In the 1800s, William Dall spent years surveying and studying Alaska for the Smithsonian Institution, including most of his findings in the book “Alaska and its Resources.” These days, his name is all over our state's map.
William Dall’s sketch of the mouth of what is now called the Melozitna River, which enters the Yukon River near the village of Ruby, from his book “Alaska and its Resources.”
Dall came to Alaska as part of a mega-project that did not go as planned. The Western Union Co. president wanted to stretch a telegraph line around the world. An unknown part of that span was through Alaska, then known as Russian America. Dall had too much momentum to leave. He sent a letter back to Spencer Fullerton Baird of the Smithsonian Institution, who was sponsoring Dall’s sample-gathering.
The map is dark with detail in areas bordering the Yukon River and is blank north of the Brooks Range, and in most of the Interior between Fort Yukon and Cook Inlet. Despite poking more than 20,000 feet into the atmosphere, Denali is not on Dall’s map, being tucked far from any views available from the Yukon River.
March, Dall wrote, was a tough month for inland Natives, whose stores of salmon and other foods caught the year before were dwindling. Fresh food in March, if people were lucky, was fish from traps set in ice and grouse and snowshoe hares snared with loops of sinew.
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