Frederick Funston (1865 - 1917)
Frederick Funston was born in New Carlisle, Ohio and his family moved to Kansas in 1867. His father, Edward H. Funston was elected to the United Sates House of Representatives in 1884. Frederick Funston spent one year as a journalist and then focussed on botany.1) Although not a trained botanist, in 1891 he was a member of the Death Valley Expedition under American botanist Frederick Vernon Coville. In the spring of 1892, he made his first expedition to Alaska to investigate the region around Yakutat Bay for Colville and the Department of Agriculture's Division of Botany. This expedition lasted 107 days, most of them rainy, and listed 168 species of flora. In the spring of 1893, he returned to the north and arrived in Juneau on April 8th, 1893.2)
Funston landed at Dyea on April 10th, 1893 with McConnell, a Canadian, Thompson, a miner from Idaho, and Mattern, a German who had mined in half a dozen Western States. Funston was the only one with previous Alaska experience. McConnell, Thompson, and Mattern were bound for Forty Mile. Funston had a roving commission for the US Department of Agriculture to make a botanical collection, take weather observations, and collect any scientific information available. He was to extend his journey to the Mackenzie and the Arctic Ocean and down the Yukon River to the mouth.3) On their journey they stopped at the Tagish houses about a mile above Marsh Lake. This was a gathering spot for the Tagish from the immediate vicinity as well as the Chilkat Tlingits, and the Tinneh [Dene] from as far away as the mouth of the Pelly River. They stopped here to build boats. A party of a dozen men arrived soon after them and Thompson joined that party. The boat they built was a flat-bottomed skiff 18' long and 26“ wide at the bottom and 4' wide at the top. At Miles Canyon the party found another group of seven men portaging their outfit around the canyon. They and several others went through the canyon and portaged around the rapids.4)
At the head of Lake Laberge, the party was joined by an experienced Alaskan prospector, Mark Russell, who had three companions and two boats. The men manhandled their boats and supplies over the sloppy ice to clear water below the lake. McConnell and Mattern continued down the river but Funston stayed at Forty Mile from May 23 to August 25, 1893. He was ordered to make Fort Yukon his headquarters until April 1st, 1894 and then march overland along the 141st meridian boundary to Rampart House, collecting as many tundra species as he could find along the way. Fort Yukon was abandoned but there was a missionary waiting for the arrival of a First Nation party coming down the Porcupine to transport supplies back up to a missionary at Rampart House. Funston decided to travel up with them and they began the trip on September 11th, 1893. They reached Rampart House on September 23rd and stayed for almost nine months. Funston started back down the Porcupine River by June 20, 1894 to arrive at St. Michael's Island to connect with the Revenue Cutter Service boat.5)
From 1896 to 1897, Funston spent 18 months as a guerrilla fighter in the Cuban insurrections. He won the Medal of Honour in the spring of 1899 while commanding the 20th Kansas Volunteers on Luzon in the Philippines. He won a commission as brigadier general in the regular army after capturing Philippine rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo y Famy in 1901. In 1906, he served in Cuba and was in San Francisco to help with the earthquake and fire. He was the commandant at the Army's Service School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas from 1908 to 1910 and then was commander of the Department of Luzon in 1911-12. He was in Honolulu in 1913 shoring up defences around Pearl Harbour. He was the military government of Vera Cruz from April to November 1914 and then became a major-general commanding the Southern Department defending the border in Arizona and Texas.6)