Alaska-Klondike Diary of Elizabeth Robins, 1900

by Victoria Moessner (Editor), Joanne E. Gates (Editor)

Among the throngs of gold-seekers rushing to Nome in the summer of 1900 was Elizabeth Robins, well known as an actress prominent on the London stage and on the brink of becoming well known as a novelist and journalist. She traveled alone to the north, seeking not monetary wealth but her brothers, Saxton and especially Raymond, her youngest sibling, whom she feared had fallen under the spell of a dubious religious persuasion. What she actually found provided the raw material for her writing and political activism during the rest of her life.

This diary is one of the most engaging, witty, and readable of the accounts surviving from the turn of the century in Alaska and the Yukon. Robins not only reveals the perceptions of a woman facing new phases of her own life but also provides vivid portraits of people whose ideas and activities were transforming the north.

390 pages, Paperback

First published April 10, 1999

Reviews

[Jason · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elizabeth Robins was a real go-getter back in 1900, tramping around the Yukon and Alaska, getting her hands dirty and describing what she was with a keen and generally unvarnished eye. Her adoration of her brother, a pastor in Nome, gets a little creepy, but that may be the time she lived in rather than a V.C. Andrews type situation.