LIBRARY OF CONTEMPORARY EXPLORATION
AND ADVENTURE

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OUR
ARCTIC PROVINCE

ALASKA AND THE SEAL ISLANDS

BY

HENRY W. ELLIOTT

ILLUSTRATED BY MANY DRAWINGS FROM NATURE
AND MAPS

NEW YORK
CHARLES SCRIBNER’S SONS
1906

If the writer could materialize in the reader’s mind that largeaggregate of printed matter now stacked on book-shelves and filedin newspaper columns, which has been published to the worldduring the last eighty years upon Alaska, the effect would certainlybe startling.

Scores of weighty volumes, hundreds of pamphlets and magazinearticles, and a thousand newspaper letters, have been devotedto the subject of Alaskan life, scenery, and value. In contemplationof this, viewed from the author’s standpoint of extended personalexperience, he announces his determination to divest himselfof all individuality in the following chapters, to portray inword, and by brush and pencil, the life and country of Alaska as itis, so clearly and so truthfully, that the reader may draw his or herown inference, just as though he or she stood upon the grounditself.

How differently a number of us are impressed in the viewing ofany one subject, by which observation we utterly fail to agree as toits character and worth! This variance is handsomely illustratedby the diverse opinion of Alaskan travellers.

Smithsonian Institution,
February 26, 1886.