Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore

Eliza Ruhamah Scidmore (1856–1928) was an American journalist and travel writer who wrote books on Alaska, Japan, Java, China and India. She was the first woman on the board of the National Geographic Society. She introduced the idea of planting Japanese cherry trees in Washington, D.C., a vision that became a reality in 1912.

Life

Scidmore was born October 14, 1856, in Clinton, Iowa. She was the daughter of George B. Scidmore and Eliza Catherine Sweeney Scidmore, who settled among family in Madison, Wisconsin, after an itinerant period early in their marriage, when their two children were born. The future writer Eliza spent several years of her early childhood in Madison, before moving to Washington, D.C., with her mother and brother during the Civil War. She later attended Oberlin College, though she never completed a degree. She broke into newspaper work in the 1870s and started her career as a "society writer" in Washington.

A keen interest in geography led her to became a writer of travel "letters" for newspapers. Accounts of her voyages to the territory of Alaska in the summers of 1883 and 1884 resulted in her first book, Alaska, Its Southern Coast and the Sitkan Archipelago (1885). She later wrote a second, more comprehensive book on Alaska, issued in 1893 by the guidebook company Appleton's.

The professional position of her brother, George Hawthorne Scidmore, a career diplomat who served in the Far East from 1884 to 1922, prompted Eliza's frequent travels to Japan, beginning in 1885. His diplomatic position gave her advantages in reporting on areas and subjects not generally accessible to ordinary travelers. Jinrikisha Days in Japan, published in 1891, became one of her best-known books and made her a recognized U.S. expert on Japan. It was followed by a short guidebook, Westward to the Far East (1892), written for the Canadian Pacific Railway.