Barrett Willoughby

Alaska, it's been said, is less a state of the Union than a state of mind. A romantic sense of the north has been enhanced (and sometimes created) by the authors who spun romances about their experiences on America's cold frontier. The names of some of these authors still come quickly to mind - Robert Service, Jack London - but others who wrote of heroic adventures in the north have now been all but forgotten. One of the forgotten wrote also of heroines. Barrett Willoughby was hailed in her time as "the first real Alaskan novelist," and her works of fiction and nonfiction charmed the national…