True Tales of Arctic Heroism in the New World

The "True Tales" are neither figments of the fancy nor embellished exaggerations of ordinary occurrences. They are exact accounts of unusual episodes of arctic service, drawn from official relations and other absolutely accurate sources. Born in 1844, in Massachusetts, Adolphus Washington Greely served throughout the Civil War. Later, Lieutenant Greely, Regular Army, saw frontier service in places like Wyoming and Utah. In his spare time, he studied telegraph and electricity. The training served him well when he was detailed to the Signal Corps in 1867. In that post, he was responsible over the next 20 years for construction of tens of thousands of miles of telegraph lines and submarine cables in Puerto Rico, Cuba, the Philippines, Alaska and elsewhere, and for the Army's earliest adoption of wireless telegraphy. He was also head of the Weather Service until it was transferred to the Department of Agriculture in 1891. After serving as a "trouble-shooter" in the construction of frontier telegraph lines, Greely volunteered in 1881, to lead an Arctic weather expedition. On a three year stint to Ellesmere Island near the north pole, Greely's party amassed a great deal of data on Arctic Weather and tidal conditions, but was almost wiped out when relief ships failed to reach them for two successive summers. In 1887 President Grover Cleveland advanced Greely from rank of Captain to Brigadier General. In the following years, Greely's innovation led to the military use of wireless telegraphy, the airplane, the automobile and other modern devices. Greely retired for age in 1908. After a trip around the world, he helped found the National Geographic Society and the first free public library in Washington, D.C.