Introduction to the diary
One of the primary goals of the Harriman Recollected project was to transcribe George F. Nelson’s diary for the first time and make findings from the diary more accessible for students, researchers, and educators through this website. However, we want to present Nelson’s writings in a critical framework that interrogates his colonial worldview and his influence on the rhetoric and actions of the Harriman Alaska Expedition.
The following brief history of the expedition and biography of Nelson provide helpful context for the selections from Nelson’s diary that have been presented on this website.
The George W. Elder in Huna Tlingit Territory (Glacier Bay), Alaska, in June 1899. From the Harriman Expedition Souvenir Album, Penn State Eberly Family Special Collections Library.
What was the harriman alaska expedition?
In 1899, a settler financier and railroad magnate named Edward Harriman was advised by his doctor to take a vacation from his job as president of the Union Pacific Railroad. Harriman decided on an Alaskan cruise, inspired by the nineteenth-century explosion in steamship tourism for the wealthy elite that transformed a trip to Alaska into a badge of status. Wanting to combine leisure with the making of his philanthropic legacy, Harriman rented his own ship, the George W. Elder, and invited over thirty field-defining scientists who were encouraged to follow any pursuit which might enhance American knowledge of Alaska. They came from colonial institutions like Cornell, Yale, the Chicago Field Museum, the U.S. Geological Survey, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.
Among them was the settler conservationist hero John Muir, whose previous journeys to Alaska had turned him into an evangelist of what he called “glacial gospel”; the lesser-known but equally influential George Bird Grinnell, a former scout for General Custer and an engineer of the national park system; and naturalist William Dall, whose 1887 book, Alaska and Its Resources, was one of the first publications by an American settler after the Alaska Purchase that framed the territory in terms of the prospects for U.S. national growth. These elite men of science would generate enough data during the expedition to fill a thirteen-volume report, titled the Harriman Alaska Expedition, that addressed the region’s geography, glaciology, flora and fauna, and more.
Also on board the George Elder was a photographer named Edward Curtis, who was just developing his interests in landscapes and Indigenous peoples which would inspire his later, more famous work, The North American Indian. As the official photographer of the HAE, Curtis took hundreds of photographs that he compiled into two souvenir albums.
Harriman and his fifty companions embarked from Seattle on May 31, 1899, for a two-month, $100,000-dollar cruise along the southeastern coast of Alaska and across the Bering Strait to Siberia. On this route, they trespassed over the lands and waters of the Tsimshian, Tlingit, dAXunhyuu or Eyak, Alutiiq and Sugpiaq, Dena’ina, Unangax̂, Inupiaq, and Siberian Yupik.
This expedition is often remembered for its violent raid on a Tlingit village. At Gaash, or Cape Fox, in the territory of the Saanya Kwaan Tlingit, the expedition landed at a village they wrongfully assumed to be deserted and looted the homes and grounds for carvings. Many of these sacred pieces were repatriated in 2001 after the Saanya Kwaan submitted a claim through the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act. The original act of theft still casts a dark shadow over the expedition legacy. Nelson’s description of the raid is included in the diary entries assembled for this website.
One of the two souvenir photograph albums of the Harriman Alaska Expedition compiled by Edward Curtis and his assistant Duncan Inverarity. Penn State Eberly Family Special Collections Library.
The map on the left, included in the expedition souvenir albums, shows Alaska as Harriman and his party wanted to see it: empty land that was ready for American expansion. The map on the right, created by the Alaska Native Language Center at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, shows that Alaska was never empty, but always inhabited by Indigenous nations whose ancestors have tended the land and water for time immemorial.
The harriman alaska expedition souvenir album, eberly family special collections library, penn state.
Copyright © 2011 Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Institute of Social and Economic Research, University of Alaska Anchorage.
Who was George Francis Nelson?
George Francis Nelson (original source)
Nelson’s name has meant little to most scholars of the Harriman voyage and was likely insignificant to many of the scientists who comprised the expedition. Being neither a scientist nor an artist, his perspective was not included in the thirteen-volume set of findings published in the years after the expedition.
But as a chaplain, Nelson played an important role on board the ship, and he brought to the job a range of curious life experiences that gave him a particularly nationalist and colonial worldview. After leaving college at Yale in his sophomore year and serving in the U.S. Army, Nelson pursued religious training and began practicing as an Episcopalian priest in New York City. At the time of Harriman’s voyage to Alaska, Nelson was serving as a bishop’s secretary and as Superintendent of the New York City Mission Society.
Having no children of his own, Nelson’s belongings were passed down to his nieces and nephews upon his death. His diary from the Harriman Alaska Expedition and eight other items that had been in his possession were donated to Penn State by his great-great nephews and niece, alumni of the school, in 1989.
Why should we read Nelson's diary?
Nelson’s diary reveals a different view of Alaska than the more popular documentary records of the Harriman Alaska Expedition because Nelson, unlike the scientists on board, was involved in the ongoing mission school system in Alaska. While his fellow expedition members were collecting plant specimens and measuring glaciers, Nelson was often walking the grounds of the different mission schools that dotted the expedition path. Recognizing Nelson’s influence on the expedition is a first step toward recognizing the Harriman Alaska Expedition’s imbrication in violent anti-Indigenous social regimes, like the residential school system.
The diary also provides a rare account of Alaska’s changing economic, social, and environmental systems at the close of the nineteenth century. Nelson’s entries recount exchanges with the Tlingit, Aleut, and Yupik peoples at seasonal camps, as well as the Chinese, Russian, and other immigrant communities employed by the fishing, whaling, and mining industries. Elsewhere, Nelson illustrates the diary with drawings of many glaciers that either no longer exist or are much diminished in size. In this way, the diary is a compelling personal record of climate change. For these reasons, Nelson’s diary is an important, though difficult, resource in the study of Alaska’s history.
Selections from the diary have been organized around the following four themes. Click any theme to explore: