Author Description

"This contemporary account of the 1899 Harriman Alaska Expedition is nature writing at its best. One hundred years after that landmark voyage, Nancy Lord follows by boat and dream, seeking to understand this century's attitudes toward nature, landscape, and culture. The Harriman Alaska Expedition assembled a company of exceptional characters - the nature writers John Burroughs and John Muir, photographer Edward Curtis, scientist William Dall, conservationist and ethnographer George Bird Grinnell, bird artist Louis Agassiz-Fuertes, geologist Henry Gannett, and others - to explore Alaska's untamed coast. They cruised glacial fjords, collected specimens, and photographed Alaska's Native people."--BOOK JACKET. "Nancy Lord, an Alaskan well-rooted in coastal life and commercial fishing, revisits many of the same stops made by the expedition. Lord tells of John Burrough's visit to a cannery where imported Chinese laborers wielded their knives, then boards a modern processing ship turning salmon into frozen "product". Lord witnesses whales and imagines whalers, shows us the Native acculturation of a century ago against the fishing lives of today's villagers, and passes time with a family living in the last house on the contiguous North American continent."--BOOK JACKET.