Alaskan Pioneer Girl: A memoir of America's Last Frontier is a memoir of my first twenty years in Alaska in the 1950s and 60s, and will appeal to most history enthusiasts. I am born into a family forging ahead as pioneers, but all screeches to a tragic end with the death of my sister, Sherry, forcing us to relocate. Family life restarts in Homer with me being a mischievous middle child hoping to follow in my older sister's footsteps. Instead, I am wrenched from her, my town friends, and comforts, to the wilderness when my parents make a claim on 160 acres of free Government land on Porcupine Lake-60 miles away. We live by the requirements laid down by Abraham Lincoln in the Homestead Act 100 years earlier. Our first home is a tent, and we live off the land--hunting and butchering moose, fishing salmon and harvesting large vegetable gardens. My brothers and I are surrounded by fundamentalist Christians in the local school and find salvation at Solid Rock Bible Camp. The last chapters are of the bumpy road to love on my return to Homer for high school. Sprinkled throughout are family recipes.
