By Hank Nuwer
Alaska’s native peoples called her “Big Girl” because she was tall and rugged as a logger. Others, whose lives she saved with grit, heart and sheer determination over more than a half-century, called her an angel or saint.
Nurse and memoirist Mildred (Mil) Keaton lived, survived, and thrived in the unforgiving Alaska and Yukon territories by living by the Golden Rule and recognizing one other rule: “In the North,” she wrote in No Regrets: The Autobiography of an Alaska Nurse, “one learns to expect the unexpected.”
Born in Kentucky in 1898, Keaton and her parents moved to Washington State where she trained as a nurse.
The year 1922 found her working in southeastern Alaska at Kake as a field nurse traveling by the health boat “Martha Angeline” or Coast Guard cutter, but also aboard an open boat, as well as by dog team. Kake then had an underserved population of under 400 persons.
Her autobiography recounts awakening in an ice-filmed tent to choke down coffee and bread soaked in bacon grease. To warm up, she lit her pipe and puffed contentedly until it was time for her Eskimo driver to set the harnesses and traipse over the next 50 miles of trail.
For a time, her public service as a nurse took her from the former city of Barrow clear into Canada. She visited only villages and villagers along the way. In 1941, she was the main healthcare worker when no doctors lived in Barrow. In the villages, she bunked with a local teacher or at any cabin where she could set down a sleeping bag.
Her toughness put many a would-be prospector and miner to shame who gave up and returned to the Lower 48 from whence they came. Her hair whitened while still young and gave her the look of an elder before she turned 40.
Keaton served as a midwife, unlicensed dentist, and surrogate pediatrician in Alaskan and Yukon villages where no doctor ever put down a cold foot. Her service included a stint in villages in the Kuskokwim and Yukon River. She adapted to eating the same mammals the villagers ate. For a rime she lived in a native Longhouse.
She could carve diamond willow with the best of the natives. In return, the “big girl” taught her village friends the fine art of shooting a basketball.
Keaton fared equally well in civilization as an administrator, serving as a nurse for the Jesuit Order in Glenallen at the Copper Valley School, and director of hospitals in Skagway and Whitehorse.
After a relative began collecting stories about Keaton to put into her autobiography, former Copper Valley student Michael Heusser wrote her family. He said he thought she once parachuted into a village or mining camp to minister to the locals.
Collier’s Magazine profiled Nurse Keaton as the “Angel of Furs” in 1936. The Colliers article recounted Keaton’s service during a number of emergencies, including the disastrous 1934 fire in Nome and the 1935 Wainright and Pt. Lay flu epidemic.
In yet another year, an “unexpected” typhoid outbreak threatened the villagers of Barrow. A writer named Linda Baldwin recalled that Keaton sent blood samples protected by muskrat kins to the health Department in Juneau to confirm her diagnosis.
Long before her death, the legend of the angel in furs was told at many a native potlach.
Keaton died of cancer in 1980.
Hank Nuwer is a writer, University of Alaska, Fairbanks adjunct professor, and community. theater actor. He thanks his friend Stephen Gemmell for suggesting a story about Mildred Keaton.