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In Darkest Alaska: and Empire Along the Inside Passage (Nature and Culture in America) (Nature and Culture in America)

Amazon.com Price:  $29.26 (as of 02/03/2019 01:03 PST- Details)

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Description

Before Alaska became a mining bonanza, it was once a scenic bonanza, a place larger within the American imagination than in its actual borders. Prior to the great Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, thousands of scenic adventurers journeyed along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea-lane that snakes up the Pacific coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Both the famous–including wilderness advocate John Muir, landscape painter Albert Bierstadt, and photographers Eadweard Muybridge and Edward Curtis–and the long forgotten–a gay ex-sailor, a former society reporter, an African explorer, and a neurasthenic Methodist minister–returned with fascinating accounts in their Alaskan journeys, becoming advance women and men for an expanding United States.

In Darkest Alaska explores the preferred images conjured by these travelers’ tales, in addition to their influence at the broader society. Drawing on full of life firsthand accounts, archival photographs, maps, and other ephemera of the day, historian Robert Campbell chronicles how Gilded Age sightseers were inspired by Alaska’s bounty of evolutionary treasures, tribal artifacts, geological riches, and novel thrills to produce a wealth of highly imaginative reportage concerning the territory. By portraying the territory as a “Last West” ripe for American conquest, tourists helped pave the best way for settlement and exploitation.

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