Author: Fritz Pettyjohn

Mainly, it’s bugs.  If you look at a topographical map of the Arctic plain north of the Brooks Range, you’ll see that it’s flat, and it’s covered with thousands and thousands of small lakes.  Minnesota brags about it’s 10,000 lakes.  There are over 3 million lakes in Alaska over 20 acres in size.

When the long summer days come, and a little warmth with it, these wetlands produce one of the great insect blooms of the world.  There are swarms of them, and the caribou avoid them at all costs.  They’re bloodthirsty mosquitoes, for the most part, and caribou are forced to flee to snow covered ground to escape them.

The ultimate punishment in Alaska Native culture is banishment, and to be banished in mosquito country, without clothes, was a death sentence.  It was almost never done.  It was a terrible way to die.

The great flocks of migrating birds come north not just to escape predators.  They come for the bugs.  Chicks can get big and strong in a hurry when they can eat bugs 24 hours a day.  In order to make the long return flight, a chick must mature very quickly.  Bugs are the perfect diet.

Ten or fifteen years ago a big magazine, The Atlantic, I believe, sent a reporter to ANWR to report on all the wildlife he expected to find.  As I recall, he spent a week looking for an animal, and all he ever found was a tuft of caribou fur.  But this little tuft sent him into seventh heaven.  He was communing with the wildlife of ANWR as he held it.

The environmentalists say ANWR is the Serengeti of the North. It is, in only one respect.  The bugs.

 

When the BBA Task Force was formed in 2010, sixteen states were on record with the requisite Article V BBA Resolutions.  Eighteen more were needed.  Work began in 2011, and here is the year by rear score card:

2011  —  Florida and Alabama

2012  —  New Hampshire

2013   —  Ohio

2014  —  Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, Michigan

2015  —  North Dakota, Utah, South Dakota

2016  —  Oklahoma, West Virginia

2017  —  Arizona, Wyoming

Alerted to our progress, the George Soros wing of the Democratic Party counterattacked. The Resolutions which had passed in the 1970’s in Delaware, Maryland, Nevada and New Mexico were rescinded by the Democratic majorities in their state legislatures.  The Task Force tried to argue, on the merits, against these rescissions.  No Democratic state legislator in any of these states was interested in listening.

We now have 27 Resolutions, and Republicans control our seven targeted states.  If we fail to reach 34 next year, we risk losing control of more state legislatures.  If Democrats in the 2018 election get control of a state with a BBA Resolution, it will be rescinded in 2019.  That would mean our path to 34 would be blocked by Democratically controlled legislatures.  Checkmate.

Getting to 34 means getting seven states in one year.  The Task Force has never won more than four states in one year, so this hill looks too steep for us.  Especially because every one of those seven targets is going to be a fight.

So David Biddulph and others on the Task Force sally forth, yet again, to raise the funds we need.   They’ve been trying to raise serious money for seven years.  They’ve tried to do it on the merits, but the money people haven’t been interested.  The attitude was, essentially, who are you guys?  You’re going to amend the Constitution?  You?

Representative Ken Buck of Colorado is going to do all he can for us, and God bless him for it.  But the key may be the Phoenix Convention of States.  This is a Bill Fruth production, although it is now firmly under the control of the Arizona legislature.  The Task Force came up with this idea, and when the first national Convention of States since 1861 convenes in Phoenix,  maybe the people with all the  money will take us seriously.

A phoenix was a bird which burned itself on a funeral pyre, and rose from the ashes with renewed youth to live again.  The Phoenix Convention will convene three weeks after the Great American Total Eclipse of the Sun.

Maybe it all means something.  We could use some help.

 

Running for public office is a family decision.   If you do it without the full support of your spouse, you will either lose your marriage or your campaign.  It’s the same as far as running for reelection.   You have to have your family behind you, or you’ll lose them.

Getting inside the head of Donald Trump is above my pay grade, but some things about him seem clear.  For one, he’s devoted to his family, and its welfare.  How is his Presidency affecting them?  More specifically, is life in the White House in the best interest of Barron Trump?

Right now, he looks like a normal eleven year old kid.  If Trump runs for a second term, his son will spend his juvenile and high school years under an intense, never ending spotlight.  That sure doesn’t seem like fun to me.

I was a fairly normal eleven year old boy.  The next seven years of my life were, let us say, eventful.  At the end of the road I met and married Babbie, so I didn’t turn out too bad.  But it was a rocky road.  If everything I did  —  just the stuff I got caught at —  had been of interest to a media looking for ways to inflict pain on my family, I would have been in trouble.

But Barron has been raised in a Manhattan penthouse, as I assume his older half-brothers were, and those two make their Daddy proud.  So maybe growing up in a fishbowl is what this boy has in store for him, no matter what.  Being the son of the President has its advantages.  But I’ll bet when he’s fifteen he’ll have had enough of it.

And then, of course, there’s Melania.  I think she’s perfectly capable of telling her husband that one term is all he gets.  She kept Barron in Manhattan for six months after the inauguration, because that was best for him.  To hell with what the President wants.  If she decides that Barron’s best interests are served by leaving the White House, and living in Manhattan or somewhere else, that’s what’s going to happen.  Trump hates living without her and Barron, and he’d go with her.

A lot of people who grudgingly admire Trump, and strongly support his entire agenda, wish it were one and done.  Trump seems to have more energy than Reagan did, but when almost any man passes his mid-70’s, you’re not as quick as you once were.  In Reagan’s case it may have been early Alzheimer’s, but you don’t want to take chances.   Trump would be 78 when he finishes a second term.  I think that’s too old.

Ideally, Vice President Pence would succeed him, and serve two full terms.   That would essentially be twelve years of a Trump administration, the last eight of which were headed by his hand picked man.  In the history books it would be like the Harding-Coolidge years of the 1920’s.  The Trump-Pence era of American politics.  Accent on the Trump.  That ought to be enough to satisfy any man’s ego.

Most one term Presidents were failures.  Tyler, Fillmore, Arthur, Andrew Johnson, Carter, and Bush I come to mind.  And then there’s James K. Polk.  Few Presidents have taken office with a bigger agenda than Polk.  He had four goals, and he achieved them all, including a settlement of the dispute over Oregon, and the acquisition of California.  I know of no President who was so completely successful.  He was one of our greatest Presidents.  He served one term.

Trump won’t admit it, because it turns him into a lame duck.  But in 2020, he’s going back to what he wants to do, at this stage of his life.  Enjoy himself.

The American west was taken from Mexico because of the illegal immigration of American settlers.

The Mexican government at first welcomed American settlers into Texas, because they couldn’t get enough Mexicans to settle it.  As a result, the few Mexicans there were constantly raided by bands of Comanche, Navajo, Apache and other warrior Indian tribes.  Their cattle, sheep and horses were stolen, crops were destroyed, men and women killed or taken prisoner.  The Mexicans wanted the Americans to help fight off the Indians.

It worked, all too well, and the government in Mexico realized they had admitted a Trojan horse.  The incoming Americans were taking over the territory, and the government in Mexico City ordered it to stop.  But it was too late.  The Americans kept coming, illegally, and finally in 1835 they rebelled, and the following year the independent Republic of Texas was formed.

When Texas formally joined the Union in 1846 it included present day Texas, the eastern half of New Mexico, the Oklahoma panhandle, southwest Kansas, central Colorado, and a part of southern Wyoming.  America profited mightily by the illegal immigration of its citizens into Mexico.

California was won in much the same way  — illegal immigration of American settlers.  Mountain man Joe Walker led the way, crossing the Sierras in 1833, but the real action began in 1841, with the Bartleson -Bidwell party.   Its principal significance is that it included seventeen year old Nancy Kelsey, and her year old daughter Ann.

The story of this party meandering from Missouri to the eastern base of the Sierras, and crossing it on horseback and on foot, is available many places.  The best I’ve read is The California Trail: An Epic with Many Heroes. , by George R. Stewart.  As they descended from ten thousand foot Sonora Pass, Nicholas Dawson, a young man in the party, later wrote, “I looked back and saw Mrs Kelsey a little way behind me, with her child in her arms, barefooted, and leading her horse  —  a sight I shall never forget.”

Nancy Kelsey, and a few other American women who came after she did, sewed the first flag of California, the Bear Flag, the one that was flown in the Bear Flag Revolt of 1846.  California was taken from Mexico as the spoils of  the Mexican-American War.  But the war wasn’t really necessary.  There were a lot more where Nancy Kelsey came from, and they weren’t going to be stopped.  The discovery of gold in 1848 meant that the entire war had been unnecessary.  Hundreds of thousands of Americans were on the way now, and California was going to be theirs.

Some Mexican-Americans talk about the Reconquista, or how they are going to overwhelm the Anglos with illegal immigration, and take the west back from the Americans who took it from them.  If left unchecked, that’s exactly what they’d do.  Americans realize that, and elected Donald Trump to stop it.

Which he is in the process of doing.  Elections matter.  If you won’t defend your country, it will be taken from you.

 

My uncle F. S. Pettyjohn Jr. was born in 1915 in a sod house on the White River of South Dakota, just north of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation.  When his mother, Mary MacNamara Pettyjohn died after giving birth to her ninth child, he quarreled with his father, and left home at the age of twelve.

In 1941 he was an Army Sergeant stationed in Cut and Shoot, Texas.  When a new paratroop division was formed in 1942, the 82nd Airborne, he was an original member.  By the end of the war, 90% of these soldiers were casualties.  He fought from North Africa to Berlin, jumping at Anzio, Normandy, and Holland.

The Holland jump was part of Operation Market Garden, and the 82nd was surrounded by SS units of the Wehrmacht for eleven days.  They were saved when the Canadians broke through to rescue them.

When he came to Alaska after the war he was known simply as Pettyjohn, as he was in the army.  After re-upping for the Korean War, he came back to Alaska.  He prospected, and in 1952 succeeded in locating the McLaren River copper deposit, which was subsequently thoroughly explored.  Low copper prices prevented it from being developed.

In the early 1950’s he was part of Tennessee Miller’s road construction crew which built an ice and snow road from Fairbanks to the North Slope.  This road was for supplies needed for the construction of the Distant Early Warning Line of radar sites.  Prior to the pipeline, the DEW line was the biggest construction project in Alaska, and was completed in 1959.

While on the North Slope he met and worked with the local Inupiat, and got to know them well, and to admire them.  He liked their toughness, and their sense of humor.  He never forgot their primitive living conditions, and their ingenuity and resourcefulness.

He’d been wounded out a couple times during the war, and his body bore the scars of combat.  But the worse scars were in his mind, and he drank excessively, and was a violent man.  He was 5′ 10″, 245 pounds, with a 53 inch chest, and the main reason he wasn’t behind bars was because of the respect that law enforcement had for his war record.

In the mid 1950’s he returned to South Dakota and married his first cousin, Helen Mary Mitchell, who was one quarter Oglala Sioux.  For her, he quit drinking, and they ran a roadhouse midway on the Richardson Highway.  He became the host of an Anchorage morning television show, “Breakfast in Bedlam”.

Later he wrote and published “Alaskana”, a complimentary newspaper supported by ads.  It was given to passengers flying to Alaska, and distributed to schools.  It was the story of Alaska, and its Natives, from the earliest days.  He wrote most of the stories himself, and was a talented writer.

He continued prospecting, and made a living selling his claims to people wanting to have the right to build a cabin in the Alaska bush.  Any amount of gold was a legal discovery, and he could find gold anywhere.

His passion was the Natives of America, and his intention was that they be treated fairly and respectfully.  His wife, Helen Mary, had a steady income as a secretary for the Federal Aviation Administration, and when they bought a nice home in south Anchorage he paid for a portrait artist to show him in a full Oglala Sioux costume.

Pettyjohn claimed to be part Native American, but it wasn’t true.  His mother was the daughter of Irish immigrants, and his father could trace his ancestors back to Virginia in 1635.  He had no Indian blood, but the portrait of him as a Sioux Indian hung above his fireplace.

Like Pettyjohn, I am named for his father, and I came to Alaska to meet him in 1969.  After going to law school I returned with my wife Babbie in 1974, with an intention of becoming a United States Senator.  I figured I’d have a hard time ever raising any money, so I decided to get into the state legislature and make a name for myself as the most conservative politician in the state.

I worked on the Reagan campaign in 1976, and came to the attention of Bill McConkey, who was running Gov. Jay Hammond’s reelection campaign.  He asked me to come to work on the campaign, which I was glad to do.

Right before the August primary against Hickel and Fink, Bill asked me to form an imaginary volunteer group, Hands for Hammond.  He then asked me to issue a press release, in which I accused Wally Hickel of running for governor as a stepping stone to the White House.  My uncle had told me that Hickel looked down on the Natives, so I was happy to do it.

The Anchorage Daily News was in on the plot, and ran a big story about my charge.  Hickel reacted as expected, over the top, confirming what everyone already knew about him.  He lost to Hammond by 98 votes.

Ideologically, I was a Tom Fink Republican, and some people just thought I was an opportunist to work for Jay Hammond.  But they didn’t know my uncle, Pettyjohn.