Listen to a Free Chapter from MeatEater's American History: The Alaskans (1896-1941)

We’re excited to announce the newest installment of MeatEater’s American History. In this audiobook original, listeners will plunge into the frozen vastness of the Last Frontier, where a diehard breed of hunters and trappers carved out a living from the Alaskan wilderness in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Steven Rinella tells the story of these remarkable frontiersmen. Lured north by the promise of the Klondike Gold Rush, this generation of hunters and trappers stayed put long after their dreams of striking it rich had faded away. Instead, they vanished into the wilderness and took up the rawboned and dangerous occupation of hunting and trapping for a living—shooting caribou to feed themselves, fishing salmon to feed their dogs, and trapping just enough wolf and lynx pelts to sustain their wilderness lifestyle.

Known to some as "sourdoughs," they traveled by dogsled, snowshoes, and homemade river boats, running their traplines in temperatures that routinely dropped to sixty below zero through a landscape where many streams and mountains remain unnamed today. Unlike the generations of rapacious market hunters who came before them, these solitary woodsmen weren't responsible for pushing wildlife resources toward ecological collapse; instead, they dreamed of creating a sustainable existence where they could live for decades in harmony with the wilderness.

Their feats of grit, self-reliance, and bushcraft defined a golden era along the distant edges of the American map—an era that, in many respects, lives on today in America's last pure wilderness.

Chapter 5: Feast and Famine, explores the fleeting bouts of abundance provided by the Alaskan wilderness and how people learned to live in accord with the chaotic natural rhythms of the land. We’re offering the entire chapter as a free excerpt, so take a listen below.

Want to hear more? Get your copy of MeatEater's American History: The Alaskans (1896-1941) now, wherever audiobooks are available.

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