“She was tough as grizzly bear claws,” one observer wrote about Fannie Quigley, who forged her own path from a dugout on the Great Plains to the Pacific Coast and then north to Alaska.
Born in Wahoo, Neb., on March 18, 1870, little Frances Sedlacek was known as “Fannie” from childhood. It was a childhood tempered with hard times. Wahoo was a village of largely Czech-speaking Bohemian immigrants from the Austro-Hungarian empire who in 1870 were being assaulted by the triple hardships of a locust plague, record-breaking blizzards and a seven-year drought. As if fate hadn’t stacked the deck against Fannie sufficiently, illness took her mother
