"The spell of Alaska," Ella Higginson wrote in 1908, "falls upon every lover of beauty who has voyaged along those far northern snow-pearled shores...or who has drifted down the mighty rivers of the interior which flow, bell-toned and lonely, to the sea.... No writer has ever described Alaska; no one writer ever will; but each must do his share, according to the spell that the country casts upon him."
In A Republic of Rivers, John Murray offers...