Who is Gov. Sarah Palin?

She is breathtakingly unlike any other vice-presidential pick in American history — a gun-toting, mooseburger-eating former Miss Wasilla, whose parents nearly missed her official unveiling because they were out hunting caribou.

The country, most of it anyway, got its first glimpse Friday of Sarah Heath Palin, John McCain's selection as his running mate, and the near-universal reaction was this: Who?

In Republican circles, the Alaska governor's name had been bandied about, but largely as a long-term prospect. Because of her relative anonymity and inexperience, few expected her to be thrust into this presidential campaign. But there she was, on stage with McCain near Dayton, Ohio, her voice sometimes seeming to catch but her argument strong — that she represents a fresh wind of change.

The first woman to grace a Republican ticket, she was surrounded by her husband and four of her five children, including a baby born in April. The tableau of everyday mom-ness, however, may have masked the ambition and grit that have marked Palin's meteoric rise in Alaska.

Two years ago, she knocked off the sitting Republican governor in the primary and a former Democratic governor in the general. Her relations with Alaska officialdom have not always been sunny, resuscitating a nickname given when, as a high-schooler, she led her basketball team to the state championship: "Sarah Barracuda."

In remarks that seemed to draw sharper as they wore on, the 44-year-old Palin on Friday whiplashed across the political spectrum. She praised McCain as the only "candidate who has truly fought for America" and touted her own son's imminent departure for Iraq. She praised union members and women like Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Rodham Clinton, Democrats who also reached for the brass ring.

"It turns out the women of America aren't finished yet, and we can shatter that glass ceiling once and for all," she said.

Massive Alaska is sparsely populated, with about half as many residents as the city of San Diego. Two years after taking office, Palin is enormously popular, in large part because many of the state's other politicians have been embroiled in ethical scandals.

"The people of Alaska, many of them got tired of the ego issues out there with longer-term federal and state officials and said enough is enough," said John Harris, the Republican speaker of the Alaska House of Representatives.

He said Palin was "not a great communicator" and has alienated enough Republicans that "without a very large contingent of Democrats supporting her positions, she can't get anything accomplished."

Palin is also embroiled in an ongoing investigation over the firing of the state public-safety commissioner, who said he was pressured by Palin's husband and her staff to fire Palin's former brother-in-law. The former brother-in-law, a state trooper, has been involved in a messy divorce and child-custody dispute with the governor's sister.

By her own telling, Palin's political rise has been improbable. Born in Idaho, she moved as a baby to Alaska with her science-teacher father and school-secretary mother, part-time trappers who seemed to personify the quirky Alaska spirit. (Her father, Chuck, to a Vogue magazine reporter recently angling for an interview: "Come on over, unless you have a problem with small dead animals." The magazine reported that a thousand caribou antlers were piled near the driveway of their home.)

As a child, sports gave a structure to her ambition, she told the Anchorage Daily News shortly before her election as governor.

"I know this sounds hokey, but basketball was a life-changing experience for me," she said. "It's all about setting a goal, about discipline, teamwork, and then success."

Palin led her school basketball team to the state championship in 1982, and was runner-up in the Miss Alaska contest two years later. (She reported with some consternation that judges were too interested in the contestants' derrières.) In 1988, she and her high-school boyfriend, Todd Palin, eloped and began raising a family.

Throughout, her pursuits appeared to be typically Alaskan: She spent a summer working at the Alyeska Seafoods processing plant in Dutch Harbor, which is America's largest seafood port.

"She used to work for me," said Frank Kelty, former mayor who at the time was the plant manager. "She took butchered crab portions, arranged them in a basket for cooking."

She enjoyed hunting, she told Vogue, and felt no qualms about shooting caribou.

"That caribou has had a good life. It's been free out there on the tundra, not caged up on a farm with no place to go," she said.

While her husband fished and worked in the oil fields, she moved quickly from the PTA to the Wasilla City Council in 1992. Four years later, she bumped off a three-term incumbent to become mayor.

During her tenure, the flashes of the future governor — not terribly communicative, running a little roughshod — surfaced. "Some of the things I'm doing, it's obvious I'm not running for 'Miss Congeniality,' " she said, citing a title she had won in the Miss Alaska contest. "I'm running the city."

Yet it was not until her term-limited departure from that job that her reformist credentials, much cited by the McCain campaign Friday, surfaced.

Appointed to the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, she filed an ethics complaint against a fellow panelist — who happened to be the state Republican Party chairman. That presaged her 2006 gubernatorial race, where she defeated Republican incumbent Frank Murkowski and another candidate in the primary, and former Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles in November.

As governor, she has struck populist positions. She laid off the chef in the governor's mansion — no need for that, she said — and often drives herself around town.

"She's got perfect political pitch," said Jake Metcalf, former chairman of the state Democratic Party. "She's just been able to get in with issues and get press on it, and she knows sort of what the public wants to hear and has been able to place her positions around those sort of issues that are important to people here, the values that are important to people here.

"I don't think you can underestimate her as a politician," he said.

McCain campaign surrogates were spreading the word Friday that Palin would appeal to female voters because of her juggling of five children and her political career. Her bookends, the oldest and the youngest, have made this a bittersweet season for Palin.

Her oldest, Track, joined the Army last Sept. 11 and will depart for Iraq shortly. Her youngest, Trig, was born this spring with Down syndrome, a condition his parents were aware of before his birth.

"Many people will express sympathy, but you don't want or need that, because Trig will be a joy. You have to trust me on this," the Anchorage Daily News said she wrote in an e-mail to relatives and friends, in the voice of "Trig's Creator, your Heavenly Father."

This spring, when her name surfaced as a potential running mate, Palin told the newspaper her advantage was that she happened to "fit a demographic" in the Republican Party.

"That's the reality," she said, adding: "It's gender; it's age; it's kind of the maverick being from the outside."

On Friday, she was as far on the inside as you could get.