Overview

Will Gurr's account of his youth opens a window onto western American and Alaskan life and travel as experienced by a boy growing to manhood in hard times. In Coming of Age in the West 1883-1906 Ted Robert Gurr tells Will's story by annotating a barely legible copy of his uncle's late-in-life memoirs. Will's youth was filled with adventures and dangers. His widowed father, the Rev. Henry Gurr, led his two boys to London and then a dozen Episcopal parishes in the Midwest and West. After several failed attempts to sail a schooner to Gold Rush Alaska and a trek over Skagway's White Pass in harsh weather, father and boys rowed and sailed 100 miles on lakes in the Canadian interior to the mining settlement of Aitlin. They built a rough cabin as winter set in and when the Rev. Gurr was recalled to Skagway, 15-year-old Will stayed behind. For the next seven years he made his own way. His memoirs describe vividly the years in which he worked, hunted and sailed a charter launch along Alaska's Inside Passage. Coming of Age in the West ends with an account of Will's life in Chelan, a resort town located at the edge of the Cascade Mountains in north central Washington, where he settled down in 1907. In Will's 70 years in Chelan he became a successful businessman and photographer, married twice, and took a leading role in public life. Family memories, letters and museum records provide rare insights into the character of a resilient and self-confident man with a strong moral compass. The written record is illustrated with 24 restored photographs of Alaska and the West, most of them taken by Will and his father.

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9781456326074

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Ted Robert Gurr is Distinguished University Professor, emeritus, at the University of Maryland College Park and lives now in Las Vegas. He received his bachelor's degree from Reed College and his Ph.D. from New York University. Gurr, who also taught at Princeton, Northwestern and the University of Colorado, has published widely in political science. Coming of Age in the West is his first book of biography and social history.

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