WASHINGTON, DC
On March 25, 1899, a gentleman from New York City arrived unannounced at the Washington, DC, office of natural historian C. Hart Merriam. At age forty-three, Merriam had already been practicing science seriously for three decades, dating back to some unauthorized taxidermy performed on his sister’s dead cat. In 1872, on summer break from high school, he had served as naturalist on an expedition to America’s newly christened Yellowstone National Park and published his findings in a fifty-page government report. He had since earned and abandoned an MD degree, cofounded the National Geographic Society, and identified dozens of bird and mammal species.
Merriam did not, however, recognize the name of the mysterious stranger who’d interrupted his typically hectic workday. Edward H. Harriman, as any close observer of Wall Street would have known, was on the verge of becoming one of the most famous—and, in the trust-busting years to come, infamous—entrepreneurs of the late Gilded Age. In the years prior to setting foot in Merriam’s office at the U.S. Division of Biological Survey, at 14th and Independence, Harriman had taken control of the underperforming Union Pacific Railroad. The previous summer, the new chief executive had personally inspected more than six thousand miles of track, examining “every poor tie, blistered rail, and loose bolt,” according to one superintendent. The complete modernization Harriman ordered for the Union Pacific had left his railroad in rapidly improving shape and its chief executive physically exhausted. For the summer of 1899, Harriman’s physician—who joined him in Merriam’s office—was ordering him to take a sabbatical.
Harriman, whose quicksilver mind terrified his underlings and allowed him to see opportunities invisible to others, had conceived something much more ambitious than a couple of months of tennis and lemonade at his country estate. His plan was to outfit a large steamship as his private yacht and survey the coast of Alaska. In the previous fifteen years, it had become possible to book package tours up the Inside Passage, as the waterways of the British Columbia coast and Alaska panhandle had come to be known. A steady flow of well-to-do excursioners had been lured by newspaper and magazine stories raving about Alaska’s glaciers. One particularly adventurous writer had done more than all others combined to promote the territory’s frozen wonders: John Muir.
Harriman was bringing along his wife and children, as well as a few guests and an ample crew, but his ship had the capacity to carry many more. He sought Merriam’s help in rounding up a team of America’s top experts in the natural sciences to accompany them. “He thought that there should be two men of recognized ability in each department,” Merriam later recalled. “Two zoologists, two botanists, two geologists and so on.” Harriman expected to depart from Seattle in just two months.
Harriman’s rough itinerary combined familiar elements of the newly fashionable northern Grand Tour with exploration into points unknown. His steamship would sail up the Inside Passage and visit its best-known spots: lawless Wrangell; Skagway, epicenter of the Klondike Gold Rush; the old Russian capital, Sitka; and Glacier Bay, perhaps the biggest draw of all, thanks to the ecstatic nature rhapsodies that Muir published in America’s most popular magazines. But one of the secrets to Harriman’s success was ignoring limits set by others. His Alaska course would extend thousands of miles further, continuing west toward the Bering Sea, scouting Prince William Sound, Kodiak Island, the Aleutians, and beyond, obscure places where large swaths of territory were labeled UNKNOWN on maps and scientific discoveries were waiting for anyone who stepped on shore. Thanks to railroad men like Harriman, the wild American West had been all but subdued in less than a hundred years. In 1805, Lewis and Clark had witnessed herds of buffalo so large their movements shook the ground. By 1899, that same species faced extinction. The true American frontier now lay in the wilderness to the north. As the historian Maury Klein puts it, “Harriman’s idea of rest was to organize, underwrite, and direct what became the last major scientific expedition of the nineteenth century.”
Seated in his office, Merriam was polite but dubious about Harriman’s offer. Whoever had steered Harriman to Merriam had chosen wisely, though. The scientist, son of a congressman, was exceedingly well connected. He made quick inquiries, which confirmed that the railroad man was not only serious but probably incapable of joking. Cartoonists delighted in depicting Merriam, who wore round spectacles and combed his hair into a tall pouf, as an administrative owl. He was wise enough to see that he might have stumbled across the most elusive of creatures: a scientific expedition with no fixed budget. When Harriman visited Merriam’s home that night and insisted that in addition to covering all costs he would allow the team Merriam selected free rein to conduct their own research, Merriam was convinced that Harriman’s northbound Noah’s Ark was no rich man’s boondoggle.
“To be a member of it would be the event of a lifetime,” he realized.