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Vol. 26:4 ISSN 0160-8460 December 1998
From the Editor
In November, the Commission recommended that up to $2,642,341 be awarded to 26 projects that will make it possible for the nation to better understand its history. At a special ceremony, Chairman John W. Carlin presented the Commission's 1998 Distinguished Service Award to Dr. Frank G. Burke, who served as NHPRC's Executive Director from 1975 to 1988. The November meeting also included an interesting discussion of copyright issues affecting the NHPRC and the projects it sponsors.
We endeavor to have each issue of Annotation highlight a different aspect of the Commission's contribution to America's understanding of its past. This issue of our newsletter focuses on the theme of the exploration of nature, whether that relates to the expeditions which the United States government sent out in the early 19th century to explore the vast territories it had acquired in the West, or the desire of private individuals to study and familiarize the public with a portion of the country or an aspect of the natural world.
Because a recent issue featured a piece by Gary E. Moulton, editor of The Journals of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, on his work with documentary film maker Ken Burns, we decided to give equal time to projects devoted to other explorers of the American West. Our first article is a general overview of The Journals of Zebulon Montgomery Pike, edited by Donald Jackson; see if you share our sympathy for Pike, whose career Professor Jackson so ably describes.
Then it's off to the Grand Canyon, where the Kolb brothers, two enterprising self-promoters, ran a photography studio that produced images still in demand today. Our next article takes us in the footsteps of the Pathfinder, John Charles Frémont, a great explorer whose subsequent careers as businessman and politician were somewhat less glorious. Behind Frémont stood another intrepid individual, his wife Jessie, a senator's daughter whose writing talents helped make her husband a 19th-century icon and later sustained her family when the Frémonts encountered hard times.
The Denver Museum of Natural History is the repository for a collection of historical ethnographic and wildlife photographs produced in Alaska by Alfred Marshall Bailey in the early 1920s. Our last article recounts the career of eminent botanist Joseph Ewan, whose papers are now in the Missouri Botanical Garden Library. Our back-page photograph captures something of the joy and wonder of exploring unfamiliar territory, as an Alaska native woman delves into the mysteries of photography.
