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Southeast Alaska: A Famous Photographer Visits Southeast Alaska; A century and half ago, Muybridge took the first photos of Alaska. By DAVE KIFFER - Each year several million photographs are taken of Alaska. Granted many, these days, are selfies in which the photographer's face is more prominent than the Alaska scenery, but parts of the Last Frontier are remain among the most photographed places on Earth.

Which is why the story of three dozen photographs, taken 150 years ago in the recently purchased territory, is interesting. The man who took the photos would go onto become one of history's most famous photographers and set the stage for the "moving pictures" that became movies and television.
 
But when he came to Alaska in 1868, Eadweard Muybridge was in the beginning of his photographic career.
 
Muybridge was born in 1830 in Kingston, England. His birth name was Edward James Muggeridge. But that was just the start. By the time he was an adult he had changed his last name to Muggridge. In his mid-20s he was calling himself Muygridge. At one point, after a trip to Central America, he was marketing his work under the name Eduardo Santiago Muybridge. In his 50s, he began spelling his first name Eadweard. Throughout his life, he signed his photos "Helios" after the Titan of the Sun.
 
When he died, in 1904, his gravestone carried the name Eadweard Maybridge, although that was probably a typo.
 
Raised in a family of stationers and corn merchants, Muybridge emigrated to the United States in 1850 and lived for several years in New York City. He moved to San Francisco in 1855 and began working as a publisher's agent and a bookseller.
 
Within five years, Muybridge had become a successful bookseller and own a prominent San Francisco business. Leaving his brother in charge of the store, he planned to sail back to the England to purchase a large number of antiquarian books to sell in his shop.
 
But Muybridge missed the ship sailing and made a fateful decision to travel overland to the East Coast instead. He left San Francisco in July of 1860 heading for St. Louis by stagecoach. In St. Louis he would board the train for New York where he would sail a ship to England.
 
Unfortunately, in Texas, Muybridge was severely injured in a stagecoach accident. A runaway team caused the coach to crash, injuring all the passengers and causing one fatality. Muybridge was ejected during the crash and struck his head on a rock. He was taken to a hospital in Fort Smith, Arkansas and remained there for three months. He then went to New York City where he would continue to convalesce for a year - suffering double vision, confused thinking, impaired sense of taste and smell and other problems - before doctors deemed him well enough to head on to England.
 
Muybridge continued to recuperate in England and as part of his treatment took up photography as well as print making. By the time he was ready to return to San Francisco in 1867, he had decided to make photography his career. He developed one of the first portable "darkrooms" – which he called his “Flying Studio” -  to allow him to travel throughout the West, where he specialized in landscape photography as well as portraiture with his view camera and glass plate negatives. His early "stereographs" were very popular at San Francisco galleries and when he took some of the earliest photos of Yosemite in 1867, his fame began to spread East.
 
In 1868, Muybridge was hired by the US government to travel to Alaska to photograph the Tlingit Natives, the remaining Russian inhabitants and the dramatic scenery.
 
Late in July 1868, Muybridge boarded the steamship Pacific, in San Francisco, heading north to Alaska.  The expedition was led by Major-General Henry Halleck, commander of the US Military Division of the Pacific. Halleck had served during the recent Civil War and at one point was appointed "General in Chief" of the Union Forces, but had proven not quite up to the task, at least according to President Lincoln. His skill set was more attuned to organization and less to battle, according to several biographers. After the war, he had been shunted West, then considered a military backwater.
 
When Alaska was purchased from Russia there was no civil authority to take to control, so Halleck was tasked with setting up a military government for the area. - More...
Saturday PM - November 23, 2019

What killed the world’s giants?
By NED ROZELL
Pam Groves of the University of Alaska Fairbanks looks at bones of ancient creatures she has gathered over the years from northern rivers. The remains here include muskox, steppe bison and mammoth.
Photo By NED ROZELL

Alaska: What killed the world’s giants? By NED ROZELL - Most of the large animals that have walked the surface of Earth are no longer here. Why?

Dan Mann thinks it’s because our recent climate has been too stable, at least when compared to the wacky ups and downs of the last ice age.

Mann, a University of Alaska Fairbanks professor, presented his idea at a recent lecture on campus. Mann is an expert on former worlds, especially that of Alaska, where along northern waterways he and UAF’s Pam Groves have found thousands of bones of extinct horses, along with the hardened remains of lions, giant short-faced bears, mammoths and mastodons. A couple of years ago, while paddling down a sluggish Arctic river, they found a 40,000-year-old steppe bison eroding from a hillside.

Groves is a co-author with Mann on a 2019 paper about what might have caused the extinction of so many large animals at the end of the last ice age, about 11,700 years ago. Many people blame humans, who had a need to hunt and the tools to get the job done.

More likely, extinction is a combination of factors that spell the doom of a species, Mann said.

“There’s no silver bullet that killed them all.”

Looking back over what they can piece together about the past millennia, Mann, Groves and their co-authors say the Holocene — the era in which we live — is too vanilla for large animals to dominate. Great swings in climate favor animals that weigh more than 100 pounds, he said.

“The small, meek and cute inherited the Earth. Climate stability favored them.”

Over the last 100,000 years, 64 percent of large animal species have gone extinct. The loss of large animals like mammoths, mastodons and giant ground sloths has been somewhat evenly spread over all the continents — except Africa, which has lost less than 20 percent of its large animals.

“Africa never lost its (extreme climate swings, including from dry to wet seasons),” Mann said.

During the height of the last ice age, 20,000 years ago, much of Canada was beneath 9,000 feet of ice. That ice sheet extended well into mid-America, though much of Alaska was ice-free at the time.

Using records of ancient climate found in deep ice cores and from other sources, scientists have found that the last ice age was unstable compared to the most recent 12,000 years. During the ice age, every thousand years or so featured wild temperature swings.

“The ice age is a time of crazy, rapid change,” Mann said. “To keep up, you really have to be on the move, whether you’re a plant or an animal.” - More...
Saturday PM - November 23, 2019

PETER FUNT: The Debate Was A Moderated Mess - The latest Democratic presidential debate was disappointing. Not because the participants weren’t articulate – in fact, many of their answers were excellent – but because the DNC and the networks can’t seem to figure out how to conduct a meaningful competition that will actually help voters determine how the candidates differ on key issues.

Wednesday night’s debate in Atlanta was scattered. At times it seemed as if questions for each candidate were being randomly picked from a hat rather than coordinated in a way that would give each competitor a chance to speak about the most controversial topics. Ten candidates might be too many to have a meaningful debate, but four moderators, freelancing with no apparent coordination, only made it worse.

Consider the issue of climate change, viewed by many as one of the most serious problems facing the planet. It only came up when Mayor Pete Buttigieg mentioned it in answer to a question about farming, opening the door to a brief series of climate-related questions. Even then, only half the candidates were allowed to speak on this vitally important issue. Not a word about climate was solicited from Senators Elizabeth Warren, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Kamala Harris or businessman Andrew Yang.

The questioning was conducted by Rachel Maddow, Andrea Mitchell and Kristen Welker of NBC News, along with Ashley Parker of the Washington Post. Although they did an effective job of clock management and refereeing, they failed miserably in giving each candidate a chance to be heard. The issue of abortion and reproductive rights was debated by four senators – Warren, Booker, Klobuchar and Bernie Sanders – while the six other candidates were excluded. The topic of paid family leave was presented to only Klobuchar, Harris and Yang.

Real-time tweets from some viewers praised the four female moderators for bringing up, at long last, these two important matters. What a shame that the two questions were answered by so few participants. - More...
Saturday PM - November 23, 2019

Political Cartoon: Dems Impeach Democracy
By Gary McCoy ©2019, Shiloh, IL
Distributed to paid subscribers for publication by Cagle Cartoons, Inc.