Includes bibliographical references (pages 276-277).

Alaska looms as a mythical, savage place, part nature preserve, part theme park. Which is why C. B. Bernard lashed his canoe to the roof of his truck and headed northwest. When a distant cousin revealed that a common relation had made the same trek a century earlier, Bernard began chasing the legacy of this legendary hunter and explorer up the family tree, discovering hundreds of pages of journals that wound up in a closet at the University of Alaska at Fairbanks. Using these journals, Bernard threw himself at Alaska, boating to remote islands, hiking distant forests, hunting and fishing the landscape, and forming a moving portrait, then and now, of the last frontier.