Edward Henry Harriman made his fortune in the stock market, and became active in the consolidation of rail lines in the late nineteenth century. In 1899 he organized and funded a scientific expedition up the Alaska coast that included George Bird Grinnell, Grove Karl Gilbert, John Muir, Frederick Dellenbaugh, C. Hart Merriam, and other scientists, artists and writers, as well as his own wife and five children, and assorted other friends and relations.
Edward S. Curtis, then working as a studio photographer in Seattle, accompanied the Harriman Expedition as official photographer. Photographs in the album are by Curtis, Gilbert, Harriman, Merriam and others.