Joseph S Harris And The U S Northwest Boundary Survey 1857 1861

Precis of Joseph S. Harris… In 1857, twenty-year old Joseph Harris joins the U.S. Northwest Boundary Commission whose assignment was to define the boundary between the United States and British Canada. As an astronomer and surveyor, he has been trained by the U.S. Coast Survey to use the new Zenith telescope and the new Talcott method of astronomical surveying. In over 200 letters to his family and in his Autobiography, he describes the task of surveying 410 miles along the 49th parallel from the Gulf of Georgia to the crest of the Rocky Mountains. In accomplishing this, Harris describes the political difficulties of working with a parallel British Commission, of the outbreak of the ‘Pig War”, and of working with local Native Americans. The Survey team astronomically surveys an unchartered wilderness crossing both the Cascade and Rocky Mountains With their recalcitrant mules, they not only negotiate steep mountains and cross dangerous rivers but they also cut a 20 foot swath through much of this wilderness, connecting 14 astronomical stations. After three years, the field work has to be rushed to a finish because Congress would approve no more appropriations now the Civil War had started. Since the Official Report was lost, this account stands as the only record of this important Survey.

Precis of Joseph S. Harris In 1857, twenty-year old Joseph Harris joins the U.S. Northwest Boundary Commission whose assignment was to define the boundary between the United States and British Canada. As an astronomer and surveyor, he has been trained by the U.S. Coast Survey to use the new Zenith telescope and the new Talcott method of astronomical surveying. In over 200 letters to his family and in his Autobiography, he describes the task of surveying 410 miles along the 49th parallel from the Gulf of Georgia to the crest of the Rocky Mountains. In accomplishing this, Harris describes the political difficulties of working with a parallel British Commission, of the outbreak of the Pig War, and of working with local Native Americans. The Survey team astronomically surveys an unchartered wilderness crossing both the Cascade and Rocky Mountains With their recalcitrant mules, they not only negotiate steep mountains and cross dangerous rivers but they also cut a 20 foot swath through much of this wilderness, connecting 14 astronomical stations. After three years, the field work has to be rushed to a finish because Congress would approve no more appropriations now the Civil War had started. Since the Official Report was lost, this account stands as the only record of this important Survey.

In this companion work to Peace Weavers, her award-winning first book on Puget Sound’s cross-cultural marriages, author Candace Wellman depicts the lives of four additional intermarried indigenous women who influenced mid-1800s settlement in the Bellingham Bay area. She describes each wife’s native culture, details ancestral history and traits for both spouses, and traces descendants’ destinies, highlighting the families’ contributions to new communities. Jenny Wynn was the daughter of an elite Lummi and his Songhees wife, and was a strong voice for justice for her people. She and her husband Thomas owned a farm and donated land and a cabin for the second rural school. Several descendants became teachers. Snoqualmie Elizabeth Patterson, daughter of the most powerful native leader in western Washington, married a cattleman. After her death from tuberculosis, kind foster parents raised her daughters, who ultimately grew up to enhance Lynden’s literary and business growth. Resilient and strong, Mary Allen was the daughter of an Nlaka’pamux leader on British Columbia’s Fraser River. The village of Marietta arose from her long marriage. Later, her sons played important roles in southeast Alaska’s early fishing industry. The indigenous wife of Fort Bellingham commander George W. Pickett (later a brigadier general in the Civil War) left no name to history after her early death, but gifted the West with one of its most important early artists, James Tilton Pickett. Interwoven Lives was a finalist for the 2020 Willa Literary Award, scholarly nonfiction.

Recommended by the New York Times Holiday Books Guide A quest to rediscover America’s other border—the fascinating but little-known northern one. America’s northern border is the world’s longest international boundary, yet it remains obscure even to Americans. The northern border was America’s primary border for centuries—much of the early history of the United States took place there—and to the tens of millions who live and work near the line, the region even has its own name: the northland. Travel writer Porter Fox spent three years exploring 4,000 miles of the border between Maine and Washington, traveling by canoe, freighter, car, and foot. In Northland, he blends a deeply reported and beautifully written story of the region’s history with a riveting account of his travels. Setting out from the easternmost point in the mainland United States, Fox follows explorer Samuel de Champlain’s adventures across the Northeast; recounts the rise and fall of the timber, iron, and rail industries; crosses the Great Lakes on a freighter; tracks America’s fur traders through the Boundary Waters; and traces the forty-ninth parallel from Minnesota to the Pacific Ocean. Fox, who grew up the son of a boat-builder in Maine’s northland, packs his narrative with colorful characters (Captain Meriwether Lewis, railroad tycoon James J. Hill, Chief Red Cloud of the Lakota Sioux) and extraordinary landscapes (Glacier National Park, the Northwest Angle, Washington’s North Cascades). He weaves in his encounters with residents, border guards, Indian activists, and militia leaders to give a dynamic portrait of the northland today, wracked by climate change, water wars, oil booms, and border security.

Winner of the 2018 Pulitzer Prize for History Winner of the 2017 Kirkus Prize for Nonfiction A National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction Finalist A New York Times Notable Book of 2017 One of the Washington Post's Best Books of the Year In this “cri de coeur about the Gulf’s environmental ruin” (New York Times), “Davis has written a beautiful homage to a neglected sea” (front page, New York Times Book Review). Hailed as a “nonfiction epic . . . in the tradition of Jared Diamond’s best-seller Collapse, and Simon Winchester’s Atlantic” (Dallas Morning News), Jack E. Davis’s The Gulf is “by turns informative, lyrical, inspiring and chilling for anyone who cares about the future of ‘America’s Sea’ ” (Wall Street Journal). Illuminating America’s political and economic relationship with the environment from the age of the conquistadors to the present, Davis demonstrates how the Gulf’s fruitful ecosystems and exceptional beauty empowered a growing nation. Filled with vivid, untold stories from the sportfish that launched Gulfside vacationing to Hollywood’s role in the country’s first offshore oil wells, this “vast and welltold story shows how we made the Gulf . . . [into] a ‘national sacrifice zone’ ” (Bill McKibben). The first and only study of its kind, The Gulf offers “a unique and illuminating history of the American Southern coast and sea as it should be written” (Edward O. Wilson).

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