Someone once mentioned Deadwood, South Dakota.

which I do not believe was really anything special as far as wild western towns go. I'm sure there were a lot of come and go wild towns in the years following the Civil War and my guess is that Deadwood is famous simply because a lot of bigger than life characters passed through during the early years.

Wyatt Earp, Wild Bill Hickock, Calamity Jane, and a number of others passed through Deadwood in its heyday.

Someone asked me what the closest I have ever lived to a place like Deadwood and I have to say it was probably the closest was the Yukon and Alaska in the 70s and 80s.

A lot of Alaskan towns had limited law enforcement and what little of it there was spent their time trying to keep us from hacking each other up. Gambling was overlooked, as to a degree so were prostitution and narcotics. 

While fights were not a daily occurrence, there were certainly no shortage of them and unless it was an outright assault a mutual combatant situation it was generally overlooked.

I never did see a real live TV style shootout but I can recall at least four unsolved murders, not including the murder of a policeman.

Three of the four murders were drug related and the fourth may have very well been, too. Of the four, two of them were pretty much a case of whacking a serious violent troublemaker. I suppose the murders could have gotten off under the Texas law of "The man just needed killing". One of the killings I assume was drug related because it was the murder of a decent clean living cab driver. I assume he was robbed by a junkie for the money he carried in his pocket.

Of the other three murders, one was a meeting of greed and stupidity. He was murdered and robbed for what I heard was $10,000 that he took to Anchorage to buy cocaine to resell in town. He boasted to a number of us that it was his plan to do this. I didn't know him very well but he told me about it and acted like he was the smartest man in the world when he did tell me. I thought he was the dumbest for telling me what he was going to do.

The other two killings were cases of the man needed killing as they were of violent meth monster types that were either beating people up, stealing everything that wasn't nailed down or both. One of these people had a reputation for carrying a nail puller so he could steal things that were nailed down.

In any normal place these murders would not have occurred because these two would have been in jail well before things resorted to murder. What happened here was that the locals simply took care of the problems the police couldn't or wouldn't take care of.

One of these took place on Kodiak Island and the other in the far flung remote outpost of Dutch Harbor. The Dutch Harbor case was a shooting and I heard he was shot in the head two or three times.

A couple of months later a couple of us were sitting around and a cop wandered by. We asked him if there were any leads. He dryly commented that it was likely to be ruled a suicide. The murder victim had spent some time in Kodiak and the police there didn't think very highly of him, either.

I later heard from a number of other people that it had been ruled a suicide. Then again maybe they heard it from one of the guys the cop told was a suicide. You never know.

Actually what happened is that things had evolved to a certain level where life was pretty much lived by a social code of some sort that was based on the general rules of basic civility. It was really rather a nice place to live for a younger man. One basically didn't hurt anyone and everyone left you alone. I have to say it fit me quite well.

During the last year or so I lived there they finally decided that they were going to have to enforce DUI laws which really didn't hurt me much. I seldom drove after any heavy amount of drinking and always had a place to stay near to downtown and the bars if I I got really tanked up.

Such was Kodiak town in the late 70s and early 80s.

Kodiak was at least a town. Dutch Harbor was a remote outpost out in the Aleutians. There were two bars there, the Elbow Room and the Unisea, also known as the Lunacy. The Elbow Room was known the world over for being somewhat of a legalized open insane asylum. There was a lot of violence there. Both bars were real zoos. I just read that the Elbow Room closed a few years back.

Kodiak actually had a police department, Dutch simply had a Village Public Safety Officer and a lone trooper to police the entire of Unalaska Island. Dutch was a big money commercial fishing port and where you have fishermen with huge wads of cash and available alcohol you generally have chaos and tumult.

I imagine Dutch was a little closer to Deadwood than Kodiak was but not by a whole lot. 

I'm really glad I managed to live in a place like that for part of my life. I got to see an awful lot of personal liberty and live as I saw fit.

On the other hand I went through a lot of culture shock when I moved to Pittsburgh. I had to steer well clear of the bars in Pittsburgh because when I arrived in Pitt I found out MOST riki-tik that what an Alaskan bartender would not even raise an eyebrow to would turn a panic-stricken Pittsburgh bartender straight to the phone to call the police. 

I arrived in Pittsburgh 30 years ago and I have still not 100% adapted although now I can go out and behave civilly in an establishment that serves alcohol. It took years to get used to Pittsburgh culture after a decade in the Alaska of the 70s and 80s.






To find out why the blog is pink just cut and paste this: http://piccoloshash.blogspot.com/2009/12/my-feminine-side-blog-stays-pink.html NO ANIMALS WERE HARMED IN THE WRITING OF TODAY'S ESSAY