Topic: Naturalists in Alaska and the Arctic

Following an earlier era of Russian and Western expeditions in the Arctic from the 16th to the 18th centuries, scientists with knowledge of the young natural history fields of zoology, botany, paleontology, and of anthropology, began to explore Arctic regions for museums and universities in Europe, Russia, and North America beginning in the 19th century. The Smithsonian Institution, established by a bequest from the British scientist, James Smithson in 1846, three years later engaged a young Chicago-based naturalist named Robert Kennicott to explore the territories unknown to Americans that were to be purchased from Russia in 1867. Following the Alaska Purchase, Smithsonian Assistant Secretary Spencer F. Baird began sending a wave of naturalists north to learn about Alaska’s peoples, cultures, and natural resources. James G. Swan was sent to the Northwest Coast, William J. Fisher to Kodiak, William Healy Dall to the Aleutians, Charles MacKay and Samuel Applegate to Bristol Bay and Unalaska, Lucian Turner and Edward Nelson to the Kuskokwim and Yukon, and John Murdoch to Barrow. Provided with little more than a train ticket, trade goods, and letters of introduction to local traders, Baird’s naturalists began gathering animals, plants, insects, minerals, as well as ethnological artifacts from the indigenous peoples, who were paid with needles, knives, beads, and other goods. In addition to documenting and shipping their collections to Washington, Baird’s naturalists turned over their diaries and records to the Smithsonian and wrote reports and monographs describing their collections. Their collections form the most complete record of Alaska’s 19th century natural history and ethnographic cultures in the world.

Perhaps most outstanding of all these enterprises from 1858 to the 1890s are the collections of James G. Swan, Edward W. Nelson, and John Murdoch. Swan’s task was complicated by difficult relations with the Northwest Coast tribes whose artifacts carried proprietary interests relating to clans and social groups, because of the large size of many objects, such as a huge log war canoe, and on account of the sensitive natural of objects like shamans’ regalia. Edward Nelson’s four years travelling throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta produced a huge trove of ornithological and animal materials, a continuous record of meteorological data, thousands of ethnological specimens and vocabularies, hundreds of some of the earliest photographs taken in Alaska, and an 800,000-word diary. Nelson’s penchant for purchasing objects earned him the Eskimo name, ‘the man who buys good-for-nothing things.’ John Murdoch, residing in Barrow, served as the Smithsonian agent during the 1881-83 U.S. International Polar Year and made large collections of material culture, language, social life, and mythology representing the whaling culture of the Inupiat people of North Alaska. Like Nelson, he produced a large monograph that became a classic of northern ethnography. The Smithsonian ethnological collections are unique because they were collected by naturalists who saw cultural materials through the objective eyes of biologists at a time when the young field of anthropology was rife with misplaced social theory and racial bias.