Grewingk's Geology of Alaska and the Northwest Coast of America
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grewingk’s geology of alaska and the northwest coast of america Marvin W. Falk, Editor . Holmberg’s Ethnographic Sketches by Heinrich Johan Holmberg. Edited by Marvin W. Falk, translated from the original German of – by Fritz Jaensch. Tlingit Indians of Alaska by Anatolii Kamenskii. Translated, with an introduction and sup- plementary material, by Sergei Kan. Bering’s Voyages: The Reports from Russia by Gerhard Friedrich Müller. Translated, with commentary, by Carol Urness. Russian Exploration in Southwest Alaska: The Travel Journals of Petr Korsakovskiy () and Ivan Ya. Vasilev (). Edited, with an introduction by James VanStone, translated by David H. Kraus. The Khlebnikov Archive: Unpublished Journal (‒) and Travel Notes (, , and ). Edited by Leonid Shur, translated by John Bisk. The Great Russian Navigator, A. I. Chirikov by Vasilii A. Divin. Translated and annotated by Raymond H. Fisher. Journals of the Priest Ioann Veniaminov in Alaska, to . Introduction and commen- tary by S. A. Mousalimas, translated by Jerome Kisslinger. To the Chukchi Peninsula and the Tlingit Indians ‒: Journals and Letters by Aurel and Arthur Krause. Translated by Margot Krause McCaffrey. Essays on the Ethnography of the Aleuts by R. G. Liapunova. Translated by Jerry Shelest with W. B. Workman and Lydia Black. Fedor Petrovich Litke by A. I. Alekseev. Edited by Katherine L. Arndt, translated by Serge LeComte. Grewingk’s Geology of Alaska and the Northwest Coast of America: Contributions Toward Knowledge of the Orographic and Geognostic Condition of the Northwest Coast of America, with the Adjacent Islands by Constantine Grewingk. Edited by Marvin W. Falk, translated by Fritz Jaensch. Steller’s History of Kamchatka: Collected Information Concerning the History of Kamchatka, Its Peoples, Their Manners, Names, Lifestyle, and Various Customary Practices by Georg Wilhelm Steller. Translated by Margritt Engel and Karen Willmore. Through Orthodox Eyes: Russian Missionary Narratives of Travels to the Dena’ina and Ahtna, s–s. Translated with an introduction by Andrei A. Znamenski. Grewingk’s Geology of Alaska and the Northwest Coast of America Contributions Toward Knowledge of the Orographic and Geognostic Condition of the Northwest Coast of America, with the Adjacent Islands DR. CONSTANTINE GREWINGK Edited by Marvin W. Falk Translated by Fritz Jaensch university of alaska press Fairbanks, Alaska English Translation © by The University of Alaska Press All rights reserved. Published . Printed in the United States of America This publication was printed on acid-free paper that meets the minimum requirements for American National Standards for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI z.-. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Grewingk, C. (Constantin), ‒. [Beitrag zur Kenntniss der orographischen und geognostischen Beschaffenheit der Nord-West- Küste Amerikas mit den anliegenden Inseln. English] Grewingk’s geology of Alaska and the northwest coast of America: contributions toward knowledge of the orographic and geognostic condition of the northwest coast of America, with the adjacent islands / by C. Grewingk; edited by Marvin W. Falk; translated by Fritz Jaensch. p. cm. — (The Rasmuson Library historical translation series ; v. ) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN --- (pbk. : alk. paper) . Geology—Alaska. Geology—Northwest Coast of North America. Physical geogra- phy—Alaska. Physical geography—Northwest Coast of North America. I. Title: Geology of Alaska and the northwest coast of America. II. Title. III. Series. QE .G 5.—d Publications of the Russian Imperial Mineralogical Society at St. Petersburg. Volumes for and St. Petersburg: Carl Kray, International Standard Book Number --- Publication coordination by Jennifer Robin Collier Text design by Rachel Fudge Cover design by Mike Kirk Contents Acknowledgments . vii Editor’s Introduction . vii Preface. ix . The Western Half of North America Between the Parallel of the Bay of San Francisco and the Mouth of the Sitkine River, with the Islands Along the Coast . . The Mainland in the Latitude of Sitka, Chugach Peninsula, Kenai Bay and the Alaska Peninsula . . West Coast of North America Between º and º N. Lat. . The Most Important Islands in the Region of Alaska . . The Aleutian Islands . . The Commander or Divided Islands [Komandorskie Islands] . . The Pribilof Islands (Ostrova Pribylova). . Volcanic Phenomena. Appendix . The Fossil Remains of Minerals and Plants Found to Date Along the West Coast of North Americaand the Aleutian Islands . Appendix . Materials for a History of the Voyages and Discoveries on the Western Half of North America and in the Adjacent Oceans . Notes . Index. Acknowledgments This translation project began in the early s with several years of fund- ing provided by the state through the good offices of Charlie Parr, Brian Rogers, and their colleagues in the Alaska State Legislature. Fritz Jaensch had completed the translation and the manuscript was being prepared for printing by AEIDC (Arctic Environmental Information and Data Center) in Anchorage when bud- get cuts put the project on hold. Philip Marshall, a geologist, had reviewed the manuscript for its geological terminology. Ginger French, Denise Coté, and especially Katherine Arndt have made a number of helpful editorial suggestions. Elmer Rasmuson’s generous annual donations to the library and the support of the library administration—Susan Grigg and Paul McCarthy—have allowed Grewingk’s text to be taken up again. The University of Alaska Press has taken over typesetting, book design, printing, and distribution. vii Editor’s Introduction Constantine Caspar Andreas Grewingk was a leading geologist and minerol- ogist in Russia during the middle of the nineteenth century. During his lifetime he published about articles and several books, with an emphasis on the geol- ogy, mineralogy and archeology of the Pribaltic region. He also made major con- tributions on the geology of the White Sea coast and the Urals. On the way, he took the time to publish a most useful compilation of information on the geology, mineralogy and physical geography of the coast north of San Francisco. Grewingk graduated from Dorpat University (Tartu, Estonia) and pursued a graduate education at Jena, in Germany, where he received his doctorate. He then became the curator of mineralogical collections at the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg in . It was there that he was able to examine the collections of mineral samples sent back by Russian expeditions and various individuals from California, Alaska and the North Pacific. Several years following the pub- lication of this work, he became the librarian of the Mining Institute and then was appointed a professor at his old University of Dorpat in . This work is the first documented compilation of all of the geologic informa- tion about Alaska and adjoining territory available during the Russian-American era. Grewingk himself was never in Alaska, but he exhaustively summarizes the reports and descriptions made by expedition personnel and other direct observers. He presents this information in several useful ways. The main body of the text provides these observations by location, region by region. It serves as something of an index to the published observations by geographic location. He presents a chronology of volcanic events that occurred from Mount St. Helens northward as a table to enhance his textual descriptions. He had access to the mineral collections sent back to the capital from the North Pacific and makes use of them in his presentation. His first appendix is a list of known animal and plant fossils found on the Northwest Coast and the Aleutian Islands. His second appendix is an extended annotated bibliography of the most important published sources for the study of voyages and discoveries arranged chronologically. He includes some sources for discoveries in the American West, including the Lewis and Clark expedition and Fremont. Grewingk provides a systematic explanation of his understanding of the relationship of the geology of Alaska to that of the rest of North America as well ix x Editor’s Introduction as the Pacific Rim. He illustrates his concept with a drawing and a schematic map. Detailed knowledge of the geology of the American West was in itself in its infancy, so that his explanations are more interesting as an early attempt to make broad sense of geologic history than as anything of current theoretical interest. Still, some of his arguments concerning the development of mountain systems and volcanic activity seem surprisingly modern. He expresses his frustration with the limits of the data at his disposal, and wishes in print that he could be free from the constraints that preclude the printing of the more advanced geological maps that he wanted in his book. Grewingk’s geography supplements and completes Ferdinand Wrangell’s Statistische und ethnographische Nachrichten über die Russischen Besitzungen an der Nordwestküste von Amerika, (translated by Mary Sadouski and published by Richard Pierce’s Limestone Press as Russian America: Statistical and Ethno- graphic Information, ). Wrangell includes extensive observations of the flora and fauna of Alaska but his most significant contribution is the ethnographic description of human populations and the history of Russian occupation of the territory. In contrast, Grewingk’s work, nine years later (written in ), focuses on geology, not human history. The value of