'It's a brave new life': How an intrepid New Jersey couple survived the Alaskan wilderness on a homestead (2024)

In this BBC archive clip from 1962, Alan Whicker meets the adventurous New Jersey couple who chose to tough it out in the Alaskan wilderness in a new life as homesteaders. In History finds out what happened next.

On 20 May 1862, US President Abraham Lincoln signed into law the Homestead Act, legislation that would kickstart the greatest land giveaway in American history.

One hundred years later, the BBC's intrepid Alan Whicker tracked down a young couple in the Alaskan wilderness who represented the same naive optimism and pioneer spirit that led thousands before them to go west and carve out new lives for themselves.

After meeting the remarkable Su Lum in 1962, Whicker observed: "It's a brave new life for young wives who are ready to butcher and preserve half a moose; for the vigorous and the determined."

Su and her husband Burt, a secretary and schoolteacher, had married a year earlier and drove north from Boonton, New Jersey to build a new life in Alaska. To find the couple, Whicker and his television crew had to take a plane journey followed by another hour's drive "along a do-it-yourself road". Sleeping in hammocks and with not much shelter, it was clear the Lums had chosen a difficult path for themselves. And Su was due to have a baby in 10 days' time.

If they could last the distance, after three years the US government would grant them 160 acres of land. While it may have been free, the price had to be paid in sweat and toil. They had to clear and cultivate at least 20 of those acres and build a habitable home, all while surviving three freezing Alaskan winters.

This was the way that much of the US was created, thanks to the 1862 Act – trees had to be felled and cleared, ground flattened, and log cabins built. In all, 10% of the United States, 270 million acres, was claimed under the Act, with prime land being snapped up quickly.

Homesteading fell sharply out of favour after the 1930s but the law remained in effect until 1976. In the less hospitable terrain of Alaska, provisions for homesteading continued right up until 1986. It really was the last American frontier.

For New Jersey schoolmaster Burt Lum, their Alaskan adventure was a chance to carve out some personal space.

"We're both basically wilderness-minded people," he said. "We like the out-of-doors ever so much and want to get away from crowds. As a matter of fact, we intend to do as primitively as we can, living here and taking our game from the woods and our fish from the streams. There are dozens of varieties of wild berries here, and, of course, we will eventually have gardens. But these are things that have long appealed to us as a change from this hurried modern life."

When President Lincoln signed the Act, the Civil War was still raging, and Alaska was still part of Russia. It wasn't until 1867 that the United States bought the territory for $7.2m. For less than two cents an acre, it gained almost 600,000 sq miles.

It was President William McKinley who brought homesteading to the then District of Alaska through legislation in 1898. Around that same time, miners struck gold in the Yukon in north-west Canada, and Alaska became the gateway for what became known as the Klondike gold rush. Few prospectors who braved the icy conditions struck it rich, but many stuck around after the gold rush. Towns began to build up around this new population, but a vast wilderness remained unconquered.

Mr Lum insisted he wasn't bothered by the cold. "When it's down to 10F (-12C) and 0F (-18C), we think we're beginning to live," he said. "Truly, the climate is marvellous in the winter. If we get to 20F below (-29C) and 30F below (-34C), then we're starting to be uncomfortable, and you can't work very well at 40F below (-40C), but indeed, at 10F above (-12C) on to 10F below (-23C), it's clean living, you know. It's wonderful air and crisp." Although, when asked if sleeping in a jungle hammock in temperatures of -10F was feasible, he did reply: "Absolutely not."

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The Lums were chasing their own particular American Dream. From numerous back-to-the-land movements to the #TradWife social media trend of women promoting ultra-traditional gender roles, from Henry David Thoreau's much-treasured 1854 book Walden to Paris Hilton's reality show in the mid-2000s, the urge for "the simple life" has consumed generations of Americans across the political spectrum. It has also been an ongoing source of fascination for outsiders looking in at the US and its founding myths.

With their gas stove, a chest of drawers full of canned food and pantry essentials, and a locker full of moose, salmon and bear hunted by Mr Lum, they might have been in danger of being eaten by the local wildlife, but at least they weren't going to starve for a while.

Whicker walked over to Su Lum in the couple's makeshift kitchen and asked her: "How do you cook moose?"

"Just like beef," she said.

"And bear?"

"Like pork," she said.

"No difference at all. When, Mrs Lum, are you expecting your baby?"

"In about 10 days," she said.

"Will you bring your child back here?"

"Yeah."

With a baby on the way and the harsh realities of life on a homestead unfolding, viewers were left to imagine what happened next for the family after the programme was broadcast.

Looking back 62 years later

"That jungle hammock you saw? My mum's waters broke in the jungle hammock."

Skye Skinner is speaking to the BBC 62 years later, as she watches the clip of her father Burt and heavily-pregnant mother Su on their Alaskan homestead. She is hearing her father's voice for the first time in decades. "It took them a day and a half to get to town to the hospital – luckily I wasn't in a big hurry," she says, of her birth.

"I'm so grateful to see it, because I was born and raised up there until I was 16, but a lot has changed in that part of the world, and the fact that that got captured is really precious."

Thankfully Skye says she didn't have to spend her first Alaskan winter out in the cold, as her dad got a teaching job at a tiny one-room school in the bush. "Luckily it came with teacher housing because winter was coming and they had a brand-new baby," she says.

"It was still in the wilderness, but at least we had shelter for that winter and a little bit of income. As weather allowed, they'd go back to the homestead and try to work on the house that, ultimately in my mind, became my dad's unicorn. He never finished the house."

By the following year's winter, the family had done enough to secure the land. They moved to the city of Anchorage while saving money for the next round of building, but trouble was around the corner.

In April 1964, Alaska was struck by a magnitude 9.2 megathrust earthquake that devastated much of Anchorage. "That was pretty much the straw that broke my mum," says Skye. "They had a friend who was living in Aspen at the time– Aspen was a glorious place in the early 1960s, full of a kind of counterculture, interesting intellectuals.

"My dad taught at the high school. My mum got a job at the Aspen Times newspaper– she worked there for over 50 years and she found her tribe. She never had any desire to ever leave that place and she never did."

Skye's sister Hillery was born in 1965, but "my dad the whole time had been pining away for Alaska".

"My mum had this light bulb go off, and she said, 'I know, you go to Alaska and I'll meet you there.' And he said, 'Okay, I'm taking Skye.' So off we went up to Alaska.

"I really loved my dad. I mean, my dad had a lot of amazing qualities as you can imagine from what he was trying to accomplish. He was just a complicated, tortured kind of a soul. But still, I was only three, and off we went into the woods."

Burt and Su's marriage could not stand the strain, and following the divorce Skye didn't see her mother again until she was eight years old. In 1970, Su was granted visitation rights, which meant Skye spent her summers in Aspen and her sister Hillery made the trip up north to Alaska.

"I don't want this to just seem so incredibly dark, but it was a hard life and we were really broke all the time. Every once in a while, my dad would get a teaching gig, and we'd get back up on our feet. We had food stamps and we had to get a moose just to live through the winter."

Skye says she hasn't recently eaten moose but it is tasty. However, she does have a culinary tip for anyone considering the wilderness life.

"Bear is not good. Don't eat bear– super oily pungent meat… ugh," she laughs.

Skye says her father's plans to build a five-storey A-frame house were overambitious.

"I've often thought, if he could have just built a two-room cabin, we would have been so much more comfortable sooner," she says.

Burt Lum died in a car accident when Skye was aged 16. Su Lum died aged 80 in 2017.

In 2000, Skye returned to visit the old homestead for one last time. "It was important for me to go back out to the land and walk the road," she says. "I kind of was saying goodbye to it because I knew I was never going to live there again. I needed to let go of the hard part but I also wanted to say goodbye to all the good parts."

Shortly after her visit, the entire area burned to the ground in a huge forest fire. "I'm quite sure it would be unrecognisable to me now - all the structures that were there and the shell of a unicorn house that my dad was trying to build. I don't know how to describe it, but there was something mythic about the whole thing."

Additional research and reporting by Francis Agustin.

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