Today is “Alaska Day”, a legal holiday in the State of Alaska. By a coincidence, some of the people involved in Alaska Day can be linked easily to the characters I have talked about in this blog.
You may remember that the person credited with the discovery of Oarisma poweshiek, the Poweshiek skipper, was Henry W. Parker. Henry Parker was a classmate of Josiah B. Grinnell, and was invited to teach at Iowa College by him. Late in the lives of both, Henry Parker wrote the forward to Josiah B. Grinnell’s autobiography, and assisted in its publication after Grinnell’s Death.
You may recall when I wrote about Kentucky Representative Lovell Rousseau assaulting Mr. Grinnell on the steps of the Capital.
Alaska Day celebrates when the flag of the United States was raised in a ceremony officiated by General Lovell Rousseau (yes, the same guy), following the purchase of the territory from Russia.
Secretary of State William H. Seward purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. Mr. Seward was criticized for the purchase, and Alaska was called “Seward’s folly” for a while.
You may recall that I speculated that Henry Parker’s wife Helen actually did most of the work of discovering the butterfly. It may have been totally her discovery. Helen was the daughter of Abijah Fitch of Auburn, New York.
Mr. Seward was also from Auburn, and was a friend of Abijah Fitch. Here is an account of a trip that Mr. Seward took in 1869, shortly after he retired.
This was from The Life of William H. Seward, by Fredric Bancroft, published in 1900.
So both Mr. Fitch and Mr. Seward apparently knew Brigham Young.
I have not posted about it yet, but so did Poweshiek.
The roused bear 