On and off for the last half century Charlie Brower has been Uncle Sam’s most northerly citizen. The honor was taken for a spell by his partner an old friend Tom Gordon, who had a house three miles farther north; at another time Charlie Klengenberg camped six miles beyond, towards the Pole. But Klengenberg moved to Coronation Gulf and Gordon to Demarcation Point—both places farther east but also farther south. That left Brower what he had been earlier—America’s most northerly pioneer. Brower is what a loyal American likes to think of as a typical American. He is what you might expect of Manhattan Island born somewhere around Twenty-third Street when that street was far uptown: he is the logical development of a boy who was admitted to Annapolis but who left that road of gold-braided promotion for the paths of high and free adventure on unknown seas and shores. Meet him at the City Club in New York, and you think him what in a sense he was born to be, a typical successful and genial New Yorker; meet him at the Explorers Club of New York, to which he also belongs, and you will have difficulty in localizing him among that far-travelled company. For he talks Africa, and Australia of the Ballarat days, till you think him a Tropic rather than a Polar-man. I write this to introduce a book which I have read in its original and rough draft, but I shall read it again with eagerness when it comes from the press in its finished and, I understand, more compact version. For if Charlie finally imparts a third of what he knows about whaling, pioneering, and about the Arctic, it will be a source-book on frontiering and high adventure; if he writes with a third of his conversational zest and charm, it will be literature. But in any case the tale will be to me the life-story of one of my oldest and dearest friends—and in subscribing myself a friend I speak for most of the explorers, whalers, traders and missionaries who have reached or passed the north tip of Alaska since 1884. I speak, too, I am sure, for many captains and officers of the U.S. Coast Guard, for reconnaissance workers of the U.S. Geological Survey, for teachers whom the U.S. Bureau of Education has been pushing up toward Barrow of comparatively recent years, and for nearly everyone else who for any reason has come within reach of Charlie Brower’s help and his cheer at any time during his fifty-eight years of keeping open house to all comers about three hundred and thirty miles north of the Arctic Circle.

Fifty Years Below Zero is an engrossing account by Charles Brower, the King of the Arctic, of his life in the north. Brower shares his knowledge of whaling, pioneering, and Alaska Native life and customs before statehood, chronicling a period of important and rapid change in Alaska history with moving depth, insight, and humor. His story is also full of high adventure and rich with details about he many vistors who became his friends--explorers, whalers, traders, missionaries, and everyone who for any reason came within reach of Brower's help and his cheer.

Brower had left San Francisco with the intention of making a short dash north on a whaling ship bound for the mythic Arctic Circle. Adventure had a way of following Charlie Brower. His initial landing turned into a fifty-year long ice-bound lifestyle. Once he stepped off the whaler and back onto dry, albeit frozen land, Brower took a job as master of the whaling station. But, though commerce brought him north, it was the people that helped keep him there for Charlie soon became fast friends with the native Inuit people. They taught him how to hunt seals on the ice, caribou on the tundra, and whales out on the sea. He learned their secrets, lived in their igloos, navigated in their kayaks and avoided being murdered in their feuds. Plus the young adventurer observed the great dramas of the Far North play out. He saw the last of the sailing ships disappear over the horizon, and watched the first airplane fly in. For fifty-seven years, through ice storms and northern lights, Charlie Brower maintained both this lonely outpost and his claim as “Uncle Sam’s most northerly citizen.” A book to remember, “Fifty Years Below Zero” is richly illustrated throughout with photos by the author.

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