The William O. Field
fonds
Previous Acquisitions
"If scholarly disciplines have founding
fathers, surely Bill Field was one of those who sired Glaciology."
– Dr. Melvin G.
Marcus
William O. Field Jr. was sixteen when
his “dream to see real mountains”1 came
true. The year was 1920. On the strength of William O. Field Sr’s
successful hunting trip in the Canadian Rockies the year before, the
Fields eagerly embarked on an August pack train trip in the mountains, far from their home in Massachusetts.
Three more Rockies summer trips in the 1920s, including a visit to the
Columbia Icefield, and a hunting excursion in Alaska inflamed William
Jr’s passion for glaciers. At Harvard he majored in geology, graduated in
1926 and soon commenced to document trends in glacial activity. Over his
long career as a
glaciologist, Field’s work has
become a major archival record or
fonds.
For over seventy years, Bill
Field surveyed, photographed, analysed and documented glaciers of the
northern hemisphere. He was published extensively and wrote on a range of
subjects from ethnography of the Caucuses to mountaineering in North
America. For many years, Field headed the Department of Exploration and
Field Research of the American Geographical Society. He retired from that
position in 1969. Because of his work on professional committees and
boards along with his own research, colleague Dr. Melvin G. Marcus
remarked:
“If scholarly
disciplines have founding fathers, surely Bill Field was one of those who
sired Glaciology.”2
Though his professional reputation was based on his ongoing work on the coastal glacier termini of Alaska, he revisited the Canadian mountains that first fired his imagination. Field viewed the Canadian Rockies as “very intimate” mountains, rising above alpine meadows and forests, so different from the huge peaks of Alaska, often surrounded by de-glaciated landscapes. The behavior of interior glaciers on the continental divide contrasted with that of the tidewater glaciers of Glacier Bay in Alaska. These differences figured in his writings and influenced his decisions about the final disposition of his archives.
Field bequeathed his Canadian Rockies
scientific archives to the Whyte Museum of the Canadian Rockies. Suzanne
Brown, his colleague, arranged for the transfer of
these records to Banff, while the balance of records were given to the
University of Alaska, Fairbanks. With grant assistance from
the Canadian Council of Archives/National Archives of Canada we have recently arranged, described and
conserved this valuable archival resource, helping to ensure a continuity of
glaciological study in the Canadian Rockies. Just as Field made use of
the observations of mountaineers and explorers before him, future
glaciologists will use his data as
benchmarks.
This arrangement and description
project involved reconstructing filing schemes, matching thousands
of
negatives and prints and ensuring that the Field
fonds is preserved for and accessible to future scientists. Students of
recreation will also find valuable source material within these records.
Adventures of trail and camp life, ascents of peaks under the amiable
supervision of Swiss guides
and friendships with a host of guides, outfitters and
research colleagues are evident in the
records.
The fonds includes textual records and photographs from trips and survey seasons throughout the 1920s, 1948, 1949 and 1953 and up until 1989. Numerous glaciers were studied throughout the Columbia, Lyell, Freshfield and Wapta Icefields and are documented in the records. Field also collected valuable glacier photographs by others: nineteenth century railway photographers, mountaineers and scientists ranging from the 1880s to the 1950s. In all, the fonds includes approximately 70 linear centimetres of textual records and 8000 photographs.
Several finding aids have been
prepared to provide access to the records. A fonds description will be
added to the Archives Network of Alberta, providing a general description
for Internet users. The arrangement
scheme for the records and
series and file descriptions will be available in hard copy and database
formats. Many of Field’s publications are available through the
Archives and Library at the Whyte
Museum.
Early in his career, William O. Field
was told that to be a successful glaciologist you should start young, make
periodic observations and “if you have a long life, you will have
an interesting story to tell.” A human life span might seem a mere instant
in the life of a glacier. However, glaciology was still a new discipline
when Field first discovered the icefields of the Canadian Rockies. Field
did live a long and full life. And his records do have an interesting
story to tell. We are grateful for his support and for the grant
assistance
to
the William O. Field fonds processing
project.
— Don Bourdon, Head Archivist
1. Interview with William O. Field by Edward J. Hart,Banff, 1989. S1/154, source of biographical information in this article.
2. Maynard M. Miller, William Osgood Field, American Alpine Journal, 1995, p365.