Scientists have demonstrated conclusively that the most powerful force in the universe is the urge to inform an author that you’ve found an error in his or her book. If you have corrections, thoughts, or moose recipes you’d like to share, feel free to e-mail me at turnrightmp@gmail.com.
Anyone interested in learning more about Alaska’s history and environment, and the Harriman Expedition’s relation to each, will find the following sources useful:
The Harriman Alaska Series, vols. I–V, VIII–XIV
This twelve-volume collection, edited by C. Hart Merriam, is available online. (Confusingly, numbers six and seven were never published.) The first two volumes, which include the most interesting essays—especially John Burroughs’s travelogue and George Bird Grinnell’s proto-ecological essay on Alaska’s threatened salmon—can also be found in various paperback editions.
Looking Far North: The Harriman Expedition to Alaska, 1899, by William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan
The Harriman Alaska Expedition Retraced: A Century of Change, 1899–2001, edited by Thomas A. Litwin
Green Alaska: Dreams from the Far Coast, by Nancy Lord
Goetzmann and Sloan’s is the most accessible history of the 1899 voyage. Litwin organized a 2001 expedition à la Harriman, which included a boatload of multidisciplinary experts who faithfully followed the original route of the Elder (and arranged to return several of the totem poles stolen from Cape Fox during the 1899 expedition); Harriman Retraced comprises then and now essays, the words of the voyage participants interspersed with Litwin’s own accounts of each stop. Lord’s book is an impressionistic musing on the 1899 journey by one of Alaska’s best-known nature writers.
Travels in Alaska, by John Muir
Alaska Days with John Muir, by S. Hall Young
The book that launched a thousand Inside Passage cruise ships, and his companion’s account of the same events.
Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land, by Walter R. Borneman
Alaska, an American Colony, by Stephen Haycox
Exploration of Alaska, 1865–1900, by Morgan Sherwood
Borneman’s and Haycox’s histories explain how the major events in Alaska since 1741 have molded the state and its people. Sherwood’s recounts the men who made the first attempts to catalog the wonders of its vast territory.
The Life and Legend of E. H. Harriman, by Maury Klein
This magnificent biography devotes a full chapter to the 1899 expedition and places it in the context of Harriman’s late-blooming career.
The Only Kayak: A Journey into the Heart of Alaska, by Kim Heacox
John Muir and the Ice That Started a Fire: How a Visionary and the Glaciers of Alaska Changed America, by Kim Heacox
Only Kayak intertwines the author’s personal history with John Muir’s accounts of his visits to Glacier Bay. Ice That Started a Fire examines Muir’s time among Alaska’s glaciers as a catalyst of the American environmental movement.
Coming into the Country, by John McPhee
The book that almost every Alaskan recommends when asked for suggestions, and for a good reason: no piece of writing (by an Outsider, no less) better captures the forty-ninth state’s uniqueness and ethos of rugged individualism.