Starting in October 1867 U.S. troops relieved Russian soldiers at the colonial capital, Sitka; the American flag now flew over the District of Alaska.26 The USS Ossipee brought two government officials to the transfer ceremonies. The secretary of the navy publicly declared that a couple of ships were headed to Alaska to collect information on “harbors, production, fisheries, timber, and resources.”27 Rudyard Kipling once wrote discouragingly of Alaska, “Never a law of God or man/Runs north of Fifty-three.”28 Contrary to Kipling, in coming decades, spiritual pilgrims, a cult of wilderness devotees like Muir and Young, found God in the blue-green ice of Glacier Bay, the upper reaches of the austere Brooks Range, and the caribou-thick coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea. Early dispatches out of frontier mining and timber towns, however, proved that Kipling’s assessment was spot-on. Alaska, in fact, was so underpopulated by U.S. citizens in the late nineteenth century that it had been administered in musical-chairs fashion by several government departments: Army, Treasury, Customs, and Navy.
Alaska’s first census came in 1880, while Muir was on his second voyage up the Inside Passage. Of the 33,426 people residing in the territory, fewer than 500 were non-Native. At the time of the Alaska Purchase, Seward had wisely refused to offer free land to attract homesteaders. The U.S. Mining Laws of 1824 had banned freelance prospecting. This bar was amended a decade later. Alaska belonged to the federal government, and various agencies dispatched wildlife biologists, cartographers, and forest experts to write reports on what exactly Seward had acquired.29 Anthropologists started writing about how Native nomads had crossed from Siberia to Alaska over the Bering land bridge. Reports from the Corwin noted that the Inupiat and Yupik were dispersed throughout the northern and western regions of Alaska. Whalers knew for certain that the Aleuts were primarily based in the island chain named for their tribes: the Aleutians. Around the Alaskan interior—near present-day Fairbanks—were the Athabascan people. Then in southeastern Alaska there were the totem pole peoples—Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian—who lived in a green paradise: they had rich forestland, a mild climate, and fish and game galore.
The Alaska district, a colossal subcontinent, was a relatively new and unknown addition to the United States. The naturalist Steller’s old notes, in fact, were still relevant to zoologists. Another naturalist, William H. Dall—known to the scientific clique at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., as “the dean of Alaska experts”—had befriended various Native Alaskan tribes including the Aleuts and Tsimshian. Besides being amazed at their arts and crafts, he considered them all great fishermen. Dall was more worried about the American drifters headed into Alaska looking for quick fortunes in salmon fishing than about the Natives. Dall, America’s first serious “Alaska naturalist,” wrote that from 1867 to 1897 the district was marked by a surprising amount of lawlessness and the slaughter of seal herds for market.30 No citizen could make a legal will or own a homestead. Polygamy was widespread throughout the territory. Occasionally there was even a burning of accused witches. With no courts in the region itself, Alaskan land claims had to be defended in the courts of California, Oregon, and Washington.
Dall, who had traveled in interior Alaska with mush dogs, began lobbying the U.S. government to regulate timber and mining claims, hoping that Alaska could be sensibly developed and eventually achieve statehood. Brimming with encyclopedic knowledge about the Alaska Range and the Kenai Peninsula, Dall insisted that the U.S. government had to regulate timber and mineral claims; it was a legal imperative. Dall saw Alaska as having ecological, moral, scientific, and spiritual values that would help preserve the frontier spirit if properly managed by the federal government. A Victorian-era classifier of animals, Dall had two Alaskan species named in his honor: Dall’s porpoise (Phocoenoides dalli) and the Dall sheep (Ovis dalli). He also called on the U.S. Navy to stop Japan and Russia from slaughtering the northern fur seal (Callorhinus ursinus) for pelage. The luxuriant dark coat of northern fur seals—males are a handsome brown and females gray-brown (dorsally) with a streak of chestnut-gray (ventrally)—was coveted by trappers for a global market. Only sea otters had a denser underfur than these seals—so dense that ocean water never touched their skin. A ringed seal pelt, with bold black stripes, as in a Franz Kline painting, was sought after by Paris and London merchants and furriers. Dall envisioned a time when the great northern fur seal herds of Alaska—like the animals of Charles Darwin’s Galápagos—would attract tourists from all over the world.31 Ignoring Dall’s call, the U.S. government decided to lease “killing privileges” on Alaska’s seal rookeries to private businesses, with royalties coming to the general treasury. There was a strong movement in Congress, in fact, to get back, by way of the skins of fur-bearing mammals, the $7.2 million that the Alaska Purchase had cost.32
Nobody captured the horror of the slaughter of Alaskan seals and otters quite like the novelist Rex Beach, of Michigan. Beach’s first novel was The Spoilers, a 1906 best seller about government officials stealing from gold prospectors in Nome, Alaska, but he later turned to the ruthless U.S. fur industry and wrote a blistering fictional exposé, considered by some scholars a pioneering environmental work. He had zero tolerance for seal blood in tidal pools of sea grasses and kelp. “Jonathan Clark, for one, considered the wholesale destruction of harmless and bewildered creatures as a thoroughly dirty and degrading business,” Beach wrote in The World in His Arms. “He was ready to wash his hands of it in more ways than one.” Clark, the novel’s hero, confronts the Alaskan territorial government in the 1870s about the need to ban the killing of marine mammals. “You probably won’t believe that a man of my sort can have a respect—a reverence, I may say—for the wonders of nature,” Beach wrote. “But a rogue can revere beauty or grandeur and resent their destruction. Those fur seals are miraculous; it’s a sacrilege to destroy them.”33
But as Beach made clear in The Winds of Change, first published in 1918, the Russian, Canadian, and Japanese pelagic hunters continued slaughtering Alaska’s northern fur seals indiscriminately. Seal fur brought money. And law enforcement, as represented by federal agents in Washington, D.C., was far, far away. To these market hunters, the Pribilofs—rocks with only clusters of creeping willows and a few shrubs bearing black currants and red salmonberries—were Fort Knox; actually, truly fine pelts were worth more than gold. Disdainful of federal seal protection laws, vessels from these countries would anchor just outside the three-mile U.S. limit and slaughter the great herds. Rudyard Kipling included in his second Jungle Book the short story “The White Seal,” a saga of the Bering Sea about nations slaughtering Pribilof fur seals and otters. Using high-powered rifles, hunters in the Aleutian Islands shot at the heads of seals and otters, hoping their bodies would wash ashore, where skinning could commence.
III
By the time Roosevelt graduated from Harvard in 1880 he had become envious of naturalists like Dall—a latter-day American version of Steller—who roamed the strange and forbidding Alaskan tundra with mush dogs, sledding past grizzly bears. The ribbon seal (Phoco fascita) in the Bering Sea, the giant tusked walrus, ice cascades, fierce gales, alpine tundra, root-digging grizzlies, unspoiled conifer forests, ripping tidal currents to match those of New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy—all of Alaska’s extraordinary ensemble of natural wonders tugged on his psyche. Such wild grandeur was incomprehensible on the East Coast. Excitedly, Roosevelt devoured everything published about the Alaskan frontier. But the real excitement in Alaska from 1870 to 1914 was gold. From the early prospectors of the 1870s to the crazed strikes of the late 1890s in the Klondike and the stampedes in Nome to the El Dorado gold fever triggered by discoveries in Tanana, Ruby, Iditarod, and Livengood, gold ruled Alaska. Only the discoveries of oil fields in Alaska, first up the Cook Inlet and then along the Arctic Ocean coastal plains in the middle to late twentieth century, equaled the wild-eyed hunger for gold.34
The part of the permafrost Arctic expanse owned by the United States—northern Alaska above the Arctic Circle—was home
to millions of birds from all over the world. In the air—arriving in swirls from Antarctica, Australia, Asia, South America, northern Canada, and the Lower Forty-Eight—were migratory birds that had flown thousands of miles. Every spring geese, ducks, swans, and sandhill cranes were the first to arrive, even before the ice melted and the rivers were free. Native Alaskan tribes, Roosevelt learned, had flourished for thousands of years, living hand-to-mouth off the frozen land and rough sea. According to the U.S. Geographical Survey in 1877, most of Alaska was an open book for any faunal naturalist willing to collect quantitative data. After reading Henry Wood Elliot’s A Report upon the Condition of Affairs in the Territory of Alaska, Roosevelt craved the rock, snow, and ice of the territory even more. Russia had made one of the worst blunders of the nineteenth century in selling more than 586,000 square miles so cheaply. Alaska sprawled over 21 degrees of latitude and 43 degrees of longitude. As the explorer Alfred Hulse Brooks—who gave his name to the Brooks Range—noted, Alaska was truly a place of “continental magnitude.”35
Alaska was one-fifth the size of the continental United States, larger than California, Texas, and Montana combined. If superimposed onto a U.S. map, the state would stretch all the way from California to Florida. Alaska had an astounding 33,000 miles of coastline; seventeen of America’s twenty highest peaks were in the territory. There were more active volcanoes there than in Hawaii and the Lower Forty-Eight combined. This was the land of 100 Yosemites. Texans could brag all they wanted to about open space, but Alaska was well over twice as large as the Lone Star State. “In Alaska,” the conservationist Paul Brooks wrote in The Pursuit of Wilderness, “everything from the price of eggs to the antlers of moose is more than life size.”36
Of all the major U.S. politicians following Seward’s Alaska Purchase of 1867, it was Roosevelt who had fought hardest to give Alaska’s citizens—largely Aleut, Inupiat, Tlingit, and other Native tribes—constitutional rights. A fist-pounding Roosevelt had urged Congress in 1906 to “give Alaska some person whose business it shall be to speak with authority on her behalf to Congress.”37 Roosevelt saw Alaska as a primitive wilderness, full of game, its waters teeming with fish without end, serving as a long-term salve to the inherent rottenness of industrialization. There was no dollar value to put on magnificent places like the Alaska Range, Alexander Archipelago, or Aleutian chain. To Roosevelt, all of Alaska could become a vast federal district whose natural resources would be tightly controlled from Washington, D.C. By the late nineteenth century wilderness preservation societies were sprouting up across the Lower Forty-Eight: the Appalachian Mountain Club (1876); the Sierra Club (1892); the Mazamas of Portland, Oregon (1894); and the Camp Fire Club of America (1897), to name just a few.38 To members of these nonprofit organizations, Alaska was a great cathedral, the last place to worship the most spectacular, untrammeled wilderness in North America.
When Roosevelt left the White House in March 1909, after serving as America’s twenty-sixth president, he donated his handsome snowy owl mount to Frank M. Chapman (head of ornithology at the American Museum of Natural History and an early proponent of federal bird reservations). A grateful Chapman gladly accepted the specimen, tagging it as accession No. 15600. He then proudly put the owl on public display. Instantly, it became the most popular artifact of Roosevelt in the museum’s natural history collection, housed in the appropriately named Roosevelt Memorial Hall.39 Everybody wanted to see the snowy owl. The bird was like a messenger from the far north, possibly from Alaska, that had winged its way thousands of miles from the quiet world to crowded New York. The snowy owl proved to Roosevelt and others that the Arctic was real—not remote or otherworldly. Although Roosevelt never visited Alaska, his conservation policies, specifically his bedrock belief that the federal government had to save Alaskan wilderness tracts en masse from despoilers, profoundly influenced how future generations thought of the district turned territory turned state.
Chapter Two - Theodore Roosevelt’s Conservation Doctrine
I
Roosevelt would have given his eyeteeth to be an ornithologist on the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899, exploring what are today Glacier Bay National Park, Misty Fiords National Monument and Wilderness, and Chugach National Forest to observe bald eagles, whales, seals, bears, and more. But, alas, he was at that time governor of New York and couldn’t get away to a far-distant sphere. Albany seemed to him like an eddy in a stream where branches float backward and accumulate in the mud, a logjam of bureaucracy—not a free, wild place like southeastern Alaska. The rhythm of natural history discoveries was Roosevelt’s passion in life. Oh, to have been able to discuss the king eider (Somateria spectabilis) with John Burroughs and mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) with John Muir! Governor Roosevelt’s stars, however, did not align in 1899; he would have to wait for the future to see the Inside Passage, Prince William Sound, and the Bering Sea land bridge site for himself. But Roosevelt was gearing up—like the twenty-eight prominent Americans documenting the natural world along 9,000 miles of Alaska’s coastline from the Elder’s deck—to make protecting the “great land” a key component of his conservationism.
An accomplished naturalist and adventurer, Roosevelt had eagerly read the scientific reports written by the faunal naturalists on the Harriman Expedition as they were periodically issued. He was especially impressed with the work of George Bird Grinnell (editor of Forest and Stream), Dr. C. Hart Merriam (chief of the U.S. Biological Survey), and William H. Dall (paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey and honorary curator of mollusks at the U.S. National Museum). Sometimes Roosevelt was envious of Dall, who had three species—the Dall porpoise, Dall sheep, and Dall limpet—named after him. By 1899 only the Olympic Range elk (Cervus roosevelti) had been named—by Merriam—in Roosevelt’s honor. The Harriman Expedition was Dall’s unprecedented fourteenth trip to wild Alaska; his first visit had been in 1865, to study the possibility of an intercontinental telegraph line. Dall had encyclopedic knowledge of all things Alaskan and was teasingly nicknamed “Inuit Dall.” His book Alaska and Its Resources (1870) was a bible to U.S. government agents traveling in the district after Seward’s purchase.1
Once Roosevelt started reading Dall on Alaska, he began thinking about ways to protect Alaska’s species (and their habitat) in perpetuity. Now, in 1899, as New York’s conservationist governor, he was setting the tone for the rest of America, including Alaska. The big-game hunter Dall DeWeese had also gone to Alaska in 1897 to shoot a trophy bull moose (Alces alces) on the Kenai Peninsula. He bagged an antler rack that set a record at the Boone and Crockett Club. Antlers of an adult moose in Alaska weighed around seventy-five pounds and had a seventy-two-inch spread. Most adult caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and moose shed their antlers by January, after the rut. Female caribou shed theirs in the springtime after calving (often not until June). Female moose have no antlers.
But when DeWeese went back the following summer, the moose population on the Kenai Peninsula had been severely diminished by market hunters working in the lowlands. Roosevelt was livid over DeWeese’s report—the Alaskan moose might soon go the way of the Great Plains bison. Roosevelt, working with the New York Conservation Society and the Boone and Crockett Club (which he had cofounded), started planning to create a moose refuge in Alaska, on Fire Island (the first in the world). To Roosevelt’s chagrin, the reports of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, of which he started getting advance copies in 1900, were short on moose biology. (That wouldn’t have happened if he had been a mammalogist on the Elder, along with Merriam and Grinnell.)
Roosevelt believed that, like bison on the Great Plains, moose added an alluring charm to the Alaskan landscape. He wanted a tough law that Alaskans had to get special permits to hunt moose only in season, when the antlers were biggest. His views weren’t far removed from those of the Koyukon people of Alaska, who claimed that wild animals weren’t property. “Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of those who are alive today,” Roosevelt said, “but the
property of unknown generations whose belongings we have no right to squander.”2
Paradoxically, stories of the Harriman Expedition mooring off Kodiak Island to hunt bears fascinated Roosevelt no end. Back in the 1880s in the Bighorns of Wyoming, he had shot grizzly bears. It was an ambition of his to bag a Kodiak bear as E. H. Harriman had done in Alaska. (Harriman, in turn, had partially modeled his thirteen-volume report of the expedition on Roosevelt’s three outdoors memoirs about the Dakota Territory.) There was, however, a dissenter: Muir thought that Harriman, Merriam, and others stomping around Kodiak Island to bag bear trophies in the name of “science” were a childish and pathetic spectacle. To Muir, his cruise compatriots were cruel fools, idiotically abandoning the glories of Prince William Sound to become “gun laden” actors preparing “for war.”3 The excuse Merriam offered was that he was writing the definitive study of Kodiak bears; he needed an “old bruin” to study biologically. E. H. Harriman, the railroad tycoon, was the expedition member who shot the biggest brown bear. A Russian hunter, paid as a scout, had killed a second. The expedition taxidermist, Leon J. Cole, was dispatched from the Elder to skin the enormous bears and bring their furs back to the ship.4
Roosevelt’s attitude—that of a faunal naturalist—seemed to envelop the Harriman Expedition. A lot was accomplished in a short time. Roosevelt’s old friend, the illustrator Robert Swain Gifford, was chosen by Harriman to sketch scenes from the two-month voyage. Gifford had ably done the illustrations for Roosevelt’s book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, published in 1885. Burroughs, Roosevelt’s dear friend, promised to tell the governor about all the Alaskan birds when he returned to New York. Merriam had reviewed Roosevelt’s first book—a pamphlet, really—titled Summer Birds of the Adirondacks, back in 1878; they became fast friends. Merriam headed the Biological Survey and was the person Roosevelt corresponded with most often about North American mammals and birds. Then there was Grinnell, founder of the original Audubon Society in 1886, with whom Roosevelt had started the Boone and Crockett Club. Together with Grinnell, they saved the Lower Forty-Eight herds of bison, antelope, deer, elk, and moose from extinction. These cronies of Roosevelt, traveling together on the Elder, were determined now to save parts of wild Alaska just as they had done for Yosemite, Yellowstone, and the Adirondacks.
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