Harriman Alaskan Expedition

[grladams at teleport.com]

Some interesting side reading is a chapter from _The Life and Legend of E.
H. Harriman_ / Maury Klein. There are better books I'm sure on this but..
It is Chapter 12 entitled Going North. I think that since the the errily
exponential wealth-generating exploits of capitalism in ATD occur after a
the fictional Vormance expedition, it can't be too far off from some kind
of reality. The Harriman Expedition was in a ship called _The Elder_ . Even
the name of the ship eerily takes one to the funhouse of Lovecraft and
mixes it with the Visitors who have come to harvest innocence... (jolly
bringers of old world Rot, slaughterers of seals and cubs, civilizing
Indians to clean fish at canneries!) 

E H Harriman was a railroad magnate famous and wealthy because he held the
Union Pacific spearheading it's major improvement program. He was almost
unknown to the public at the time. He suffered from ill health and left his
success on hold at the height of his ambition to stop and attain his desire
from Alaska, which was (this book claims) to (and he did) hunt a Kodiak
bear (a mother and cub..)  For around two months his invited team of
scientists included John Burroughs, John Muir, George Bird Grinnell,
Clinton Hart Merriam, Edward S. Curtis, William Healey Dall, and William
Emerson Ritter. They shipped tons of supplies and cameras, a grammophone..
Among 50 colorful passengers, animals, there's a Scottish missionary
civilizing the natives in free enterprise, there's deafening roar of
explosions from the Treadwell Mine, there's a stray dog that is treated
well onboard, there's ghastly horrors, there's an expression of seeing
"granite ribs of the earth," 


The preamble to the chapter: (and maybe more of that mechanism of
evolution? just as arbitrary??)
"hardly less important than the actual fruit of the expedition is its value
as a sign-post to our multi-millionaires. A little while a go a Western man
of vast wealth was heard to complain to a friend that he did not know how
to spend his money satisfactorily. ... Mr Harriman's Alaska Expedition and
its magnificent results seem to indicate one true solution to the problem...
--Will Dall, "Discoveries in Our Arctic Region"


Snippets
"Now he had caged himself up with a cargo of academics and artists, wooly
thinkers and sensitive souls who had never cut a deal or met a payroll.
They were men who liked to ruminate and contemplate, who understood every
aspect of an egg except how to cook it."

...

"Drawing the launches up on a smooth white beach north of Cape Fox, the
group found an entire village of abandoned cabins fronted by a row of
nineteen beautifully carved totem poles. There were no signs of life; no
one knew why the inhabitants had fled. Decorations, crockery, even clothing
could be found inside the cabins, but the poles were the prize.
While the scientists ransacked the cabins for artifacts, Harriman brought
deck hands ashore to dig out several of the totem poles.... Some of the
scientists claimed poles for their institutions; Harriman helped himself to
a pair of large carved bears adorning graves. It took an entire day to
gather the treasures and fload them back to the Elder..."

....
Jill


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