![]() Here he describes (and draws) the style of fish trap used on this coast. For lying, stealing, and all petty meannesses and gross vices, taken as a whole they would be hard to match.” He goes on to describe his entire past year’s adventures: paddling down the coast of the Bering Sea by night in a small walrus-skin craft, searching for a harbor by the Northern Lights climbing a 70-foot cliff by himself to collect a cache of fossils, “dropping from ledge to ledge by the light birch which grew in the clefts of the rock.” William held onto the letter all winter without any opportunity for sending it, and then resumed on 23 April, still in Nulato. William had remained behind in Alaska after the Americans ended the expedition, wintering over in a small trading post with Russians and “a little halfbreed boy who Ketchum brought down as an interpreter from Fort Yukon, and whom I volunteered to take care of, feed, clothe, & get home again in the spring,” as well as two Inuit: “my faithful Rurill, the other Peetka, whose hand I saved last year after he had blown it pretty well to pieces by careless use of his gun.” He describes the Russian inhabitants as “most of them felons, sent here from Siberia. He addressed it to his father, the Unitarian missionary to India, Charles Henry Appleton Dall (1816-1886, see also lot 164). William’s epic letter was written in what he still describes as “Russian America,” although just two months earlier the Seward Purchase had been completed and the flag of the United States raised. However, when the first successful cable across the Atlantic was laid in 1867, the Western Union expedition folded its operation. This was seen as a more practical alternative to the failed transatlantic cable projects. ![]() ![]() The expedition had attempted to lay a telegraph line from California through British Columbia, the interior wilds of Russian-held Alaska, across the Bering Strait, and on to Moscow. ![]() The explorer and scientist William Healey Dall (1845-1927) wrote this letter as a young man, after serving in the Collins Overland Telegraph Expedition from 1865 to 1867. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |