Crooked Past
The History of a Frontier Mining Camp: Fairbanks, Alaska
Classic Reprint Series
Judge James Wickersham's 1938 memoir Old Yukon is one of the great books by one of the great men of Alaska history. Called the most truthful account of the gold rush era ever written, Old Yukon is the unvarnished story of Wickersham's seven and-a-half years as the only judge in interior Alaska in the early 1900s, in charge of a district that covered over 300,000 square miles. Wickersham faced the worst of nature and human nature, dealing justice by dog team at fifty below zero to murderers, thieves, conmen, and scoundrels. His legacy is evident throughout Alaska: for example, he named the city of Fairbanks.
Edited and extensively annotated by historian Terrence Cole, and supplemented with sometimes shocking entries from the judge's private, unpublished diaries, this new edition reveals a side of early Alaska history never seen before, an inside look at the stories and scandals that made the headlines and those that didn't.
