Harriman Alaskan Expedition

[Michael Bailey]

I had it in the back of my mind to read up on Harriman.
Thanks for sharing that.  Lots of correspondences, or at
least eigenvalues, with the Vormance expedition.

On 1/9/08, grladams at teleport.com <grladams at teleport.com> wrote:
> 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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