The Call of the Last Frontier


Book Description

Melissa Cook shares her Alaska adventures, joys, struggles, and daily life in the Last Frontier with heart-pounding excitement and humor.




Last Frontier


Book Description

Since 1935, Alaska magazine has charted the development of our biggest, most mysterious state. With compelling stories on such events as earthquakes, tidal waves, grizzly and polar bear attacks, the Russian influence, the Gold Rush, the Japanese invasion of the Aleutians during World War II, hunting and fishing, the lives of sourdoughs, village life, and much more, The Last Frontier truly captures the essence of our largest state. Other chapters include the tale of the Eskimo commercial pilot, flying villagers across the Arctic. Or the one about the young woman who conducted the 1940 census in the Interior by dog team. Or the story about the family who placed their automobile on a raft, hooked paddles to the axles, and steered their home-built paddle-wheeler down the Yukon River to the first road-whereupon they removed the car from the barge, and drove home to Nebraska.Other stories you won't want to miss in this book include: Don Sheldon's floatplane rescue of eight men from white water; the mystery of Klutuk, the beast of the tundra; how Julie Collins's sled dog saved her life; the trials and tribulations of a nurse running a hospital on the arctic coast in 1921; an Athabascan writer interviews her grandmother, a medicine woman; newsworthy events across the state and much, much more.




Nature's State


Book Description

An engaging blend of environmental theory and literary studies, Nature's State looks behind the myth of Alaska as America's "last frontier," a pristine and wild place on the fringes of our geographical imagination. Susan Kollin traces how this seemingly marginal space in American culture has in fact functioned to alleviate larger social anxieties about nature, ethnicity, and national identity. Kollin pays special attention to the ways in which concerns for the environment not only shaped understandings of Alaska, but also aided U.S. nation-building projects in the Far North from the late nineteenth century to the present era. Beginning in 1867, the year the United States purchased Alaska, a variety of literary and cultural texts helped position the region as a crucial staging ground for territorial struggles between native peoples, Russians, Canadians, and Americans. In showing how Alaska has functioned as a contested geography in the nation's spatial imagination, Kollin addresses writings by a wide range of figures, including early naturalists John Muir and Robert Marshall, contemporary nature writers Margaret Murie, John McPhee, and Barry Lopez, adventure writers Jack London and Jon Krakauer, and native authors Nora Dauenhauer, Robert Davis, and Mary TallMountain.




Bears of the Last Frontier


Book Description

"Companion to the PBS series NATURE: bears of the last frontier"--Dustjacket.




Chasing Alaska


Book Description

Alaska looms as a mythical, savage place, part nature preserve, part theme park, too vast to understand fully. Which is why C. B. Bernard lashed his canoe to his truck and traded the comforts of the Lower 48 for a remote island and a career as a reporter. He soon learned that a distant relation had made the same trek northwest a century earlier. Captain Joe Bernard spent decades in Alaska, amassing the largest single collection of Native artifacts ever gathered, giving his name to landmarks and even a now-extinct species of wolf. C. B. chased the legacy of this explorer and hunter up the family tree, tracking his correspondence, locating artifacts donated to museums, and finding his journals at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Using these journals as guides, he threw himself into the state once known as Seward’s Folly, boating to remote islands, hiking distant forests, hunting and fishing the pristine environment, forming a landscape view of the place that had lured him and “Uncle Joe,” both men anchored beneath the Northern Lights in freezing, far-flung waters, separated only by time. Here, in crisp, crystalline prose, is his moving portrait of the Last Frontier, then and now.




Pilgrim's Wilderness


Book Description

Into the Wild meets Helter Skelter in this riveting true story of a modern-day homesteading family in the deepest reaches of the Alaskan wilderness—and of the chilling secrets of its maniacal, spellbinding patriarch. When Papa Pilgrim, his wife, and their fifteen children appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy, their new neighbors saw them as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal. But behind the family's proud piety and beautiful old-timey music lay Pilgrim's dark past: his strange connection to the Kennedy assassination and a trail of chaos and anguish that followed him from Dallas and New Mexico. Pilgrim soon sparked a tense confrontation with the National Park Service fiercely dividing the community over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins. As the battle grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, veteran Alaska journalist, Tom Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive.







Alaska's Place in the West


Book Description

The first comprehensive examination of Alaskan development schemes from 1890 to the present. Focuses on five major conflicts between environmentalists and developers, from reindeer herding to the Trans-Alaska Pipeline. Takes readers behind common and simplistic representations of the state to explore the rich history and extreme diversity of a land that cannot easily be pigeonholed into typical American conceptions about place.




Alaska Homesteader's Handbook


Book Description

The Alaska Homesteader’s Handbook is a remarkable compilation of practical information for living in one of the most impractical and inhostpitable landscapes in the United States. More than forty pioneer types ranging from their mid-nineties to mid-twenties describe their reasons for choosing to live their lives on Alaska and offer useful instructions and advice that made that life more livable. Whether it’s how to live among bears, build an outhouse, cross a river, or make birch syrup, each story gives readers a window to a life most will never know but many still dream about. Dozens of photographs and more than 100 line drawings illustrate the real-life experiences of Alaska settlers such as 1930s New Deal colonists, demobilized military who stayed after World War II, dream seekers from the ’60s and ’70s, and myriad others who staked their claim in Alaska.