The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960

by Douglas Brinkley

  E. H. Harriman was so rich in 1899 that he didn’t need a letter of introduction in Alaska. But Roosevelt was close to Governor James Brady of Alaska—they had a family connection—and saw to it that Brady rolled out the red carpet for the Harriman Expedition in Sitka, a fishing and forest town in the Alexander Archipelago. If they were going to save wild Alaska, including what birds and game weren’t shot-out, Brady would be a crucial ally. At this time, Harriman was fifty-one years old and, as chairman of the Union Pacific Railroad, one of the richest and most powerful men in America. By the time of his death in 1909—when he was worth $100 million—Harriman had overseen the Union Pacific, the Southern Pacific, the Saint Joseph and Grand Island, the Illinois Central, the Central of Georgia, the Pacific Mail Steam Ship Company, and the Wells Fargo Express Company. Years afterward, however, it was his scientific expedition to Alaska that earned him his permanent place in history.5

  When Roosevelt became governor of New York in January 1899, Alaska was very much in the news. While he formed the Rough Riders in San Antonio, Texas—the volunteer cavalry outfit—to fight in the Spanish-American War in 1898, the Klondike gold rush was on. The U.S. Army had charted the upper 500 miles of the Yukon River in Alaska, inadvertently opening up the Klondike gold fields to placer mining. Prospectors and preachers, prostitutes and poachers, thieves and roustabouts—all came tumbling into Alaska in record numbers. While only a few men made fortunes in 1890, Alaska’s mineral production was estimated to be $800,000; by 1904, gold production alone had risen to $10 million.6 A few of these boomers, too, became millionaires; but most found themselves cursing the cold, inhospitable climate.

  Because of his elite upbringing as a New York Knickerbocker, Roosevelt rejected the kind of get-rich-quick schemes that the novelist Knut Hamsun had condemned. Nor did Roosevelt believe that corporate monopoly should have a role in the Alaska district. What interested Roosevelt most about Alaska—besides the moose in the Kenai Peninsula—was that wholesome, God-fearing pioneer families were starting to put down permanent roots. The principal Christian denominations in the Lower Forty-Eight, through the Federal Council of Churches, had divided up zones in which to bring New Testament principles to the Native Alaskan people. Different sects sent missionaries to different regions: Fairbanks (Catholics); Kenai Peninsula (Baptists); Point Hope (Episcopalians); Brooks Range, Anaktuvuk Pass, Barrow, Wainwright, the Alexander Archipelago (Presbyterians); and Anchorage (Methodists). At their best, the missionaries taught sanitation, medicine, and math. At their worst, they prohibited dancing and frowned upon Native arts and crafts as perverse. Both benignly and purposefully, an erosion of Native Alaskan culture was under way.

  One Presbyterian missionary hoping to Christianize the Chilkat Tlingit was John Brady (who served as governor of the district of Alaska from 1897 to 1906).7 Brady, living amid mile-long glaciers and shimmering coastal waters, would do anything for Roosevelt—literally anything—because he owed his life to Theodore Roosevelt Sr. (the president’s father). Brady was based in Sitka (on Baranof Island) with the Pacific Ocean serving as his backyard, and he was properly concerned that thirty-seven salmon canneries were operating at capacity around the Inside Passage, the glorious waterways that Muir had extolled in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. In 1894, for the first time, packers in the Alexander Archipelago had exceeded the million-case mark by late fall. Overfishing was becoming a menace. Grinnell had likewise complained in his report for the Harriman Expedition that Alaskan Natives were being swindled by the rapacious salmon industry. “For hundreds of years,” he wrote, “the Indians and Aleuts had held those fisheries with an actual ownership which was acknowledged by all and was never encroached upon. . . . No Indian would fish in a stream not his own.”8

  Perhaps in repayment for having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. regularly found foster parents for homeless children in New York during the late nineteenth century. John Hay, a family friend, claimed that TR Senior had a “maniacal benevolence” to help slum children. He was a founder of the Children’s Aid Society; he paid support stipends for dozens of waifs through that society; and he spent every Sunday at the Newsboys Lodging House, offering counsel as a sort of father figure. One afternoon in 1854 TR Senior saw little John Brady, in ragged clothes and with disheveled hair, begging with a tin can around Chatham Square. Within a few weeks TR Senior had gotten the ragamuffin Brady, whose father was a drunken longshoreman, placed with a foster family in Indiana. He took personal pride in Brady’s graduation from Yale University in 1874. Next for Brady was a scholarship to Union Seminary; he excelled at ecclesiastical scholarship and was eventually ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Then Brady studied law, with a plan to help Native Americans get ahead in society. In 1878 he moved to Sitka, Alaska, and founded the Presbyterian mission school there. (This school, which later became the Sitka Indian Industrial Training School and still later Sheldon Jackson College, was an industrial vocational institution for Native Alaskans.) The words of Jesus had arrived on the panhandle.

  When Muir was touring Glacier Bay in 1879 and 1880, Brady, the only serious rose horticulturist in Alaska, had been teaching Tlingit and Haida children how to speak English, and introducing them to the scriptures. The huge glacier where Muir and the dog Stickeen had almost died would be named after Brady. On July 15, 1897, after McKinley’s election as president, Brady became governor of Alaska. Brady was a protégé of Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister who had been trained at Princeton University and who was pro-temperance, pro–Native American rights, and pro-conservation. Jackson, in fact, imported reindeer from Siberia on the cutter Bear and released them at Amaknak Island in the Aleutian chain. Reindeer—domesticated caribou—were then introduced near Port Clarence in Northwest Alaska, and Jackson hired Laplanders to teach Native peoples how to become reindeer herders.9 Much of Brady’s work, like Jackson’s, involved trying to properly educate Alaska’s Native populations—the Aleut, Athabascan, Tlingit, and other peoples—and insisting that they were equal to whites. Although Brady and Jackson meant well, their promotion of Christianity and of English as a first language led to the destruction of many Native American cultural mores.

  Brady’s town, Sitka, once a peaceful village, was populated in the late 1890s by 40,000 non-Native argonauts trying to make a strike in the Klondike. Like the voyageurs of the fur companies in the Canadian northwest, they came hungry for wealth. Brady telegraphed the U.S. Army for immediate help; troops arrived with what might today be described as riot gear and dispersed the gold-seekers away from Sitka.10 Roosevelt had lobbied for him. “Your father picked me up on the streets of New York, a waif and an orphan, and sent me to a Western family, paying for my transportation and early care,” Brady reminded Governor Roosevelt when they met in 1900. “Years passed and I was able to repay the money which had given me my start in life, but I can never repay what he did for me, for it was through that early care and by giving me such a foster mother and father that I gradually rose in the world until I greet his son as a fellow governor of a part of our great country.”11

  When Roosevelt suddenly became America’s twenty-sixth president in September 1901—after the assassination of William McKinley in Buffalo, New York—the district of Alaska hadn’t yet earned U.S. territory status (until May 7, 1906, it was simply federal district property). With Brady serving as the leading light of Alaskan politics, Roosevelt called for Alaska’s representation in Congress (a half measure was adopted in late 1906, when Alaska was given a voteless delegate in Congress). While Alaska had executive and judicial officers, the district was without a legislative body until 1912. This gave Brady, as district governor, political clout in Alaskan affairs during Roosevelt’s presidency.

  Harriman himself praised Brady’s hospitality and intelligence after spending time with Brady seeing the natural wonders around Sitka. Brady had taken Harriman, Burroughs, Merriam, and others swimming in a hot spring outside Sitka (at a camp frequented by the Sons of th
e Northwest). The bubbling waters, the smell of sulfur, and the steam hissing out of the little pond made the hot spring like a spa—and a curative for the cabin fever that had beset the passengers on the Elder. But Muir, the moralist, objected to the Sitkans’ hunting practices. Muir recalled that the overseer at the hot spring “murdered a mother deer and threw her over the ridge-pole of the shanty, then caught her pitiful baby fawn and tied it beneath the dead mother.”12 Such brutality to animals, including killing at point-blank range, always turned Muir’s stomach.

  Until the advent of Roosevelt, officials in Washington, D.C., were baffled about what to do with Alaska’s soaring mountains, hidden caves, sumptuous forests, and extensive coastline. Extraction in all its many manifestations seemed wisest. The intimidating Alaskan landscape was so large that rivers just disappeared over horizons and mountain ranges unfolded in staggered rows toward a surreal blue infinity. Deeply influenced by the Harriman Expedition’s reports—the publishing venture overseen by Merriam, which grew into thirteen thick, illustrated volumes—Roosevelt knew that the U.S. government had to properly manage the remarkable forestlands, fisheries, and wildlife resources. These reports became his administration’s all-purpose reference points for Alaskan scientific research and management of public lands. A conservation ethos had to prevail in Alaska, to prevent the twentieth-century industrial order from turning the district into slagheaps, cesspools, and tracts of stumps. Important gold discoveries—Fairbanks (1902); Valdez Creek (1903); Kantishna (1905); Richardson, Chandalar, and Innoko (1906)—were becoming annual occurrences. Gold, however, wasn’t going to save Christian souls, help First Nation people prosper, or protect the forestlands of Alaska.

  Besides reading the Harriman Expedition’s reports, Roosevelt received from a Seattle studio copies of images produced on the 1899 cruise. Edward Curtis’s black-and-white photographs of Alaska’s natural wonders floored the president. Curtis (born February 16, 1868, in Whitewater, Wisconsin) was well known to people interested in the Pacific Northwest wilderness for taking amazing landscape photos of Mount Rainier, the Olympic Mountains, and the island-dotted Puget Sound. Grinnell, an expert on Native American culture, met Curtis one afternoon at Mount Rainier. A fast friendship ensued. Curtis had just taken his first portrait of a Native American: Princess Angeline (the daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle). Grinnell became an enthusiastic booster of the youthful thirty-year-old Curtis, who thus got the job with the Harriman Expedition.

  Using a six-by-eight camera, developing his own film in the ship’s darkroom along the Alaskan coastline, Curtis brilliantly documented the surreal boldness of Alaska in 1899, using the high-latitude light to produce textured prints documenting glacial action. Regularly, Curtis explored glaciers with Muir, perfecting his photographic techniques. While Muir was sketching glaciers, Curtis recorded their advances and retreats. Scientists concerned about global warming in the early twenty-first century used Curtis’s prints as archival evidence of what used to be. Historians have a sense of Alaskan glaciers, icebergs, and fjords in 1899 because of Curtis’s devotion to his craft and to science.

  When the expedition ended, Curtis was commissioned by Harriman to make the Souvenir Album of Alaska. Feverishly working overtime to get this volume ready by 1900, Curtis did a remarkable job of laying out what he saw as the two Alaskas—soaring nature and desolate poverty. His Native American portraits, soon to become his calling card, sadly display acculturation at work. Eskimos, seen through Curtis’s honest lens, were abysmally treated by whites as lowly servants. Curtis’s village images were a haunting testament to the ramshackle, dilapidated fishing communities of the Alaskan coast, which looked nothing like the happy cottages of Nova Scotia or Newfoundland. In Curtis’s portfolio, sealing camps were slums where gutted whale carcasses and bloody dirt dominated the landscape. Curtis frowned on the vicious slaughter of walrus—strong animals, but defenseless against a harpoon or gun. Captains of the hunting schooners in the Bering Sea all seemed amused by a new cutthroat attitude: the idea that Alaska was like a ripe melon to be sliced and diced for profit by outsiders. Washington, D.C., was too far away to enforce anything. Curtis’s bold photographic images demonstrated that if overfishing continued, treasured places like Prince William Sound would become whale cemeteries. Curtis, always studying the light, started being referred to by Native Americans as a “shadow catcher.”13

  But Curtis made nature in Alaska radiate with transcendent light and love. Prefiguring Ansel Adams’s Alaskan photographs by almost half a century, Curtis’s icebergs looked like marble sculptures by Henry Moore. Curtis’s photographs of volcanoes in the Aleutian Range, some people said, were as majestic as Frederic Church’s landscape paintings. Any connoisseur of natural wonders would be touched by Curtis’s elegiac Alaskan images, such as Muir Glacier, Orca Harbor, The Way to Nuntak, and Last View of the Pacific. His most enthusiastic fan of all, it seemed, was Theodore Roosevelt.14 Writing the introduction to Volume 1 of Curtis’s magisterial twenty-volume work The North American Indian, Roosevelt said, “In Mr. Curtis we have both an artist and a trained observer, whose work has far more than mere accuracy, because it is truthful. . . . Because of his extraordinary success in making and using opportunities, [he] has been able to do what no other man has ever done; what, as far as we can see, no other man could do. Mr. Curtis, in publishing this book, is rendering a real great service; a service not only to our people, but to the world of scholarship everywhere.”15

  President Roosevelt wanted to help Alaska—its nature and its Natives—prosper. Henry Gannett, the chief geographer for the U.S. Geological Survey, was his well-placed ally in drawing up new maps for the territory. After spending several amazing weeks on the Harriman Expedition, hiking along ice-cloaked fjords with Muir and Burroughs, marveling at the majesty of coastal rain forests and pendant-shaped waterfalls, Gannett realized that “nature tourism” would become a major Alaskan industry. He rejected outright the notion that Alaska should be tapped for gold, copper, coal, and other sources of extractable wealth. “There is one other asset of the Territory not yet enumerated, imponderable, difficult to appraise; yet one of the chief assets of Alaska, if not the greatest,” Gannett wrote. “This is the scenery. Its grandeur is more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exhausted. This value, measured by direct returns in money received from tourists, will be enormous, measured by health and pleasure it will be incalculable.”16 National Geographic echoed his sentiment in the coming years. “The Alaska coast is to become the showcase of the earth,” the magazine predicted in 1915. “Pilgrims, not only from the United States but from far beyond the seas, will throng in endless procession to see it.”17

  Just as a Texan cattle rancher wouldn’t tolerate claim jumpers overrunning his pastures, President Roosevelt objected to California boomers racing up to Alaska and timbering and gold mining on public lands. Natural resource management wasn’t going to be a free-for-all under his administration. No matter how many gold discoveries were trumpeted in the Fairbanks Daily-Miner or the Yukon Press, Alaska belonged to the U.S. government, not to bonanza seekers—end of story. As landowner in chief, Roosevelt envisioned the Alaska district as a loosely knit fabric of well-run small towns surrounded by federal forest reserves and wildlife refuges.18 Mining and timbering would be localized. Over time, civic responsibility would emerge. Alaska would be America’s permanent wilderness zone. When asked by the Wall Street Journal if such an exercise of executive power might not hurt his popularity, Roosevelt scoffed at the idea, saying that he wasn’t a “college freshman” and that therefore he always acted on behalf of the long-term “public in- terest.”19

  With the whole Harriman Expedition cheering him on, Roosevelt insisted that an honest court system had to be established in Alaska, one willing to take to trial a huge backlog of civil and criminal cases. The Aleutian Islands had virtually no courts, and the Yukon valley regularly delayed trials. Lawyers who could marshal pro-conservation arguments needed to b
e appointed and complemented by more honest judges, or else the 375 million acres of pristine Alaskan landscape would be ravaged. Disdainful of the disgraceful way the Russians had slaughtered seals on the Pribilofs, Roosevelt believed the judge’s gavel was needed in the territory, as much as Paul Bunyan’s ax. A better tax system had to be established. The Hamiltonian side of Roosevelt’s political personality wanted strong federal regulations for the Alaska district, from Point Barrow all the way down to Ketchikan. Meanwhile, in Juneau, Brady served as Roosevelt’s political watchdog over U.S. public lands that were being protected.

  II

  During the spring of 1903, President Roosevelt made a “great loop” tour of the American West, promoting conservation; it included stops in Yellowstone, the Grand Canyon, and Yosemite. By the time he arrived in Seattle on the steamer Spokane, the president was on a conservationist mission to protect Alaskan lands from overmining, overfishing, market hunting, and deforestation. Dry-hole oil speculators were starting to drift to Alaska, motivated by the automobile craze, calling petroleum the new whale blubber. Parading through thirty-five blocks of downtown Seattle, Roosevelt eventually made his way to the original grounds of the University of Washington. He gave a thumbs-up to the totem pole in Pioneer Square. More than 50,000 people listened to him deliver a stem-winder about protecting the natural resources of places such as Prince William Sound, the Alexander Archipelago, and the Tongass. Behind him was a banner that read, “Alaska Greets the President.” Roosevelt was asserting the supremacy of federal law in the Alaska district. The great primeval forests of the Pacific Northwest and southeastern Alaska, he said, belonged to the American people. The highlight of Roosevelt’s three days in the Puget Sound area was his address to the Arctic Brotherhood, a fraternal organization founded in 1899 on board a steamer traveling from Seattle to Skagway. Perhaps mellowed by the free-flowing booze, Captain William Connell had suggested en route that a “Brotherhood of the North” be formed. Membership in what became the Arctic Brotherhood was restricted to white males over eighteen who lived in Alaska, the Yukon Territory, the Northwest Territory, or parts of upper British Columbia—men who knew what it was to endure the severity and length of an Alaskan winter. The brotherhood’s mascot was the polar bear, and trudging off for getaway hikes and hunts was what its members did best. Accepting honorary membership in the brotherhood, Roosevelt warned the other members that conservation had to be part of their mission.20