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

by Douglas Brinkley

  On September 24, 1918, President Woodrow Wilson declared the “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes” the Katmai National Monument. The boundaries of Katmai National Monument, which originally encompassed forty square miles of the Mount Katmai pyroclastic flow, were expanded in 1931, 1942, 1969, and 1978.64 Then, in one of the crowning achievements of the entire post-1960s environmental movement, the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980 put millions of additional acres surrounding the “Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes” under federal protection, enlarging the total area to more than 4 million acres. It was redesignated the Katmai National Park and Preserve on December 2, 1980.65

  IV

  If Taft hadn’t tried to undermine Roosevelt’s national forestry agenda in Alaska, it’s doubtful that the ex-president would have challenged his successor for the Republican nomination in 1912. Even though, as president, Taft had prosecuted the Standard Oil and American Tobacco trusts, Roosevelt nevertheless painted him as a lackey of big business. Roosevelt was partially wrong. President Taft did enjoy automobiles more than bird-watching, but he had a decent record on conservation. Still, perception matters in politics. No matter whether they had sided with Pinchot or Ballinger in the notorious feud, journalists believed that there was a curious ambivalence about conservation issues in Taft’s White House. Taft, it seemed, had an old-fashioned Abrahamic concept of land, finding no real value in wilderness. Favoring the Department of Commerce and Labor, he seemed to enjoy rejecting expansions of forestland proposed by the departments of the Interior and Agriculture.

  In February, after weighing the pros and cons, Roosevelt announced that he would indeed run for president again. His declaration was welcomed by a press corps eager for a riveting news story. On every major issue of the day, TR vowed to act uncompromisingly. Taft, in a foolish, backward-thinking way, had mocked Roosevelt’s Alaskan conservationism. If Taft wanted to sell off Alaskan lands to “big coal” instead of leasing them to locals, then Roosevelt would confront the president in the public arena. To Roosevelt’s everlasting fury, Taft had indeed followed through on his pledge to side with the dictatorial Speaker of the House—Joseph Cannon of Illinois—and Senator Nelson Wilmarth Aldrich of Rhode Island, both in the pocket of special interests.66

  While the Republican old guard clung to Taft, Roosevelt beat out Robert La Follette of Wisconsin as the progressives’ favorite son. Before long, Roosevelt, in an ad hominem attack, cold and merciless, was calling President Taft an old-maidish “fathead” and “puzzle wit”—and many Americans loved hearing such insults. Taft shot back that Roosevelt was a “dangerous egoist” and “demagogue.” What Roosevelt understood was that rural Americans weren’t instinctively fond of lawyer-politicians like Taft, who supposed that the rifle was a toy for grown-ups and that dinner came from a grocery store, not from a farm or a duck blind. Although Roosevelt outperformed Taft throughout the spring of 1912 and arrived at the Republican convention in Chicago only a few delegates short of having the nomination locked up, the conservative old guard managed to stop the wilderness warrior. Roosevelt had even secured thirty-seven of Ohio’s forty delegates (and Ohio was Taft’s home state)—but these were of no avail in locking up the nomination. The Republicans handed Taft the nomination, by a slim margin.67

  But Chicago hadn’t seen the last of Theodore Roosevelt. The ex- president joined a third party: the Progressive, or Bull Moose, Party. On August 7, 1912, Roosevelt delivered the most impassioned speech of his political career at its convention. Surrounding him like bodyguards were a number of Rough Riders from the Spanish-American War, in full army uniform, who had served under the Colonel in Cuba in 1898. Roaring about the rights of working Americans over business conglomerates, Roosevelt laid out the Progressive platform, emphasizing conservation and promoting the principles of public domain lands, women’s suffrage, regulation of corporations, roadside beautification, federal assistance to the poor, better schools, and so on. He set forth a liberal domestic agenda for the twentieth century that Franklin Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, and Obama would build on. Roosevelt lambasted mechanization and human abuse of the environment. If financial titans thought the conservation movement was over, they were doomed to disappointment. Botany, biology, geology, soil science, entomology, and forestry offered clues to humans’ relationship with Earth. To Roosevelt, it was impractical to discuss land policy without placing people’s concerns first and foremost. However, it was blasphemous to rape and loot the landscape for profit, as the placer miners had done along East Creek near Fairbanks. If Taft was going to be anticonservation, Roosevelt would sink him like the Titanic—a disaster that was still fresh in people’s minds. “There can be no greater issue than that of conservation in the country,” Roosevelt declared. “Just as we must conserve our men, women, and children, so we must conserve the resources of the land on which they live.”68 As Pinchot pointed out, for Roosevelt and the Bull Moose Party, conservation was a “moral issue.”69

  Throughout the 1912 campaign, Alaskan fishermen went on strike against Roosevelt and Taft’s policies regulating fishing. They claimed the right to use salmon traps. Big canneries likewise insisted that the traps were a necessity. In Pacific Fisherman, their trade journal, packers called the huge clamlike traps, which were designed to funnel migrating salmon, “the best and only friend the canners have in Alaska.”70 A tender such as Little Tom would take the salmon—hundreds brailed from a fish trap—all day long. The goal was to “fish out” a place, then move somewhere else. Roosevelt wanted to shut the packers down for illegal fishing methods; otherwise, these “big fish” companies would deplete Alaska of salmon.

  Most sourdoughs (or old-timers) in Alaska despised everything about the Bull Moose Party. Although Roosevelt was respected as a big-game hunter, his federal land grabs between 1902 and 1909 on behalf of wildlife and forests infuriated them. None of them, however, voted in the 1912 elections, so they didn’t matter. But coal and timber corporations in Washington and Oregon used the sourdoughs’ antifederal attitude to arouse contempt for all regulation of the extraction industries.

  By September 1912, President Taft, his popularity diminished, was looking irrelevant. Every rally for Taft was lackluster, sweltering hot, and newsless. Roosevelt, the youngest of the presidential candidates, relished attacking the “husks” of the Democratic and Republican parties, which had nominated “boss-ridden” men of weak moral fiber.71 Roosevelt called the president a “flubdub with a streak of the common and the second rate in him.”72 The combustible campaign centered on the Democratic nominee Woodrow Wilson’s “new freedom” versus Theodore Roosevelt’s “new nationalism.” Wilson, a former president of Princeton University and popular reformist governor of New Jersey, pushed his attacks on corporate abuses even farther left than Roosevelt. Wilson, in some cases, claimed to support federal control of companies. But Roosevelt still held the progressive high ground when it came to the environment. Roosevelt considered Wilson nothing more than a “sham reformer,” embracing dull precedent because that was politically expedient.73

  To Roosevelt and his supporters, Wilson was also hostage to the laissez-faire doctrine, an ignorant, outdated philosophy for the twentieth century. Only money-grubbers would put laissez-faire over the collective good of the American people. “Now the governmental power rests with the people, and the kings who enjoy privilege are the kings of the financial and industrial world,” Roosevelt said at rallies, promoting progressive democracy. “And what they clamor for is the limitation of government power, and what the people sorely need is the extension of governmental power.”74

  On the campaign trail, Roosevelt was brilliantly successful at inspiring young, conservation-minded outdoors enthusiasts to join the Bull Moose cause. In Chicago, for example, Harold L. Ickes, an attorney deeply interested in reform politics, quit the Republican Party and signed up with Roosevelt. Reporting for the Chicago Record Ickes—whose clients included Jane Addams of Hull House, a leader in the social work movement—for t
he first time became informed about federal forest reserves, national parks, and wildlife protection. Quirky and combative, with an impish smile that often beamed forth from his thin lips, Ickes didn’t look like an outdoorsman. But looks are often deceiving. The acerbic Ickes was a dyed-in-the-wool Pennsylvanian conservationist, a proud native son of Altoona, whose great love in life was the Appalachian mountain range.75 Clear, fast-moving western Pennsylvanian rivers like the Little Juniata, and secret places like Horseshoe Cave and Blue Knob, were indelible images in his memory. Ickes, a self-proclaimed lone wolf, was a paradox: an urban wheeler-dealer who thought America’s salvation was in the backcountry. “I love nature,” Ickes declared. “I love it in practically every form—flowers, birds, wild animals, running streams, gem-like lakes, and towering snow-clad mountains.”76

  As Ickes noted in his diary for 1912, nobody could claim that Roosevelt wasn’t striking a nerve in the body politic with his fiery Bull Moose rhetoric. At his rallies, huge crowds hung on his words as he attacked Wall Street, overcome more by emotion than by insight. Because the Socialist Party had nominated the labor leader Eugene Debs for president, Roosevelt was facing an able challenger in campaigning for economic justice for the laboring class. Budding conservationists like Ickes, however, chanted, “The Bull Moose has left the wooded hill/His call rings through the land/It’s a summons to the young and strong/To join with willing hand.”77 Outdoors enthusiasts had long before developed a firm affection for Roosevelt’s high-purposed stagecraft; they voted for him without hesitation in 1912. As a performer, Roosevelt was raw and visceral, brimming with defiance, insisting that he was an unshakable one-man squad for American betterment. His words seemed to glow in the air. But stumping from coast to coast was banal compared with the outdoors life. “I am hoarse and dirty and filled with a bored loathing of myself,” he wrote to Kermit. “I often think with real longing of the hot, moonlit nights on our giant eland hunt, or in the white rhino camp, with the faithful gun-boys talking or listening to the strumming of the funny little native harp.”78

  It was in this circus atmosphere that John Schrank, a Bavarian immigrant from New York, arrived in Milwaukee for a Bull Moose rally with murder on his mind. On October 14, Schrank approached Roosevelt and shot him at close range with a .38-caliber pistol. Two spectators restrained the psychotic shooter as Roosevelt tried not to faint. Schrank, it turned out, was angry because Roosevelt was behind laws that closed saloons on Sunday. Luckily, a thickly folded fifty-page copy of a speech and a metal eyeglass case (used for bird-watching) inside Roosevelt’s coat pocket stopped the bullet from piercing his heart. A scuffle ensued and Schrank was apprehended. Roosevelt refused medical attention and went on to speak for ninety minutes before being rushed first to Emergency Hospital in Milwaukee and then to Mercy Hospital in Chicago. The bullet, lodged close to his lungs, was never removed. “Friends, I shall ask you to be as quick as possible,” Roosevelt had said from the stage, his chin thrust high. “I don’t know whether you fully understand that I have just been shot; but it takes more than that to kill a Bull Moose.”79

  When Pinchot heard the news from Milwaukee, he was at first disbelieving. But when he learned that Roosevelt had continued to give the speech while bleeding profusely, he knew it was God’s honest truth. “It may seem like a queer thing to say,” Pinchot wrote to Roosevelt, “but your being shot has been one of the finest things that has ever come into my life on account of the way you have handled the whole situation.”80 Roosevelt reassured Pinchot that he remained determined to win the presidential election, refusing to give up his effort.81

  Americans were spellbound by the unfolding drama. Was Roosevelt still on the march? Or was his campaign now over? No matter how many scholars insist that Davy Crockett died of disease at the Alamo or that Abraham Lincoln was really a bigot, the general public refuses to abandon the orthodox view of these heroes. The larger public view—whether accurate or not—is that Crockett fought for the independence of Texas, and Lincoln emancipated the slaves. After Milwaukee it no longer mattered whether Roosevelt won or lost the 1912 presidential election. By the time he arrived at Madison Square Garden on October 24, and received a forty-five-minute standing ovation, the bullet still lodged in his rib cage, he had become an enduring American icon.82

  On November 5, however, Wilson swept the election with 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s disappointing 88. “I won’t pretend,” Ickes later recalled in Autobiography of a Curmudgeon, “that we didn’t awake the day after the election with a bad headache.”83 Roosevelt consoled himself with the fact that Taft had won only eight electoral votes and Debs—who, surprisingly, won 6 percent of the popular vote, the most ever by a socialist candidate—nevertheless failed to receive a single electoral vote. The Bull Moose Party succeeded in winning 27.4 percent of the vote and electing thirteen new members to Congress. Even more impressively, the Bull Moose Party brought more than 230 state legislators into office. To offset his own loss, Roosevelt boasted that he had fulfilled his pledge to make Taft a one-term president. But no genuine whoop of victory was conveyed by the Colonel’s reasoning. “Well,” he had written to Kermit on election night, “we have gone down in a smashing defeat; whether it is a Waterloo or a Bull Run, only time will tell.”84

  Chapter Five - Charles Sheldon’s Fierce Fight

  I

  All of Alaska brought a bounce to Charles Sheldon’s gait. Like a protagonist in a novel by James Oliver Curwood, he decided that every inch of the territory was Edenic, though with a lethal component. But it was 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, its peak blanketed in deep perpetual snow, that left Sheldon in awe. Just looking at McKinley—which he first saw in mid-July 1906 from a hilltop near Wonder Lake—seemed to lower Sheldon’s blood pressure and heart rate. Time stood still within a fifty-mile circumference around the base. Even in summer, the temperature on the mountain, wrapped with storm clouds and mist, frequently dropped below zero Fahrenheit. Gold prospectors had named the towering peak in 1896 to honor President William McKinley. The name stuck. To the Athabascan Indians, however, the peak was Denali (“The Great One”). Sheldon used the Indian name (although he sometimes simply said “The Mountain”). The south peak was the highest point in North America. To Sheldon the whole area around Mount McKinley—the huge glaciers, the trough-like gorges, the miles of tundra stretching out to meet other mountains on the blue horizon—was his beloved “Denali wilderness.” The Alaska Range made the Colorado Rockies seem like foothills. Furthermore, in terms of its sheer rise from base to summit Denali was the tallest mountain in the world.

  Traveling around Mount McKinley, Sheldon was like a cowboy riding through a well-stocked cattle ranch in Texas and eyeing his herd, except that Sheldon’s cattle were migratory caribou. From halfway up the mountain the caribou looked like ants. In his field journals he waxed eloquent about caribou herds and told of risking his life to study grizzlies. Unlike the slopes in the Lower Forty-Eight, the Alaska Range—home to 161 species of birds and thirty-seven of mammals—was not heavily forested; it was primarily blanketed by snow and ice.1 Besides protecting wildlife, Sheldon also wanted to ensure that the large quantities of hemlock, birch, poplar, alder, and willow surrounding McKinley didn’t become cordwood. Alaska had more than 450 types of plants that botanists believed might be potential medicines. He feared that the Alaska Railroad line connecting Fairbanks to Seward—completed in 1914—would forever ruin the Denali wilderness. Yet he recognized that because McKinley was between the two cities, the railroad would make the national park a convenient stopover. “To America’s fledgling conservationists, railroads were synonymous with wildfire, destruction,” the historian Tom Walker wrote in McKinley Station. “Enter the railroad—gone the wildlife; gone the frontier.”2

  In the aftermath of the Harriman Expedition, it was the search for a Roosevelt elk (Cervus roosevelti), in 1904 on Victoria Island in Canada, that first injected Charles Sheldon into the drama of saving Alaska’s wilderness.3 The Biological Survey was lookin
g for this subspecies of wapiti—which had survived in small herds on the Olympic Peninsula (in Washington state) and Vancouver Island (in British Columbia)—to analyze in Washington, D.C., and Sheldon volunteered to bring back mounts.4 (There were no native elk species in Alaska.*) Although he was essentially a big-game hunter, Sheldon had become a legend in old Mexico for climbing sheer cliffs to spy on bighorn sheep. Financially comfortable and politically astute, he was a well-rounded sportsman who was difficult to ignore. His sharp features conveyed willpower, an impression confirmed by his deep, almost gruff voice. Looking like a Canadian Mountie, the pinched-lipped, muscular Sheldon stood at about five feet ten inches. Demure, respectful, and bookish, he was a clean-shaven embodiment of roughing it like Jim Bridger, an old-time mountain man of days past, easily able to backpack 100 pounds or so across rugged terrain. As a big-game hunter for the Biological Survey, Sheldon was always ready with rifle, field glasses, and camera. To Sheldon wildlife conservation wasn’t an optional policy; it was a life force, the necessary corrective to manifest destiny and to the industrial revolution.

  Reading Sheldon’s faithfully kept faunal journals isn’t for everybody. Much of his prose smacks of Forest and Field and the old-style campfire yarns of the nineteenth century (a genre in which “half-breed” Indians were backwoods scouts and educated white men made historic “discoveries” in bioregions where Native American tribes had lived for thousands of years). Sometimes, however, when he describes blunders he made on the trail, the reader can almost hear silent laughter. Anecdotes of deer carcasses hanging from clotheslines, endless winter nights, and salmon impelled to swim upstream because of “tooth and claw” mandates reveal Sheldon as a Darwinian naturalist—Theodore Roosevelt without TR’s elegant, dramatic turn of phrase. When Sheldon vividly described the flora and fauna of Admiralty Island (then part of the Tongass National Forest and since 1978 a national monument) and Montague Island (at the entrance to Prince William Sound)—both around 300 square miles with sheer-sided and thickly wooded coastlines—he was superb.