Stephen Harriman Long was born in Hopkinton, New Hampshire on December 30, 1784, one of the 13 children of Moses and Lucy Long. He became a teacher after graduating from Dartmouth College (1809), and joined the army in 1814, teaching mathematics at the US Military Academy at West Point. By 1816 he was a major and an army topographical engineer. As soon as 1817, he took his first trip to the west, where he surveyed the Fox, Wisconsin, and upper-Mississippi Rivers.
Long moved to Philadelphia after his marriage to Martha Hodkiss, in March 1819. In July of the same year he joined the Yellowstone Expedition, led by General Henry R. Atkinson. However, this enterprise failed. Soon after he was given permission to explore the Great Plains. He took with him Titian Peale (1799-1881),an artist and naturalist, whose specific assignment was to collect and record specimens of birds, mammals, reptiles, fishes, and insects, and also to sketch the landscape and views of the Indian life, and Edwin James (1797-1861) - a physician and botanist. This was the first expedition to specifically set out to collect scientific material as well as showing the rest of the country the first images of the western regions.
The party set out on the Missouri River and turned west at the South Platte, reaching the Rockies and discovering a mountain which was named after the Long: Long's Peak. The expedition then headed south and separated into two groups, one under captain John Bell to follow the Arkansas River, and one under Long to follow the Canadian River. During this trip they met some Kiowa-Apache Indians. In September the two parties met at Fort Smith, Arkansas.
In 1823 he surveyed the US-Canada western border and the Minnesota and Red Rivers. As a lieutenant colonel, in 1827, he worked with the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad and from that experience he published a very important book, the Rail Road Manual, in 1829. He surveyed railroads in Georgia, Tennessee and was chief engineer of the Great Western Railroad until 1856, when he left to work in improving navigation on the Mississippi River. Two years later, he moved with his family to Illinois.
Long was called to Washington DC, in 1861, as commander of the topographical engineers, a post that he kept until his retirement as a colonel in 1863.
Colonel Long died on the 4th of September of 1864, in Alton, Illinois.
Source: Goetzmann, William H. and Williams, Glyndwr. The Atlas of North American Exploration. New York: Prentice Hall General Reference, 1992.; Virtual American Biographies Stephen Harriman Long The Handbook of Texas Online LONG, STEPHEN HARRIMAN (July 23, 2001)