INNOCENT IN ALASKA

At the age of 18, weighing in at 90 pounds, Margaret Burke, a fugitive from the Victorian mores of Blair, Nebraska, sailed for Alaska as the first woman telephone operator in the territory. En route, she fell in love with a clever cad who led her a chase for the next two years, while Will Burke, a steadier sort and one of the chief entrepreneurs of those early days, became her confident and mentor, concealing his own love for Margaret. Eventually she married Burke- and this tells of their happy, and prosperous, ever after. She learned to mush a dog team, supervised a freight route of her own, and reported the famous Scotty Allen sled race, the first in history, to an eager audience in Nome.... Springer has told her story with a fast moving collection of verbs, adjectives and similes- it is full of period color and it provides a rugged and sometimes poignant personal history, paralleling the development of the 50th state.