Frederick Whymper, a young Englishman travelled north as the official artist for the Yukon section of the Overland Telegraph Company's construction project. Although he only spent a year in the north before the project collapsed, he wrote and illustrated a book, Travels in America and on the Yukon, published in 1869. The book helped awaken interest in the possibilities of the Yukon, and provided information about the new American territory of Alaska.
Hired in Victoria, British Columbia, Whymper waited impatiently for a year before being posted to Alaska in 1866. He spent the winter at the Russian-American Company's post of Nulato on the Yukon River, sketching and making notes. He travelled with William Dall up-river to Fort Yukon in the summer of 1867, continuing to sketch and help Dall collect and preserve specimens of local wildlife.
In July Whymper and Dall returned to Nulato, where they found instructions waiting for them to return immediately to St. Michael. Here they learned for the first time that, thanks to the construction of a transatlantic cable, the overland telegraph was obsolete, and their work in the north finished.
