Tent Life in Siberia

First published in 1870, this book is a thrilling account by telegraph operator George Kennan, who signed on to build a telegraph line across Siberia in the 1860s. Though the Trans-Siberian telegraph line failed, we are left today with this tale of virtual first contact with a land and a people. It is an important Siberian title with many detailed passages people, fish, music, song, costume, marriage ceremonies, language, customs, Siberian tribes, volcanoes, the coasts, and a profusion of others. At the age of twenty, Kennan was traveling all around eastern Siberia with wandering natives on dogsleds and reindeer sleds, living in yurts and eating local foods, starving at times, camping under snowdrifts at fifty below zero, and mostly just observing and interacting with native peoples, and all this just after the U.S. Civil War. In the mid-1880s he went back to Siberia to investigate the system of political exile. The resulting Siberia and the Exile System is another great travel book, with dark political overtones.