USGS Topographer in Charge

Above: Topographic map of Port Valdez, 1915. Surveying took R. Harvey Sargent around the world, from Maine to the American West to China and north to the unmapped wilderness of Alaska.

“Topographer-in-charge involved making surveys in the field, preparing them for publication, supervision of special maps in the office, and following them through reproduction. 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

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 right place in 1898, eager and ready to take on the new and thrilling task of joining the United States Geological Society and learning all he could learn. The National Zoo, thanks to Uncle Frank, had been the first step.”

“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.

During his lifetime R. Harvey Sargent would become well known and widely respected as an explorer, mapmaker, author, educator, and lecturer. In 1903-04, Harvey Sargent joined a mission to China and with his colleagues drew the first topographic surveys of the Empire, establishing surveying stations on the Great Wall of China and making geological discoveries along the way. The excellent, accurate maps produced by Harvey Sargent were the first of their kind, winning the expedition a gold medal from the Geographical Society of France. A century later, drawing on his mapmaking grandfather’s photographs and other sources, Bob Sargent organized a traveling exhibit, China: Exploring the Interior (1903-4), providing a glimpse of rural China two years after the Boxer Rebellion.

R. Harvey Sargent (left) and Bailey WIllis, surveying in China, 1903.

In 1904 R. Harvey Sargent was posted to Tombstone, Arizona Territory, to map the region. In January, 1906 he married Helen Bailey in Salt Lake City, Utah, and in the early summer of 1906 he traveled to Alaska the first time, an event he described as “almost as momentous as getting married!”

Sargent was posted to the Matanuska-Talkeetna region, and his first adventuresome journey was up the Matanuska River from Old Knik, up the Chickaloon River into the Talkeetna Mountains, and down the Talkeetna River, then returning to Old Knik, a distance he noted as approximately 800 miles. From Knik he took his surveying party to Point Possession in a small gas boat and began a traverse of the shoreline along the east shore of Cook Inlet to the mouth of the Kasilof River: “Our means of transportation was a very poor old rowboat, and a smaller boat of dory type. It was a frolic to drift along the shore, stopping every mile or so to make a plane-table station, and pitching our camp on the beach whenever night overtook us.”

Within two years R. Harvey Sargent was put in charge of mapping for the Geological Survey’s Alaskan branch, and he held the job for almost three decades. As topographer-incharge, Sargent oversaw all levels of production, ensuring the quality and accuracy of the maps produced under his purview. His many accomplishments include discovery of the Aniakchak Crater (the world’s largest extinct volcano, now the Aniakchak National Monument); discovery of one of the largest icefields on U.S. territory (the Sargent Icefield); a survey of the Yukon River Valley, from Ruby south to Iditarod, in 1909; a horseback trip over the Fairbanks-to-Valdez Trail, gathering data, in 1910; and in 1911, an assignment to map the area between Kachemak Bay and Turnagain Arm, with four men and eleven packhorses, which he described as “a season filled with thrills from the start!”

In 1912 Sargent was sent to map a potential railroad route from Iliamna Bay to Iditarod, crossing the mountainous Lake Clark country and the Kuskokwim River, second largest in Alaska, and noting, “I was right happy to be given the task. This was country through which no white man had traveled, as far as we knew. It was to be no boy’s play, we realized from the beginning. I took twenty-two packhorses. Everybody walked.”

Chenega Glacier and the Sargent Icefield, in the northeast corner of the Kenai Peninsula, named in 1952 by the USGS for R. Harvey Sargent, who did extensive exploration and mapping on the Kenai Peninsula in 1911.

“During the summers of 1926 to 1929, Sargent was on loan from the Survey to the Departments of Interior and Agriculture, under whose aegis he participated in the groundbreaking Naval Alaskan Survey Expeditions that mapped Alaska from the air, the first aerial surveys made by the United States government.”

In 1937, Harvey Sargent was appointed Chief of the Inspection and Editing Section of the Topographical Branch of the USGS in Washington, where he worked until his retirement in 1947. In that position, he kept pace with the rapidly developing new science of photogrammetry, as applied to map making, and inaugurated many changes in the practices of cartography and in the processes of map reproduction.

Rufus Harvey Sargent at USGS headquarters in Washington, D.C., 1934 [USGS photo]

Over the years, Sargent lectured extensively about his exploration, discoveries, and adventures—in China, Alaska, and the western United States. In March, 1947, R. Harvey Sargent received the Distinguished Service Award from the Department of the Interior. He died in December, 1951, in Washington, D.C.

A short biographical sketch in the USGS History of the Topographic Branch notes: “In every sense a geographer, Mr. Sargent sought to pass on to others his knowledge of foreign lands through lectures and written articles, and he brought to all of his work and activity a zeal, enthusiasm, and ability that marks him as true explorer and pioneer. His love of nature and keen sense have added a human touch that makes his accomplishments stand out with all who knew him.” ~•~