Editor's note: This is part one of a two-part series. Read part 2 here.

Many of Alaska's mountains, rivers, and other geographic features were named for people who never set foot in Alaska. Mount McKinley may be the best example. In 1897, a prospector named the peak after President William McKinley, because he was a champion of the gold standard -- and happened to be a distinguished son of Ohio. While most Alaskans prefer Denali, the Athabaskan name, Ohio’s congressional delegation has sandbagged every attempt to rename the mountain.

But most of the time Alaskans don't know who named a prominent feature or why. Take the Glenn Highway, one of Alaska's busiest highways, named after Capt. Edwin F. Glenn.

In 1898 and 1899, Glenn commanded several expeditions along routes that later became four of Alaska's highways. In 1898 Seward was a town, but none of the other towns built along the Seward, Parks, Richardson, or Glenn highways -- including Anchorage, Fairbanks, Palmer, Wasilla, and Glennallen -- yet existed. Glennallen was named by merging the surnames of Glenn and Lt. Henry Allen, an earlier explorer of the Copper River valley. 

Three years after leaving Alaska, Glenn became one of the few American officers to be tried and convicted of waterboarding or other war crimes. Most of the following is from Compilations of Narratives of Explorations in Alaska, Lt. Castner's Alaskan Exploration, 1898: A Journey of Hardship and Suffering, and Glenn's service records.

Glenn's first Alaska expedition

Before Canada's Klondike Gold Rush, miners were finding gold in placer deposits scattered along the Yukon River and some of its tributaries in Alaska. American miners were accessing the Alaska gold fields from Skagway and Juneau, but these mapped routes, via the headwaters of the Yukon River, were through Canada. The government wanted an all-Alaska route.

In 1898 the U.S. Geological Survey combined forces with the U.S. Army to explore potential transportation routes along the territory's large river valleys. Glenn was tasked with finding a route to interior Alaska up the Matanuska and Susitna rivers.

Glenn had graduated from West Point in 1877, the year after George Armstrong Custer's defeat on the Little Bighorn River. He was posted to the 25th Infantry Regiment, one of the famous "buffalo soldier" units -- with black enlisted men and white officers -- doing duty in Texas, Montana and the Dakotas. Apparently tiring of Indian fighting, Glenn cast about for ways to advance his career. He became a professor of military science and tactics at the University of Minnesota, where he also attended law school, from 1888 to the early 1890s.  He wrote a book on international law, published in 1895. When he received orders in 1898 to lead an expedition to Alaska, he was with the Judge Advocate Corps, although still nominally affiliated with the 25th Infantry.

Glenn headed up Alaska's Inside Passage. His party, consisting mostly of soldiers from the 14th Infantry, stationed in Southeast Alaska, eventually numbered four officers, 22 enlisted men, and three civilians. The expedition was supposed to acquire 50 reindeer and their Lapp handlers in Haines. Congress had purchased the reindeer from Norway for the Army to use in relief expeditions to the upper Yukon, where tales of widespread food shortages were filtering back to the United States. Many of the reindeer had died in transit; the remainder nearly dead from a diet of hay. Glenn deemed the reindeer unsuitable for his needs and went looking for other pack animals.

He found a large assortment of army horses and mules in Dyea, but almost all of these animals were heading back to the United States. The U.S.S. Maine had been sunk in Havana harbor, and American newspapers and some politicians were agitating for war against Spain. Glenn obtained four mules and one horse considered "too worthless for transport."