Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, 1869, First American Edition

Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, Formerly Russian America--Now Ceded to the United States--and in Various Other Parts of the North Pacific. 1869, First American edition, New York, [xviii], 353pp. Illustrated frontispiece (tissue guard missing, fold out map, wood engravings. Brown cloth binding with gilt image on front and gilt title and decorations on spine. The first five chapters contain the author's reminiscences of his B.C. travels in the 1860's. They include an account of his trip to the interior of Vancouver Island in 1864 with Robert Brown's exploring expedition, and details of the Bute Inlet massacres.

Frederick Whymper (20 July 1838 in London – 26 November 1901) was a British artist and explorer. Whymper was the eldest son of Elizabeth Whitworth Claridge and Josiah Wood Whymper, a celebrated wood-engraver and artist. His younger brother Edward Whymper was a renowned alpinist who made the first ascent of the Matterhorn in 1865. In his youth, Whymper was a talented artist working to produce engravings for publication and having his landscapes on exhibit at the Royal Academy of Arts in London from 1859 to 1861. He travelled to Victoria, British Columbia in 1862 and to the Cariboo in the following year. In 1864 he joined road builders in the area of Bute Inlet on the Pacific Coast, leaving shortly before the Chilcotin War. Many of his early travels were by steamship; his drawings include volcanoes on Kamchatka and Alaskan glaciers. While in the far north, Whymper served on the Vancouver Island Exploring Expedition and the Western Union Telegraph Expedition (1865), spending the winter of 1866 at Nulato, Alaska with W.H. Dall and travelling up the Yukon River to Fort Yukon, where he witnessed the first American flag being raised over the new territory of Alaska. In November 1867, Whymper arrived back in England where his account of his travels, Travel and Adventure in the Territory of Alaska, was published in 1868. (Wikipedia)