Captains Glenn and Culp
In 1898 and 1899 expeditions came up through Cook Inlet to look for inland routes to the gold fields (as well as for other reasons, of course.) These expeditions were commanded by Edwin Forbes Glenn, a captain in the U.S. Army. Edwin Glenn is the Glenn in Glennallen and in the Glenn Highway. (We also have materials related to the Allen of Glennallen, but we’ll save that for another time).
A&SC, through the courtesy of Harold Tyler, Glenn’s grandson, holds Glenn’s diary for the 1898 expedition and a number of photographs taken on the expedition. Side note: one of the expedition photographers was Walter C. Mendenhall who later became head of the U.S. Geographic Survey and who isn’t the Mendenhall of all of the place names around Juneau.
Last summer A&SC was awarded an Interlibrary Cooperation Grant funded by the IMLS and the Alaska State Library to digitize the photographs in the Glenn collection and the diary and to put these up on the Alaska’s Digital Archives site.
Nicole Jackelen proofreading
Nicole Jackelen, a part-timer here at A&SC who has been taking on a lot of our grant projects, has been working with the images and with the diary to prepare them for loading online. In the photo to the right, she’s carefully reviewing the diary to make sure the transcript (on screen) is as accurate as possible. An unproofed version of the transcript is available through the Glenn collection link above and that will be replaced as soon as she finishes this project.
In the meantime, most of the photographs (and tomorrow, all of the photographs) are online and can be searched through the Alaska’s Digital Archives site. To pull them up quickly, just type in keywords Glenn, expedition, and 1898 and you’ll be able to browse through them. All of the descriptive information you see with the photographs was written up and attached to each image by Nicole, who we think you’ll agree is great at doing this kind of work, especially since the photographs came with nearly no original captions or descriptions.
And if you like the accessibility of having these materials online, don’t forget to thank IMLS and the Alaska State Library: we couldn’t have done this without them.