The curtain in a Broadway playhouse went up, several years ago, on an Alaskan valley and a colony of bankrupt, wrangling, hopeful, bewildered, bitter Midwesterners transplanted there by the U.

This was the Matanuska Valley, 50 miles northeast of Anchorage, in south-central Alaska. This was the promised land—promised by the wide-eyed Federal Emergency Relief Administration to ...