Blue Hills: Alaska's Promised Land by Judy Ferguson

Blue Hills, Alaska's Promised Land portrays through a strong woman and her family, a window into old Alaska and the characters that made Alaska a living legend. Today, Alaska is losing both its pioneer elders and the rugged, untamed life that originally defined its mystique. Adventure with horses and dogs, canoes and kayaks, Blue Hills is the unseen Alaska life. Judy and Reb met in Alaska six years before the Trans-Alaska Pipeline began its transformation of traditional Alaska. It is the transparent story of Judy Eskridge, a young, Midwestern woman who had a dream in 1968 she could not let go: a dream of a longed-for place where life was visionary, a dream she called "Blue Hills." Judy reached for a life of simplicity beyond the fracturing world of the 1960s. Once a raw frontier, America had evolved into a competitive superpower, convulsed by deep rifts. Before the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention, the boiling point of the 1960s' revolution, Judy left Oklahoma for Alaska. As she journeyed up the Alcan Highway, Senator Robert Kennedy was shot, a signal to Judy that the world and the life she desired might no longer exist in the Lower 48. Carrying on the legacy of the old pioneers for nearly fifty years, Reb and Judy typified the Bush network from the Copper, Tanana, Yukon, and Kobuk Rivers of Alaska to the Porcupine and Mackenzie River Valleys in Canada. It is Alaska's personal story: the evolution from old to new, from the ice box to global neighborhood, the very human story of the woman and her family who lived it.