Tisha

I just finished reading the book Tisha by Robert Specht. I would highly recommend it to anyone interested in reading a true story of a teacher in bush Alaska. The summary of the book on the back cover reads...

"Alaska was as remote as the moon, as roistering and lawless as the Gold Rush. And a pretty young schoolteacher from Colorado like Anne Hobbs was even rarer than nuggets. 'So appealing are the people here, even the villainous ones; so dramatic is the landscape in which they act out their adventure; so pure is the moral conflict that forms the story's backbone, and so honest is its sentimentality--that I managed to suspend all my disbelief as I read it. And it was with pleasure that I raced through this good old-fashioned yarn, hissing the villains, holding my breath at each succeeding catastrophe, and above all adoring 'plain old Anne Hobbs,' as she calls herself, the pretty slip of a nineteen-year-old who in 1927 had the courage no only to brave the Alaska wilderness as a teacher in a tiny gold-mining community called Chicken, but also to face down the community's violent disapproval when she dared to treat the local Indians as human beings..." ~Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times--

Here's a link to a good map that you can see Chicken and Eagle; the towns that were talked about in the book. http://www.travelalaska.com/images/maps/AlaskaMap.jpg