1850 TO 1865 249 



Baird. This is especially the case in the Explorations 

 for a Railway route to the Pacific Coast, whose monu- 

 mental series of quarto Reports is almost wholly the 

 work of Baird and his collaborators. 



So far as we know, every one connected with the 

 direction of these explorations is dead, and no personal 

 reminiscences can be hoped for unless some private 

 diaries remain. But apart from private papers and 

 printed documents, the government archives, especially 

 of the War Department, should afford much material 

 for an historian. Among these notable explorations 

 were the Ringgold and Rodgers expedition to the North 

 Pacific, of which, on account of the Civil War, no extended 

 report has ever been published; Dr. Elisha Kent Kane's 

 second Grinnell expedition to the Arctic regions; the 

 Pacific Railroad surveys; the survey of the Mexican 

 Boundary; the Astronomical Expedition to Chile; the 

 Exploration of the Colorado River by Ives and Dr. 

 Newberry; of Utah by Stansbury; the expedition to the 

 Amazon by Herndon; those explorations connected with 

 surveys for an Isthmian Canal; and many others of less 

 public notoriety. Later than most of these came Kenni- 

 cott's work in the Hudson Bay Territory; that of the 

 Western Union Telegraph Company's expeditions in 

 search of a route for an overland telegraph line between 

 America and Siberia, through British Columbia and 

 Alaska to the mouth of the Amur river of Eastern 

 Siberia; the subsequent explorations in Alaska by the 

 navy and the Revenue Marine; and numerous smaller 

 expeditions. 



Of several of these material may be gleaned in the 

 excerpts from letters received by Baird, which follow in 

 the course of this narrative. Much more remains of this 



