Eleanor Phillips Brackbill

Eleanor Phillips Brackbill is the author of The Queen of Heartbreak Trail: The Life and Times of Harriet Smith Pullen, Pioneering Woman (TwoDot, An Imprint of Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), a 2017 WILLA Literary Award Finalist in Scholarly nonfiction. *

It is the story of the Klondike Gold Rush pioneer who, despite landing broke and alone in Skagway, Alaska, in 1897, launched her career as owner of the famed Pullen House by single-handedly hauling prospectors’ provisions into the Yukon where gold beckoned. The Queen of Heartbreak Trail is the first comprehensive, documented assessment of her life.

The story begins with Harriet Smith Pullen’s adventurous formative years as a homesteader in sod houses, challenged by grasshopper plagues, droughts, blizzards, prairie fires, floods, lawsuits, and land contests with the U.S. government. She marries a transplanted Mainer, reinvents herself in Alaska, and thrives during the last great gold rush, independent and empowered, a raconteur heralded as “The Mother of the North.” Brackbill, Pullen’s great-granddaughter, retraced by foot, by car, by train, by plane, and by ferry, the Pullen and Smith families’ westward migrations from Maine and Pennsylvania to Wisconsin and Dakota, then to Washington and Alaska. Brackbill delved into unpublished material and family stories to tell this remarkable American saga.

Earlier publications include An Uncommon Cape: Researching the Histories and Mysteries of a Property (State University of New York Press, 2012), essays for When Modern Was Contemporary: The Roy R. Neuberger Collection, and several articles. Eleanor was the director of education at the Neuberger Museum of Art, Purchase College, State University of New York. She graduated from Antioch College, earned an MA in art history at Boston University, completed a curatorial fellowship at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and studied in the art history doctoral program at City University of New York. Following twenty-five years as an educator, she embarked on a second career writing about history. She is currently working on a project involving a thirty-year, nineteenth-century diary she unearthed while researching The Queen of Heartbreak Trail. She lives in Westbrook with her husband. [photo credit: Michael Torlen] 

* The WILLA Literary Award, named in honor of Pulitzer Prize winner Willa Cather, is awarded annually for outstanding literature featuring women’s stories set in the West.