‘The Quiddities of an Alaskan Trip’ stands out among early Alaska travelogues despite exaggerations

Part of a continuing weekly series on Alaska history by local historian David Reamer. Have a question about Anchorage or Alaska history or an idea for a future article? Go to the form at the bottom of this story. He’s presenting a series of free history talks at Bear Tooth Theatrepub this fall. The third, Nov. 9 at 11 a.m., is on Spenard Stories.

More than once, a trip to Alaska marked by accidents, misconceptions, and disillusionment has resulted in a book. Do you want to read about an adventurous and possibly fraught journey to Alaska that perhaps produced some personal epiphany? Well, you have plenty of options from which to choose. A (different) historian could spend their entire life cataloging and studying these texts, comparing and contrasting the varying experiences.

And yet, Alaskans have a complicated relationship with travelogues. Most of us have our treasured travel stories and likewise appreciate tales of dramatic Alaska journeys, whether recent or historical. But some of the most contentious Alaska books have also been travelogues, including the occasionally harsh critiques in John McPhee’s “Coming Into the Country” (1977) or the unfortunate hagiography of Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild” (1996). William Bell’s 1873 illustrated book “The Quiddities of an Alaskan Trip” is happily more familiar and amusing than controversial. Despite its age as one of the earliest travelogues touching on Alaska, its anecdotes and conclusions are alternatingly entertaining, insightful, and recognizable, littered with incidents that will echo with modern readers.

William Hemphill Bell was, if not the very model of a career soldier, something close to it. Born in 1834 in Pennsylvania, he enrolled at West Point in 1853. He retired as a brigadier general in 1898 at the age of 64. When he died of pneumonia in 1906, The New York Times noted his passing.

Apart from Alaska, he served across the country, from New Mexico to Wyoming to Maryland. His time in the Army covered the breadth of the Civil War, including fighting at the First Battle of Bull Run, the first major battle of the war. He was stationed at a Texas fort directly before the outbreak of those hostilities and away on a mission to Cuba when Fort Sumter fell in 1861. Out of touch with the news, he abruptly learned of the war when he returned to Texas, which had been transformed from a politically rebellious state into outright enemy territory.

Decades later, he wrote of that early confusion as part of a wartime tales anthology. A Texan harbor pilot was the first to update him on the state of the nation. “His news was that Fort Sumpter had fallen to the guns of rebellious South Carolinians, and that fighting was now going on all over the country. This, of course, was exaggerated; but we did not know it, and thought it the truth. Recollect that we had come home perfectly ignorant of the true state of affairs, with no thought but that what was told us in Texas was true; not brought to the crisis gradually, as the people of the North had been, but shoved against it in all of its hideousness, without a moment’s warning. The blow was stunning.”

In 1869, Bell was a brevet major stationed in Washington, D.C., when he was dispatched to examine the condition of the supplies at Sitka, to determine the extent of their food stores. The Army was considering reducing the minimum required subsistence stores, and such inspections were underway at other remote outposts. His orders were received in February of that year, just three months before the transcontinental railroad opened for passenger service. So, he instead took the longer Panama route to the West Coast.

Bell, an amateur artist, decided to document the long journey north in a series of illustrations. In 1873, the result was published by a Portland, Oregon firm. “The Quiddities of an Alaskan Trip” is a physically small book featuring two illustrations per page followed by a page with short captions. It is essentially a comic book prototype, a graphic novel travelogue. “Quiddities” is an archaic term now, then meaning the essential quirks of something or someone, their defining aspects.

The tale begins with Bell in Washington, D.C., “awaiting orders, thermometer 110° in the shade.” More than anything, he wants to cool down. “He has put his feet on ice, and has sent for an ice-bag for his head.” After a summons to his commanding officer, he is told, “You will make your arrangements to go to Alaska, sir!”

Shocked at the news, he returns to his quarters, dreading the assignment. The orders were perhaps a punishment for some unrecorded slight or misbehavior. For decades, many appointments to Alaska were punitive in intent, possibly including Bell’s superior officer at Sitka. Jefferson C. Davis — not the Confederate president Jefferson Davis — was the first commander of the Department of Alaska, a predecessor to the governor position. During the Civil War, Davis killed a fellow Union officer but was never disciplined. The relocation to remote Alaskan a few years later undoubtedly reflected an unpopularity with the powers that be.

Bell wrote, “His horror at the situation does not leave him during his hours of slumber, and his dreams are all of the fur country,” pun definitely intended. He dreams of monsters and ice and snow. And as with so many uninformed depictions of Alaska to come, he dreamt of igloos.

Like so many tourists since, he overly invested in heavy clothing, intending to wear as many layers as possible. “The Major, in anticipation of the prospective icebergs and frozen thermometers, bulls the flannel market, and depletes the stock of Isaacs Ben Levi.” The latter referred to jeans, as in Levi’s jeans.

For all his terrors about the future, his fantastical fears about life in Alaska, the grim realities of travel then were far more immediate. He boards a ship for Panama and is violently seasick as soon as they reach open water. “As the vessel pitches and rolls, experiences a new sensation. His stomach appears to go up with him properly, but as he subsides into the trough of the sea it seems to remain suspended somewhere in mid-air.” When he first boarded, the soldier was confused by the tin bowls attached to each berth. Now wracked with nausea, “he becomes initiated as to their utility.”

The following several cartoons document Bell’s ongoing, failed battles against the queasiness. His hat and several meals succumbed to the seasickness, necessitating repeated “offerings to Neptune,” that is, vomit off the side of the ship. He spent most of the trip to Panama curled weakly into his berth.

The Panama Canal did not open until 1914. Many canal laborers then left Panama for work on the new Alaska Railroad. Some of these itinerant workers possibly named Anchorage’s Government Hill neighborhood after another Government Hill in Panama.

Even before the canal, and especially before the completion of the transcontinental railroad, a significant amount of mail and goods from the eastern United States were shipped to the West Coast via Panama. A railroad across the narrow isthmus was completed in 1855. Bell’s ship landed at Colón, and the passengers rode the train to the city of Panama on the Pacific coast. Bell, however, was still in the grips of his seasickness. As he noted, “He indistinctly remembers having been put into the baggage car when the train was ready for the passage across the Isthmus, and his impressions of the scenery were, as it were, indistinct.”

The major’s travel issues were far from over. At Panama, he quickly retreated to his stateroom on his next ship, which was unfortunately rife with bedbugs. “The Major finds the bugs to be unremitting in their attentions, and he is further complimented by being made the recipient of a serenade, followed by a dance.” His face swelled from the bites into “mountainous appearances.” They stopped at Acapulco followed by a crossing through the notoriously stormy Gulf of Tehuantepec. At San Francisco, he endured his first earthquake.

While in San Francisco, he received two months’ wages in advance and, in preparation for Alaska, bought “a pair of snow-shoes, and, putting on all the clothes he can buy.” Then he boarded the steamer Moses Taylor bound for Victoria, Canada. Denizens of the West Coast dreaded the Moses, a narrow sidewheeler prone to drunken bobs and rolls in the sea. Bell called it the “Rolling Moses,” a nickname attributed to New York newspaper publisher Horace Greeley.

When he was far enough north to see snow, he tested his new snowshoes, resulting in the expected pratfalls. As Bell described, “Not being up to all of the tricks of snow-shoes, a little ground-and-lofty tumbling occurs, leaving the acrobatic Major in a recumbent position.”

Finally, he reached Alaska. He noted, “Having entered Alaska, it commences to rain, which ... it has continued to do ever since.” With an Alaska Native guide, he established a small camp, his useless snowshoes in tow. He had some difficulty in picking a location. As he declared, there was plenty of good wood and fire. However, the ratio was “about two waters to one wood.”

The next day was even more notable. “A sudden rustling of the bushes on one side of the trail attracted the attention of the Major, who saw a bear emerging therefrom. Not having lost a bear, the Major knew that this one did not belong to him. He don’t know which has the pernicious effect upon a man’s nerves, earthquakes or bears.”

After that, and at long last, our discouraged traveler finally reached his destination. “Having been suddenly separated, by the appearance of the bear, from his guide and his snow-shoes, he arrives in destitute condition, after a series of wadings, swimmings, and climbings, in Sitka.” In such wretched shape, he “goes to report to the department commander that he is under bonds to open a corner grocery,” a commissary department, in other words.

His time in Sitka was brief; he was gone before the end of 1870. During this brief Alaska tenure, he crossed paths with Sophia Cracroft, niece of British explorer John Franklin, the leader of the doomed 1845-48 Franklin Expedition. In her diary, Cracroft made multiple positive comments about Bell, who she described as a “very pleasant, sensible little man.”

She particularly admired his paintings of Sitka and its surroundings. She wrote, “Major Bell came in before we left & shewed us his sketches, some of which are very interesting. He gave my aunt a water colour drawing of the Russian Church & some other houses adjoining it, including ours ... I wish I had some others he has taken of this & other places.” She added, “Major Bell has done me an exceeding favor, which I shd. never have ventured to ask, but wh. Dr Tonner proposed to me, saying he would himself ask Major Bell for the loan of his sketchbook for the purpose of my copying some of the sketches of Sitka, &c –and this morng. the book came & I set to work at once upon them.” Bell’s original paintings of Sitka are mostly scattered and lost. However, the Anchorage Museum possesses one original painting attributed to Bell: “Low Tide at Sitka.”

As an Alaska travelogue, “The Quiddities of an Alaskan Trip” stands out for its mixture of authentic details with obvious exaggeration. For example, his account of the trip from the East Coast across Panama and up the West Coast is similar to those of other travelers. Seasickness was indeed common, particularly for passengers of ships like the “Rolling Moses,” underpowered steamers sailing near or beyond their intended operational limits. On the other hand, he claimed to enter the Canadian port of Victoria with a copy of the Constitution under one arm and a chicken under the other, the latter the best available substitute for an American eagle.

Ryan Charlton, an English faculty member at Georgia State University, is almost certainly the only other scholar interested in this obscure 19th-century text. In a 2023 conference presentation, Charlton noted, “Though exaggerated and played for humor, the events of the first half of the narrative largely exist within the realm of plausibility. However, as ‘the major’ approaches Alaska, things take a turn for the fictional, as the plot becomes increasingly farcical.”

The book suggests Bell hired a canoe to carry him from Victoria to Sitka, about 800 miles in a line. He also did not mention his wife, four-year-old son, and his son’s nurse, who were all present in Sitka and possibly traveled with him.

Still, while the sequencing and extent of Bell’s Alaska anecdotes undermine trust in the narrative, the individual incidents are far from impossible. Newcomers struggling with their winter gear is an annual event. Seeing a bear is more personal social media fodder than newsworthy. And no one who has spent time in Southeast Alaska is surprised by constant rain. In fact, Bell’s complaints of incessant downpours mirror many visitor accounts, like that from Joe McGinnis’s 1980 book, “Going to Extremes.” McGinniss wrote of Juneau, “Oh, such rain. It fell day after day, week after week, month after month. Sometimes sleet, sometimes snow, but, in the end, rain again. Soaking through the clothes, through the skin, into the soul.”

Though “The Quiddities of an Alaskan Trip” is relatively short, this article still did not cover all of its humorous anecdotes, including a shipboard battle with a goat and so much more vomit. The full public domain text is available online via HathiTrust, a collaborative digital repository for research libraries. The book is well worth the few minutes it would take to browse it in its entirety.

Key sources:

Bell, William H. “Ante Bellum; Or, Before the War.” In Sketches of War History 1861-1865, Cincinnati, OH: Robert Clarke & Co., 1888.

Bell, William H. The Quiddities of an Alaskan Trip. Portland, OR: C. A. Steele & Co., 1873.

“California Gossip.” New York Times, November 29, 1860, 2.

Charlton, Ryan. “Tripping Alaska: William H. Bell’s Quiddities of an Alaskan Trip.” Southern American Studies Association. Atlanta, GA. September 2023.

Cracroft, Sophia. Lady Franklin Visits Sitka, Alaska, 1870: The Journal of Sophia Cracroft, Sir John Franklin’s Niece. Edited by R. N. DeArmond. Anchorage: Alaska Historical Society, 1981.

Guinn, J. M. “To California Via Panama in the Early ‘60s.” Annual Publication of the Historical Society of Southern California and Pioneer Register 5, no. 1 (1900): 13-21.

McGinniss, Joe. Going to Extremes. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.