The United States knew relatively little about Alaska prior to the turn of the century when the Klondike Gold Rush was about to attract thousands of stampeders north, many of them spilling over into Alaska as more gold was discovered on the Yukon River and her tributaries. The government had few reliable maps of the vast territory it had purchased from Russia thirty years before.

The U.S. government commissioned J. Edward Spurr, a geologist, author, and explorer from New England, to mount two expeditions to explore and inventory Alaska, traveling thousand miles by canoe and on foot without benefit of telephones, radios, airplanes.

The effort almost killed him, but his efforts helped provide detail to regions that had been largely blank on the Alaska map.