Pay Dirt: Fortunes and Misfortunes of an Alaska Gold-Miner

Epicenter Press, 1998. Softcover. Very Good. 5x0x8. Otis Hahn was born in Black Duck, Minnesota, in 1927, attended school in Mizpah, Minnesota for eight years, and grew up in the timber country of northern Minnesota among the rivers and lakes. Severely dyslexic, Hahn found the wilderness around him a more effective teacher than books, and he spent his youth hunting, fishing, and trapping. In 1950, Hahn spent the first of many summers in Alaska, where he met his wife, Audrey. During the early fifties, he worked seasonally in a Livengood gold mine and for the Alaska Road Commission. The couple returned to farming for the next twenty-five years in Minnesota, where they raised two sons and two daughters. Today they have six grandchildren. Hahn always dreamed of going back to Alaska and looking for gold, and he finally did so in 1981. It was an adventure I'll never forget," he says. "I've got a story to tell about mining gold in Alaska, Otis Hahn gold writer Alice Vollmar a few years ago. If you're interested, let's get together and talk about it. Their meeting led to a collaboration between Hahn and Vollmar to write Pay Dirt.