A collection of profiles remembering and imagining the people referenced in Nelson's diary.
The name of this digital project, Harriman Recollected, plays on the multiple valences of the word “recollection.” On the one hand, to re-collect might mean to reexamine the origins of a collection—a possibility we explore on our Artifacts page. On the other hand, to recollect might mean to remember something anew, or to remember it differently. That is, “recollection” also signals an intention to challenge the conventional historical narratives of the Harriman Expedition.
Specifically, we want to affirm the past and ongoing existence and resistance of Indigenous peoples and other local communities who Nelson and fellow expedition members tried to overwrite. We seek to generate some counter-narratives that press against the assumptions on display in the selections from Nelson’s diary on the site. To do this, we are experimenting with the creation of speculative profiles of the peoples and places who Nelson only fleetingly acknowledges in his diary, usually without giving them a name or a voice.
Included below are the results of this experimentation in speculation: a short series of brief profiles of local workers and Indigenous crafters and guides. Though we cannot know the identities of many of these unnamed individuals, we can imagine the lives they might have lived and how those lives were impacted by the Harriman Alaska Expedition. By doing so, we hope to redirect attention away from the expedition’s usual cast of characters—the glamorized scientific heroes, mostly white settler men—and toward the many people who those men often only briefly encountered, but whose knowledge, generosity, or labor was often necessary to the expedition.
Sketch of kayaker from Nelson’s entry for June 25th.
Kayaker in iqyax (Bidarka)
Name once known
On June 25th, Nelson notes that while the George W. Elder was anchored in Gladhough Bay, an “Indian came along side [the ship] in a three-hole bidarka or Kayak made of walrus or sea lion skin on a frame.” The next day, June 26th, the expeditioners ventured to Port Wells Bay, and Nelson observes that there again they met the same canoer “who was alongside of us last evening in his bidarka in Gladhough Bay pulled alongside of us again here in Port Wells Bay at noon. What a distance he must have paddled! Some 70 or 80 miles.”
Nelson reflects, “And what is his object? After resting a few moments—neither last evening nor this noon did he leave his boat to come aboard ship—(and having received a loaf of bread which a steward threw to him) he motioned with his hand toward the glaciers at the upper end of the Bay and then paddled off in that direction.” Nelson pauses his narrative to sketch the canoer (see image at left).
The word bidarka is the Russian name for the kayaks of the Unangan and Sugpiaq (Alutiiq) people of the Aleutian Islands. In Unangam Tunuu, the kayak is iqyax. The traditional iqyax is distinguished by its bifurcated bow, as seen in Nelson’s drawing. This ancient craft is celebrated for its great speed—a trait evidenced by Nelson’s account of the distance travelled by one kayaker overnight—thanks to a light build, slender low profile, and flexible covering of seal or sea-lion skin.
Nelson’s sketch of the kayaker serves as a reminder that the waters plowed by the George W. Elder were peopled. Additionally, the drawing attests to the deep history of marine technological innovations in Alaska, such as iqyax, that had developed over thousands of years prior to the visits of uninvited colonial ships.
Where was the kayaker’s home, and what was the purpose of his long journey? Why was he headed toward the glaciers?
Cannery workers at Orca
Names once known
During an extended stay at Orca between June 25-27, Nelson made several visits to the local cannery to observe how the Chinese workers prepared the “great quantity of salmon” to meet the growing market demands for tin salmon. In his entries written during this time at Orca, he describes several steps of the salmon canning process, including the cutting and soldering of the tin cans, the transport of the fresh fish down to the “cutting-room,” and the removal of fins and entrails from the fish.
The Orca cannery was one of many fish-packing facilities established on the Pacific northwest coast in the nineteenth century that employed predominantly Chinese immigrant laborers. Nelson noted that the Orca cannery employed 140 men, all of them “Chinamen who are employed by a Chinese contractor with whom the Company has an agreement.” These laborers left their families behind in China and boarded a ship to San Francisco, and then from San Francisco to Orca, in order to work tirelessly without labor protections and earn approximately half a dollar per full case of packed salmon.
As for the identities of the workers that Nelson observed at Orca, we do not know. What were their names? Who were they missing at home?
Editor’s note: In our editorial principles, we discussed the ethical dimensions of reproducing photographs which may have been taken without the subject’s consent, such as the portraits of Alaska Natives in the Harriman Alaska Expedition souvenir albums. The same question of consent applies to the image of the cannery workers seen above, complicating its inclusion here. At the same time, though, we recognize that institutional archives have historically neglected the records of many racialized workers’ histories, contributing to the abstraction of labor from the laborers and supporting a narrative that settler-colonial industrial expansion simply “happened.” Ultimately, we decided to include the photograph of cannery employees as a way of visibilizing a form of work usually made invisible.
Salmon cannery workers at Astoria, Oregon, in the late nineteenth century. The organization of the workspace closely resembles the scene that Nelson saw in Orca. (Original Source: The South China Morning Post)
James, Expedition guide
On June 19, as the George W. Elder sailed through the waters of the Yakutat Tlingit, Nelson wrote that three Indigenous men—perhaps Tlingit—came on board the ship with otter pelts to sell. Though none of the expeditioners were willing to buy any fur, Nelson implies that they did ask one of the men to stay on board the Elder and “give some advice to [the] pilot” as the ship navigated the nearby bays. In describing this man who was to be their temporary guide, Nelson wrote: “young, one eyed, stubby moustache, Rough-rider hat, blue flannel shirt, vest, overalls in rubber boots.” Writing in the typical detached style of the nineteenth-century colonial ethnographer, Nelson carefully observed the guide’s appearance but neglected to recognize the guide’s humanity by providing his name.
Other firsthand accounts from the expedition add to our knowledge of the guide and his stay on board the ship. In William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan’s Looking Far North: The Harriman Alaska Expedition 1899, they write that the guide was named James. He “impressed Harriman so much that he invited the Indian to join the expedition as a consultant for the pilot,” and “‘Indian Jim’ soon became a familiar, well-respected figure on board.” This derogatory nickname reflects the expeditioners’ disregard for the legitimacy and integrity of Indigenous peoples and cultures in the regions where they were trespassing.
Who was James? We know what he wore, but little else. Where did he call home, and how did he spend his days? How did James and the expeditioners live alongside one another in the days (weeks?) that he stayed on board the Elder?
A boy living at Woody Island Orphanage
Name once known
The Woody Island BAptist Orphanage in 1915. University of Alaska Anchorage archives & Special collections.
On the 4th of July, the Harriman Alaska Expedition visited Woody Island (known to Nelson and fellow expeditioners as Wood Island at the time) to watch a baseball game between “the Wood Island and Kodiak teams.” This island was the site of a Baptist mission and orphanage, established in 1893 by Ernest and Ida Roscoe. Materials are scarce to construct the story of this orphanage and its impacts on the local community. One source, written for a past exhibit on Alutiiq culture at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History, suggests that the orphanage “provided a home for some children who needed one. But it also led to many conflicts with Native families over the custody of their children. The Baptist missionaries sometimes brought children to the orphanage, even against their parents’ will.”
Nelson did not think about this on July 4th, 1899, as he watched how the “Children of the Baptist Orphanage at Wood Island amused themselves with fire crackers presented by the North American Commercial Co.” He notes, “I asked a bright-looking boy engaged to setting off some fire crackers if he knew what day it was, and he did not answer me though I had found out that he could speak English.”
This boy may have been unwilling to talk to a white man like Nelson, who likely wore a clerical collar that reminded the boy of the religious institution where he was living, potentially against his will. Or perhaps this boy simply did not feel like talking. The orphanage was not a place that encouraged Indigenous ways of living well. The 4th of July holiday might have been a rare break from the hard labor that the orphans were required to undertake to provide food and supplies for the mission, as seen in the photo on the left. Children were denied the use of their own language or the practice of Indigenous spirituality or Russian Orthodoxy, the latter having spread in the region during the Russian occupation of Woody Island.
A contemporary index of the “inmates” at the orphanage lists 13 boys who lived at the orphanage in 1900, a year after Nelson’s visit. To which of these boys did Nelson try to speak? Was he Anton Larson, Alexander Colugan, Theodore Shelikoff?