front cover of Crooked Past
Crooked Past
The History of a Frontier Mining Camp
Terrence Cole
University of Alaska Press, 1991
The crookedest street in Fairbanks, an Alaskan sourdough once said, is rightly named for town founder E. T. Barnette. Crooked Past, Terrence Cole's lively history of Fairbanks examines one of Alaska's most notorious con men. Barnette, a footloose fortune hunter who had served time in an Oregon penitentiary, came north during the Klondike gold rush of 1897-1898. He struck it rich after founding the city of Fairbanks in the early 1900s. Yet less than ten years later he was run out of the territory and allegedly disappeared in Mexico, becoming the most hated man in the town he founded and fled.
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front cover of Fairbanks
Fairbanks
A Gold Rush Town That Beat the Odds
Dermot Cole
University of Alaska Press, 2008
The turbulent history of Fairbanks, Alaska is far less well-known than most urban histories. With this volume, Dermot Cole chronicles the rollicking backstory of a city that owes its beginnings to a cargo boat accident and the Klondike gold rush. Cole engagingly recounts how Fairbanks and its hardy residents survived floods, fires, harsh weather, and economic crises to see the city flourish into the prosperous transportation hub and government seat it is today. Fairbanksis ultimately a fascinating historical saga of one of the last cities to be established on the American frontier.
 
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front cover of Good Company
Good Company
A Mining Family in Fairbanks, Alaska
Sarah Isto
University of Alaska Press, 2006
Good Company is a vivid and compelling story of life in early twentieth-century Alaska. From the lean years of the Depression through World War II and Vietnam, Sarah Isto’s family made a home in “company housing” in the small mining town of Fairbanks. With a wry sense of humor and an eye for detail, Isto tells of the courtship and marriage of her parents and her own Fairbanks childhood, weaving rich descriptions of daily life and northern living into her story.

With grace and perception, Good Company celebrates the joys and challenges of family life on the Alaska frontier.
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front cover of A Place of Belonging
A Place of Belonging
Five Founding Women of Fairbanks, Alaska
Phyllis Demuth Movius
University of Alaska Press, 2009

Alaska has always attracted people from varied backgrounds. In A Place of Belonging, Phyllis Movius introduces us to five women who settled in Fairbanks between 1903 and 1923 and who typify the disparate population that has long enriched Alaska. The women’s daily lives and personal stories are woven together in these biographical portraits, drawn from the women’s letters, memoirs, personal papers, club records, their own oral histories and published writings. Enriched by many never-before-published historical photos, Movius’s research gives us a unique inroad into life on the frontier.

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