North to Share: The Sisters of Saint Ann in Alaska and the Yukon Territory by Sister Margaret Cantwell, S.S.A. (review)

BOOK REVIEWS113 data and Catholic-Baptist comparisons are particularly informative. His general observations and conclusions, however, raise more questions than diey answer. Charles E. Nolan Archives of the Archdiocese ofNew Orleans North to Share: The Sisters ofSaintAnn in Alaska and the Yukon Territory. By Sister Margaret Cantwell, S.S.A. In Collaboration with Sister Mary George Edmond, S.S.A. (Victoria, British Columbia: Sisters ofSt. Ann. 1992. Pp. xii, 308. 820.95 paperback.) If I were to keep only one book on the history of die Catholic Church in Alaska, North to Share would be that book. One's first impression of this oversized paperback is that it has something for everyone. The impression remains. As one examines its pages, a remarkable number of features appear: maps, many excellent photographs and facsimiles, chronologies, lists of Sisters, endnotes, bibliography, index, even diagrams on how to cut up a salmon or skin a wolf. The text, of course, is the best part. It contains almost as much about others as it does about the Sisters. This is the author's generous interpretation of sharing. In gracious tribute she gives more credit to others than to herself or her gentle colleagues, but in reality, the Sisters deserve more. Sister Margaret Cantwell, S.S.A., is a veteran of more than four decades of mission work in Alaska and Western Canada and her collaborator, the irrepressible Sister Mary George Edmond, S.S.A., spent as many years in Alaska, where she left her heart. Both drew heavily on the memoirs of their companions and gathered other details, as well as confirmation, from the vast archival resources of their congregation and those of the Jesuits. Cantwell begins her account with the arrival of three Sisters in Juneau in September, 1886. A deluge of rain greeted them. When they disembarked at midnight, having arrived earlier than expected, they were ushered into the pastor's primitive hut. Father John Althoff gave them all of his blankets and left them to seek their nocturnal repose on the bare floor. He decamped for a hole nearby, where he shivered through the rest of the night. Two years later, when another group ofpioneers sailed up the Yukon River to Koserefsky, to a village called Holy Cross, they, too, found a primitive residence. The only civilized features ofthis log cabinwere innerwalls papered with flour-made-paste and pages of The Police Gazette. The flour attracted scores of field mice seeking shelter from die arctic frost, and they multiplied so fast the Sisters' traps could not catch them all. 114BOOK REVIEWS These two experiences, in the south and in the north of Alaska, were symbolic of the kind of environment they would live in, one Sister of St. Ann after another, for a period of nearly a century. Eight of diem are buried in Alaska. From Holy Cross the Sisters were summoned to Dawson in Yukon Territory to assist Father William Judge, S.J., with his makeshift hospital. This was during the gold rush in 1898. When Judge died in the following year, the Sisters acquired his hospital and remained in Dawson, serving in a school as well, until 1963. Four of diem lie buried near Father Judge, in die cold, frozen ground of Yukon Territory. In the contents oíNorth to Share, then, one finds useful information about Alaska and Dawson, the hierarchy, the missionaries, schools and hospitals, and the people for whom the Church was there. Of special note is the aumor's history of Copper Valley School, which is the best published account of the mission's ambitious experiment in native education. Alas! the school failed, but none of the missionaries, least of all the Sisters, were to blame. If I have any criticism to offer for this book, it is this: it should have been published in hardback, in traditional format, to provide for its use for a long time to come. Wilfred P. Schoenberg, SJ. Gonzaga University RoseHawthorneLathrop: Selected Writings. Edited by Diana Culbertson, O.P. (New York and Mahwah, New Jersey: Paulist Press. 1993· Pp. v, 242. 824.95.) Two years ago, when I reviewed Patricia Dunlavy Valenti's biography of Rose Hawthorne Lathrop for this...