Among the Dene: Allen's 1885 trans-Alaska expedition

• Main Author: Vander Lugt, Russell W.
• Other Authors: Ehrlander, Mary, Boylan, Brandon, Heaton, John, Koester, David, Cole, Terrence
• Format: Doctoral or Postdoctoral Thesis
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Henry T. Allen; Henry Tureman; Travel; Alaska; Military leadership; Discovery and exploration; Military relations; Athabascan People; Government relations; Interior Alaska; Alaska Natives; Doctor of Philosophy in Arctic and Northern History: Interdisciplinary Studies; Arctic; Bering Sea; Fairbanks; Pacific; alaska range; Athabascan
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/11122/13110

Dissertation (Ph.D.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2022 In 1885, U.S. Army Lieutenant Henry T. Allen crossed Alaska for the purpose of obtaining all information "valuable and important," especially to the military branch of government. The following year, the Secretary of War submitted Allen's much-anticipated report of a reconnaissance in Alaska to the U.S. Senate. Although the Senate ratified a treaty transferring Russian America to the United States nearly two decades earlier, and Alaska had been a Russian colony for over a century, the interior of Alaska - the homeland of Alaska's Dene people - remained largely unknown to the outside world. With constant assistance while traveling among the Dene, Allen surveyed twenty-five hundred miles of Dene territory including the Copper, Tanana, and Koyukuk Rivers. From the North Pacific, the Dene guided Allen across the Alaska Range and north to the Arctic Circle, then west to the Bering Sea. Though scholars then and now have recognized Allen's expedition as the most comprehensive exploration of Alaska and the earliest documentation of Dene lifeways in much of Alaska's Arctic and sub-Arctic regions, this dissertation presents the first scholarly work entirely focused on the expedition. An interdisciplinary approach and narrative history provide the framework for evaluating the expedition's place in U.S. and Alaska history, particularly regarding Allen's noteworthy interactions with Indigenous peoples and his ethnographic and cartographic contributions. With Dene support, Allen recorded the social and physical environment throughout much of Alaska's interior prior to direct colonial influences and resultant rapid and irrevocable change. The expedition's primary sources, combined with documented Dene perspectives, illustrate positive Indigenous-military relations. Mutually respectful interactions between Allen and Alaska's Dene who played an integral role in the expedition's success remain a legacy of the expedition. The character traits that contributed to Allen's ...