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the Seattle wharf to see her steamer, Jefferson, set off for Alaska. In Skagway the family boarded the Sarah, a stern-wheeler, which, with its huge green-plush saloon and its salon for ladies’ needlework, filled Mardy with glee. Mardy had expected to see stately mountains, but she was surprised by the wildflowers: whole gorges were filled with royal purple blooms. “For a nine-year-old girl, it was a time to watch the landscape unfold, to adjust to new ways of daily living, and to take her own measure of the frontier,” her biographers Charles Craighead and Bonnie Kreps wrote in Arctic Dance. “Mardy’s vivid childhood memories of the epic journey seemed to set the stage for her somewhat nomadic lifestyle; long before Alaska became a state, she would travel up and down the length of Alaska’s southeast coast seven times and journey thousands of miles crisscrossing the Territory.”4

Fairbanks—founded in 1901, when E. T. Barnette established a trading post at Tanacross on the upper Tanana River—was all about gold (although Native peoples had lived in the general area for thousands of years). The new town was named for Charles Warren Fairbanks—the U.S. senator from Indiana who successfully negotiated an Alaskan boundary dispute with Great Britain at the 1898 Quebec Conference. The ever-popular Fairbanks was elected vice president on the ticket with Theodore Roosevelt in 1904.5 Judge James Wickersham, the most powerful politician in the territory, successfully promoted the new Chena River settlement he named “Fairbanks” after his own political mentor.6 Somehow the settlement survived food shortages in 1903, a flood in 1905, and a fire that wiped out the downtown in 1906. (The fire burned fifteen blocks of buildings. Until the 1930s the entire town was built solely of timber logs with sawdust insulation.) The rumors of gold always came back. . . . Another strike . . . just one creek down . . . on a free claim . . . the mightiest vein of all. . . . Until they didn’t.

Scraping out a living became a permanent condition in Fairbanks. During the winter, miners worked away relatively warm, compared with the surface temperature of forty to fifty below zero. Gold production rose dramatically, from $40,000 in 1903 to $9.6 million in 1909. In 1915 it became a permanent hub, when, after a lot of false starts, the construction of the 470-mile Alaska Railroad commenced. By 1920, however, with the gold rush fading, only 1,100 residents remained. Isolated from the Lower Forty-Eight, and from modernity, they resorted to gossip to keep themselves amused. Notably bad company could be found in the town’s twenty-three saloons. The same could be said of its five clapboard churches. Booze ran freely—both in the red-light district and outside it. During the winters, the miners, pioneers, saloon keepers, preachers, and prostitutes all knew that the only way to endure until spring was to embrace the darkness. But come Independence Day, when Cushman Street was bedecked with the Stars and Stripes, Fairbanks seemed like a prosperous town in the Midwest, glad to be alive.

Fairbanks was, however, a close-knit community, brought together by the surrounding wilderness and by the unrelenting forces of nature. Snow was measured in feet, not inches. People shared yarns of encountering brown bears digging in their trash barrels and of caribou “turning blue” from the cold. Taxidermy allowed men to flaunt their hunting prowess. There was hardly a building in Fairbanks in 1912 that didn’t have a moose or elk head on one of its walls. Bear rugs were mandatory in homes. Regularly in the spring, residents would go on hunting trips up the Chena River. There were no bag limits, and wild game was served in most restaurants. Nobody had yet divided the Arctic caribou into three distinct herds—the “Porcupine,” “Central,” and “Imperial”; sourdoughs saw all caribou as the same.

Everybody in Fairbanks—Native Alaskans and newcomers alike—also shared an intense reverence for the northern lights. The earliest descriptions involved lonely spirits and supernatural battles in the skies.