental United States” to include Alaska, but if you go to this General Services Administration per diem calculation webpage and choose Alaska as your state, you receive an error message: You entered a location outside the Continental United States.

Instead, you have to go to the Department of Defense per diem website, which classifies Alaska and Hawaii as OCONUS, along with all the US territories and the rest of the world. The definition of the acronym CONUS varies by department. On the GSA website it expands to “continental United States”; the Department of Defense expands it as “contiguous United States”.

Which begs the question: Who put the “fed” in “conus”? (Go on, do the anagram!)

Stateside with Rosalea: Arizona

The 48th state has always been a pain in the United States’ left butt, geographically speaking. After the defeat of the Mexican army in 1847, the US could have taken over all of Mexico but chose not to and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo instead established a border that was based on an inaccurate map. Senate debate on the treaty was notable for the reluctance of the US to add a quotidian of poor, ignorant peasants—mostly Catholic—to its population.

Some years later, with the debate over slave vs. free states becoming embroiled with the ambitions of those Southerners who wanted to see a transcontinental railroad from San Antonio to San Diego, President Franklin Pierce authorized his US minister to Mexico to make an offer to the cash-strapped Mexican government for some additional land that included flat land suitable for the railroad. The Gadsden Purchase was completed via the Treaty of La Mesilla in 1853, and the treaty was ratified in the US Senate on June 1854. As this 2004 article in the Tucson Star notes, Mexicans view it not as a “purchase” but a belligerent act.

At the time, present-day Arizona was part of the New Mexico territory of the United States. The first Arizona Territory included parts of New Mexico, and was created by citizens who supported the Confederate cause, not the Union. The Wikipedia entry puts it this way:

At the outbreak of the Civil War, sentiment in the area south of the 34th parallel was in favor of the Confederacy. Territorial secession conventions were called at La Mesilla and Tucson on March 16, 1861, that adopted an Ordinance of Secession that declared itself independent of the United States and established the provisional Confederate Territory of Arizona with Owings as its governor, and petitioned the Confederate Congress for admission. The Confederate Territory of Arizona became officially recognized when President Jefferson Davis signed the proclamation on February 14, 1862. To commemorate this event, February 14, 1912, the fiftieth anniversary, was selected as the official date of statehood for Arizona.

In the light of current dissatisfaction with the United States federal government, it is interesting to compare a map of the states and territories claimed by the Confederacy with the list of states that have a reciprocal agreement to honor Arizona’s (optional) concealed weapons permits. With the exception of Delaware, Indiana, Kansas, Minnesota, Michigan, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania and western states formed from territories after the Civil War, all the reciprocating states seceded from the Union. (I’m just saying!)

The Arizona Citizens Defense League claims it “was instrumental in the introduction and/or passage of the legislation” that is known as the Constitutional Carry law, which the ACDL says eliminated “the prohibition and penalties for law-abiding adults who carry a weapon discreetly without first seeking written permission from the government via a ‘permit .’” (Putting the word “permit” in quotation marks is anti-government code alerting sympathizers to a “tax” disguised as a fee.)

“The State of Arizona has long been the home to defenders of personal liberty and the freedoms enshrined and protected by the Constitution of the United States and our State Constitution,” said AZ Governor Jan Brewer in the April 2010 press release upon her signing of the legislation into law. Arizona has allowed “open carry” of guns since it first became a state; this legislation was to do with carrying loaded concealed weapons. Brewer succeeded to the office of Governor in January, 2009 after Democrat Janet Napolitano resigned to take a post with the Obama Administration. Prior to that, Brewer was Secretary of State, and criticized by some for being absent from the state when it held its primary elections that year. She was instead heading the AZ delegation to the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Jan Brewer after casting Arizona’s vote for the McCain-Palin ticket.

Given her credentials within the Republican Party, and her attractiveness to the anti-tax, anti-immigrant, anti-gay marriage, pro-gun lobbies both within and outside the GOP, it’s within the realm of possibility that Brewer might make a bid for the presidential nomination herself next time around. A December 2008 article on the Arizona Republic website points out that “Nearly every race that Jan Brewer has run - from her first primary for the state House of Representatives in 1982 to the tough, often down-and-dirty contest for secretary of state in 2002 - has been contested, often fiercely. Often, she faced more experienced opponents, including incumbents.”

The article—unfortunately, in the light of the recent supermarket parking lot shooting in Tucson—goes on to say that “As a political neophyte in 1981, Brewer acknowledges being ‘dumbfounded’ upon learning that politics required approaching total strangers in supermarket parking lots asking for their signatures on her nominating petitions (‘And son of a gun! They'd sign it!’).”

But Arizona, like much of America, has always had a fascination with a gun-toting (or -touting) momma, especially one who sticks it to the government in some way or other. Back in 1899, when the saloon singer Pearl Hart was on trial in Tucson for robbing a stage coach at gunpoint, the local newspaper editorialized in favor of her stance that she “would never consent to be tried under a law she or her sex had no voice in making.” The jury took all of ten minutes to acquit her of the robbery charge.