First Scientist of Alaska: William Healey Dall

by Edward A. Herron

192 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1958

Reviews

[Rebekah Morris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some biographies I’ve read are dry and dull. Others are very interesting. This one was interesting. Some of it read like an adventure book only it was real. I found it quite fascinating that William Dall was only around 19-20 when he first traveled up to Russian America (Alaska) as part of a group of scientists and explorers who were part of a big Western Union project to string telegraph lines up the coast of Canada, across Russian America, under the Bering Strait and across Siberia to connect the western world and the eastern world. Then he was 21 when he was put in command of another ship heading up there. I loved all the details of the work, of traveling inland from the sea, of waiting for the ice to break up in the spring and all the other things.

There are two pages where "millions of years” are mentioned along with some other things that had me laughing because they don’t make any sense but were believed back then. (Explain to me how something that supposedly died 20 million years ago–about the time the mountains in California formed–could still smell.)

My only other concern is the life of Tonso McCrae who, according to this book, was a greatly feared Confederate who sailed his ship, the Shannon, all over fighting for the Confederacy even after the war was over. Tonso McCrae is in the story quite a bit, but I can’t find anything about him anywhere else so I’m not sure if he’s just a made up character to make the story more interesting or not.

[Nola · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book told about a plan of which I had never heard to lay a telegraph cable from Europe through Siberia, under the Bering Strait, across Alaska (Russian America at the time) and down to the United States. William Healey Dall was a young (16 year-old) naturalist who took part in the exploratory work prior to the laying of the line. He was left close to Nome in the fall and went up the Yukon to spend the winter ready to begin exploration in the spring. In spring, he explored the area from his winter stopover up to Fort Yukon. Another team was responsible for the area from Fort Yukon to British Columbia.
A cable was successfully laid across the Atlantic Ocean, and this stopped the project. Dall returned to Alaska for later studies, and several places in Alaska are named after him. He worked at the Smithsonian, where he had sent the samples he collected in Alaska) for decades after his initial trip to Alaska.