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the request of the Russian Academy of Science, had invited Steller to come along on the 1741 voyage to record wildlife sightings. Working quickly under severe time constraints, Steller took excellent notes on climate, soil, and resident flora and fauna. Allowed only ten hours on Kayak Island, principally to help collect freshwater, he nevertheless discovered Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri), recognizing it as resembling the eastern American blue jay. “This bird,” Steller wrote, “proved to me that we were really in America.”11 The same afternoon he found Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri), Steller’s sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus, now endangered), and Steller’s white raven (a mystery). He discovered all sorts of new fish. As the historian Corey Ford pointed out in Where the Sea Breaks Its Back, Steller never missed an opportunity to attach his name to an Alaskan discovery in need of instant classification. There were also Steller’s greenling (Hexagrammos stelleri), a colorful rock trout; Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), a giant northern manatee; and Steller’s sea monkey (which was never formally identified). That was a lot of naming for a single working day.12

Steller also stumbled on a Native encampment, where the campfire coals were still warm but nobody was to be seen. Fearful that enemies were lurking around, Steller swiped a few Indian artifacts and fled back to the ship.13 Steller’s naturalist studies were sui generis in eighteenth-century Alaska. He was a man far ahead of his time. On the return voyage to Russia many of the sailors on the Bering Expedition were sick with scurvy. Serving as a herbalist, Steller administered antiscorbutic broths that were credited with saving lives. “He was brilliant; he was arrogant; he was gifted as are few men,” the former director of the Alaska Game Commission Frank Dufresne wrote of Steller. “Though he spent no more than ten hours on Alaskan soil, his accomplishments in that short day were such that his name will live on forever.”14

Alaska’s biological diversity seemed to explorers a strange remnant from the ice age. American geographers around the time of the Harriman Expedition divided the territory into five very distinct ecosystems: (1) the Arctic, (2) Western Alaska, (3) the Interior, (4) Southwestern Alaska, and (5) the Southeastern Panhandle (including the Inside Passage cities of Sitka, Skagway, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Haines, and Juneau). Depending on where you went, there were icy fjords, sedge meadows, glacial fields, volcanic ranges, and tundra regions. What the Mississippi River had been to Mark Twain’s imagination, the 1,980-mile Yukon River—whose watershed comprised nearly half of Alaska—was to the new generation of fortune seekers. For a natural scientist wanting to start a career, the banks of the Yukon River were (and still are) an all-you-can-gaze-at smorgasbord of wildlife. Despite the presence of scientists on the Elder, mysteries such as caribou migratory routes or wolf ecology were largely propagated by unreliable oral tradition. A university-trained biologist, one who wrote well, could make a distinguished reputation seemingly overnight by trekking north from the Lower Forty-Eight and investigating the biological face of roadless Alaska.15

Alaska belonged to the Native tribes and wildlife while Roosevelt was growing up in New York City following the Civil War. Muir in The Cruise of the Corwin had deemed the Indians “the wildest animals of all.”16 Alaska was far removed even from the slow crop-growing pulse of rural American life. Farmers had yet to settle there. A few rogue gold miners made their way from British Columbia hoping to strike a vein. But wandering fur hunters from the Rockies and whalers from Russia, Great Britain, and Canada were the most prevalent new arrivals. During the summer months, whales swam the coastal waters in pods; their sheer numbers would have baffled and delighted a New Englander. Musk oxen (Ovibos moschatus) roamed wild, shaggy relics of the ice age. But Danish, Norwegian, and American hunters were quickly driving