Publisher's Synopsis
Writing from Cavite El Viejo in the Philippines during the Spanish American War, a 19 year old Corporal wrote his sister: "What will I do if I should have to change to a climate of 6 degrees below? Do you think I could be able to stand it after coming from a country where I doubt if it ever went below 40 degrees? Don't imagine for a minute that us soldiers care for 1/4 of the cold. That you are having there now (in March I mean) our blood is so thin and vitality so low from climatic diseases that 1/4 of that cold would kill us all in a month. Say! Sister ask Aunt Ellen if there was any roving spirits in the Cronin family, for if there was, his sins of roving must have passed the other generations and singled me out to keep the thing a-going." The 19 year old soldier penned part of his own unique future on that day in the tropics of the Philippines during the Spanish American War. Edward J. Cronin would indeed travel and reside in one of the coldest and most desolate regions of the United States, first journeying to Alaska in 1917 and staying there for 30 years. He took his first plane trip there and traveled by dog sled from Hot Springs to Bethel, Alaska covering 1,100 miles in 34 days in 1929. Considered a pioneer Alaskan, he was a bookkeeper working as a traveling auditor for the Northern Commercial Company and fiscal agent for the Matanuska Valley Colony for many years. Cronin was also in charge of the commissary department of the Alaska railroad and the engineer for the American Bridge Company helping build the railroad through Nenana and Denali National Park. As a result, he had a part in the ceremonies when President Harding drove the golden spike at Nenana in 1923 when the railroad was opened for traffic. As a soldier during the Spanish American War he had already journeyed throughout the world and when he came back to the United States, he would visit a good portion of the country as well. Even in his later years, Cronin traveled back to his ancestral homeland of Ireland. This then is the unique and adventurous life of a lion of the seasons, Edward J. Cronin.
