Manuscript/Mixed Material The Harriman Alaska Expedition: Chronicles and Souvenirs May to August 1899

Title

• The Harriman Alaska Expedition: Chronicles and Souvenirs May to August 1899

Created / Published

• May-Aug-1899

Headings

• -  Alaska--Description and travel
• -  Discoveries in geography
• -  Landscape painting--United States
• -  Indians, Treatment of--North America
• -  Manuscripts

Genre

• Manuscripts

Notes

• -  This is the private souvenir album created collectively by the members of the scientific expedition along the Alaskan coast funded and accompanied by railroad magnate Edward H. Harriman in the summer of 1899. In addition to the Harriman family, the expedition included a host of scientific, literary and artistic luminaries, whose names are listed in the album; the major results of its scientific and ethnological investigations filled fifteen volumes published between 1901 and 1914. The album includes maps, photographs, paintings, poems, song lyrics, and prose, reflecting participants' experience of the beauty of the scenery, their perceptions of wildlife, of Native peoples and customs, their scientific field observations, interpersonal relationships, and patriotic celebrations on the Fourth of July. Highlights include the photographs of Edward S. Curtis, for whom the Expedition launched a remarkable career as a visual chronicler of Native Americans; paintings by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, at the outset of his career as the nation's most notable ornithological painter since Audubon; notes on the region's indigenous trees from pioneering forester Bernhard E. Fernow; a meditation on the seasons by wildlife conservationist George B. Grinnell; and various entries by nature essayist John Burroughs and by America's great prophet of wilderness (and lover of Alaska), John Muir. The album's contents embody in a single cultural artifact many of the complexities and contradictions which shaped the formative identity of the American conservation movement: its foundation in scientific knowledge and in the technical expertise of science and geographical exploration; its deep undercurrent of piety, ardent spiritual and aesthetic aspirations, and its debt to art, literature, and photography; its moral and sentimental love of nature; its appetite for scenery, travel, and adventure; its social base in urban wealth and leisure, and in the close-knit personal universe of a confident elite, with its overlapping circles of acquaintance in science, technology, literature, private wealth, government, sport, and recreation; its moral earnestness, and its patriotic faith
• -  Part of The Evolution of the Conservation Movement
• -  Former identifer: vm03

Source Collection

• W. Averell Harriman

Repository

• Manuscript Division

Digital Id

• https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.mss/mss61911.0001

Online Format

• image

IIIF Presentation Manifest

• Manifest (JSON/LD)