June 25, 2026, Seward Folly by Jessica Bamford for Dreamland Books and Yarn

I’m writing this review from the coziness of a rainy afternoon at Dreamland. A customer just asked me if I could recommend a book set in the Seward area, preferably by a local writer, and I knew my moment had finally come! I have been waiting months to be able to put this book into readers’ hands at the bookstore, and our shipment arrived just this week!

“The Last Homesteaders” is a must-read for locals, for visitors who are interested in a Seward story, for anyone who is fascinated by the idea of a life off the grid, and for those who like nonfiction that feels up close and personal.

Seward historian Doug Capra has spent years researching, interviewing and writing to tell the story of the Davidsons, a young family who built a life for themselves along the rugged coastline of Day Harbor, 25 miles from Seward (by boat), and who tragically disappeared in August 1977.

I was the last person to see the Davidsons alive. We were down in the harbor. John already had the outboard motor warming up when I walked by and stopped to say hello. He was loading a few last items into the open skiff where Ginger and Jesse sat waiting. They were on their way back to Driftwood Bay with supplies. There were boxes and duffle bags stacked one atop another and a well-used back pack on the forward thwart. Several pieces of scrap iron and a coil of steel cable in the bottom of the skiff hinted at more of John’s construction projects. I watched while he untied the mooring lines and gave a small wave as they pulled out of the harbor and headed south into a horizon obscured by mist and rain. I watched as they disappeared into the gloom. They were never seen again. No trace of the skiff was ever found.

–Lynn Schooler

John Davidson and Ginger Higgins met in Seward in the late 1960s and married in 1969. They had both come to Alaska looking for a more authentic life, John an Air Force veteran and Ginger a recent resident of a hippie commune. When John got the opportunity to homestead a remote parcel of land along the coast, the couple felt that this was the chance they’d been looking for to make their unconventional home and live life on their own terms. They reveled in learning new skills and overcoming challenges, and their property grew to include a cabin, barn, workshop and garden. They started a family as well, teaching their young son Jesse in nature’s classroom. And through it all, they documented the experience in journals and letters to their families back east.

This is perhaps the most immersive nonfiction book I have ever read. The writings the Davidsons left behind give us insight into their mindsets, memories and motivations, while Capra’s firsthand experience of life in Seward in the 1960s and ‘70s provides the cultural context, along with the memories of John and Ginger’s families and the Seward locals who knew them. In addition to the main story of the Davidson family, the book includes multiple appendices that expand the reader’s understanding of Seward history and the people that the Davidsons knew during their time here.

In The Last Homesteaders Capra provides us with a finely detailed map of John and Ginger’s story that follows them from their early years and separate arrivals in Alaska and into their subsequent entwining in the pursuit of their dream. The story is almost Shakespearean in its arc from youthful fantasy to accomplishment and into the fog of disaster, and there is a place for it on the shelf of Alaskan classics.
—Lynn Schooler

The Davidsons’ resilience and resourcefulness are inspiring, while the risks they took are almost unthinkable to many of us. As Capra points out, everything is magnified – the rewards and the risks – when living a life “on the edge,” especially in a place as wild as Alaska.

Note: The inserted quotes are from Lynn Schooler’s foreword to “The Last Homesteaders.” He is the author of “The Blue Bear: A True Story of Friendship and Discovery in the Alaska Wild,” and “Walking Home: A Traveler in the Alaska Wilderness, a Journey into the Human Heart.”

PRAISE FOR THE LAST HOMESTEADERS

Ambitious and self-reliant, John and Ginger Davidson were admired as picture-perfect archetypes of Alaska’s back-to-the-land movement in the 1970s. Their legend only grew after their tragic end. From his writer’s perch in Seward’s Resurrection Art Coffee House, Doug Capra has labored mightily to bring John and Ginger back to life, drawing on journals and letters and everything from Kierkegaard to John McPhee to account for their brief, remarkable careers and the wilderness yearnings of a lost generation.
—Tom Kizzia, “Pilgrim’s Wilderness,” and “Cold Mountain Path”

Survival and tragedy stories are similar to murder mysteries. We know what happened before we open the book. In The Last Homesteaders, Capra takes us beyond the tragedy and into the lives, the land, and the legacy that make this story matter. Ever the diligent researcher, Capra shares the back stories of a young couple who, like Thoreau, “went to the woods to live deliberately”. The author grounds the story in place and time, helping us see a frontier town, the people who lived there, and the family for whom it was a harbor on a stormy shore.
—Dan L Walker, “Letters from Happy Valley: Memories of an Alaska Homesteader’s Son”