A Wild Discouraging Mess

A Wild Discouraging Mess PDF Author: Julie Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description

A Wild Discouraging Mess

A Wild Discouraging Mess PDF Author: Julie Johnson
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Frontier and pioneer life
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description


Across the Shaman's River

Across the Shaman's River PDF Author: Daniel Lee Henry
Publisher: University of Alaska Press
ISBN: 1602233306
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The story of one of Alaska’s last Indigenous strongholds, shut off for a century until a fateful encounter between a shaman, a preacher, and a naturalist. Tucked in the corner of Southeast Alaska, the Tlingits had successfully warded off the Anglo influences that had swept into other corners of the territory. This Native American tribe was viewed by European and American outsiders as the last wild tribe and a frustrating impediment to access. Missionaries and prospectors alike had widely failed to bring the Tlingit into their power. Yet, when naturalist John Muir arrived in 1879, accompanied by a fiery preacher, it only took a speech about “brotherhood”—and some encouragement from the revered local shaman Skandoo’o—to finally transform these “hostile heathens.” Using Muir’s original journal entries, as well as historic writings of explorers juxtaposed with insights from contemporary tribal descendants, Across the Shaman’s River reveals how Muir’s famous canoe journey changed the course of history and had profound consequences on the region’s Native Americans. “The product of three decades of thought, research, and attentive listening. . . . Henry shines a bright light on events that have long been shadowy, half-known. . . . Now, thanks to careful scholarship and his access to Tlingit oral history, we are given a different perspective on familiar events: we are inside the Tlingit world, looking out at the changes happening all around them.” —Alaska History

Stampede

Stampede PDF Author: Brian Castner
Publisher: Doubleday
ISBN: 0385544510
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
A gripping and wholly original account of the epic human tragedy that was the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897-98. One hundred thousand men and women rushed heedlessly north to make their fortunes; very few did, but many thousands of them died in the attempt. In 1897, the United States was mired in the worst economic depression that the country had yet endured. So when all the newspapers announced gold was to be found in wildly enriching quantities at the Klondike River region of the Yukon, a mob of economically desperate Americans swarmed north. Within weeks tens of thousands of them were embarking from western ports to throw themselves at some of the harshest terrain on the planet--in winter yet--woefully unprepared, with no experience at all in mining or mountaineering. It was a mass delusion that quickly proved deadly: avalanches, shipwrecks, starvation, murder. Upon this stage, author Brian Castner tells a relentlessly driving story of the gold rush through the individual experiences of the iconic characters who endured it. A young Jack London, who would make his fortune but not in gold. Colonel Samuel Steele, who tried to save the stampeders from themselves. The notorious gangster Soapy Smith, goodtime girls and desperate miners, Skookum Jim, and the hotel entrepreneur Belinda Mulrooney. The unvarnished tale of this mass migration is always striking, revealing the amazing truth of what people will do for a chance to be rich.

A Passion for Nature

A Passion for Nature PDF Author: Donald Worster
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199831068
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
"I am hopelessly and forever a mountaineer," John Muir wrote. "Civilization and fever and all the morbidness that has been hooted at me has not dimmed my glacial eye, and I care to live only to entice people to look at Nature's loveliness. My own special self is nothing." In Donald Worster's magisterial biography, John Muir's "special self" is fully explored as is his extraordinary ability, then and now, to get others to see the sacred beauty of the natural world. A Passion for Nature is the most complete account of the great conservationist and founder of the Sierra Club ever written. It is the first to be based on Muir's full private correspondence and to meet modern scholarly standards. Yet it is also full of rich detail and personal anecdote, uncovering the complex inner life behind the legend of the solitary mountain man. It traces Muir from his boyhood in Scotland and frontier Wisconsin to his adult life in California right after the Civil War up to his death on the eve of World War I. It explores his marriage and family life, his relationship with his abusive father, his many friendships with the humble and famous (including Theodore Roosevelt and Ralph Waldo Emerson), and his role in founding the modern American conservation movement. Inspired by Muir's passion for the wilderness, Americans created a long and stunning list of national parks and wilderness areas, Yosemite most prominent among them. Yet the book also describes a Muir who was a successful fruit-grower, a talented scientist and world-traveler, a doting father and husband, a self-made man of wealth and political influence. A man for whom mountaineering was "a pathway to revelation and worship." For anyone wishing to more fully understand America's first great environmentalist, and the enormous influence he still exerts today, Donald Worster's biography offers a wealth of insight into the passionate nature of a man whose passion for nature remains unsurpassed.

Hard Drive to the Klondike

Hard Drive to the Klondike PDF Author: Lisa Mighetto
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Commercial geography
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
The Alaskan Klondike Gold Rush coincided with major events, including the arrival of the railroad, and it exemplified continuing trends in Seattle's history. If not the primary cause of the city's growth and prosperity, the Klondike Gold Rush nonetheless serves as a colorful reflection of the era and its themes, including the celebrated "Seattle spirit." This historic resource study examines the Klondike Gold Rush, beginning in the early 1850's with the founding of Seattle, and ending in 1909 with the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition commemorating the Klondike Gold Rush and the growth of the city. Chapter 1 describes early Seattle and the gold strikes in the Klondike, while the following three chapters analyze how the city became the gateway to the Yukon, how the stampede to the Far North stimulated local businesses, and how the city's infrastructure and boundaries changed during the era of the gold rush. Chapter 5 looks at how historians have interpreted the Klondike Gold Rush throughout the 20th century. The final chapter brings the Klondike story up to the present, describing the establishment of Seattle's Pioneer Square Historic District and the Klondike Gold Rush National Historical Park. The chapter titles include: (1) "'By-and-By': The Early History of Seattle"; (2) "Selling Seattle"; (3) "Reaping the Profits of the Klondike Trade"; (4) "Building the City"; (5) "Interpreting the Klondike Gold Rush"; and (6) "Historic Resources in the Modern Era." Contains an extensive 147-item partially annotated bibliography; 12 appendixes contain historical documents and photographs.

Letters from Alaska

Letters from Alaska PDF Author: John Muir
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 9780299139544
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 156

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Book Description
A collection of letters published in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin by naturalist Muir when he was exploring Alaska in 1879-80. He describes the natives and missionaries, gold mines and towns, mountains and glaciers, trees and wildlife, and other aspects. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Northern Landscapes

Northern Landscapes PDF Author: Daniel Nelson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136524231
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Alaska in the early 1950s was one of the world's last great undeveloped areas. Yet sweeping changes were underway. In l958 Congress awarded the new state over 100 million acres to promote economic development. In 1971, it gave Native groups more than 40 million acres to settle land claims and facilitate the building of an 800-mile oil pipeline. Spurred by the newly militant environmental movement, it also began to consider the preservation of Alaska's magnificent scenery and wildlife. Northern Landscapes is an essential guide to Alaska's recent past and to contemporary local and national debates over the future of public lands and resources. It is the first comprehensive examination of the campaign to preserve wild Alaska through the creation of a vast system of parks and wildlife refuges. Drawing on archival sources and interviews, Daniel Nelson traces disputes over resources alongside the politics of the Alaska statehood movement. He provides in-depth coverage of the growth of Alaskan environmental organizations, their partnerships with national groups, and their participation in political campaigns into the 1970s and after. Engagingly written, Northern Landscapes focuses on efforts to persuade public officials to recognize the value of Alaska's mountains, forests, and wildlife. That activity culminated in the passage of the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA) of 1980, which set aside more than 100 million acres, doubling the size of the national park and wildlife refuge systems, and tripling the size of the wilderness preservation system. Arguably the single greatest triumph of environmentalism, ANILCA also set the stage for continuing battles over the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and Alaska's national forests.

Natural Rivals

Natural Rivals PDF Author: John Clayton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1643131818
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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Book Description
John Muir and Gifford Pinchot have often been seen as the embodiment of conflicting environmental philosophies. Muir, the preservationist and co-founder of the Sierra Club. Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service advocating sustainability in timber harvests, instituted conservation. The idealistic Muir saw nature as something special and separate; the pragmatic Pinchot accepted that people used the products of nature. The environmental movement’s original sin, and the root of many of it's difficulties, was its inability to reconcile these two viewpoints—and these two men.So how was it that Muir and Pinchot went camping together—and delighted in each other's company? Does this mean that the seemingly irreparable divide in environmental ethos is not as unbridgeable as it might seem? The perceived rivalry between these two men has obscured a fascinating and hopeful story. Muir and Pinchot actually spent years in an alliance that lead to the original movement for public lands. Their shared commitment to the glories of natural landscapes united their disparate talents and viewpoints to create a fledgling and uniquely American vision of land ownership and management.

In Darkest Alaska

In Darkest Alaska PDF Author: Robert Campbell
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 0812201523
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 357

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Book Description
Before Alaska became a mining bonanza, it was a scenic bonanza, a place larger in the American imagination than in its actual borders. Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, thousands of scenic adventurers journeyed along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that snakes up the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Both the famous—including wilderness advocate John Muir, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Curtis—and the long forgotten—a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, an African explorer, and a neurasthenic Methodist minister—returned with fascinating accounts of their Alaskan journeys, becoming advance men and women for an expanding United States. In Darkest Alaska explores the popular images conjured by these travelers' tales, as well as their influence on the broader society. Drawing on lively firsthand accounts, archival photographs, maps, and other ephemera of the day, historian Robert Campbell chronicles how Gilded Age sightseers were inspired by Alaska's bounty of evolutionary treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and novel thrills to produce a wealth of highly imaginative reportage about the territory. By portraying the territory as a "Last West" ripe for American conquest, tourists helped pave the way for settlement and exploitation.

All for the Greed of Gold

All for the Greed of Gold PDF Author: Catherine Holder Spude
Publisher: Washington State University Press
ISBN: 1636820727
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
When the steamship Cleveland left Seattle’s docks on March 1, 1898, William Jay Woodin was on board, traveling with his father and several others. They were chasing the nineteenth century’s last great gold rush, but instead of mining, they planned to earn their fortune by providing supplies. Enhanced with family photographs and skillfully edited, Will’s writings--including diaries, a short story, and a delightfully candid 1910 memoir--record events, emotions, and reflections, as well as his youthful wonder at the beauty surrounding him. Unlike many stampeders, Will’s party chose to take both the White Pass Trail and the Tutshi Trail, and his story offers a rare glimpse into ordeals suffered along this less common route. Will’s experiences also epitomize a mostly untold story of how working-class men endured a grueling Yukon journey. He was part of an emerging middle class who, with minimal formal education, left farm life to seek urban employment. Whether packing tons of goods on their own backs or building boats at the Windy Arm camp, Will brings to light the cooperation and camaraderie necessary for survival.