Professor Nadia White will give an update and present a travelogue on her Travels With Josie project at the monthly meeting of the Rocky Mountaineers on March 14. Travels with Josie is a reporting project that travels across an American landscape and back in time as White follows her great grandmother’s migration from the Oklahoma Panhandle to the Klondike goldfields. For the first part of the three-part project, White rode her bicycle from Josie’s family homestead in Kenton, Okla., to Sumner, Wash., where Josie got a job as a typesetter, hated it, and married the editor.
The second part of the project involves kayaking from Port Townsend, Wash., to Skagway, Alaska. It is scheduled for this summer. Josephine White was a reporter and typesetter who married Elmer John “The Stroller” White. Driven by the economic collapse of the 1890s and drawn by the promise of adventure, EJ and Josie followed the course of the gold rush. EJ landed in Skagway early in 1898 to work as associate editor of the Skaguay News. By the end of the same year, he and Josie and their toddler daughter had followed the miners down the Yukon River and landed a job at the Klondike Nugget. White’s presentation will be at The Trail Head at 7 p.m. on March 14.