I always enjoy reading stories about adventurous teachers who have taught under the most unusual circumstances. One of these is Hannah Breece, a teacher who spent nearly a decade and a half educating Athabascans, Aleuts, Inuits, and Russians in the Kodiak Archipelago in the Alaskan frontier before the Territory became a state. I recently read about the exploits of this remarkable trailblazer in her memoir, A Schoolteacher in Old Alaska: The Story of Hannah Breece.

Hannah Breece was born in 1859 in Pennsylvania, where she inaugurated her career as a teacher. She also taught for a time in the Rocky Mountains. When Hannah first set foot on Alaska soil in 1904, the territory was a remote and lawless wilderness inhabited by indigenous peoples, prospectors, bootleggers, and Russian priests. Over the next 14 years, this intrepid teacher struggled to educate her students (and their families and communities) in the harshest of environments, and sometimes with the most limited of resources. Along the way, she carefully recorded the details of her work in her powerful eye-witness account, amply supplemented with her personal photographs. In addition, the volume contains maps, commentary notes, and an introduction by critically-acclaimed historian Jane Jacobs. Jacobs is the grand-niece of Hannah Breece.

Working in the poorest and most primitive communities, Hannah often provided her students necessary grocery supplies when food was scarce, and offered instruction in basic hygiene principles and homemaking skills, in addition to her innovative lessons on a variety of elementary-school subjects. Although she often expressed a condescending attitude toward native Alaskans—which reflect the prevailing attitudes of her day—Hannah’s commitment to her students was genuine and unwavering. Her adventures included dangerous encounters with snow storms, forest fires, and wild dogs.

Hannah’s spellbinding account, published in 1997 by Random House Books, can be found on this link at amazon.com.