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The Queen of Heartbreak Trail: The Life and Times of Harriet Smith Pullen, Pioneering Woman

Amazon.com Price:  $19.67 (as of 06/05/2019 10:28 PST- Details)

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Description

The story of Harriet Smith Pullen’s early life, from her childhood journeys by covered wagon to her circle of relatives’s subsistence in sod houses on the Dakota prairie where they survived grasshopper plagues, floods, fires, blizzards, and droughts is a narrative of American migration and adventure that still resonates today. But there is a lot more to the legendary woman’s life, revealed here for the first time by Eleanor Phillips Brackbill, her great-granddaughter, who has traveled the path of her ancestor, delving into unpublished material, in addition to sharing circle of relatives stories in this American story in order to capture the imagination of a new generation.

After migrating by emigrant train to Washington Territory, Harriet endured typhoid fever and a shipwreck, then homesteaded some of the Quileute people on the coast of Washington, where she married Dan Pullen, with whom she was once an equal partner in ranching and managing an Indian fur-trading post before a life-changing series of events caused her to strike out for the north. In 1897, she landed in Skagway, Alaska, broke and on my own after leaving her husband and four children in Washington, made up our minds to make a fresh start and to reunite with her sons and daughter. Newly independent and empowered, she became an entrepreneur, single-handedly hauling prospectors’ provisions into the mountains where gold beckoned and then starting the Pullen House, an acclaimed hotel.

Later in life, Harriet would entertain her guests with fabulous stories about the gold rush and her renowned selection of Alaskan Native artifacts and gold rush relics. She achieved near-legendary status in Alaska all the way through her lifetime and The Queen of Heartbreak Trail brings to life moments that are well known and moments that have never before been published—her arrest for holding a claim jumper at gunpoint, her grueling courtroom testimony defending herself against the spurious accusations of a malevolent employer, and, how, in her father’s words, she “turned out” her husband of twenty years.

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