'Alaska's best friend' subject of PBS historical documentary

Tonight public television will debut a documentary program about Adolphus Greely, the Army officer some have credited with doing more than anyone else to make territorial Alaska a permanent part of the USA.

Trained in warfare, he fostered important peacetime innovations. Did you use a cell phone to call another state today? Greely made the first connection possible. When you watch fighter jets take off from Elmendorf, know that it was Greely who purchased the military's first airplanes. Fort Greely, near Delta, home of America's high-tech anti-missile system is fittingly named for him.

But "The Greely Expedition" mentions none of that. Instead it focuses on macabre events that brought Greely both fame and infamy 125 years ago.

The documentary, presented as part of PBS's "American Experience" series, touches on Greely's impoverished boyhood and his service in the Union Army. He survived some of the worst fighting of the Civil War and led one of the first contingents of black troops. After the war, he became a specialist in the new sciences of telegraphy and weather forecasting.

In 1881, as part of an international polar research effort, he was dropped off in the Canadian Arctic with a contingent of 25 men. They overwintered, made weather observations and set a new "farthest north" record.

But the following summer, no ship returned to bring them home. Nor did one appear the next summer. The expedition was forgotten, cut off by ice floes and lost between the cracks of the War Department.

Following orders, Greely and his men left comfortable and well-supplied quarters and set out for a rendezvous point pre-determined by bureaucrats with no understanding of the region. The documentary recounts how Greely became listless and nearly lost command of his men as they wound up stranded with meager supplies on a small pan of sea ice. Just before it melted, the ice washed up on a barren rock devoid of game or vegetation.

Then things got bad.

ABANDONED

The men huddled in sleeping bags under makeshift shelters through the ferocious winter at nearly 75 degrees latitude, farther north than Point Barrow. Greely's courage and leadership now came to the fore. But he faced a hopeless situation. Eighteen men died from cold and starvation. One was executed for theft.

The government had abandoned them. But the documentary shows how Greely's wife waged a desperate campaign in the popular press until the public demanded action. A final search mission went out. The last survivors were hours from death when rescuers arrived. One perished shortly after he was plucked off the rock.

Greely and the five other men who made it back alive were heroes. But reports of cannibalism soon circulated in The New York Times and elsewhere. Politicians and fellow explorers loudly condemned the adventure's failures.

The late Alden Todd, author of "Abandoned," the 1961 book still cited as the definitive account of the expedition, once told the Daily News that some of the corpses probably had chunks hacked off and consumed. But he doubted that Greely or the other survivors did it. If anything, he said, the cannibals probably caused their own deaths by eating the toxified flesh of their companions' corpses.

SPECTACULAR CAREER

"The Greely Expedition" jumps from the rescue in 1884 to Greely's death in 1935. This covers the expedition, but hardly encompasses the man.

"It's not a biography," admitted producer Rod Rapley. He compared the expedition's "morality play" of human character placed in extreme conditions with his earlier film about Wyatt Earp.

"When society is in a crucible, some people are ennobled and others have their flaws magnified."

Ignoring the last half of Greely's career was painful, he said. "The 51-minute limit is just tyranny. This is by nature a 75-minute story. A lot of things had to get cut."

Here's some of what didn't make it.

After 20 years as a lieutenant, Greely became the Army's Chief Signal Officer with the rank of brigadier general. During the Spanish-American War he oversaw the construction of thousands of miles of telegraph lines in Cuba and the Philippines.

When the gold rush hit in 1898, Alaska had no telecommunications to speak of. Greely arrived and, under adverse conditions, built a telegraph system that connected the far reaches of the territory with the rest of the world. It included land lines, submarine cables and the new-fangled radio.

Gold rush Alaska had the largest regularly working system of wireless telegraphy in the world.

EMBRACING TECHNOLOGY

Greely didn't just build infrastructure. He developed the financing to expand the system and make it available to private users. He's considered the founder of the Alaska Communications System, the predecessor of the companies that supply communications between Alaska and the Lower 48.

He made several trips to every corner of the territory. His encyclopedic "Handbook on Alaska," first published in 1909, was a standard text for decades. A Seward newspaper of the day expressed widespread sentiment when it wrote, "Gen. Greely is one of the best friends that Alaska has ever had."

In 1906, he took command of the Army's Pacific Division, headquartered in San Francisco. When the great San Francisco earthquake struck that year, he worked quickly to restore order and utilities.

Before his mandatory retirement at age 64, he made one more incalculable contribution to military history; he ordered the Army's first airplanes from the Wright Brothers. Many years later, when he heard of Richard Byrd's flight over the North Pole, he called it "a matter of great gratification to me."

"He was always organizing, speaking, taking initiatives," said Todd. "He saw to it that new ideas -- aviation, radio, photography -- were developed in practical ways. He showed remarkable abilities to learn and keep up with technology throughout his life."

IMPACT CONTINUES

His contributions continue long after his death.

"The Greely Expedition" ends by noting that the weather observations he made in the 1880s, only recently put into a digitized format, are now being used as a baseline by scientists studying climate change.

"It's much earlier than any other reliable data," said Rapley. "The next solid information wasn't collected until the Cold War" in the 1950s.

Shortly before he died, Greely received perhaps the most unusual Congressional Medal of Honor ever issued. It was not presented for any specific act of heroism, but for lifetime achievement. He is buried in Arlington Cemetery.

Todd, who died in Anchorage in 2006, remembered meeting Greely as a boy when his mother visited the general's eldest daughter.

"He was sitting in a corner, an old man with this formidable beard."

Todd put his wrist to his chin, hand sticking out horizontal to the ground, fingers splayed to indicate how Greely's whiskers grew. "One finger was missing. He had this great, deep voice.

"I was 10 and very impressed."

When they drove away, he asked who the old man was.

"My mother told me only that he was the central figure in a tragic story from her youth."

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