I was Born Under a Spruce Tree by J J Van Biber

I purchased this book in Dawson City, in the Klondike Yukon territory August 17, 2013 on our trip to Alaska.  I had taken the day off away from the tour we were on and wandered around Dawson, which I prefer to being herded.  There in the local drugstore I met the author and two sisters, Pat Van Bibber, Lucy Sanderson and Kathleen Thorpe.  This book is a biography about their late brother JJVan Bibber.  I had heard about it on local news in Alaska and it is just the kind of activity I enjoy, meeting authors.  Kathleen is a famous local artist.  

This is an amazing paperback, only 147 pages but rife with history and photos  of the family.  It had been published only in 2012 and illustrated by a grandson, Shannon Van Bibber.  The grandchildren persuaded JJ to write down all the stories he had shared with them about his life in the 1920's growing up in Mica Creek, the 1940's with his marriage to Clara, the 1970's when he surveyed for the government.  These native peoples lived through and survived in a country known for wilderness.  The women were as hearty as the men to survive.  Each tale has it's own mystique and sense of wonder.  

Me standing behind Pat Van Bibber

 

Back cover

It was beyond delightful to talk with these people.  Pat took an instant shine to me because he said, "you Pat, I Pat.  Good name."  With help from an anthropology student from the University of Alberta, Niall Fink, JJ talked about his life."They're making a book about me.  Yeah.  It is going in all the schools so the kids can learn about how we lived in the old days.  They call it oral history. "  Page 3,JJ's introduction.    Born in 1920 and whether or not under a spruce tree might be questioned, he led a fascinating life setting trap lines, building moose skin boats, playing the harmonica, . His father was a white settler who came to the Klondike from West Virginia  in the Gold Rush and married his mother Eliza who was born in the 1880's.  Page 9, "My mother was an Indian, you see.  She could talk both languages.  I don't know how she did it but she could talk to Indians around Stewart River at Dawson and they talked different languages altogether.  She knew Tlingit too.  Her mother was married to Chief Jackson, from around Juneau."  It is beyond intriguing to read how they went away to school, as very young tots, really away, down river and had to stay until the end of school term, away from their families.  Pat was 92 when I met him and sharp but tired.  This last photo shows me with the family.  This is a 5 ***** book.  

  

Tisha BY/as told to Robert Specht

Tisha is the true adventure love story  of Anne Hobbs, who at 19 years of age in 1927 ventures to Alaska to teach school.  It is her memoir as told to Robert Specht.  After we spent weeks in Alaska last year I have a very deep appreciation of it's natives and history and cannot read enough about it.  I was browsing in the Goodwill book section and had a conversation with another woman who is also a self confessed reader junkie, she spotted this book, paperback, published by Bantam Books in March 1977 on the very low priced bargain shelf and handed it to me declaring it one of the best books she had ever read.  I had told her I am fond of history and memoirs and prefer non-fiction.  I recognized this book from our Alaskan trip as one I considered buying  while there but did not because I had a box full already to ship home.  I snatched it up.  At  first I thought Tisha was an Indian name but learned it was the way the Alaskan Indians pronounced "teacher" and the name that stuck with her.  

The first sentence transported me immediately to the wild country of Alaska and  this frontier, places we visited that  preserve the same structures as the  gold rush times and before--Eagle,  Chicken, Dawson, deep Yukon territory and the vastness of the land  and reawakened  my appreciation for those who ventured there way back then.  Anne begins,  "I have lived in the Forty Mile country of Alaska for a long time, but even now, every so often when I'm out rock-hunting or looking for fossils< I get lost."  It was not an easy life and had Anne not been venturous and head strong she would not have made it and lived to tell, it was not a time for timid or weak people but for survivors.  It begins September 4, 1927, "Even though it was barely eight o'clock and the sun had just  come up, practically the whole crew of Eagle had turned out to see the pack train off.  ...Mrs Rooney tells Ann, One thing you'll learn  is that it doesn't take much to collect a crowd in Alaska..."   

It's only 342 pages but likely out of print now, although it is a current seller in Alaskan bookstores and the Yukon territory today,   I agree that the book is wonderful and give it 5 *****.  It's a keeper. 

I Married the Klondike by Laura Beatrice Berton

I purchased this book in Dawson, the Yukon and would have missed it if not for one of the locals with whom I was talking in that book store of sorts.  I am so fortunate to have picked it up, as it is not a book available or known in the states, or lower 48 as they refer to us up north.  This  is the memoir of Laura Berton who went to the Klondike in 1907 as a 29 year old kindergarten teacher from Toronto leaving her family and life of upper  class comfort for the wilderness.  She was drawn to the life in what they called the Paris of the North, met  the man who would become her husband and  raised her family, having her first child at  42 years old.  I was familiar after traveling there with Pierre Berton's, her son, excellent historical chronicles of the  far north.   Because we  were there in August, this historical writing resounded with me. 

It is a  concise, well written book, at only 231 pages but filled with her perspective in the rugged land and winters.  A magnificent forward by Robert Service, the poet of the north and her son, Pierre are in this republished edition.  Her opening line, is almost an understatement of the life she would have in the bitter cold and the wilderness in the early 1900's, "I imagine that in everyone's life there eventually comes a moment when a simple question or a change meeting or a knock on the door changes the entire course of one's future."   It is a wealth of history and personal anecdotes as well as a unique chronicle of the decline of Dawson after the gold discovery of 1898 peaked. 

In talking about the journey to Whitehorse to Dawson on foot in winter, I shuddered.  It is a rugged land and although we on tour made that trek in train, dome car and by motor coach bus with all amenities  I  appreciated and imagined the hardships endured back in the day. Page 136.mentions the walk ins when the stage would take a fort night, considered too long for the seekers.    "I'm walking in you know, he said, talking as casually as if he were about to take a stroll down Regent Street.  And, off he went, in his brisk way, on a 360 mile hike through deep snow, lonely forest, frozen river and high plateau, in the dead of winter with the thermometer well below zero and the blue Aurora his only beacon.  A short time later we had a letter from him from Dawson describing the experience." 

Seldom do I  include this much from the cover but it conveys the
outstanding historical content and excellent writing of this book. 

 It is a book I will keep for future reference and one I suspect few of my friends will ever read.  I give it 4 ****.

Alaska by James Michener

First published in 1988, then in the paperback edition in 1989 this was one of the few Michener's I had not read  although I have a shelf of  complete works. In January I determined this was a must read prior to our August journey to Alaska and so it traveled south with us and then returned home.  It is a Michener tome, a wonderful work, over 1100 pages, very small print but I finished it last month; read very little of it on our trip when I  went through other books faster.  James Michener is one of  my all time favorites if not the number one author, who else  does such marvelous research and delves into history, geography, sociology, anthropology, biology, geology and all facets of whatever subject he tackled, perhaps David McCullough and is it not a coincidence both authors are Pennsylvanians with roots into Pittsburgh.

An adroitly blended mixture of fact and fiction, woven through 12 chapters covering geolocigal concepts beginning far before the prehistoric era  with Clashing Terranes and culminating with Alaskan statehood in the final chapter, Rim of Fire there is no history nor anthropology of a peoples untouched. The early movement of the woolly mammoth and the arrival of humans is almost comical but becomes tragic.  I cannot begin to adequately review this book;  readers who enjoy learning as they read and spending a good long time delving into a work enjoy Michener.  It is neither light reading nor for someone lacking rudimentary literary, historical, sociological background.  As only Michener can do, the historical is expanded upon, characters embellished or created and their descendants survive through the ages tying all the chapters back to the earliest times and memorializing events.    It is not until Chapter 3, that humans arrive, first on a small island of the Aleutians, about 12,000BPE however the Athapascans are the first,  much  much later the Eskimos and  finally the Aleuts who were probably a mixture of Eskimo while the Tlingits were descended from the Athapascans.  The Russians, English and Americans explorers, sailors, narrative covers  Tsar Peter the Great, Vitus Bering, George Steller and Aleksei Chirikov, Captain James Cook, William Bligh, George Vancouver and more. 

I was a teenager in 1959 when Alaska  became a state and I recall then from studies that it must surely be a desolate wilderness.  The Alaskan history, settlements, heritage of the Russian Orthodox  church, seal hunting, life cycles of salmon, reindeer, whales,  gold rush, mining techniques and equipments,  land rush and maneuvers of the Seattle businessmen who conspired to keep it as a territory make fascinating pondering.  I never  knew before reading this book about the US government land give away and transport of hearty stock Minnesotan  but starving  farm families  to settle the Matanuska Valley in the depression.  The families had to be intact families, husband and wife and children, no single stragglers, healthy stock preferred to be German and Finn ancestry.  Those who went and stayed in Alaska prospered eventually but many returned to their homes in MN disheartened.  It was a very different aspect of another type of homestead, managed by the US  government.  This is absolutely a 5 *****. 

I have marked up many passages in my previously pristine volume.  Page 94 for one passage,  as Azaruk an early human ponders,  "Will I find a refuge for my people?  Does that matter?  And as he tucked the little figure back in its pouch he could hear the laughter, the chuckling of the wind coming over the hail, the exhilaration of a whale breaching after a long  submarine chase, the gaiety of a young fox chasing birds and lessly, the wonderful hallowed sound of a universe that does not care whether a man finds refuge or not, so long as he enjoys the irreverent pleasure of the search. "  See and feel the picture that passage portrays?  

Page 106 on the origin of the word Alaska, is precious  linguistic history,  "The Aleutian word for  Great Land was Alaxsxaq'"   but earliest  Europeans stopping in this portion of the arctic asked  the name of the lands ,   and in their tongues Alaxsxaq became Alaska. 

Page 207, when the a settler considers to marry an Eskimo woman, Kiinak, "Let this be a lesson.  Good lives only come from  good beginnings. "

When we tour Alaska in August I will have knowledge to build upon and an enhanced perspective having read this great work.