THE DISCOVERY OF GLACIER T, ALASKA 
141 
In a recent communication to the Geograihiical Society of the 
Pacific, Rear-Admiral L. A. Beardslee has raised questions as to 
the discovery of Glacier bay, prompted thereto by an article liy 
Professor John IMuir, pulilished in the Century Magazine, June, 
189-5. Admiral Beardslee very tlatteringly refers to and quotes 
in proof certain published notes of my own — notes puldished in 
such condensed form for general and average tourist information 
that not all the details and facts relative to the discoveiy of and 
earliest visitors to the bay could be given. 
Vancouver’s descrii)tion would dispel some of Admiral Beards- 
lee’s references to later visitors, since he very plainly noted the 
fact that there was a navigable bay with an entrance, and wrote : 
“The shoves of the continent form two large open bays, which were 
terminated (July 12, 1794) by compact, solid mountains of ice rising per- 
pendicularly from the water’s edge and hounded to the north hy a con- 
tinuation of the united, loft\% frozen mountains that extend eastward 
from mount Fairweather. In these bays also were great quantities of 
broken ice, which, having been put in motion by the springing up of a 
norther! wind, were drifted to the south waixl.” 
The Fairweather ice-sheet extended then some 40 miles south 
of its present limit in the bay. The Russian traders aptly named 
Icy straits into which the bay debouches, and as there were no 
Indian villages on its north shore, where currents and floating 
ice made navigation dangerous, they kept away, and their charts 
" only repeated Vancouver’s lines. 
J'he first really known of the existence of this great bay of 
tide-water glaciers was in 1869, when Kloh-Kutz, the Chilkat 
chief, told Professor George Davidson of a l)ay full of breaking 
ice clifl's lying to the westward of the Davidson glacier in Lynn 
canal. It was distant only one day’s journey on snow-shoes 
(30 miles), be stated, and Kloh-Kutz urged the astronomer to 
make the little excursion with him and see the hair-seal riding 
around on ice cakes and the ice rumbling down like landslides 
into the water. The visit of ex-Secretary Seward to the eclipse 
ol)servatory ami his waiting to convey Professor Davidson hack 
to Sitka on his private steamer prevented the full discovery of 
the hay that season hy that first and greatest of Pacific coast 
scientists whose name is so inseparably connected with all of geo- 
graphic record on that side of our continent. 
In 1S77, when Lieutenant C. F. S. Wood, U. S. A., and Mr 
Charles J'aylor were ]»revented from making their pro|)ose(l ex- 
ploration of the mount St. Flias region by the mutiny of their 
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