A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska

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 allow…