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A 1794
drawing of the Russian fur trading settlement on
Kodiak. |
In 1799, the Russian American Company was granted an
imperial charter that gave the company sole economic and
governmental powers in the Russian's Alaskan territories.
Conditions for Alaska Natives improved, but they were still
seen as workers without rights. In 1810, 200 Aleuts from
Unalaska were sent to the Pribilofs Islands in the Bering
Sea for to establish a permanent seal harvesting community
there. Soon after, sea otter and seal populations dropped
precipitously, and by 1828, the Russian American Company was
compelled to put limits on the number of otter pelts that
could be purchased in each district.
Although resource exploitation was their top priority, the Russians did not entirely abandon exploration for its own sake. Russian Navy ships surveyed Alaska's Bering and Pacific coasts, reporting on Native communities, resources and natural features. Between 1800 and 1860, parties were sent along the coast and into the interior by the Russian American Company. In 1818, one party charted the coast between the Kuskokwim and Nushagak Rivers, and, in 1819, Andrei Ustiugov, an Aleut from Unalaska, charted Bristol Bay. In the 1830s, explorers traveled through the Yukon and explored Alaska's polar coast as far as Point Barrow.
U.S. Exploration in Alaska
By the mid-eighteenth century, several factors converged to set the stage for a new age in Alaskan exploration. Expeditions focused on geographical exploration and ethnographic inquiry, as well as resource exploitation. One significant factor contributing to this trend was the declining Asian fur market, and the near-extinction of the sea otter. As the Russian American Company found profits from fur sales dropping, the Russian government, embroiled in a number of conflicts in Europe, lost interest in Alaska. In 1859, the government authorized Edoard de Stoeckl, a Russian diplomat in the U.S. delegation, to broach the subject of selling Alaska to the United States.
To Spencer F. Baird, assistant secretary of the recently-founded Smithsonian Institution, the prospect of an impending Alaska sale was good news indeed. Baird was building the Smithsonian's natural history collection, and hoped to include all parts of the North American continent. Now, with an expanding American interest in the territory, he recruited collectors from the commercial and government survey teams that were headed to document Alaska's resources.
George Kennicott, a seasoned
naturalist and explorer, led the Smithsonian's first Arctic
expedition. Kennicott spent the years 1859 to 1863 in the
Yukon, and eventually sent forty boxes, loaded with natural
and ethnographic materials, to Washington, D.C. Kennicott's
second expedition, in 1865, was financed by the Western
Union Telegraph Company. Kennicott and his team were charged
with surveying a route for a trans-Alaskan, trans-Siberian
cable route, and with collecting ethnographic and natural
history specimens along the way. When Kennicott died
unexpectedly on this trip, his assistant, the young William
Healey Dall, took over as leader. But a rival company laid
the Atlantic telegraph cable first, and Western Union
canceled the expedition in July 27, 1866. Dall stayed on,and
over the next decades he made more than a dozen trips to
Alaska. He worked for the Smithsonian, collecting and
organizing specimens. He worked for the U.S. Coast Survey,
charting the coastal features along the Aleutian chain, and,
in 1880, the Bering Strait and the Arctic Ocean. He worked
for the U.S. Geological Survey as a paleontologist, and
during his stays in Washington wrote books and reports, and
organized the collections from the field. When C. Hart
Merriam set out to assemble a team for the 1899 Harriman
Alaska Expedition, William Healey Dall was one of the first
men he contacted.
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A sample page
from one of Dall's field notebooks showing Eskimo
clothing details. |
During the last decades of the 19th century, a growing
interest in Native cultures led to a number of field studies
among the Alaska Natives. One such venture the Jessup
Expedition, begun in 1897, was sponsored by the American
Museum of Natural History. The project involved six years of
fieldwork among Native communities in northeastern Asia and
northwestern North America, and resulted in extensive
reports on Native life, language, and culture, and
contributed almost 17,000 artifacts to the Smithsonian's
collections.
The Harriman Expedition
E. H. Harriman was not an
ethnographer or a map-maker. He was a business man, a stock
broker turned railroad owner, but he did not come to Alaska
on a business trip. He knew, of course, that there was money
to be made in Alaska, and he, along with any number of
entrepreneurs were eager to use the developing technologies
of rail and cable to capitalize on the business
opportunities that might arise. But Harriman's motive for
coming to Alaska stemmed from his well-documented love of
the outdoors. His decision to turn a wilderness trip into a
serious exploration of the coast speaks to his undeniable
ability to do things on a grand scale, and the results
reflect this as well. The expedition returned with more than
one hundred trunks of specimens and more than five thousand
photographs and colored illustrations. The scientists
produced thirteen volumes of data that took twelve years to
compile. There were two major discoveries, a new fjord and
glacier, and a sweeping survey of an environment in flux.
The expedition arrived when Alaska's patina of pure
wilderness was beginning to show wear and tear from resource
exploitation. The Gold Rush was in full swing, salmon
canneries were working round the clock, and fur seal
rookeries exported thousands of skins every year. The Native
cultures were contending with a growing tourist community,
and subsistence practices were giving way to a new economy
of gold, fish and fur. The Harriman scholars of 1899
observed and catalogued what they saw: a gloriously
beautiful land on the cusp of inevitable and sometime
devastating change.
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Members of
the Harriman Expedition camping at Point
Gustavus |
Tlingit
Canoe
Tlingit canoe designed
for seal hunting "St. Petersburg. 16
March, 1730. On February 28 past Fleet Captain
Bering arrived back here from Kamchatka. He was
sent there on the personal order of Emperor Peter
the Great... to explore the northeastern limits of
this land and to ascertain whether this land, as
several think, is jointed to the northern part of
America." From the first public
notice of Bering's 1828 voyage, published in the
Sanktpeterburgskiia Vedomosti. "Of all hunts, the sea
otter hunt requires the most experience, skill, and
patience. Fur seals, sea lions, and walruses,
despite their strength and size, are caught more
easily and more quickly." Ferdinand Von Wrangell,
1835 "The Russian-American
colonies, seeing the opportunity for marketing in
various places furs, fats, fish, and other natural
products, would attract people of all kinds, tries
in the sciences and arts, and would set about
establishing mills and factories ... Cities would
finally arise out of villages." N. P. Rumyantsev,
Russian Minister of Commerce, reporting in 1803 on
the prospects for Russian growth in Alaska. "I have traveled on
snow shoes, with the thermometer from 8 to 40 below
zero. I have paddled in open canoes up stream six
hundred and fifty miles, and down, 1,300 miles. I
have obtained 4,450 specimens, including a set of
the rocks from Fort Yukon to the sea." William Healey Dall,
reporting on his explorations in Alaska, 1867 "I soon saw that he was
uncommon. He was taking a trip for rest, and at the
same time managing his exploring guests as if we
were a grateful, soothing, essential part of his
rest cure, though scientific explorers are not
easily managed, and in large mixed lots are rather
inflammable and explosive, especially when
compressed on a ship." John Muir, writing
about E. H. Harriman in Harriman the Man,
1911.
Click image for a
larger view
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For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: [email protected] |