newsminer.com

Most pictorial books about Alaska focus on the outsized wilderness and the wildlife that surrounds the state’s inhabitants. Very few are devoted to the people who live here. One welcome exception is the newly published “Historic Photos of Alaska.” Covering approximately a century of Alaska history, the book focuses on the experiences of average Alaskans.

This book doesn’t offer much in the way of sweeping splendor, nor does it reprint stock photos of miners swarming over the Chilkoot Trail, climbers topping Denali, and Iditarod teams crossing the finish line.

What readers get instead are historic images of men loading copper ore onto a train car, people working a riverside fish camp, horse-drawn sleighs headed for the Chugach Mountains, picnickers in the southeastern rainforest, halibut fishermen, Native walrus hunters, fire fighting crews, Fourth of July celebrations, dog sled races, street scenes … in other words, life as it has been lived here for as long as photographers have been around to chronicle it.

This book is part of an ongoing series of historic photo volumes being produced by Turner Publishing that focus on American places, people, and events, and that emphasize the pictures, with only a minimum of text (provided in this case by News-Miner columnist Dermot Cole). The photos in this volume have been largely drawn from the collections at the Library of Congress, as well as the Alaska State Library, Anchorage Museum, and the University of Alaska libraries.

It is clear from the outset that plenty of thought and care has gone into the selection of images. One deeply moving picture shows a single old man in 1899 at the entrance of his dugout shelter, surrounded by a bit of detritus and a large stretch of barren tundra, and under a dreary sky. One immediately wonders how he came to be in this lonesome place and whether this was where his life ended.

Another picture shows ship passengers in Nome being carried above the water aboard a rickety-looking cable-drawn pallet because the waters were too shallow in that gold rush town for ships to come to shore.

A handful of people are seen a few pages later at a winter camp north of the Arctic Circle, amidst snow and spindly trees. Elsewhere, a street scene in Valdez, where winter snowfall averages 325 inches (that’s 27 feet, folks), shows pedestrians loitering on the sidewalk. The sidewalk has been dug out, but the street itself hasn’t, and the mass of snow towers over the people in the picture.

The pictures are arranged chronologically, starting in the 1890s and concluding with the construction of the pipeline in the 1970s. All but a few show the presence of humans. Even those that don’t feature people usually have traces of their passing; totem poles on the coast of the Panhandle; a well-traveled pathway through the snow; the pipeline extending through a mountain pass. The editors of this book have stuck to the human history of our state.

Sometimes the pictures are quite dramatic. A picture of boomtown Nome shows tents lining the coast for as far as the horizon reaches. In another picture, the ship Princess Mary is seen run aground, its bow hoisted into the air by the rocks it couldn’t escape near Juneau. Still another shot shows Fourth Avenue in Anchorage after the Good Friday earthquake, parts of the street caved in more than 6 feet, with the businesses lining the sidewalk collapsed even deeper and tilting in various directions.

Other pictures are more mundane. One shows downtown Ester during its peak. In some ways, it seems, Fairbanks’ strangest suburb has changed little — the road in this old picture is rutted and rough, a sign advertises the Golden Eagle, the vehicles look a bit worn for the wear, and the trio of residents on the sidewalk don’t look to be in a hurry to get anywhere.

Early pictures of Nome show narrow streets, while another shot, taken after much of downtown burned in a fire, shows a wide boulevard clearly designed to accommodate the arrival of automobiles. A picture taken in Fairbanks in the ‘60s shows a dog perched atop a Volkswagen Bug in a quiet residential neighborhood.

Flat ground is hard to come by in Southeast Alaska, where mountains often rise directly up from the shore. The result of living on such terrain is demonstrated nicely by a pair of pictures taken from the same vantage point in Ketchikan: The first shows a baseball game being played on the town ball field, while the second shows the same ball field completely submerged by the high tide. Obviously players would have been concerned about going into extra innings.

A lot of times life in Alaska is about making do with what you have. This was particularly true in the territorial days, as can be seen from some of these pictures. One shows a shipment of groceries, including cases of Quaker Oats, being delivered by dog sled. Another shows a small house in Anchorage being moved on a sledge by a pair of horses. And a picture of travelers heading over the Valdez Trail in winter includes one man with a bicycle, equipped with none of the amenities that winter cyclists a century later consider essential.

This book is a fine addition to any library of Alaskan photography. A few of the pictures have been widely seen, but the majority will be new to most readers. Cole’s captions and section headings are brief but informative. And it offers a perspective rarely found in Alaskan pictorial books — the notion that people are a part of this place and that they are just as worthy as everything else in Alaska of being remembered on film.