A 20 something girl from Seattle transplanted to a part of Alaska so remote that even today it doesn’t have a zip code, learned to survive, to cope with deep snow and temperatures as low as 40 or 50 below, to work a mine, to raise and train and drive sled dogs. Picture a one or two room cabin, an outhouse, a primitive kitchen…
And Mary didn’t just survive. She didn’t suffer. She liked it! She made her life there. She strode into an incredible place and an incredible life and never looked back. Even as I ask myself what on earth made this woman tick, I realize the most incredible thing of all. In the North Country she was normal!
Mary Hanson grew to 20 something in Seattle, got educated there, married there; and, at age 23, she moved with her husband to Hope, Alaska.
The first winter the couple trapped furs and Mary helped other trappers care for their sled dogs; earned a batch of puppies for herself. Afer a year, the couple moved on to run a mining operation in remote Kantishna County.
In summer Mary worked the sluice boxes at the mine. In winter she mushed supplies in over the snow.
In the early 1930’s Mary got pregnant; had a miscarriage; took herself to Nenana for medical treatment. Not by any means the Mayo clinic, whatever medical facilities Nenana had to offer did the trick. And, if life in Alaska suited her, life with her husband apparently didn’t. Nenana offered legal services as well as medical. And Mary got a divorce.
She moved to Fairbanks, found a place to board her dog team and took a job as a waitress. And she met Bert Hansen. Bert had gone “outside” to train as a chef and returned to Fairbanks to open an ice cream parlor. He and Mary tied the knot in 1935.
In 1936 Mary became the first woman to race the men in what is now the North American Dog Sled Classic. She raced in 1936, 1937 and 1938. She placed third in at least one of those races.
In 1939 Bert and Mary relocated to Big Delta, filed on 149 acres along the Richardson Highway, and opened “Bert and Mary Hansen’s Roadhouse”.
For More on Delta Alaska–Now and Then
Alaska speak for hotel, a “roadhouse” offered food, a bed, accommodations for dogs, horses or whatever…
A year later in dead of winter, a very pregnant Mary mushed over a snow- closed Richardson Highway to a midwife who delivered her daughter. Many years later that daughter recorded a biography of her mother in an oral history interview. And that’s how I know about Mary.
In December 1942 one hundred of the black soldiers who had just helped complete the Alaska HIghway ‘lived’ in bivouac near Bert and Mary’s Roadhouse. An old double cabin served as a field kitchen, but the men lived in frigid tents. And December that year brought bone crunching cold—fifty even sixty degrees below zero.
At Christmas, Bert made up a package—a comb, cigarettes, a candy bar, soap—for each man. Their tattered uniforms horrified Mary. Living in tents through an Alaska winter, the men worked outside in uniforms so ragged that she could see their skin.