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The Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 voyaged up the Inside Passage, passing hundreds of forested islands, isolated coves, towering glaciers, and white-dipped mountains rising in waves against the mainland. The expedition—which included Muir’s fellow naturalist John Burroughs, the scientist William H. Dall, the botanist William Brewer, the conservationist and ethnographer George Bird Grinnell, the artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and the ethnographer and photographer Edward S. Curtis—eventually crossed the Bering Sea all the way to the Chukchi Peninsula to catch a glimpse of Siberian soil before heading back to Puget Sound. They spent five days in Glacier Bay—one of the first scientific expeditions to this ecosystem—with Muir as their teacher with regard to glaciers.

What shocked members of the Harriman Expedition more than the wild beauty itself was how imprudently coastal Alaska was being stripped of its natural resources. They noted deforestation, clear-cutting, overfishing, animal slaughter. Canneries and extraction companies were in the process of recklessly slashing many natural features. “At places,” Burroughs wrote, “the country looks as if all the railroad forces in the world have been turned loose to delve and rend and pile in some mad, insane folly and debauch.”59 Most troublesome of all were the fifty-five salmon canneries along coastal Alaska, many around the Inside Passage and far west at Bristol Bay. Refusing to pay Native Alaskans fair wages, these big canneries hired cheap Chinese labor. Determined not to be federally regulated, these canneries formed the Alaska Packers’ Association.60

In Prince William Sound the Elder explored the largest concentration of tidewater glaciers in Alaska. Many were actively calving. The surrounding Chugach and Kenai mountain glaciers were so powerful that they had cut more than forty fjords into the margins of the sound. The expedition spent perhaps the finest hours of the journey at College Fjord, twenty-five miles long and three miles wide. The members even discovered an unmapped inlet, dubbed Harriman Fjord as a tribute to their benefactor, containing over 100 glaciers. Muir burst with childlike excitement at seeing these glaciers. Instead of sleeping on the Elder, he pitched a tent along the shore to be closer to them. Grove Karl Gilbert, a glaciologist, always with binoculars in hand, likewise thrilled at seeing the Prince William Sound glaciers, taking invaluable notes on the stunning topography. “Gilbert’s work on the Harriman Expedition was a major contribution to glacial geology,” the historians William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan wrote in Looking Far North. “He had described the Ice Age horizons and he had outlined the physical mechanics of glaciers and glacial action.”61

What came from the expedition was the publication of the thirteen-volume Harriman Expedition reports (usually called the Harriman Alaska Series). These scientific volumes, organized around information gathered on the cruise, captured the public imagination about wild Alaska as nothing had before. The fact that the northern third of Alaska (above the Arctic Circle) had yet to be properly explored or mapped excited people’s imagination. Want to have a mountain named after yourself?—head to the Brooks Range or the Aleutian Range. Also, Harriman’s eminent scientists brought back a wealth of data that opened up Alaska to natural history for the first time. Muir, however, was frustrated with the penchant of the expedition’s members for hunting bear and catching the biggest fish. Muir also found the opulence aboard the Elder (the expedition’s ship) off-putting; too much faux positioning went on. “Why, I am richer than Harriman,” Muir bluntly declared. “I have all the money I want and he hasn’t.”62

Some fifty scientists compiled the Harriman Alaska Series; editorial work was done in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Berkeley, California. Harriman, as always, was generous with pay. The team modeled the scientific volumes on