Fannie the Hike, rehabilitated by her stove

I wrote about Fannie Quigley and her wild rhubarb pies last July 4, in memory of an earlier Fourth spent baking pies for a celebration at Kantishna. I made a short Alaska pilgrimage this August, photographing her final home and that well-worn rusty cookstove.
Frances Sedlacek was born in 1870 on a homestead into a Bohemian family in Nebraska. Her father remarried after her mother died when she was six. Those farming years in Nebraska were marked by locusts, low crop prices, and Arctic-style blizzards.
Fannie left home at an early age, learning English as she followed the railroads west, then heading north at age 27 to the Klondike. Lugging a portable Yukon cookstove, groceries and a tent, she prided herself on arriving at new gold strikes to sell meals to the prospectors.
Her nickname, "Fannie the Hike," was purportedly from the distances her diminutive legs could cover while toting her portable kitchen, although some said it also came from her stint as a dance hall girl.
Clutching her free miner's certificate, Fannie staked a claim in 1900 on a tributary of the Stewart River, 125 miles from Dawson. She married miner Angus McKenzie Oct. 1, 1900, after returning to Dawson.
They opened a roadhouse near Gold Bottom. In January 1903, she departed the Klondike and Angus and headed off on an 800-mile hike down the Yukon River.
Miners were arriving at the Tanana, a large river that meets the Yukon, and she stopped near Chena. In August 1906, Fannie then headed for the Kantishna strike discovered by Joe Quigley and his partner.
She staked 26 claims in the area in a dozen years. Her first claim, staked on Jan. 1 1907, was witnessed by J. X. Quigley, and filed on April 15, 1907. Groups of miners, including Fannie, joined to file for large association claims on Glacier and Caribou creeks.
In November 1910, Joe Quigley found the first of his claims on Quigley Ridge between Eureka and Friday Creeks. Fannie and Joe were married in 1918 and moved from Glacier Creek to the western end of Quigley Ridge near Kantishna, at a cabin site at Friday Creek where Fannie had her own placer claims. They leased a strike that produced 1,435 tons of silver lead ore to Tom Aitken, who developed an underground mine, but declining silver prices and lease disagreements closed the mine in 1924.
Fannie's abilities in the kitchen were a means of support, and she hunted game and grew a garden to supply meals to the mining camp. Trapping also brought in extra income.
She shot caribou, moose, sheep, and bears, rendering the fat from berry-fed fall bears for use in baking her famous blueberry pies. Fannie ran her dog team many miles into the Denali drainages, trapping furs and hauling wood for the cabin and bunkhouse. Although sharing her largesse as a gardener and cook with the passing public as a means of support, she also continued to prospect for gold for additional spending cash. Alaska Magazine reported in July 1940 that "Fannie Quigley of Friday Creek shot a moose from her back porch last winter. While lugging the meat up to the cabin she picked up a gold nugget worth sixty dollars. "Heck!" she said, "I seen the dern thing layin' there all the time--but I just didn't believe it. Friday Creek's been worked four times."
In 1912, artist and frontier chronicler Belmore Browne partook of Fannie's hospitality. He said, "That meal was one of the most delicious that I have eaten. First came spiced, corned moose-meat, followed by moose muffle jelly. Several varieties of jelly made from native berries covered the large slices of yeast bread, but what interested me more was rhubarb sauce made from wild rhubarb of that region…These delicacies were washed down with great bowls of potato beer, ice-cold, from the underground cellar."
As the survivor of a rough and tumble existence --- a look at the mountains she had mined and the rivers she'd crossed are the hard evidence --- she picked up a salty vocabulary, and her thirst was legendary. In the end, she died alone, leaving her stove to rust. I think of her as someone who managed to turn moose muffle and wild rhubarb into extraordinary fare.

That Wild Rhubarb 4th of July

For the Fourth of July celebration at Kantishna Roadhouse in 1995, the owner asked me to bake wild rhubarb pies.
Polygonum Alpinum, known as Alaska Wild Rhubarb, grew next to the cultivated garden at Kantishna. It was prolific there, possibly encouraged by Fannie Quigley.
Fannie Sedlacek McKenzie Quigley died at age 73 at Kantishna at her cabin, where she had lived for 38 years. Her ex-husband, Joe Quigley, went back to civilization after a mining accident nearly killed him. In 1906, Fannie had gone to Kantishna for the newest strike. With Joe Quigley, she staked several claims. Fannie and Joe married and mined, trapped and hunted together until they were divorced seven years before her death and Joe moved to Seattle for the company of his younger nurse.
Fannie was known for her skills hunting, butchering and packing out her own game, although she was barely five feet tall.
In 1912, a traveler, Belmore Brown, came to Kantishna and described the delicious meals made by Fannie, who made her pie crust with bear fat and managed to raise a prolific garden at 1,900 feet. The year I was there, much of the garden froze during an August snowstorm.
Fannie made her own corned moose meat, roasted porcupines to succulence, and made jelly from wild berries to be spread on her hot homemade bread. She grew cabbage, cauliflower, radishes, small potatoes, lettuce, onions, even certain types of tomatoes. She made the wild rhubarb into a sauce she served with meat. (I also picked wild blueberries and cranberries when I was there, and baked them into muffins and quick breads.)
Athabascan natives living in the upper Tanana region chewed the raw roots and stems of Alaska wild rhubarb for colds, as reported in "Upper Tanana Ethnobotany," a publication of the Alaska Historical Commission.
According to a 1953 book, "Edible and Poisonous Plants of Alaska," published by the University of Alaska, wild rhubarb leaves and stems were chopped and added to a pudding of flour and sugar, much like domestic rhubarb. Also, the young leaves were mixed with other greens and cooked like spinach.
Arctic Inuit sweetened the juice and made it into a beverage, according to another 1953 book, "Edible Plants of the Arctic." That book also said the stems were stewed and used as a pie filling.
The Inupiat made a dessert with the stored stalks, which were boiled, mixed with cranberries, raisins, dried apples or peaches and eaten as a dessert, according to a 1983 report, "Plants That We Eat," published in Kotzebue for the Maniilaq Association Traditional Nutrition Program .
That report also stated the stalks were "boiled into a sauce and used on cooked fish." Similarly, the fresh, chopped stalks were "mixed with whitefish or pike eggs and livers, oil, and sugar and eaten," and "eaten raw with seal oil and meat or fish."
Wild rhubarb was also boiled, "mixed with oil and sugar and used as a sauce for dumplings, cake or sweet breads."
According to the same report, Alaska wild rhubarb was used like celery and eaten with peanut butter (remember "ants on a log?).
Inupiat people also boiled the leaves and ate them as hot greens. The stalks were boiled and stored in a barrel for winter use.
When I was asked by Roberta to make pies for the Fourth of July celebration, I didn't make the connection with Fannie Quigley, although I knew about her old cabin nearby.
I used my Grandma Smith's Rhubarb Meringue Pie recipe that Fourth of July, as the hollow rhubarb cooked down a lot and had to be stretched to make four or five pies.
This recipe makes one pie:
1 T. butter, 2 cups diced rhubarb, 1 cup sugar.
Melt the butter in a saucepan and add the diced rhubarb and cup of sugar. Cook slowly until the rhubarb softens. Mix 1/4 cup sugar, 2 T. cornstarch, 2 egg yolks and 1/4 cup sweet cream, mix well and add to the hot rhubarb mixture. Cook until thick and poiur into a baked pie shell. Use the egg whites to make a meringue, adding 1/3 cup sugar and a 1/4 tsp. cream of tartar to the two whipped whites. Spread on the rhubarb filling, piling it into peaks, and bake until meringue is light brown.
Cool before serving, and refrigerate any leftovers.