THE WOMEN OF ALASKA.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXVIII, Issue 2746, 26 February 1910, Page 4 (Supplement)

THE WOMEN OF ALASKA.

(“The Housekeeper.”)

Every spring hundreds of brides journey to Alaska and iully as many young women go north, with more or less trepidation, to be married, so that the number of homes in the neighborhood of the Arctic circle grows larger each year. .The trepidation only, lasts while the brides are “cheechalkos,” or tenderfeet. After they have watched the ice go out and are real “sour doughs,” they want no sympathy because Fate sent them to a country where coal is thirty dollars a ton and lemons a dollar a dozen. You cannot find an Alaskan who will find fault with Alaska, and so everyone is satisfied, the mining camps at Lawson, Fairbanks and Nome, or the cabins out along the creeks, miles and miles from what we call civilisation, hold only happy housekeepers, women who know more about canned goods and What can be done with a tin of beans than anybody in either continent.

Everything that comes to their doors is canned, milk, eggs and potatoes, as well as the vegetables that we all use. In the larger camps fresh vegetables are brought in by steamer in the summer until the shops bloom .with a wealth of-succulent green thihgs ? but only the. of these delicacies reach “the creeks.” The gardens at Dawson are famous*for . alipost -any vegetable .will grow;,if r the. housewife will, bother to plant it.- Although the season is so short the sun shines, night and day and the cabbage keeps the same workinghours.

Condensed milk is the Arctic housekeeper’s standby, and one would not believe how much was used unless one saw the pile of empty tins. , Every woman has to learn to make muffins and cake all over ■ again until: she • knows just the proportions of milk and water that will produce the light and, feathery result. Canned eggs offer a similar course of study and so do tinned potatoes to the woman who must se* vo three palatable meals a day from canned or dry foods. It is a w T ild, free life these Arctic women live. They know how to shoot and can keep the larder‘‘replenished when the men are busy. They can also take a big pan of pay gravel and wash it.until the specks of. gold' are (free from dirt. -'ln their fur parki aind muckluks they can trot beside the dog sled on the winter train, and when the journey of several hundred miles is over they can play Mendelssohn or Chopin oh the piano that takes up half the room in the little cabin.

“We never sleep,” declared a happy Arctic housekeeper. “In the summer it is light for twenty-four hours and it is not worth while to go to bed, and in the winter when it is dark for twenty-four hours we .have to be doing things to forget the darkness, so there is no chance to sleep.” But 'whether they sleep or not they look fresh and unfagged * like the days they go forth to meeF so joyfully.