Alaskan History “Topographer-in-charge involved making surveys in the field, preparing them for publication, supervision of special maps in the office, and following them through reproductiion. There was just enough responsibility to savor the task, but not a sufficient amount to make it too strenuous. There was just enough extra work involved to provide zest.” ~R. Harvey Sargent, in Mapping the Frontier
Left: Topographic map of Port Valdez, 1915. Right: Surveying took R. Harvey Sargent around the world, from Maine to the American West to China and north to the unmapped wilderness of Alaska. “Mapping the Frontier: A Memoir of Discovery from Coastal Maine to the Alaskan Rim,” with a foreword by R. Harvey Sargent’s grandson, Robert M. Sargent, was published by Down East Books in 2015.
USGS Topographer in Charge R. Harvey Sargent Rufus Harvey Sargent, born in Sedgwick, Maine, in 1875, was the son and grandson of ship captains; at the age of twelve he sailed with his father's schooner to Mexico, helping along the way, tracking the ship and learning the rudiments of navigation. He made other sea voyages with his father, but by the age of nineteen his interests were turning elsewhere. An uncle in Washington, D.C., Dr. Frank Baker, a highly respected physician and one of the founders of the National Geographic Society, offered him a job as a survey crew member at Washington’s National Zoological Park, a part of the Smithsonian Institution. After working at the National Zoo for a few years Harvey wanted something more exciting, and the idea of working for the United States Geological Survey, mapping uncharted territories, seemed to fit the bill. He joined the USGS in 1898 as a traverseman, working in the Black Hills and the Rocky Mountains before being appointed an assistant topographer in 1900. It was a timely opportunity, as explained in Sargent's autobiographical book, Mapping the Frontier: A Memoir of Discovery, Coastal Maine to the Alaskan Rim (Down East Books, 2015): "During the years when Sargent began his career with the USGS, the value of its topographic mapping division was just being acknowledged. Harvey Sargent was the right man in the
!38
alaskan-history.com
