The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960
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One national forest Roosevelt surely had in mind in 1913 was Alaska’s Chugach. In the coming months a bill was introduced in Congress to dissolve the Chugach National Forest. According to two U.S. senators—Wesley Jones of Washington and Thomas Walsh of Montana—the Forest Service was thwarting the economic development of Alaska. Likewise, the territorial government issued a report declaring that the Chugach was an example of abuse by the federal government. The commercial timber industries, these politicians argued, should be given free rein in the Chugach. Backing this campaign to abolish the Chugach was Secretary of the Interior Walter Fisher, who wanted an Alaska commission created to lease out the land for timbering. Luckily, the U.S. Forest Service still had a lot of conservationists willing to wage an all-out war over the Chugach.8
Roosevelt dutifully dispatched notes from the Grand Canyon, the Petrified Forest, and Utah’s Rainbow Bridge for the Outlook, and Leopold was riveted by TR’s words, amazed that the ex-president had spent time in Deming, New Mexico, an afternoon’s drive from Carson National Forest.9 When Hornaday came west to Albuquerque in 1915 on a book tour, orating with holy-roller fervor, Leopold was in the audience cheering his every word. A mesmerizing showman, full of the indignant rage of a true believer, Hornaday showed horrific slides of seals being slaughtered, clubbed, and skinned alive. The images were so gruesome that even New Mexican sportsmen in the audience, accustomed to blood and guts, winced. A cowboy hat was passed around to collect money for Hornaday’s Wildlife Protection Fund (used to pay legal fees in his successful battle against the U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor for using unethical practices to hunt marine mammals in Alaska). Leopold asked Hornaday to inscribe both Our Vanishing Wild Life and a copy of his newest book, published by Yale University Press, Wild Life Conservation Theory and Practice.10 “To Mr. Aldo Leopold,” Hornaday wrote in the latter book: “On the firing line in New Mexico and Arizona.”11
But Roosevelt, Pinchot, and Leopold’s style of “wise use” conservationism was on the firing line in California. John Muir had expended all his vitality, futilely, in trying to save Hetch Hetchy, at Yosemite National Park, from being destroyed by a dam. It perplexed Muir why the people who espoused the “Roosevelt doctrine” couldn’t see that Hetch Hetchy was one of the priceless Rembrandts or Raphaels the ex-president had written about in Outlook—a national treasure to be protected and preserved. Throughout 1913, congressional hearings had considered the pros and cons of building O’Shaughnessy Dam and thereby flooding the Hetch Hetchy Valley to create a reservoir. Because Hetch Hetchy was part of Yosemite National Park, an act of Congress would be required to build a dam. Unfortunately, President Wilson had selected a former San Francisco city attorney, Franklin Lane—an advocate of the dam—as secretary of the interior. Lane was actually a conservationist-minded lover of national parks. But he was no good on Hetch Hetchy. Muir used eloquent language about Hetch Hetchy: he said it was a “mountain temple” under attack by “despoiling gainseekers” and “mischief-makers of every degree from Satan to supervisors, lumbermen, cattlemen, farmers, etc., eagerly trying to make everything dollarable.” This was powerful stuff. Also, U.S. senators received bags of mail, echoing Muir, urging them not to destroy the lovely Hetch Hetchy.12
But by the end of 1913 Congress, after intense debate and deliberation, passed the Raker Bill, which approved the flooding of the Hetch Hetchy Valley. President Wilson signed the bill on December 19. Disappointed by the death warrant for his beloved Tuolumne Yosemite, an exhausted Muir hoped that “some sort of compensation must surely come out of this dark damn-dam-damnation.”13 The following year Muir hiked in the Hetch Hetchy Valley for the last time before the huge, groaning construction vehicles entered the national park. On Christmas Eve 1914, Muir died. Many of his loyal supporters claimed that his tireless work to protect Hetch Hetchy had impaired his immune system and thus lowered his resistance to disease. The Sierra Club, his lasting institutional legacy, attempted to obtain legal injunctions, but construction of the O’Shaughnessy Dam nevertheless commenced. In 1923, at the cost of billions of dollars and the loss of sixty-eight lives, the dam was completed. Muir, before his death, had felt defeated by the “despoiling gainseekers” intent on taking “pocket-filling plunder” from his beloved Sierra Nevada.14
The death of Muir was like a body blow to Americans who loved the great outdoors. Muir’s lungs and legs were strong until the end; so to his wide circle of friends his demise from pneumonia was a surprise. He had seemed uncollapsable, imperishable, as if his enthusiasm would spill over mountaintops forever. But although the corporeal Muir was gone, his exaltation of the wilderness remained timeless, influencing every environmentalist for decades to come. His legacy—the Sierra Club—was stronger than ever. What had worried Muir most was that America, his hallowed land, was being recklessly destroyed by developers. “Even the sky,” Muir noted, “is not safe from scathe.”15
Muir’s concern wasn’t just for preservation of the land, but also for the people who were victimized by oil drillers and strip miners. Large investment banks, such as Barnette’s Washington-Alaska Bank (with headquarters in Seattle), were starting to ship heavy dredging equipment to the territory. There was an array of new players, Alaska Petroleum and Coal, Clarence Cunningham, Amalgamated Development, Saint Elias Oil, and Alaska Coal Oil among them. As a rule, Muir used to say, wherever an extraction company owned a town, the long-term future of the community was bleak. In Nevada, not far from where Mark Twain saw the “celebrated jumping frog of Calaveras County,” Muir once encountered a mining boomtown that had, seemingly overnight, turned into a ghost town. According to Muir, only one man remained: “a lone bachelor with one suspender.”
But Muir, a true believer, never touched by pessimism or despondency, was fearless about passing from the Earth. All over California, friends of Muir wept because they would never again see him picking berries or leaning on a walking stick. The following year the John Muir Trail was established to honor the Sage of the Sierras, running 200 miles at high altitude from Yosemite Valley to Mount Whitney.16 “Ordinarily,” Roosevelt wrote in Outlook, “the man who loves the woods and the mountains, the trees, the flowers, and the wild things, has in him some indefinable quality of charm which appeals even to those sons of civilization who care for little outside of paved streets and brick walls. John Muir was a fine illustration of this rule. He was by birth a Scotchman—a tall and spare man, with the poise and ease natural to him who has lived much alone under conditions of labor and hazard. He was a dauntless soul, and also one brimming over with friendliness and kindliness.”17
The words Hetch Hetchy became important to conservationists in Alaska. The name was a rallying cry like “Remember the Alamo!”—a call to protect Alaska’s legacies, such as Glacier Bay and Lake Clark, from meeting a similar fate. If Yosemite National Park wasn’t safe from desecration, then neither was Mount McKinley National Park or Tongass National Forest or Yukon Delta Federal Bird Reservation. Federal protection was a sham, and permanency was an elastic or slippery term that depended on the whim of Congress and the White House. The wilderness movement seemed to be losing momentum, at least in America. In November 1913, only a few months after Hornaday’s Our Vanishing Wild Life was published, an international conference for the protection of wild places was convened in Basel, Switzerland. Sixteen nations discussed issues of global conservation and wildlife protection; but the Wilson administration had, inexplicably, refused to participate. A worldwide movement was under way to start protecting special places in every nation as something akin to the present World Heritage sites. The United States was no longer leading the world in the conservation revolution that Muir, Burroughs, and Roosevelt had popularized.18
Posthumously, however, Muir gave the Alaskan wilderness movement—and Rooseveltian conservation in general—a powerful boost in the age of automobiles. In 1915, Houghton Mifflin published Muir’s memoir Travels in Alaska, modeled on Thoreau’s Cape Cod and Maine Woods. It began with Muir steami
ng out of San Francisco on the Dakota in 1879, then up past glorious Seattle all the way to Sitka. Muir vividly recounted his adventures along the Alexander Archipelago and beyond. Voyaging northward, he wrote of whales (“broad back like glaciated bosses of granite heaving a lot in near view, spouting lustily, drawing a long breath, and plunging down home in colossal health and comfort”) and porpoises (“a square mile of them, suddenly appear, tossing themselves into the air in abounding strength and hilarity, adding foam to the waves and making all the wilderness wilder”).19
The Grand Canyon and the Great Smoky Mountains have never found their bard, but Muir delivered for Glacier Bay in Travels in Alaska. Suddenly, in 1915, the glacier rambler of 1879 was very much alive; his enthusiasm gushed forth from Travels in Alaska with the force of Niagara Falls. In the memoir Muir’s wise take on Glacier Bay—both landscape and wildlife—stands as a high point of American travel literature: “To the lover of pure wilderness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world. No excursion that I know of may be made into any other American wilderness where so marvelous an abundance of noble, new born scenery is so charmingly brought to view as on the trip through the Alexander Archipelago to Fort Wrangell and Sitka.”20
Muir’s approach to nature was that of the “wandering eye.” Calculations were made, in Travels in Alaska, of the discharge of glaciers, gravel deposits, and the search for wild mutton. The gray mundane flashed with the same cerebral insight as garden spots lit with the bright colors of epilobium, saxifrage, and sedges. Place-names like Sam Dum Bay, Taylor Bay Glacier, Mount Fairweather, and Island of the Standing Stone were given prominence. Religious imagery was offered, but in the subtlest ways. “A pure-white iceberg,” Muir wrote, “weathered to the form of a cross, stood amid drifts of kelp and the black rocks of the wave-beaten shore in sign of safety and welcome.”21
The Presbyterian minister S. Hall Young was among those who couldn’t accept the fact Muir had died. To Young, the gray-bearded naturalist was eternal, a sequoia tree destined never to topple. At age sixty Muir was still climbing mountains, undertaking dangerous journeys through the wild lands of California. Instead of slowing down at seventy, Muir took extended voyages to South America and Africa. All his books—Mountains in California, Our National Parks, and The Yosemite among them—radiated youthfulness. Wanting to eulogize Muir, as ministers are apt to do, Young published his reminiscences about their days together going up the Inside Passage, titled Alaska Days with John Muir, later that year.
“I cannot think of John Muir as dead, or as much changed from the man with whom I canoed and camped,” Young wrote. “He was too much a part of nature—too natural—to be separated from the mountains, trees, and glaciers. Somewhere I am sure, he is making other explorations, solving other natural problems, using that brilliant, inventive genius to good effect; and sometime again I shall hear him unfold anew, with still clearer insight and more eloquent words, fresh secrets of his Mountains of God.”22
II
Charles Sheldon had initially been considered the next Rooseveltian leader, but it was Aldo Leopold who eventually led the conservationist movement—in his low-key, deeply honest, visionary, academic way—after John Muir died. In 1917 Leopold was thirty and good to look at, with a deep wrinkle between his eyes and a high forehead. He was in good trim and balding. Every day Leopold’s conservationist convictions grew stronger and his controlled writing style more lyrical. Leopold never wrote a florid line in his life. Energized by Hornaday’s book and by Roosevelt’s dispatches to the Outlook from the Southwest, Leopold spearheaded the New Mexico Game Protection Association (NMGPA)—an unusual step, considering that he was an employee of the U.S. Forest Service. Sick of politicians’ blather, Leopold demanded that New Mexico’s game law always be enforced the same way. If you poached a white-tail in the Carson National Forest, for example, jail time should be imposed, no matter who was governor in Santa Fe. Inspired by Roosevelt’s effort as governor of New York in 1899–1900, Leopold now claimed that a head game warden should be appointed in New Mexico, an overseer independent of political parties. Using The Pine Cone, a newsletter, as his megaphone, Leopold also called for new federal wildlife refuges, known as the Hornaday plan. However, unlike Hornaday, who saw refuges as places where hunting was illegal, Leopold hoped these federal reserves would be places that produced wild game for sportsmen. Regardless of this difference, the two men were brothers in arms for the cause: wildlife protection.23 The Hornaday plan failed to pass Congress, but a step had been taken toward the Wilderness Act of 1964.
Conservationist circles in America during World War I were like an underground railroad, with an inexhaustible spirit. The members passed along circulars, newsletters, and correspondence, much as the Y2K generation would later do on the Internet. Nature was wounded in forestlands and waterways, and conservationists were vigilant in starting the healing process. A ranger in the Tongass knew intimately what a game warden in Okefenokee Swamp was up to. It was much more than gossip, or a grapevine. Facts about birds, insects, mammals, and trees were traded. The bourgeois were belittled for never turning down a dollar, for their predictable greed, avarice, and overconsumption. The conservationists praised the legacy of both Muir and Pinchot. There was a growing post-Darwinian belief that the natural world held the key to unlocking the mysteries of man. Among the U.S. Forest Service publications that were being privately printed across the country, Leopold’s The Pine Cone was the most audacious. It became mandatory reading for all those in the outdoors world, including Theodore Roosevelt.
A letter that Roosevelt sent to Leopold in 1917 has, over the decades, become the connective tissue between his and Leopold’s generations of conservationists. Leopold received it courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service in his mailbox at Albuquerque, and it was as unexpected as the snowy owl Roosevelt had shot in Long Island many years earlier. It was neatly typed and quite brief. But to Leopold it was a stamp of approval for his career, as when Thomas Edison told the young Henry Ford at the Oriental Hotel on Long Island that the gasoline-run internal combustion engine, not the electric car, represented the future.
My Dear Mr. Leopold,
Through you, I wish to congratulate the Albuquerque Game Protection Association on what it is doing. I have just read the Pine Cone. I think your platform simply capital, and I earnestly hope that you will get the right type of game warden. It seems to me that your association in New Mexico is setting an example to the whole country.
Sincerely Yours, Theodore Roosevelt.24
Roosevelt was in his late fifties when he praised The Pine Cone. His health was declining. After losing the 1912 election he had several high points—such as hiking in the Grand Canyon with his family and exploring a hitherto undiscovered river in Brazil’s Amazon (named Rio Teodoro in his honor) with Kermit, who had saved his father’s life in the jungle. After practicing the strenuous life for so long, Roosevelt was burned out, exhausted to the point of depletion. Jack London died in 1916. Buffalo Bill died the following year, and was buried in a tomb on top of Lookout Mountain in Colorado.25 The whole Rough Rider generation, it seemed, was going . . . going . . . gone.
Most of Roosevelt’s characteristic vitality had disappeared by 1916. He was blind in one eye; a bullet was still lodged in his chest; he occasionally experienced bouts of malarial shivers and fever lingering from the arduous trip to the Amazon in 1913–1914; some minuscule parasite still lived in his body, eating away at his energy; his digestive system was a wreck. Unable to tap into his physical reserves, Roosevelt retired his gun and took up philosophizing. Instead of telling bear yarns, he spoke of nature, the universe, the planet Earth, hardship, existence, and destiny. At home at Sagamore Hill, forgetful of his bearings, looking out the window to the west and thinking for a second he might see Old Faithful or Pikes Peak, somber in its blue snow at sunset, Roosevelt grew melancholic. After he wrote Through the Brazilian Wilderness—a memoir of hunting and camping with Kermit in the Amazon jungle—his prose was un
derstandably less action-packed and aimed more at the horizon, toward distant buttes, calving glaciers, and shore mud. He turned once again to the vast expanses of Alaska.
Roosevelt’s infatuation with Alaska was notable in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open (1916), his elegant celebration of the world’s cragsmen, explorers, scientists, and faunal naturalists. Trumpeting his own conservationist record, he called for a revolutionary ethos of game management like the one Leopold was promoting in The Pine Cone. He wanted Americans to take seriously the dire Biological Survey reports by Edward W. Nelson about the danger Alaska’s caribou herds were in when the long winters shut down food supplies. “The man should have youth and strength who seeks adventure in the wild, waste spaces of the earth, in the marshes, and among the vast mountain masses, in the rotten forests, amid the streaming jungles of the tropics, or on the desert, or sand or snow,” Roosevelt wrote. “He must long greatly for the lonely winds that blow across the wilderness and for sunrise and sunset over the rim of the empty world.”26
As an appendix to A Book-Lover’s Holiday in the Open, Roosevelt wrote an individual paragraph about all the federal bird reservations he had created by means of executive orders during his presidency between 1903 and 1909. They were his secular shrines. Many of them were in Alaska. Roosevelt continued to work his magic by lobbying legislators on Capitol Hill as a voice of the National Conservation Association. Although he had lost the 1912 presidential election, it was largely through his strong influence that the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate had been thwarted in its repeated efforts to purchase mines around the Tongass and Chugach national forests. This was a policy victory for Roosevelt despite his defeat as a third-party candidate. In 1911, Roosevelt had successfully championed the Weeks Law to purchase lands for national forests in the White Mountains and Appalachian Mountains (where there was no public land). Further, in 1914, Congress passed landmark bills regarding coal and oil leasing, and these acts were in accordance with Roosevelt and Pinchot’s philosophy of keeping huge corporations out of public domain lands. Roosevelt was also a powerful advocate of the Federal Water Power Act to provide for development by private enterprise (under federal ownership and control) of waterpower for the public domain and navigable streams. It even seems possible that Roosevelt’s staunch conservationist agenda had influenced his former antagonist William Howard Taft. Before leaving the White House in 1913, Taft, as if in a face-saving gesture, had signed executive orders saving Alaskan bird-breeding areas on Forrester Island, Wolf Rock, and the Hazy Islands.27