A Rat's Nest of Rails: Tundra, Ice, Mosquitoes, and Permafrost: Saga of the Alaska Railroad

by Steve Levi

Overview

That the Alaska Railroad was ever built is astonishing. It was constructed over the most treacherous terrain in the world during the most violent political era in US history. The workforce included anarchists, Bolsheviks, socialists, syndicalists, and labor union organizers against the backdrops of the First World War, Spanish Influenza, the Russian Revolution, American troops in Siberia to keep Russian Socialism from our shore, Japan's relentless gobbling of colonies from Southeast Asia to Siberia, and the Great Red Scare. It was built by the United States military to supply the United States Navy with coal and, in the process, closed coal mining in the Territory of Alaska - to the great anger of the private sector. Then there were the scammers, land speculators, Natives and their land claims, blacks and discrimination, sedition, wages in scrip, permafrost, freezeup/breakup, ration stamps, and environmental damage. A Rate's Nest of Rails is an in-the-weeds look at what it took to construct the only government-funded railway in American history.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781637471968
Publisher:	Publication Consultants
Publication date:	04/15/2024
Pages:	156
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.33(d)

About the Author

Steve Levi has spent more than 40 years researching and writing about Alaska's history. He specializes in the ground-level approach to events. His book Bonfire Saloon is a saloon floor-level book of authentic Alaska Gold Rush characters in a Nome saloon on March 3, 1903. His book, The Human Face of the Alaska Gold Rush, is a compendium of people and events that are usually left out of scholarly books. He is also a scholar on the forgotten decade, 1910 to 1920, the most violent era in American history, which included four major bombings, widespread terrorist activity, and the birth of the labor movement. A Rat's Nest of Rails focuses on how the construction of the Alaska Railroad survived the era - and thrived!