Background
Alfred Hulse Brooks was born on July 18, 1871, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. He was a son of Major Thomas Benton and Hannah Brooks.
1891
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
At Harvard Brooks studied under Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and William Morris Davis, graduating in 1894.
Alfred Hulse Brooks was born on July 18, 1871, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States. He was a son of Major Thomas Benton and Hannah Brooks.
Brooks received his elementary and secondary education in the Newburgh, New York, schools and from private tutors. Succefully completing his study, Brooks focued engineering in the Polytechnic Institut in Stuttgart in 1889 and of Munich in 1890, then entered Harvard in 1891. At Harvard he studied under Nathaniel Southgate Shaler and William Morris Davis, graduating in 1894.
Brooks is credited with discovering that the biggest mountain range in Arctic Alaska, now called the Brooks Range, was separate from the Rocky Mountains. In 1898, the federal government announced a systematic topographic and geologic survey of Alaska that would include renewed exploration of the Brooks Range. Alfred Hulse Brooks, the new assistant geologist and head of the Alaskan branch of the United States Geological Survey (USGS), called the project "far more important than any previously done," due in large part because it "furnished the first clue to the geography and geology of the part of Alaska north of the Yukon Basin." Between 1899 and 1911, six major reconnaissance expeditions traversed the mountain range, mapping its topography and geology and defining the patterns of economic geology so important to prospectors and miners.
Brooks was appointed geological curator of Alaskan mineral resources in 1902. Every year from 1904 to 1916 and from 1919 to 1923, Brooks wrote summaries of Alaska's mineral industries. The missed years, during World War I, were those that he spent in France as chief geologist for the American Expeditionary Force in France.
In love with nature and the outdoors, Brooks was a bit of a romantic, yet a man of unflinching intellectual honesty and almost excessive humility. He wrote with style and clarity, and devoted a good deal of his time to attempt to improve the prose produced by his Alaskan colleagues and subordinates.
Physical Characteristics: Brooks was a small man, but vigorous and active through most of his life. A dark, closely trimmed full beard lent distinction to his rather serious features.
Brooks led a quietly happy family life with his wife, the former Mabel Baker, whom he married in Washington on February 23, 1903.