Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago

In 1883, a restless American journalist named Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore sailed from the Pacific Northwest into waters that most Americans knew only as a frozen wilderness, a bureaucratic afterthought purchased from Russia a generation earlier. What she found instead stunned her: a territory of staggering fjords, emerald forests, and indigenous cultures so vibrant they demanded recognition. This book, compiled from her letters to the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and New York Times, stands as one of the first sustained English-language love letters to Alaska's southern coast. Scidmore travels from Port Townsend and Victoria through the mist-shrouded islands of the Sitkan Archipelago, encountering Tlingit villages, Russian Orthodox missionaries, gold-rush speculators, and scenery so «matchless» it borders on the divine. She writes to correct the American imagination: this is no barren wasteland but a place of profound beauty and complex human life. For modern readers, the book offers something rarer than travel narrative: a snapshot of Alaska on the cusp of transformation, before the railroad, before statehood, when the Tongass still echoed with canoe songs and the Outside was just a steamship ride away.