Alaska

Plot

Millions of readers were deeply moved, as well as enlightened, by James A. Michener's first great historical novel "Hawaii", which honored the entry of our fiftieth state into the Union in 1959. Now, almost thirty years later, his subject is our forty-ninth, which had been admitted earlier that same year. "Alaska", as the author's admirers have learned to expect, displays the same masterly placement of imagined characters among genuine participants in events of history. Alaska and its numerous islands have for so many thousands of years been occupied by peoples from Siberia that the "discovery" of this continent by Columbus seems like a current event. Eskimos, Aleuts, Athapascans, and Tlingits crossed to this breathtakingly beautiful land in small boats, or, when the floor of the Bering Strait was exposed, they came on foot, as did various huge exotic animals that now no longer exist. Century after century, with little modification, these people survived, feeding and clothing themselves by their skills as hunters and fishermen. The beginning of this novel portrays the lives and struggles of humans and animals of Alaskan prehistory, and then the story makes a broad leap into the eighteenth century… In 1724, shortly before he died, Peter the Great appointed the Danish navigator Vitus Bering to explore the lands that lay beyond the eastern coast of his empire. The result was that for almost a hundred and fifty years the native Alaskans were under the domination, often cruel, of Russians, whose interest was more in furs than in colonization. Then, for some reason not entirely clear, Alaska was sold in 1867 to the United States for $7,200,000 (a price many members of Congress and the press regarded as too high). The exciting high points in the story of Alaska since the American acquisition are brought vividly to life: the gold rush either over the forbidding Chilkoot Pass or up the Yukon to Dawson, Canada, then later to the Golden Beaches of Nome; the tremendous growth and exploitation of the salmon industry; the discovery of oil and its social and economic consequences; the difficult construction over permafrost of the Alcan Highway, making possible the defense of the territory during WWII. The author places his emphasis less on the historical events themselves than on the more than 100 characters, real or fictional, who made them happen.