Wartime ads promoted Alaska's imagery: businesses used state's mystique to sell products.

• Author: Dickrell, Jeffery

As all Alaskans know, the people in the Lower 48 have a convoluted idea of what life is like here in the Last Frontier. Polar bears, igloos, endless darkness, deadly cold--we have all been asked about these things.

Most of the impressions the Outside has of Alaska can be traced to a few sources. Prior to the Klondike Gold Rush, very little information was known about Alaska. Most of the wealth was garnered by the Alaska Commercial Co. harvesting fur seal pelts on the Pribilof Islands. This was hardly a romantic enough premise to capture the public's attention. But with the gold rush came two authors who made a living writing about the extremes of Alaska. These were Robert Service, a bank clerk who came to Dawson in the Yukon Territory years after the rush, and Jack London, who came north during the rush as a young man and never stopped writing Alaska stories.

Additionally, two early movies brought visual images into the minds of thousands of Americans. These would be "Nanook of the North," filmed in Canada, and Charlie Chaplin's "The Gold Rush." The images of brutal cold, polar bears, igloos and sourdough-tough guys all can be traced to these stories.

WWII came to Alaska in June 1942 with the bombing of Dutch Harbor and the Japanese occupation of two remote Aleutian Islands, Attu and Klska. Victory in the Aleutians came through building airbases on remote islands and a yearlong air war. Then in May 1943, a bloody three-week assault on Attu cleared the Japanese from the Aleutians.

After victory, the stories poured out of the theater. How the Americans, in weather so bad it was hard to describe, built whole airfields in days, not weeks. A documentary, "Report from the Aleutians," directed by John Ford, won the Academy Award that year. The Aleutians became the first area completely cleared of invaders and the government wanted its people to know.

With the advent of eBay, I have been able to amass a rather large collection of Aleutian artifacts. Books and maps abound, but one of the more esoteric collections I have created is Aleutian-themed advertisements from the war era. These offer a unique snapshot of what the Aleutians represented in America's mind. As always, companies use what people believe to sell products.

The products, which used the Aleutians as a selling point, range from Harley Davidson to Bundy Tubing, from Haskelite Plywood to Diamond T Trucks, Kodak film to Curtis Aircraft. But for me, it was interesting to note which images...