The Leffingwell Camp Site, on Flaxman Island, 58 miles (93 km) west of Barter Island on the Arctic Coast of Alaska, was used by polar explorer and geologist Ernest de Koven Leffingwell on his pioneering Anglo-American Polar Expedition of 1906–1908, which aimed to explore the Beaufort Sea.

The expedition's ship, the Duchess of Bedford, was allowed to become locked in ice which eventually destroyed it.

He accurately identified the oil potential of the area, including assessing that it was not, in his day, technologically or economically feasible to develop it.

[3] Following the destruction of the Duchess of Bedford, Leffingwell "returned to civilization in the fall of 1908, as the guest of Capt.

Leavitt's vessel, the steam New Bedford, Massachusetts-based whaler Narwhal, and bestowed the name of the Maine-born Captain,[5] who married an Inuk woman and settled at Barrow, on Leavitt Island off the Alaska North Slope.