Early Writings and Historic Photographs
“I was so fortunate as to see Anchorage in the stump, tent, and shack stage, though it was growing marvelously fast. I give you my notes just as I penned them when I was on the spot, seeing how Uncle Sam’s engineers and executives were putting through their big job.” —Frank Carpenter, in Alaska: Our Northern Wonderland, 1923
Alaska & the Klondike, Early Writings and Historic Photographs, compiled and edited by Helen Hegener, is an anthology of selected writings by early explorers and travelers in Alaska and the Yukon Territory of Canada. Charting an unknown country, exploring a wondrous land, searching for gold, delivering freight and mail beyond where any roads would reach, these were the exciting subjects of books which became northland classics, with titles such as Ten Thousand Miles with Dog Sled, Along Alaska’s Great River, and The Land of Tomorrow. Wonderful photographs accompany the often colorful writings of Frederick Schwatka, Hudson Stuck, Robert Service, Josiah Edward Spurr, and many others as they tell of adventure, explorations, fortunes won and lost, and the magnificent promise of our great northern lands. Read the words of those early travelers who accepted the chalenge of the North and left an indelible mark in their writing of it.
An excerpt from The Land of Nome: A Narrative Sketch of the Rush to our Bering Sea Gold-Fields, the Country, Its Mines and Its People, and the History of a Great Conspiracy, by Lanier McKee, 1900-1901. “Hundreds were living in tents upon the beach, thanks to the clemency of the weather. Within a very short distance from our camp, with their freight piled about, were the ‘syndicate,’ and quite unenthusiastic. There was defection in their camp. Actually, the “syndicate” were selling out, and without a struggle. Several of its members very soon bade us farewell, and pulled out for what they thought the ‘real thing’—quartz-mines in Oregon. And yet some of the mines on Anvil Creek even then, and with only a few men shoveling the pay dirt into the sluice-boxes, were turning out from ten to fifteen thousand dollars a day. To be sure, this was for the very few only, but, at the same time, it went to prove that the country was not a fraud. Even the dirt in those miserable Nome streets contained ‘colors,’ or small particles of gold; and it is an incongruous thought that, of all the cities of the world, Nome City, as it is called, most nearly approaches the apocalyptic condition of having its streets paved with gold!”
Selected excerpts are from the following books:
• Golden Alaska, by Ernest Ingersoll
• The Land of Tomorrow, by William B. Stephenson, Jr.
• The Spell of the Yukon & Other Verses, by Robert Service
• The Ascent of Denali, by Hudson Stuck
• From Paris to New York by Land, by Harry DeWindt
• Through the Yukon Gold Diggings, by Josiah Edward Spurr
• A Woman Who Went––To Alaska, by May Kellogg Sullivan
• The Land of Nome, by Lanier McKee
• Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, by Hudson Stuck
• Along Alaska’s Great River, by Frederick Schwatka
• Alaska: Our Northern Wonderland, by Frank Carpenter
• A Dog-Puncher on the Yukon, by Arthur Treadwell Walden
Alaska & the Klondike: Early Writings and Historic Photographs
“Alaska & the Klondike: Early Writings and Historic Photographs,” compiled and edited by Helen Hegener, published in May, 2018 by Northern Light Media. 320 pages, over 100 b/w photos, ISBN-13: 978-1717401991. $24.95 plus $5.00 First Class shipping. Also available as an eBook.
$29.95
Northern Light Media 