In the summer of 1899 as the nineteenth century drew to a close, one of America’s up-and-coming powers, soon-to-be rail baron E. H. Harriman, took a two-month vacation. He went to Alaska. His wife, Mary, and their five children, including seven-year-old Averell, went with him. There, the similarities with other family vacations ended. Also along were 119 others: three relatives and a friend; a retinue of Harriman staff and servants, including two stenographers, a doctor, a nurse, and a chaplain; 65 officers and crew of the chartered steamer George W. Elder; 5 budding artists and photographers; and 25 of the era’s most distinguished geologists, botanists, ornithologists, and ethnologists. It was, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, the most distinguished gathering of scientists, writers, and naturalists since Thomas Jefferson dined alone. And if a single event can be called the crucible of Alaskan conservation efforts, the Harriman Alaska Expedition is it.
Harriman’s doctor had told him to take a break. His rescue of the Union Pacific was in full swing. His acquisition of the Southern Pacific and his fight with Jim Hill for the Northern Pacific were two years in the future. Harriman may have gone purely for the diversion. He may have underwritten the venture as a grand philanthropic gesture to East Coast society, which still saw him as somewhat of an upstart outsider. Some later speculated—without much basis in fact—that the coterie of scientists was mere window dressing to obscure his real motive: a quiet investigation of the feasibility of a railroad between New York and Paris via a tunnel under the Bering Strait. Given Harriman’s nature, it was probably a combination of motives, including one purely personal one. The Wall Street financier was determined to bring home an Alaskan brown bear. The summer’s itinerary was left quite open, except that a definite hunting stop was scheduled at Kodiak Island.
The George W. Elder was not your average yacht. Originally built in 1877 for the Oregon Steamship Company, the ship first saw service as a regular on the run between San Francisco and Portland. She was 250 feet long, had a beam of 38.5 feet, and was registered at 1,709 tons. Two slender masts towered fore and aft of a large smokestack that sat squarely amidships. Her coal-fired boiler and large three-bladed propellers were capable of making twelve knots. The iron steamship was plying the waters of the Inside Passage as a mail streamer before Harriman ordered it refitted for his cruise. When the Elder’s makeover was complete, the vessel had become a luxury liner, furnished with staterooms, scientific labs, and a 500-volume library boasting almost everything that had ever been written about Alaska. In her holds, there were livestock pens crowded with cows, pigs, and chickens—just in case the hunters and fishermen on board were not successful.
Harriman left the invitations and details of organizing the scientific participants to C. Hart Merriam, then chief of the U.S. Biological Survey. The inner circles of exploration and science were particularly highbrow in the later decades of the nineteenth century, and Merriam recruited heavily from among his fellow members of the venerable Cosmos Club of Washington, D.C., and the National Academy of Sciences. The Harriman party included ornithologist and author John Burroughs, glaciologist Grove Karl Gilbert, artists R. Swain Gifford, Frederick S. Dellenbaugh, and Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and photographer Edward S. Curtis. William H. Dall was along as sort of the “grand old man” of Alaska, as was John Muir, by now well established as America’s foremost wilderness sage. Henry Gannett, chief geographer of the U.S. Geological Survey, joined the group and would pen several of the expedition’s most memorable lines.
But the expedition’s most influential writer was probably George Bird Grinnell. He was an ethnologist, author of books about Native Americans, and publisher of Forest and Stream, one of the most widely read outdoor magazines of the day. As early as an 1887 editorial, Grinnell had proposed an organization to curb the excesses of sport hunting and promote renewable wildlife and natural resources management. Shortly thereafter, Theodore Roosevelt—then known largely to Forest and Stream readers only as the author of Hunting Trips of a Ranchman—hosted a dinner party for a group of gentlemen sportsmen. Out of this gathering grew the Boone and Crockett Club, America’s first national conservation organization. (Five years later, John Muir founded the Sierra Club.) Doubtless TR himself would have delighted in the Harriman adventure, but by 1899 he was up to his eyebrows in work in his first year as governor of New York.
After a trip by special train across country from New York to Seattle, the assembled party left Seattle on board the Elder on May 31, 1899. As the ship steamed north, the scientific luminaries engaged in impromptu discussions on a host of topics and took turns giving formal nightly lectures. To be sure, there was a collegiate atmosphere on board. The Harriman Alaska Expedition even had its own cheer: “Who are we? Who are we? We are, we are, H.A.E.!”34 It was the ultimate semester at sea.
The Elder’s first stops were at Annette Island, where the Reverend William Duncan had established a reservation for Tsimshian Native Americans from British Columbia in 1887, and at Wrangell, still a relatively rough-and-tumble outpost. Then it was on to Juneau with a tour of the great Treadwell Mine and Skagway with a ride on the newly constructed White Pass and Yukon Railway. The railroad was complete to Lake Bennett, but officially operating only between Skagway and the White Pass summit. Harriman paid close attention to Mike Heney’s handiwork and got so engrossed in the area that the train departing the summit for Skagway left without him—a mistake that was quickly discovered and rectified. It simply would not do to run off without the man who was paying the bills!
From Skagway, the Elder called briefly at Juneau to retrieve a scientific party and then headed for John Muir’s old stomping grounds at Glacier Bay. The party spent five days there, the longest stop of any on the trip. Muir held court on the glacial retreats that had occurred since his first visits and no doubt delighted in telling the Harriman children the story of the faithful Stickeen. From the bay, it was south down Peril Strait to Sitka, where the party was feted by territorial governor John Brady and given a tour of Sheldon Jackson’s budding museum. Farther up the coast at Yakutat Bay, they visited a Tlingit sealing camp, and Harriman intrigued local Tlingit by playing a phonograph recording he had made of Tlingit chants at Sitka only a few days earlier. Obviously, he had all of the latest “toys.”
The Elder sailed west from Yakutat and put in to the harbor at Orca (soon to be overshadowed by Cordova) before steaming amid the mixed puzzle pieces of Prince William Sound. Scientists and laymen alike marveled at the huge glacier west of Port Valdez that rivaled anything in Muir’s Glacier Bay. Collectively, they gave it the name Columbia, after Columbia University. Farther west, the Elder poked its bow into two largely unexplored fjords. In 1794, Vancouver gave the name Port Wells to the wide northwestern arm of Prince William Sound. Just the year before the Elder’s arrival, army captain Edwin F. Glenn camped there with orders to probe the towering Chugach Mountains for routes to the Copper and Susitna Rivers. Glenn found none, and the area became the one location of the Elder’s entire cruise where expedition members liberally sprinkled place-names.
At the head of the main northerly extension of Port Wells, the expedition continued the university tradition and named twin glaciers after Harvard and Yale. To four large glaciers draping the western side of the fjord, they gave the names Smith, Bryn Mawr, Vassar, and Wellesley, and then decided that the entire location should be called College Fiord. A decade later, geologist U. S. Grant (no relation to the famous general and president) added the names of the remaining Seven Sisters, Baltimore, Barnard, and Holyoke, to three smaller glaciers also along the western side of College Fiord.
The westernmost of the two fjords was a surprise. It was not marked on the charts, but the Elder gingerly picked her way past the Barry Glacier at its mouth and steamed into a large fjord rimmed by glaciers and snow-clad peaks. The fjord and the massive glacier at its head were named after their host, but around Harriman Fiord, the group also bestowed a host of descriptive names, including the Cascade, Serpentine, Stairway, Surprise, and Toboggan Glaciers. Later, U. S. Grant and his associates also added names here to commemorate the expedition: Mounts Gilbert, Curtis, Muir, Gannett, and Emerson for the scientists and Mount Doran for Captain Peter Doran of the Elder.
Now it was time to keep the appointment on Kodiak Island. They put in at Kodiak, and while Mrs. Harriman organized picnic excursions and rehearsed the upcoming Fourth of July program, Mr. Harriman and Merriam, backed up by a properly armed retinue, went tramping across Kodiak Island. The Wall Street baron got his forest bruin, and Merriam was delighted to confirm that it was indeed a Kodiak brown bear. The fact that it was on the small size, and a younger female with a small cub at that, was downplayed, and only John Muir winced at the sight of the two skins being brought on board the Elder.
Supposedly, it was Mrs. Harriman who insisted on seeing the Bering Strait. Perhaps, but the Elder would not have moved one inch in that direction if EHH had not approved. Maybe he was thinking about a rail tunnel under its waters after all. Captain Doran and local pilot Omar J. Humphrey steered the ship to Dutch Harbor and then the Pribilofs with only minor mishap, it being not at all uncommon in those days for a coastal steamer to run aground or hit a rock or two here and there. In the Pribilofs, Merriam gave a well-received lecture on seal rookeries before the steamer turned toward Siberia. After a stop on the Siberian coast, Mrs. Harriman got her wish, and the Elder steamed east across the Bering Strait to Port Clarence, an Inupiat settlement just south of Cape Prince of Wales. This was the northernmost point visited, and on July 13, the Elder turned south.
Given the methods of the day, it had been a whirlwind trip. How much relaxing Harriman had done is open to question. As with everything he did, Harriman had participated to the fullest in all of the shipboard activities and shore explorations, including piloting small boats through ice-choked bays and raging surf. By the time the ship was again back in southeast Alaska, it was the looming railroad wars that again weighed heavily on his mind. Supposedly, even Harriman soon growled, “I don’t give a damn if I never see any more scenery.”35
But there was one more major stop to be made. On the trip north, Harriman had heard rumors of an abandoned Tlingit village south of Wrangell. If time permitted, he intended to stop. It did and the Elder dropped anchor off the Tlingit village of Cape Fox southeast of Ketchikan. Cape Fox was not inhabited, its residents having moved north to the village of Saxman closer to Ketchikan. Nineteen totem poles, burial grounds, and houses containing belongings remained. Whether these were abandoned in the Anglo-Saxon sense is debatable. Nonetheless, the expedition members swarmed ashore and collected a number of artifacts, including several totems. To the ethnologists’ credit, these artifacts ended up at the California Academy of Science, Chicago’s Field Museum, and the University of Michigan, but it would be some decades before this collecting mentality was replaced by the preservation mentality. Muir, who had already looked the other way at some of his companions’ actions, was horrified.
The George W. Elder dropped anchor in Seattle on July 30. Nineteenth-century anthropological collecting methods aside, the trip was a remarkable documentation of Alaska on the verge of a new frontier. C. Hart Merriam was charged with organizing the expedition’s papers and photographs. They appeared in eleven volumes over the next fifteen years and became the most complete collection of Alaskan data since William H. Dall’s Alaska and Its Resources was published in 1870. Two other volumes, with descriptions of Alaska’s mammals to be written by Merriam himself, never appeared, perhaps because Merriam became too bogged down in his editorial duties to write them.
E. H. Harriman immediately again immersed himself in railroading, but the camaraderie and collaboration of the scientific members of his expedition would have a decided impact on the conservation consciousness of Alaska and the nation. Edward Curtis would go on to become a world-renowned photographer, Gilbert a foremost authority on glaciation. Grinnell, Merriam, Burroughs, Muir, and others would all work together in the conservation battles of the next three decades.
If there is a fitting valedictory for the Harriman Alaska Expedition, perhaps it was the words penned by Henry Gannett in his section of the report on the general geography: “There is one word of advice and caution to be given to those intending to visit Alaska for pleasure, for sightseeing. If you are old, go by all means; but if you are young, wait. The scenery of Alaska is much grander than anything else of the kind in the world, and it is not well to dull one’s capacity for enjoyment by seeing the finest first.”36
Then again, perhaps the words were more fittingly a prelude, because the Harriman Alaska Expedition highlighted the dichotomy that would grip Alaska throughout the next century: Was it a land of rare beauty to be preserved as wilderness at all costs? Or was it truly the “last frontier” to be tamed with roads, railroads, airfields, pipelines, and more. A century after E. H. Harriman’s summer vacation, the questions still remain.
And what of the venerable George W. Elder? Released from the Harriman charter, the Elder returned to regular service and then hit a rock in the Columbia River in 1905 and sank. It was raised a year later and repaired, but its final resting place is unknown. It was last reported bound for Puget Sound from South America in 1918 with a load of fertilizer nitrates on board.