The cover of Volume 5, Number 4 features the U.S. Revenue Cutter ‘Bear,’ and an excerpt from a book by Alaska historian Gary C. Stein shares the 1889 voyage of the “Bear” as seen through the eyes of the ship’s surgeon, Dr. James Taylor White.

This issue also features the story of the ‘Tanana Chief,’ a sternwheeler which plied the waters of Interior Alaska, told by the great-granddaughter of one of its builders, J.E. Orme, who journeyed north with the ship in 1898 in search of Alaskan gold. Mary Lynn Roush shares her great-grandfather’s letters to his sister, which includes the rescue of one of Alaska’s earliest explorers, Second Lieut. J.C. Castner of Edwin F. Glenn’s 1898–1899 military expedition, who had been presumed lost for months.

The great 1912 eruption of Novarupta in the Mount Katmai region, the largest volcanic eruption of the 20th century, includes the official report of Capt. K.W. Perry of the Revenue Cutter ‘Manning,’ which was in port at Kodiak at the time of the eruption, and sheltered over 400 people, providing fresh water from her evaporators (which were an innovation at the time).