Yukon: The Last Frontier

By Melody Webb

Book Overview

Covering vast distances in time and space, Yukon: The Last Frontier begins with the early Russian fur trade on the Aleutian Islands and closes with what Melody Webb calls "the technological frontier." Colorful and impeccably researched, her history of the Yukon Basin of Canada and Alaska shows how much and how little has changed there in the last two centuries. Successive waves of traders, trappers, miners, explorers, soldiers, missionaries, settlers, steamboat pilots, road builders, and aviators have come to the Yukon, bringing economic and social changes, but the immense land "remains virtually untouched by permanent intrusions." ?

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803297459
• ISBN13: 9780803297456
• Release Date: January 1993
• Publisher: University of Nebraska Press
• Length: 416 Pages
• Weight: 1.28 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 5.9" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Excellent Alaska state history

The tone and tenor of this excellent history of Alaska matches perfectly the subject it details: straightforward, lively, tough-minded, and sincere. She relates the history of the state from the first Russian fur trading stations of the 1700s through the most recent trends, including the building of the Alaskan pipeline and modern mining developments. Still considered a frontier up to the present day, Webb focuses on various "frontiers" throughout Alaska's history: the trader's frontier, the explorer's frontier, the miner's frontier, and others, including transportation (3 chapters), the military, and missionaries. Webb has a great feel for this vast land and for the people who have chosen to inhabit it; she obviously is concerned with the big issues, but she also includes the simpler human-interest concerns, such as what mail carrier Ed Biederman went through to deliver the mail in winter in the early 1900s. Her writing is vivid and the story of Alaska that she tells is interesting and informative from beginning to end. Highly recommended.