The Last Rider By William P. Ancker: Personal Narrative Essay
ALASKA
THE LAST FRONTIER
By William P. Ancker
(From English Teaching Forum, July 2002)
Describing Alaska requires the use of superlatives: biggest, tallest, longest, most, and even fewest. Here are some of the notable features of the 49th state of the United States:
Alaska has the tallest mountain in the country, Mt. McKinley (also called Denali) at 6,194 meters (20,320 feet). McKinley is not very tall by the standards of the Himalayas, Karakoram, or Andes, but it is the tallest mountain in North America.
Alaska has the northernmost location in the U.S., Point Barrow. It also has the westernmost location, Little Diomede Island, in the Bering Strait. In fact, the Russian island, Big Diomede, is only about four kilometers away from …show more content…
There is limited physical evidence of migration, however, because the land bridge is now submerged underwater. There are at least two ways people could have migrated from Asia. One is that groups of hunters may have followed game animals from Siberia to Alaska and then southward. Another is that seafarers may have followed the southern shore of the land bridge to Alaska, then continued all the way down the western coast of the Americas.
A crucial part of this migration theory is that the land bridge stayed open for thousands of years. Even as ocean levels slowly rose and covered the land bridge, transit by boat would have been possible. The native inhabitants of Alas ka may have been rather late migrants, arriving after the descendants of earlier migrants had already established populations as far as South America.
The name "Native Alaskan" is used to collectively identify the indigenous people of Alaska. In the past, they were subsistence hunters and gatherers who depended on the oceans and rivers for marine mammals and fish and were distinguishable by their areas of settlement and languages. Some groups had permanent villages, for example, those in the Aleutian Islands. Others, such as Eskimos, had different winter and summer
THE LAST FRONTIER
By William P. Ancker
(From English Teaching Forum, July 2002)
Describing Alaska requires the use of superlatives: biggest, tallest, longest, most, and even fewest. Here are some of the notable features of the 49th state of the United States:
Alaska has the tallest mountain in the country, Mt. McKinley (also called Denali) at 6,194 meters (20,320 feet). McKinley is not very tall by the standards of the Himalayas, Karakoram, or Andes, but it is the tallest mountain in North America.
Alaska has the northernmost location in the U.S., Point Barrow. It also has the westernmost location, Little Diomede Island, in the Bering Strait. In fact, the Russian island, Big Diomede, is only about four kilometers away from …show more content…
There is limited physical evidence of migration, however, because the land bridge is now submerged underwater. There are at least two ways people could have migrated from Asia. One is that groups of hunters may have followed game animals from Siberia to Alaska and then southward. Another is that seafarers may have followed the southern shore of the land bridge to Alaska, then continued all the way down the western coast of the Americas.
A crucial part of this migration theory is that the land bridge stayed open for thousands of years. Even as ocean levels slowly rose and covered the land bridge, transit by boat would have been possible. The native inhabitants of Alas ka may have been rather late migrants, arriving after the descendants of earlier migrants had already established populations as far as South America.
The name "Native Alaskan" is used to collectively identify the indigenous people of Alaska. In the past, they were subsistence hunters and gatherers who depended on the oceans and rivers for marine mammals and fish and were distinguishable by their areas of settlement and languages. Some groups had permanent villages, for example, those in the Aleutian Islands. Others, such as Eskimos, had different winter and summer