In 1899 Edward Harriman, the railroad tycoon and most powerful man in America, assembled an elite crew of scientists and artists and took them on a two month survey of the Alaskan coast. Its 126 members included mountaineer John Muir, nature writer John Burroughs, biologist C. Hart Merriam, naturalist and Alaskan expert William Dall, bird artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, ornithologist George Bird Grinnell, and photographer Edward Curtis. The expedition returned with 100 trunks of specimens and over 5000 photographs and coloured illustrations. The scientists produced 13 volumes of data that took 12 years to compile.