"Making Book on the Subject of History"

 

MAKING BOOK ON THE SUBJECT OF HISTORY

SEPTEMBER 2010

“What astonished me most was that she was so large. I afterward learned that she weighed around three hundred pounds, but she was not grossly fat. She was wide-shouldered and well proportioned and wore a becoming yellow silk afternoon dress. She was, I thought probably between thirty-five and forty. I had understood that her health was poor, but she looked the picture of vitality…. From her letters I had gathered that she was serenely content in helping her husband conquer the wilderness, but this woman looked far from serene. I found something disturbing about her in spite of her laughing welcome and hearty voice. I had expected our friendship to be as it had been in our letters, but she seemed an entire stranger.”

This less-than-flattering first-impression portrait of homesteader wife Jess Anderson comes from the 1961 Ada White Sharples memoir, Two Against the North, which describes her largely unsuccessful attempts at creating a home with her husband, Jack, on the shady southern shore of Skilak Lake in the late 1930s.

When the book was published, the depiction of Mrs. Anderson understandably infuriated the rest of the Anderson family, particularly since the Andersons had been so generous in their assistance to the young couple.

The Sharples survived, despite being ill-equipped to carve out a home on a large wilderness lake that would not be connected to any road system for another decade—but their unpreparedness did not keep Ada Sharples from taking pen to paper and writing about her adventures in an occasionally sanctimonious tone.

In spite of the book’s deficiencies, however, it does afford readers a glimpse into life in a time and place seldom described except by big-game hunters relating their tales of conquest in outdoor magazines, and it also provides an idea of the rigors required of homesteaders coming into a country sans most of the amenities we now take for granted.

And Sharples’ book, readers may be surprised to discover, is but one of dozens touching on the subject of Kenai Peninsula history. Those books range from other personal memoirs to diaries of pioneers, from collections of facts and stories about mining, the construction of roads and bridges, tales of ship captains and fishermen, of truckers and railroad workers, of hunting guides and Natives and homesteaders, and tales of the founding of peninsula communities, the community college system, the Kenai Peninsula Borough.

Although this is by no means a comprehensive list, here are three lists of peninsula-related works (including those that are excellent, those that are simply average, and those that are poorly written or of questionable veracity):

·         The Hope Truckline and 75 Miles of Women: Stories of Alaska by Dennie D. McCart. The titillating title aside, this 93-page 1983 memoir is entertaining but fairly tame. The enthusiastic writing sounds like the oral renditions of a man who loves to tell stories. McCart occasionally rambles, but his heart is in the right place as he describes what it was like to live in Hope and to operate a trucking service between his town and Seward in the 1930s and ‘40s.

·         Our Stories, Our Lives by Alexandra J. McClanahan. This book is subtitled “Twenty-three Elders of the Cook Inlet Region Talk about Their Lives,” and its 1986 publication was financed mainly by the CIRI Foundation. Among the notable storytellers in the book are Peter Kalifornsky, Victor Antone Jr., Elsie Sanders Cresswell, and Fiocla Sacaloff Wilson. Each section is a transcription of a recording of an elder speaking to an interviewer.

·         Once upon the Kenai: Stories from the People by the Kenai Historical Society, under the direction of Jetret S. Petersen and edited by Mary Ford. This 468-page compendium was published in 1984 and is still selling. Its huge collection of first-person narratives of life on the central Kenai Peninsula focuses mainly on homesteaders and leaves in some obvious contradictions. While most of the stories appear to be largely factual, a few of the writers seemed to have had axes to grind or perhaps faulty memories. Still, this is an invaluable reference work to anyone interested in central peninsula history.

·         Go North, Young Man: Modern Homesteading in Alaska by Gordon Stoddard. Published in 1957, the book involves Stoddard’s adventures as he homesteaded on Stariski Creek, worked various jobs around the peninsula, and ran a greenhouse and garden. A bachelor who sought marriage but never found the right woman, Stoddard packed up and left the area after his greenhouse burned to the ground.

·         Catching the Ebb: Drifting for a Life in Cook Inlet by Bert Bender, published in 2008. Bender moved to Alaska from the Pacific Northwest to become a drifter in Cook Inlet. His memoir is interesting and well written, despite some errors in his opening history.

·         Capt. Joshua Slocum: The Life and Voyages of America’s Best Known Sailor by Victor Slocum, published in 1950. This biography is certainly not centered on the Kenai Peninsula, but part of its story involves this place. Capt. Slocum sailed from San Francisco to Australia in 1869, married a 21-year-old woman there, and then sailed in 1870 to Kasilof, where his ship, the Washington, dragged anchor in a storm and washed ashore. The book details how Slocum and his men survived and eventually made it home.

·         A Dena’ina Legacy: K’tl’egh’i Sukdu: The Collected Writings of Peter Kalifornsky. This 1991 collection was edited by James Kari of the Alaska Native Language Center and Alan Boraas of Kenai Peninsula College, and it contains the works of Peter Kalifornsky, the Dena’ina Native who worked hard in the last half of his life to preserve the stories, traditions and language of his people. These stories comprise an important local heritage of a culture that, until recent years, had no written language with which to record its own history.

·         A History of Mining on the Kenai Peninsula, Alaska by Mary J. Barry, published originally in 1973, and then republished in an expanded, updated version in 1997. The most thorough description of peninsula mining efforts from the 1700s onward, Barry’s book focuses mainly on the latter half of the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th centuries. The book is replete with references and cross-references, photographs, maps, stories, and lots and lots of names. It is an extremely helpful research tool.



Published in 2009.

·         Clam Gulch: A Memoir by Scott Ransom, published in 2009. Weighing in at a hefty 515 pages, Ransom’s reminiscences of his time as a commercial fisherman in the Clam Gulch area paints a colorful picture of a lifestyle not frequently explored in local literature. Although not without some factual errors, the book is mainly an enjoyable read that introduces its audience to a cast of characters still familiar to many of those living around Clam Gulch.



·         A Handful of Pebbles: Stories from Seward History by Doug Capra, published most recently in the mid-1990s. Capra, who also wrote Something to Be Remembered: Stories from Seward History, treats his readers to a series of tales about the good ol’ days in Seward. Capra, a former English teacher at Seward High School, writes well and knows how to tell a good story.

 

 

·         If You’ve Got It to Do by Wilma Williams, whose family homesteaded in the Homer area in the 1920s, long before any road connected Homer to the rest of the world. The book, published in 1996, details some of that early life there. Another of Williams’ works—This Is Coffee Point : Go Ahead: A Mother's Story of Fishing & Survival at Alaska's Bristol Bay—focuses on her family’s time spent commercial fishing near Nushagak Bay.

 

 

 

More Stories

When Andrew Berg died of heart failure in an Anchorage hospital in early 1939, his 69 years of life were memorialized in an obituary in the Anchorage Daily Times:

“Of Finnish extraction, Mr. Berg was known in his heyday as the most powerful man of the Kenai country. He was six feet two inches tall and weighed 235 pounds. He out-traveled all others in speed and distance. As a trapper, he built 14 cabins…. Mr. Berg served as guide for many parties and hunted for museums…. The veteran Tustumena resident was the first game warden of that district and also served as fish warden for some time…. Mr. Berg’s name appears often in the Remington tabulations of record trophies, both as hunter and guide.”

Dubbed the “dean of guides in Alaska,” Berg lived a remarkable life, the last 49 years of which he spent in and around Tustumena Lake, and a detailed, photograph-filled history of his life can be found in the pages of Alaska’s No. 1 Guide: The History and Journals of Andrew Berg, 1869-1939. Thoroughly written and painstakingly researched by Catherine Cassidy and Gary Titus, this book is an open window to the more rugged and wild Kenai Peninsula that existed in the first half of the 20^th century.

Other books that open up the sweep of peninsula history to interested readers include:

·         A Larger History of the Kenai Peninsula—by Walt and Elsa Pedersen, self-published in 1983 as an expanded version of the Pedersens’ original offering, A Small History of the Western Kenai, which was published in 1976. Although the Pedersens’ own views shine through clearly in the sections written by Elsa, the research and general sense of local history is undeniable. Most of the histories were written by long-time residents of the areas about which they wrote. Lance Petersen’s essay entitled “The Fragmentation of Kenai: A History” is particularly moving and eloquent.

·         Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula: The Road We’ve Traveled—created by the Kenai Peninsula Historical Association in 2002. This remarkable collection of community histories is actually a paean to the first travel book ever written about the Kenai Peninsula: Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula, published in 1946 by Lois Hudson Allen, a journalist and teacher who died only two years later at age 74. The individuals who assembled the more current work were so taken with Allen’s slim book that they actually incorporated her work into the pages of their own. Consequently, readers of the KPHA collection will be treated to two books in one, and the comparisons between Allen’s Alaska and the KPHA Alaska nearly 60 years later are sometimes striking and provocative.

·         Snapshots at Statehood: A Focus on Communities that Became the Kenai Peninsula Borough—also created by the KPHA, and published in 2009 in celebration of 50 years of Alaska statehood. The emphasis of this particular collection of community-based writings is on peninsula life at the time of statehood. Despite the similar community-related structure of The Road We’ve Traveled, this book is rife with new stories and a vastly different selection of photographs.

·         Any Tonnage, Any Ocean: Conversations with a Resolute Alaskan—by Walter Jackinsky and Jacqueline Ruth Benson Pels, published in 2004. Ninilchik native Jackinsky spent most of his long life at sea, and this book explores the many facets of that life, particularly his long tenure as a ferry captain in the Alaska Marine Highway System. Pels, who did the writing, also has Alaska roots that reach deep; the author/editor of several history-related books, she was a 1953 graduate of Kenai Territorial High School.

·         Memories of Old Sunrise: Gold Mining on Alaska’s Turnagain Arm—an autobiography of Albert Weldon “Jack” Morgan that was published in 1994, although Morgan finished writing his memoirs in 1959, five years before his death in his mid-90s. Among the many and sometimes astonishing tales is the story of how he got the nickname “Black Jack”: A drunken miner mistook Morgan’s young wife for one of the many prostitutes in Sunrise (near Hope) and put his hands on her. Morgan struck the offender so hard that he broke the man’s neck.

·         Brother Asaiah—by Martha Ellen Anderson, published in 2007. This is the affectionate biography of Asaiah Bates, a loving, altruistic pacifist who made his home in Homer, which he called the “Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea.” Of Bates, former Alaska Gov. Jay Hammond once said, “Toss into a blender 1 part eastern mystic, 2 parts Old Testament prophet, 3 parts wounded warrior, 4 parts aging flower child and from the mix at least the essence of the man emerges.”

·         Family After All: Alaska’s Jesse Lee Home, Volume II: Seward, 1925-1965—a collection of photos and reminiscences compiled by Jacqueline Pels, published in 2008. This nearly 800-page book is the weighty companion piece to Volume I, which focuses on the Jesse Lee Home when the orphanage was located in Unalaska from 1889 to 1925. Perhaps the most famous resident of the Jesse Lee Home was Benny Benson, who at age 13 entered and won a contest to design a flag for Alaska.

Published in 1941,

 

·         Alaska Nellie—by Nellie Neal Lawing, published in 1941. Alaska Nellie was a remarkable woman who ran a lodge near the upper end of Kenai Lake in the first half of the 20^th century. This is her memoir of that time.

·         Prescription for Adventure: Bush Pilot Doctor—by Naomi Gaede Penner, published in 1993. Penner is the daughter of Dr. Elmer Gaede, who, along with Dr. Paul Isaak and Dr. Calvin Fair, helped establish the first medical-dental center on the central peninsula. The focus of this well-paced book, however, is on Dr. Gaede, who flew out into the Bush to assist patients before and during his time on the peninsula.

·         The Homer Spit: Coal, Gold & Con Men—by Janet R. Klein, published in 1996, the centennial of Homer. Despite the title, the real center of attention here is a man named Homer Pennock, who fits into the categories of coal miner, gold miner and con man, and who is the namesake for the city at the southern terminus of the Sterling Highway. This lively narrative is a quick read at only 70 pages.

·         The Dragline Kid—by Lisa Augustine (nee Arlene Rheingens), published in 2002. Augustine was born in 1939 when her parents were residents of Hope, and then the family moved in 1948 to Kenai, where Joyce Rheingens became the Kenai postmaster. Although the last 40 pages of this book focus on Augustine’s move Outside and the start of her modeling career, the first 213 pages are all about her life in Hope and Kenai. Augustine’s tales of being a teen in Kenai are particularly enjoyable, as she depicts a number of that community’s colorful denizens of that time.

·         Fish, Oil & Follies—by Loren Flagg, published in 2009. Flagg, a Kenai resident, was an Alaska Department of Fish & Game fisheries biologist, and this memoir centers on his time in the state after opening with his earlier life Outside. Flagg writes with good humor about the politics, adventures and misadventures involved in being a steward to one of the state’s most important resources.

·         “I’d Swap My Old Skidoo for You”: A Portrait of Characters on the Last Frontier—by Nan Elliot, published in 1989. These brief but intimate histories of Alaskans cover the gamut of state localities, but this book is noteworthy for peninsula history buffs because it contains the stories of Marge Mullen of Soldotna and Clem and Diana Tillion of Halibut Cove.

·         Legends & Legacies: Anchorage 1910-1935: Remembering Our Buried Past—by John P. Bagoy, published in 2001. At first glance, this book might appear unrelated to the history of the Kenai Peninsula, but what some might not realize at first is that many of the peninsula’s early non-Native residents stopped first in Anchorage before venturing on to the Kenai to try their hand at homesteading, commercial fishing, or a number of other endeavors. Among the many locally important individuals to be found in this book are Heinie Berger, Dr. Howard Romig, Dr. Clayton Pollard, and Tom O’Dale.

·         Bear Wrangler: Memoirs of an Alaska Pioneer Biologist—by Will Troyer, published in 2008. Although only a small portion of Troyer’s adventurous and occasionally hilarious book concerns his time on the Kenai Peninsula, Troyer himself lives in Cooper Landing and has spent several decades connected to peninsula life. Perhaps his most significant peninsula-related achievement was acting as manager of the Kenai National Moose Range during the 1960s.

Oddities & Rarities

Histories of peninsula people and events have been penned many times over the last several decades. Some of those histories are readily available, and are solid, informative and interesting. Others are either just as available but a bit unusual, or are intriguing but difficult to find. Here is an assortment of each of these types:

MOSTLY STANDARD FARE:

·         A History of Kachemak Bay: The Country, the Communities—by Janet Klein, published in 1987 by the Homer Society of Natural History. This is a well-written overview of the land and people of this region.

·          Beyond Road's End: Living Free in Alaska—by Janice Schofield Eaton, published in 2009. This memoir centers on Eaton’s own life in the Kachemak Bay area.

·          Kenai Peninsula Gold—by Rob Wendt, published in 2001. This slim volume lightly covers the history of mining on the peninsula.

·          Wolf Trail Lodge—by Edward M. Boyd, published in 1984. This 108-page memoir relates the adventure of Boyd and his wife coming to the peninsula in the 1950s to carve out a life in the Trail Lakes area.

·          Trails Across Time: History of an Alaska Mountain Corridor—by Kaylene Johnson, published in 2005. Filled with photos, maps and clean, clear text on glossy paper, this 112-page history explores the routes across the Kenai Mountains and Turnagain Arm country. The book acts as a pleasant introduction to the development of transportation in this rugged portion of the peninsula.

·          Bridging Alaska: From the Big Delta to the Kenai—by Ralph Soberg, published in 1991. Soberg, who lived in Soldotna for a number of years, was the boss of the Alaska Road Commission crew that established many of the peninsula’s roads and bridges. The final three of the book’s 11 chapters deal specifically with opening up the Sterling Highway and building bridges all the way to Homer.

·          Pioneers of Homer—by Diana Tillion, published in 2001. Tillion’s book contains numerous narratives and photographs from individuals who helped make Homer what it is today.

Published in 2001.

·          Seldovia Alaska: An Historical Portrait of Life in Zaliv Seldevoe-Herring Bay—by Susan Woodward Springer, published in 1998. This slim, handsome volume on glossy paper provides just what it advertises.

·          Kachemak Bay Years: An Alaska Homesteader’s Memoir—by Elsa Pedersen and Rebecca Poulsen, published in 2003. This book focuses on Pedersen’s homesteading life in the 1940s in Kachemak Bay. Pedersen later moved to Sterling and penned A Larger History of the Kenai Peninsula.

·          Jesse Lee Home: My Home—by James L. Simpson, published in 2008. This memoir covers, in words and pictures, Simpson’s life in the renowned Seward orphanage.

·          Bent Pins to Chains: Alaska and Its Newspapers—by Evangeline Atwood and Lew Williams, published in 2007. This thick compendium covers the history of newspapers all over the state, but included are the accounts of the many papers that have served the Kenai Peninsula.

 

ODDITIES, RARITIES & OBLIQUE REFERENCES:

Published in 1948.

·         The Clenched Fist—by Alice M. Brooks and Willietta E. Kuppler, published in 1948. This memoir concerns two Midwestern missionary-like sisters who ventured to Kenai in 1911 to teach school and foster “enlightenment” in what they perceived as an uncivilized land, and it should be read with a sense of its historical context. While the book is valuable for its many references to historical facts, individuals and occurrences during their three-year tenure in the village, some readers may want to pass this one by because of the sisters’ pejorative views regarding the local Natives.

·         The Kenai Peninsula College History—by Lance Petersen, published in 1992. The title says it all. Anyone interested in the first three decades of the college will find considerable detail here.

·         Miracle at Solid Rock: An Alaskan Adventure—by Bert and Donna Schultz, published in 1992. Solid Rock Bible Camp has been serving the youth of the Kenai Peninsula, and beyond, for decades, and this is an insider’s tale of how it all got started.

·         A Voyage to the Pacific Ocean—by Capt. James Cook. This multi-volume work has been published many times and in many forms since Cook’s voyages in the latter 1700s. History buffs may be intrigued by some of his early observations of life in the communities along the inlet that would one day bear his name.

·         Dictionary of Alaska Place Names—by Donald J. Orth, published in 1967. This is a fascinating collection of information. Anyone interested in the origin of a particular landmark’s name is likely to find at least a modicum of information here.

·         A History of the Incorporation of the Kenai Peninsula Borough of Alaska—by Robert M. Bird, published in 1992. Nikiski High School history teacher Bob Bird researched and penned this authoritative look at the origins of the peninsula’s central government.

·         McLane Diaries—by Archie and Enid McLane. This is a collection of 17 diaries and record books dating back to the 1920s in the Ninilchik area. These books should soon be available on DVD through the McLane Center on Kalifornsky Beach Road. McLane Center, incidentally, has a number of one-of-a-kind titles that can be viewed and perused.

·         Alaska Teacher Tales—compiled by the Alaska Educators Historical Society in 2009. The two-volume set includes chapters by local writers and teachers Elsie Seaman, Mona Painter, Mary France and Shirley Henley.

·         Alaska’s Heroes: A Call to Courage—by Nancy Warren Farrell, published in 2002. This book contains the 1977 story of George Jackinsky rescuing John Nepple and Kearlee Ray Wright from a burning plane in Kasilof.

·         Seward, Alaska: The Sinful Town on Resurrection Bay—by John Paulsteiner, published in 1975. This book is not particularly well crafted, but it does approach the history of the Gateway City from an angle different than most.

·         Alaska Odyssey: Gospel of the Wilderness—by Hal Thornton, published in 2003. Hal and Jeanne Thornton came to Alaska in 1938 and operated a string of businesses from Hope to Kenai. His memoir is hectic and tinged brightly with his religious views, but it does offer a different perspective of life on the Kenai.

·         Sockeye Sunday and Other Fish Tales—by Dorothy B. Fribrock, published in 1999. The focus of this book is the cannery on Chisik Island, but the cannery’s history involves many peninsula fishermen.

·         Agrafena’s Children: The Old Families of Ninilchik, Alaska—by Wayne Leman, published in 2006. This locally published book examines Ninilchik’s oldest family lines. Agrafena produced a daughter named Mavra, who married Grigorii Kvasnikoff, and the two of them in 1847 became the first permanent settlers in the area.

·         Have Gospel Tent, Will Travel: The Methodist Church in Alaska since 1886—by Bea Shepard and Claudia Kelsey, published in 1986 on the 100^th anniversary of Methodists in the state. The book ranges across the state but does include a history of Methodist churches on the peninsula.

·         The Ghost of Fannie Guthry-Baehm: A Murder Mystery—by Jonathan Faulkner, co-owner of Land’s End on the Homer Spit and of Kenai Landing near the mouth of the Kenai River, and the new owner of the Van Gilder Hotel in Seward. Published this year, this is a novel and would not be on this list if it weren’t for the fact that the story takes place in Seward and is based on an actual murder that happened in the Van Gilder in 1950. Harry Baughm, the estranged husband of Fannie Guthry-Baehm, was tried and convicted of the murder and served 25 years in prison. Since the murder, according to local legend, Fannie’s ghost has haunted the hotel and has been reportedly seen by a number of guests.