The Queen of Heartbreak Trail
The Life and Times of Harriet Smith Pullen, Pioneering Woman
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The story of Harriet Smith Pullen’s early life, from her childhood journeys by covered wagon to her family’s subsistence in sod houses on the Dakota prairie where they survived grasshopper plagues, floods, fires, blizzards, and droughts is a narrative of American migration and adventure that still resonates today. But there is much more to the legendary woman’s life, revealed here for the first time by Eleanor Phillips Brackbill, her great-granddaughter, who has traveled the path of her ancestor, delving into unpublished material, as well as sharing family stories in this American story that will capture the imagination of a new generation.
After migrating by emigrant train to Washington Territory, Harriet endured typhoid fever and a shipwreck, then homesteaded among the Quileute people on the coast of Washington, where she married Dan Pullen, with whom she was an equal partner in ranching and managing an Indian fur-trading post before a life-changing series of events caused her to strike out for the north. In 1897, she landed in Skagway, Alaska, broke and alone after leaving her husband and four children in Washington, determined to make a fresh start and to reunite with her sons and daughter. Newly independent and empowered, she became an entrepreneur, single-handedly hauling prospectors’ provisions into the mountains where gold beckoned and then starting the Pullen House, an acclaimed hotel.
Later in life, Harriet would entertain her guests with fabulous stories about the gold rush and her renowned collection of Alaskan Native artifacts and gold rush relics. She achieved near-legendary status in Alaska during her lifetime and The Queen of Heartbreak Trail brings to life moments that are well known and moments that have never before been published—her arrest for holding a claim jumper at gunpoint, her grueling courtroom testimony defending herself against the spurious accusations of a malevolent employer, and, how, in her father’s words, she “turned out” her husband of twenty years.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Brackbill (An Uncommon Cape) digs into the life of her great-grandmother, Harriet Smith Pullen, who earned the moniker "Mother of the North" during the late 19th-century Klondike Gold Rush. Pullen had risen from hardscrabble Washington homesteader to briefly but notably become the multi-talented lady of a servant-filled mansion, and her life story features frontier hospitality, expert horse management, entrepreneurial instinct, and a touch of appropriated Native American exoticism. Her life inspired tales that appeared in contemporary national newspaper accounts, local legends, and Pullen's father's invaluable diaries. These diaries portrayed a man with the paradoxical needs to both own land and migrate, a pattern his resourceful daughter repeatedly followed even as a single mother. Brackbill delves into her family's resources to find the truth behind Pullen's mesmerizing adventures, using numerous family photos and her own stories (including of the gold earrings that belonged to both subject and author) to further flesh out Pullen's legacy. So much of the story stems from diaries, short biographies of Pullen's children, and Brackbill's genealogical discoveries that this is really an account of a fascinating, adventurous pioneering family who actively participated in the transformation of the Pacific Northwest and Alaskan frontiers.
