(From the back flap of the book) In 1903, at the close of the Balkan Turkish Empire, John Hajdukovich crossed the sea from Montenegro to an untouched wilderness: Alaska.  John became a trader and a father to the Upper Tanana Athabaskans, the U.S. Commissioner, the Interior’s finest big game guide, and the architect of the federal Tetlin Native Reserve.  Happiest when he strode across the land.  John was not like other men.  In 1914, during Alaska’s gold rush, John built a roadhouse at the confluence of the Delta and Tanana Rivers, which today is Rika’s  Roadhouse State Park.  Through the window of John’s life: the Slavs who shaped Alaska, the Natives, and the Great Land’s development may be seen.  Their lives, like braided river channels, separate and run together, running side by side in parallel destinies.  When, in 1942, the international AlCan Highway was built, the leisurely winters of Alaska’s traders and roadhouses evaporated like a Chinook wind blowing through a forest.  John, who began the Upper Tanana’s infrastructure, lived to see modern military forts where once only Lieutenant "Billy" Mitchell’s 1901 telegraph trail had been.

Parallel Destinies is also a story of a Swedish woman, Rika Wallen, to whom John deeded the roadhouse for back wages.  For fifty years, Rika was a stake in the ground for the roaming John.  While John traded and prospected, Rika ran the hub of hte Upper Tanana’s crossroads.  Her establishment was "town" to the three hundred people who walked the trails to the Alaskan-Canadian border.  John and Rika were the history of the Upper Tanana Valley.

About the author:  Judith Eskridge Ferguson was born in 1945 when the Alaska wilderness first intersected with the "lower 48" states, and in the era when the international highway, the Alcan, was new.  She was raised in Tulsa, OK.  After going to college, she moved to Big Delta, AK in 1968.  She met Rika Wallen at her roadhouse, the year before Rika died.  On the banks of the Tanana River, Judy met Reb Ferguson, a hunting guide, trapper and forest fire fighter.  They married and for the next 22 years of their marriage, they raised three children in an isolated wilderness life up the Tanana River.

In 1998 just began writing the history of the state park, Rika’s Roadhouse.  Parallel Destinies, An Alaskan Odyssey is Judy’s first book and was printed in Belgrade, Yugoslavia in January 2002.  At this time she planning a forthcoming book on Yugoslavia and several more concerning Alaska.

Table of Contents

Introduction
Alaska:  When Alaska Was A Different Land
"The Great Death", the White Man’s Gold Rush
Sweden - 1875 - Lovisa Erika Jakobsson/Rika Wallen
Montenegro:  Jovo Hajdukovic, 1879
McCarty’s Beginning
John’s Entrance
The Alaska Road Commission
McCarty
Sugar Beets and Rationing/McCarty Agriculture
Alonzo Maxey and the US Army Military Reservation
Fraternity of Prospectors
The Builidng of the Roadhouse
The Family Left Behind; Milice Andje
Prospectors Scattered to the Four WInds
Rika’s Entrance
The Sale of the Roadhouse; McCarty’s/Rika
Tuberculosis at Healy Lake and in the Upper Tanana
Trading
Milo Began Trading "Inside" The Agreement in 1922
The Bison Herd Importation
The Interior’s Most Recognized Big Game Guide
The Potlatch of 1927
The Roadhouse
The Happy Days of Trading
The Tetlin Reserve
Trading and the Office of Indian Affairs
John’s Family, Milo Marries in Montenegro
Transition to the Modern Age
A Promoter Not A Miner
Rika’s Roadhouse in the 1930’s
Early Alaska Trucking
World War II
The Isolation of the Upper Tanana
Milo’s Investments and the Death Years
Last Days in the Roadhouse
Reaching for Straws
Fred and John
Jack Singleton and C. D. Flannigan
Transistion
Milice AndjeJovovoa
"They had the best of both worlds"
Rika
Epilogue: Surviving Family in Sweden &  Montenegro
Alaska, 1895
Hajdukovich’s Alaska, Landmarks of the Big Delta
Traders in the Late 1920s - Early 1930s

Credits
List of Inside Illustrations
Glossary