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Fifteen year old Kate desperately wants to be a newspaperwoman. Her family had arrived six months earlier from Minnesota along with 150 other families taking advantage of the US government's offer of land to be turned into farming acreage. It is 1935, just before the first snows fly, and the newly settled colony of Palmer, Alaska, is still part tent, part wooden homes.

Clearing the heav... More

Fifteen year old Kate desperately wants to be a newspaperwoman. Her family had arrived six months earlier from Minnesota along with 150 other families taking advantage of the US government's offer of land to be turned into farming acreage. It is 1935, just before the first snows fly, and the newly settled colony of Palmer, Alaska, is still part tent, part wooden homes.

Clearing the heavily wooded land and building houses for their families was the men's first priority. The women cooked and sewed and cleaned and tended to the children. But young Kate is of a different mind and her determination and persistance is finally rewarded with menial jobs in the newspaper office of the town's only paper. Continuing persistance gets her the chance to be an investigative reporter; her subject will be an old Laplander, Grandma Charles. Grandma's grandson provides a gentle romantic interest for Kate. The reader understands the area's history through their eyes.

Editor Hank Sloan is gruff and one-handed, and his past is a mystery. When an accident disables his typing hand, Kate takes over, unasked, to get the news in and the paper out. Caught up in the pressure of producing the paper, she neglects the time and rapidly worsening weather. When she finally does head home, she loses direction and nearly dies in the snow.

Running concurrently with Kate's adventures as a newspaperworman is the mystery of the published poison pen letter which takes a grossly one-sided view of the governments "abandonment" of the settlers in their winter plight. Kate and her teenage friends know that the letter threatens to influence the government to give up the homesteading project. They take action to unmask the writer and protect their new homeland.

Sally Gwin's homesteaders embody the attitudes, hopes and fears of mid-1930 Americans.

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