A School Teacher In Old Alaska: The Story Of Hannah Breece

Hannah Breece braved the Alaskan wilderness nearly a century ago to teach native children how to become Americans. A proud and fiercely independent woman, she struggled against great odds to establish federally sponsored schools in remote settlements. This is her own story of her many adventures on the Alaskan frontier. Breece compiled a draft of her experiences from her diaries and letters, but never completed the project. Before she died, she entrusted the manuscript to her great-niece Jane Jacobs, and this delightful book is the results. Jane Jacobs visited the communities her great-aunt described to fill in some of the gaps in her story. Her original research complements Hannah Breece's story to give us a vivid picture of old Alaska, of the infant settlements of Juneau, Kodiak, Seward and Fairbanks, and of the amazing woman who conquered its frozen wilderness, loved its children and, for nearly fifteen years, made it her home.

When Hannah Breece came to Alaska in 1904, it was a remote lawless wilderness of prospectors, murderous bootleggers, tribal chiefs, and Russian priests. She spent fourteen years educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuits, and Russians with the stubborn generosity of a born teacher and the clarity of an original and independent mind. Jane Jacobs, Hannah's great-niece, here offers an historical context to Breece's remarkable eyewitness account, filling in the narrative gaps, but always allowing the original words to ring clearly. It is more than an adventure story: it is a powerful work of women's history that provides important--and, at times, unsettling--insights into the unexamined assumptions and attitudes that governed white settler's behavior toward native communities at the turn of the century.
"An unforgettable...story of a remarkable woman who lived a heroic life."--"The New York Times"