Through lobbying, the Rooseveltian conservationists won numerous battles in Alaska, one at a time. Roosevelt’s “Terminator” was Hornaday, the genius zoologist, who never pulled a punch. The Camp Fire Club of America (CFCA) had ceremoniously placed the head of a Montana bison—one that had died on the Flathead Reservation, a federal game reserve that Roosevelt and Hornaday had founded in 1908—over the fireplace at its Chappaqua lodge in New York. This head was a present to the club from Hornaday; emphasis was placed on the fact that the bison died of natural causes. Toward the end of his life, Hornaday—who remained active in the campaign to protect Alaska’s northern seals until his death in 1937—crusaded against allowing motorized vehicles into national parks; these vehicles disrupted wildlife sanctuaries. “As everyone knows,” Hornaday growled, “the automobile has become a fearful scourge to the game of our land, by enabling at least 2,000,000 men of the annual army of hunters to cover about four times as much hunting territory as they formerly could comb with their guns.”28
Hornaday also sympathized with Native Alaskans who lived just outside McKinley National Park, the Tongass and Chugach national forests, and the huge bird refuges in Alaska.29 Furious at the shoddy way Natives were behaving as stewards of the land—they were too readily bribed by timber and coal interests—he lambasted leaders of the Aleuts, Tlingit, Athabascan, and Inuit. Hornaday didn’t believe that Natives should have special eminent-domain rights to shoot caribou or sell out a habitat to despoilers. From Hornaday’s perspective, the parks and refuges existed for wildlife, not for people. Global overpopulation was forcing a more rigid policy for saving wilderness. Humans—including Alaskan Natives—who ignored conservation laws were, like locusts landing on a crop, a plague.
World War I also caused worries in wildlife protection circles. Roosevelt was a leading proponent of war against Germany, believing that the United States could not sit in comfort and allow the Hun to wreak havoc in Europe. But he lost his temper when game market syndicates used the war as a pretext to abolish hunting restrictions in Alaska and elsewhere. Only money-grubbing thugs, Roosevelt said, would wipe out animal species “for all time” to “gratify the greed of the moment.”30 The premise of the market hunter syndicate was that meat—including deer, elk, antelope, moose, and caribou—was needed to feed U.S. Army troops in training. Hornaday—who had a peak named after him in the Absaroka Range in Yellowstone National Park—was unleashed by the CFCA to be an attack dog. This time, however, Roosevelt was even more vehement and threatening. “To the profiteering proposal of the Pseudo-patriots, the patriots for revenue only, that protection of wildlife in wartime be relaxed, the united hosts of conservation reply,” Roosevelt said, “You Shall Not Pass.”31
A local Alaskan conservation society—the Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association, based in Fairbanks—backed the pugnacious Roosevelt. The association was founded in 1916, and its headquarters eventually were located alongside the lovely Chena River; it was made up of hunter-anglers from interior Alaska. The members oversaw the transporting of almost thirty bison from Montana to Delta Junction, Alaska. In coming decades they also backed the repopulation of Alaska with musk ox; supported the protection of bears;32 and helped protect the Mulchatna caribou herd, which as a result of their efforts grew into one of the largest in Alaska. All around Twin and Turquoise lakes, in what became Lake Clark National Park, these Alaskan hunter-conservationists helped the Dall sheep survive, too.
One area where Roosevelt seemingly wanted to say “You shall not pass” was the Arctic; scientists, naturalists, and explorers—not extraction industries—were needed at the pole. Roosevelt wrote a fine article for the Outlook, “Is Polar Exploration Worth While?” Looking at the bright side of exploration, Roosevelt said there was a need for more Pearys, Amundsens, Stefanssons, and Shackletons. The natural history of Antarctica was an opportunity for someone hoping to make a name for himself as a mammalogist or zoologist. “The leopard seal is as fierce as the great spotted cat of the tropics from which it takes its name; and there are other seals, fat, good-humored, helpless, who, unless cruelly undeceived, treat men merely as friendly strangers, objects of mild curiosity only,” Roosevelt wrote. “The penguins never touch dry land and never know warmth. They pass their whole lives upon the ice and in the icy water. The emperor penguin, standing erect on its two flippers, is almost as tall as a short man.”33
But it was the abundant wildlife of Arctic Alaska that most intrigued Roosevelt. The Inupiat (or Eskimos) actually lived above the Arctic Divide. (By contrast, there was no permanent human habitation in Antarctica.) With no hard-packed trails to follow, they traveled by dogsled over frozen creeks and shorelines along the Beaufort Sea. The whole North Slope was a tide of caribou in migration. During the fall months, hundreds of thousands of lesser snow geese landed like a blizzard on the coastal tundra; some observers claimed it was the greatest avian spectacle on American soil.34 “There is an abundant life stretching very far towards the Pole, and probably there are some representatives of this life which occasionally stray to the North Pole,” Roosevelt wrote. “Both in the water, and on the ice when it is solid over the water, and on the land, in the brief Arctic summer when the sun never sets, the Arctic regions teem with life as do few other portions of the globe. Save where killed out by men, whales, seals, walruses, innumerable fish literally swarm in the waters; myriads not only of water birds but of land birds fairly darken the air in their flights; and there are many strange mammals, some of which abound with a plenty which one would associate rather with the tropics.”35
Under Roosevelt’s leadership, the Boone and Crockett Club started amassing data on the inequitable treatment of Alaska’s game animals. Madison Grant, a cofounder of the Bronx Zoo who had a spotty reputation as a eugenicist, wrote for the club a Darwinian-style essay on why the wolves, bear, moose, and deer were all bigger in Alaska than elsewhere. The club called for more game reserves in Alaska—like the moose reserve on Fire Island—where no hunting, trapping, or sled dogs would be allowed. And, most significantly, the Boone and Crockett Club, America’s most prestigious hunt club, was calling for a roadless wilderness. The members were inspired by examples such as Afognak Island, near Kodiak, Alaska, which Benjamin Harrison had put under protection during his presidency and which was now teeming with elk. The Boone and Crockett Club also took note of strips of land along the Uganda Railway in British East Africa that had been preserved as game ranges. As Madison Grant noted, those carved-out ranges were “absolutely swarming with game.”36
Sportsmen’s clubs viewed Alaska as an opportunity to preserve and protect a land rather than just try to restore it. For ardent outdoorsmen Alaska was the “last chance to do it right.”37 The Arctic was a unique resource, a vast land of extremes: long winter darkness and around-the-clock summer daylight; mountain ranges and permafrost prairie; snowy deserts and tundra wildflowers as far as the eye could see. Some parts of Alaska were ice fields year-round. Aldo Leopold noted that a wilderness like the Arctic was a unique geographic resource, which could shrink but never expand. “Invasions can be arrested or modified in a manner to keep an area usable either for recreation, or for science, or for wildlife,” he wrote, “but the creation of new wilderness in the full sense of the word is impossible.”38
Because Alaska was a ward of the federal government, the teeming caribou herds of the Arctic that migrated thousands of miles annually could be saved in a game reserve. And it was the U.S. Congress, not the residents of Alaska, that sportsmen’s clubs of the Lower Forty-Eight turned to for the enactment and enforcement of suitable wildlife-protection laws. Federal control of Alaskan land was essential, they believed, if wildlife was to thrive. Some conservationists wanted to see the U.S. Army get back into the effort to protect nature, as it had done in Yellowstone from 1872 to 1917. As Madison Grant wrote in Hunting at High Altitudes (copublished by the Boone and Crockett Club and the Camp Fire Club of America), “The men who live in Alaska constitute a floating population—for the
most part of miners who have no permanent interest in the country in the sense that farmers are attached to the soil. . . . The stable elements of the population are chiefly the keepers of local saloons or roadhouses. Miners are accustomed to live off the country, with little care for its future. It would be extreme folly to entrust to such a population the formulation and enforcement of complicated game laws, which require a thorough knowledge of the habits of animals.”39
The late John Muir was still, through his published works, beckoning naturalists to explore and preserve underreported areas of Alaska. Muir’s literary executor, William F. Bade, skillfully put together the great naturalist’s scientific articles and unpublished journals about the Arctic as The Cruise of the Corwin; it was published in 1917. Presented as a seafaring adventure story, Muir’s book described the Arctic Ocean as a boundless nursery for bird flocks and marine mammals. The farther north the Corwin went, the less heat the sun provided, and the richer Muir’s prose became. “This is the region,” Muir declared on his 1881 trip, “of greatest glacial abundance on the continent.”40
III
Frederick Vreeland had admired Muir’s memoir The Cruise of the Corwin because it had opened up an unknown Alaskan ecosystem—the Bering Sea—to the general public. The Lake Clark region—named after a trader of the Alaska Commercial Company (ACC), John C. W. Clark (1846–1896)—was one of the least explored areas in the territory.41 Lake Clark is the sixth-largest lake in Alaska; it covers 110 square miles and is at least 900 feet deep. Clark first came to Russian Alaska in 1866 (with the Western Union Telegraph Company’s Russo-American Expedition). Among his first customers at ACC were Yupik Eskimos (who lived along the Bering Sea coast), and Dena’ina Athabascans (situated in the Iliamna–Lake Clark region of the 55,000-square-mile Bristol Bay basin).
Recognizing that Bristol Bay was the greatest wild salmon area in the world, Clark ran the ACC post very profitably from 1879 until his death in 1896. His most lasting achievement was his pivotal role in the creation of the shore-based commercial salmon industry in Bristol Bay. Clark put up thousands of barrels of salt salmon for the ACC to feed their Aleut employees, who were living in the Pribilof Islands and killing northern fur seals for the company. Clark produced salt salmon (sold by the wooden barrel) at his trading post. And he founded the Clark’s Point cannery and was the leading investor for the Nushagak Canning Company (which owned the Clark’s Point cannery in 1887). Clark, as a representative of ACC, also traded furs with Alaskan Natives throughout the Bristol Bay re- gion.42
The ACC valued Clark for his entrepreneurial attitude. The German-Jewish businessmen, Louis Sloss and Louis Gerstle, who owned ACC, did close business deals with Clark at Nushagak Canning and trusted him with thousands of dollars. There wasn’t much Clark didn’t sell. He mass-marketed red fox furs, walrus ivory, caribou hides, and beaver pelts. Clark, in fact, knew of the existence of what would soon be named Lake Clark because he served customers from the remote village of Kijik. These Natives shopped at his Nushagak trading post in the 1880s and 1890s, loading up on staples such as tea, sugar, pots and pans, tobacco, pilot bread, traps, guns, knives, and axes as provisions for the winter.
Although Clark never wrote a word himself, he successfully led the Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper Expedition of 1891 to look for the northern source of Iliamna Lake. The members of the expedition were going to do a census around Lake Clark and Iliamna Lake. A writer for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, after an expedition to the Bristol Bay basin, named the big lake after John W. Clark. Even though Clark knew that the Dena’ina called the lake Kijik, as had the Russians, Lake Clark stuck; it was the white explorers’ prerogative.43
Now, in June 1921, with Colonel A. J. Macnab as a trail mate, Vreeland held his own scaled-down expedition to Lake Clark. Instead of weathering winter conditions, the two men were equipped for the best weeks of summer. What worried Vreeland and Macnab more than grizzlies or hailstorms was disease. In 1902, a lethal combination of measles and flu had devastated the village of Kijik on Lake Clark. Between 1902 and 1909, the epidemic’s survivors relocated their village to Old Nondalton (located twenty-five miles southwest on Sixmile Lake). In 1909, the explorers G. C. Martin and F. J. Katz of the U.S. Geological Survey visited the Iliamna–Lake Clark country on a reconnaissance mission. Their 1912 map was used by Vreeland and Macnab to get around the region (unfortunately, it was an incomplete map north and east of Tanalian Point on Lake Clark). They also relied heavily on a work by Wilfred Osgood of the U.S. Biological Survey: A Biological Reconnaissance of the Base of the Alaska Peninsula.
Voyaging down the Cook Inlet coast, Vreeland and Macnab were amazed by how underpopulated the landscape was south of Anchorage. They hadn’t expected to see nobody. There were enough huge ice fields and braided streams, however, to uplift any outdoorsman’s spirit. A cannery boat first took these advance agents of the Camp Fire Club of America (CFCA) to Iliamna Bay. Their adventure at Lake Clark commenced in earnest after a wonderful night’s sleep at the Iliamna Pass. In the morning, they laced their heavy boots and put light wood on the fire to make coffee. The wind was roaring. The Chigmit Mountains engulfed them, calling out to their romantic yearnings. Vreeland and Macnab hiked over the twelve-mile Iliamna portage, where they met a local man, Fred Phillips. With relative ease they then crossed the seventy-mile Iliamna Lake in a canoe (towed behind Hans Seversen’s gas boat). They soon reached the lower Newhalen River. They put their canoe in the upper part of the river, which was twenty-two miles long, and paddled hard to Sixmile Lake and on to Lake Clark. Having become friends through CFCA, they were ready to explore Lake Clark. They kept diary notes tracing their route from Cook Inlet to Lake Clark: Iliamna Bay, Iliamna Portage, Old Iliamna Village (on the Iliamna River), Iliamna Lake, Seversen’s Roadhouse, the upper Newhalen River, Sixmile River, Lake Clark itself, and at last Tanalian Point on Lake Clark.
What most startled Vreeland about the Lake Clark–Lake Iliamna region was the shortage of visible wildlife. “This has every evidence of having been once a good game country,” Vreeland reported in a long letter to E. A. Preble of the Biological Survey. “But at present every native is armed with a high-powered rifle and kills everything that he sees with the result that there is very little game left except in inaccessible places. Grouse and Ptarmigan however quite plentiful.”44
The Lake Clark country had some of the prettiest meadows in America, soft grass sloping up hillsides, fringed by forest; the whole panorama was one of stunning mountains and creeks, with no settlements in sight. Sometimes a sudden, absolute silence made it seem sacrilegious to talk on the trail. The rivers in the region—Beluga, Chakachatna, McArthur, Drift, Tuxedni, and Big—created the tidal flats of Cook Inlet. These rivers, as Muir knew, had been born from the huge glaciers located northwest on the Chigmit and Tordrillo mountains.45 The largest tributary of the Cook Inlet—the Susitna River—was here. Iliamna Lake—the largest body of freshwater in Alaska—was enormous, covering 1,000 square miles; it was seventy-eight miles long, twenty-two miles wide, and as much as 1,192 feet deep.46
Photographic Insert 1
At 19.2 million acres, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge supports the greatest variety of plant and animal life of any park or refuge in the circumpolar Arctic and is a crown jewel among Alaska’s wilderness areas. On December 16, 1960, President Dwight D. Eisenhower established the original 8.9 million-acre Arctic National Wildlife Range. Twenty years later, President Jimmy Carter more than doubled its size, and established the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The coastal plain “1002 area” remains unprotected. Repeated attempts to open this area to oil drilling have been narrowly defeated.
Hulahula River valley, Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. © ART WOLFE.
Pacific loon nesting on the coastal plain. More than 180 species of birds migrate to the Arctic coast from six continents and all fifty states to feed on abundant insect life, and breed and raise young before returning to their native winter grounds. © SUBHA
NKAR BANERJEE.
Because large herds of Porcupine caribou converge on the coastal plain to calve each spring, the region is known as the “American Serengeti.” © FLORIAN SCHULZ.
The once-endangered musk ox is a relic of the ice age, and lives year-round on the Arctic Refuge coastal plain. Musk oxen give birth to their young between mid-April and mid-May, when the region is still fully covered in snow. The original Alaska musk oxen were exterminated in the late 1800s, but through conservation efforts beginning in the 1930s, the species is being gradually reestablished. © ART WOLFE.
A buff-breasted sandpiper engages in a courtship dance on the coastal plain, Jago River. These sandpipers migrate each year from Argentina to the Arctic Refuge to nest and rear their young. The species has a small world population estimated at only 15,000 birds, and has been identified as one of the top five species at greatest risk if there is oil development on the Arctic Refuge coastal plain. © SUBHANKAR BANERJEE.
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 22