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 
