Alaska was an idea in the minds of Europeans long before they had touched its shores. It was a fantasy before it had a name. (Ages of indigenous names were as yet unknown.) Previous to its becoming an American territory, the north was a space to dream over. And at this beginning there was a map.

In 1648 the Russian Cossack Semyon Dezhnev sailed east from the mouth of the Kolyma River in the Asian Arctic through a strait later named after the Danish navigator Vitus Bering, returning with vague rumors of land to the east. Thousands of years earlier...

In Darkest Alaska charts the experiences of travelers and tourists along the southeastern Alaskan coast and interior from the 1867 purchase through the Klondike gold rush. Focusing on the largely ignored late nineteenth-century Alaskan travel literature, this work places several decades of tourist activity at the center of late nineteenth-century northern expansion. The narrative follows travelers along the Inside Passage, the nearly thousand-mile sea lane that weaves a snakelike path up the coast from Puget Sound to Icy Strait. Protected from the fetch of the North Pacific, ships navigated through the islands and fjords, exposed to the open sea only...

“Less is known today of Central Alaska than of Central Africa,” noted Charles Erskine Scott Wood during an 1877 reconnaissance of the Inside Passage. Wood went north to climb mountains, but also “to acquire information about the unknown districts lying nearest the coast, with a view to future explorations.”¹ Acting as a military escort to Chicago adventurer Charles Taylor, the pair attempted an early ascent of Mount Fairweather and had their sights set on tackling Mount St. Elias. In the imperial drama of the late nineteenth century the image of Darkest Africa prevailed over the imaginative spaces of empire. And...

In 1889, Rudyard Kipling suffered a breakdown. “My head has given out,” Kipling wrote in a letter, “and I am forbidden to work and I am to go away somewhere … I can do nothing to save myself from breaking up now and again,” admitting to thoughts of suicide.¹ His doctors advised a sea voyage and extended travel to ease the strain of his work life. Arriving in San Francisco after a rough Pacific crossing, Kipling could only marvel with disappointment at the place. “Recklessness is in the air,” he noted of the Americans’ habits. Everything seemed expressed in “dollar...

Gazing at the green archipelago from the deck rail of the steamer Queen, Minister Stephen Merritt stared into the “inky blackness … the water deep, blue and clear.” He had found respite from the rigors of his city life in the “matchless scenes of indescribable beauty … the islands, the coves, fjords … strangeness and beauty; the calmness continues … more and more sublime.” Merritt could hardly contain his enthusiasm. “We are now sailing through a scene of unparalleled splendor…. Oh it is gloriously wonderful,” he wrote in his journal, describing the Inside Passage route to Alaska.¹ In June 1892,...

Not all travelers headed north pursuing the same scenic rewards. Though the leisure set exerted its persuasive powers over the representation of the north, and the transportation companies and advertisers marketed a particular regional aesthetic, the North and its meanings were broader and more complex than the prevailing sentiment. As powerful individuals and companies incorporated Alaska into a national network of capital, others boarded northbound steamers with different futures in mind. Workers heading north for wages, outcasts and outlaws escaped from their pasts, hopeful prospectors, women and men from all walks of life trooped northward with a world of expectations....

When Stephen Merritt, recovering from his depressive episodes, reached Wrangell in July 1892, he relished the chance to investigate “this strange, and to me, intensely wonderful place.” The town seemed to have changed little since the American takeover. The occasional boom of a gold discovery somewhere in the interior crowded the outpost, but it soon fell back into its sleepy corner of the world. C. E. S. Wood’s description in 1877 might have easily passed for Merritt’s view more than a decade later. “A few sick or bankrupt miners were hanging about the American town,” the visiting Wood wrote. “One...

Out of Fort Wrangell, steamers churned northward another hundred nautical miles to the mining center of Juneau. First west into Frederick Sound and then turning northwestward into the nearly seventy-mile stretch of the Stephens Passage, the ships carried their cargoes of tourists, miners, mail, groceries, and mining supplies to the booming village, site of the largest gold mine in the world during the late nineteenth century. Leafing through the pages of an Alaskan tour book, these tourists might have agreed with travel writer Eliza Scidmore, who marveled at the passing scenery. “There was something, too,” Scidmore wrote, “in the consciousness...

Leaving the smoking, clanking mine operations at Juneau, travelers returned to the slate dark sea and coastal wilds. Steaming across the Lynn Canal, around the north end of Admiralty Island, and west through Icy Strait, the vessels carried their sightseeing cargoes to Glacier Bay. In their thoughts the travelers shifted from the technological machine culture of the massive Juneau mines to what they thought of as nature’s culture at Glacier Bay. They moved easily from the noisy technological sublime to the geological sublime.¹

Crossing the gleaming sea, “each point or peak passed brought another glacier into view, nineteen glaciers in...

Alaska steamer excursions made a final stopover at Sitka. The regular mail ships remained for a full twenty-four hours, but the tour ships made shorter visits. “Sitka faces full upon the sea, overlooking a harbor that is dotted as full of small islands as a pepper box is with holes,” wrote one visitor of the island’s position.¹ The Sitka stop usually came at the end of the nearly two-week trip and boat-bound travelers felt pent up and ready to return south. But this final stop gave the tourists one last chance to take final snapshots and make curio purchases. In...

In August 1897 John White tossed up a half-crown to decide whether to book passage to Canada or Africa. Another restless Brit like Edward Glave, White worked as a clerk for a Fleet Street firm in London. He first found escape with the Greek foreign legion, fighting in the Greco-Turkish War of 1897. Returning to England, his “fate had been decided by the flip of a coin.”¹ White headed to Canada.

“Adventure,” he wrote in a letter to his father, “is like any other stimulant; the habit acquired is hard to abandon and satisfaction is found only in successive and...