Shirley Schollenberg Back in 1959, one of my uncles heard about free land in Alaska: you could homestead up to 160 acres and all you had to do was clear a small portion and live on the land for a short time and it was yours. He came here in June to check it out when the green grass was belly deep and he thought it was God’s gift to cattlemen. So he went back home and convinced his four sisters that they should all move their families to Alaska—of course, nobody had really researched what the winters were like. My parents were the only ones who stayed and settled on that original parcel of land in a small community known as Happy Valley. We’re pretty modern nowadays, but we certainly weren’t when we first moved up here. I was probably in eighth grade before we got a television and a telephone. We used to do all of our communication with a CB radio. And I can certainly remember when we first got running water. That was a big deal—I was probably already in high school. But in some ways, things haven’t changed that much. There were eighteen kids in my graduating class in 1974. My daughter Katie graduated four or five years ago from the same school, and there were still eighteen in her class. My family always teased me—because this is a fishing village—that I was going to marry a fisherman. And I said, No, I’m gonna marry a cowboy! Well, sure enough, I married a fisherman. He goes out on the boat around the first of June and is gone all summer. When he leaves, that’s about the time I start farming. So it’s really nice having Katie around. She’s twentythree now. She has an outside job, but she certainly spends time on the tractor and training horses with me. One of the things that she always does first, after she’s been away for a little while, is get on her horse and ride to the beach. There’s a smell in the salt water that just makes you feel like you’re home.
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right: Shirley Schollenberg with her daughter, Katie, hay and horses, Ninilchik, Alaska. following pages: Dave Vaughn, cattle, Lander, Wyoming.