Volume 5, Number 2

A year before the first official summiting of Denali (Mount McKinley) by Harry Karstens and Hudson Stuck, Belmore Browne came heartbreakingly close to the peak. As Browne’s party was making their way back down, a 7.2 magnitude earthquake struck the great mountain, and Browne’s harrowing description of the event is a classic!

Also in this issue is an excerpt from the recent book by longtime wilderness guide Michael Engelhard, No Place Like Nome: The Bering Strait Seen Through Its Most Storied City (Corax Books, September, 2025), which was an Anchorage Daily News 2025 favorite. The article focuses on Father Bernhard Rosecrans Hubbard, a Jesuit and geologist who led thirty-two expeditions to Alaska between 1927 and 1958. He was an intrepid explorer and an astute lecturer who built a career which made him the highest-paid speaker of his time.

“During studies for the priesthood at Innsbruck’s Ignatius College, he proved himself in Tyrol’s Alps, earning the epithet ‘Glacier Priest’ from his guides. His interest in mountains and glaciers might rather have hindered his theological career. At Santa Clara, a California Jesuit college, he continued his order’s intellectual tradition by teaching geology, German, and Greek in 1926. From 1930 on, his superiors freed Hubbard from all duties so that he could devote himself fulltime to lecturing, writing, and further explorations.”

Also in this issue is an article by James T. Bartlett, author of The Alaskan Blonde: Sex, Secrets, and the Hollywood Story that Shocked America (Los Angeles, California: Territory Books, 2023), describing a 1947 trip to the territory of Alaska by Walt Disney and his 11-year-old daughter, Sharon, who visited Anchorage, Fairbanks, Mount McKinley National Park (now Denali National Park and Preserve), Nome, and Candle, with several traveling companions. An excerpt from Bartlett’s atticle:

“The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner reported that Disney, 46, told fellow diners he wished to tell the ‘Story of Alaska’ using the five hours of color film that had been taken by filmmakers Alfred and Elma Milotte. In the spring of 1946, Walt Disney had contracted with the two-person photography team from Ketchikan, Alaska, to shoot documentary footage of the wildlife and culture of Alaska.”

Additional articles in this issue include a tour of a few of the old salmon canneries which proliferated along the Pacific coast between 1879 and 1950. Commercial salmon canneries had their main origins in California and in the Pacific northwest, especially on the Columbia River, but by the 1920s the principal canneries had shifted their efforts to the wealth of salmon in Alaska.

Also in this issue: The history of territorial schools, including the boarding schools established under the dual federal-territorial system of education established in 1905; and an excerpted chapter from Ella Higginson’s 1908 book, Alaska The Great Country, about the exquisite basketry she discovered on her four visits to the territory between 1904 and 1908.

Alaskan History Magazine brings interesting and in-depth articles about the history of Alaska and its northern neighbors to readers in a “no advertising all history” format. Every 64-page issue features well-researched articles, book excerpts, historic photographs, maps, and images, presenting a look at several topics, events, people and places which played a role in the history of the North.