We Live in Alaska, by Constance Helmericks

We Live in Alaska, by Constance Helmericks Originally published in 1944, We Live in Alaska is the first book by acclaimed author, Constance Helmericks. At twenty-four, Connie and her young husband, Harmon “Bud” Helmericks, set off from Fairbanks, Alaska in a homemade canoe. Paddling down the Tanana and into the great Yukon River, they leave…

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People of the Noatak, by Claire Fejes

In 1946, Clair Fejes moved from New York City, where she had been exhibiting in the A.C.A. Gallery, to Fairbanks, Alaska. She ultimately became an artist in a pioneering community, and traveled to a Noatak hunting camp on the edge of the Kotzebue Sound, where she was irrevocably inspired by the people and landscape of…

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Cold River Spirits, by Jan Harper-Haines

Cold River Spirits (192 pages) is a wryly humorous and inspirational story about a proud Alaska Native family struggling to survive in two worlds. Sam and Louise Harper and their ten children make a soul-grinding transition into a modern white-dominated society where they face bigotry, poverty, and illness. Yet, Louise, the Athabascan matriarch, remains in…

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A Cheechako Goes to the Klondike, by C.W. Adams

The Klondike Stampede caused a transportation boom in the north, where in its thrilling heyday about 250 wooden steamboats operated in the Yukon River drainage of Alaska and the Yukon. The sternwheelers became gold rush icons. But the hardy, pragmatic entrepreneurs who ran the boats were lured by profits, not romance. In 1901, a passenger’s…

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