The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960
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After Roosevelt’s death, Sheldon began corresponding intensely with George Bird Grinnell about fauna and flora. Both conservationists had been alive during the Civil War. And now, suddenly, it was 1920; automobiles had replaced horses, and new, younger, more technocratic types had entered the fields of wildlife biology and ecology. Taxidermy was fast becoming a lost art. But purposefulness, drive, and commitment never leave a person whose vocation or trade happens to be his lifelong passion. Together these outdoorsmen—Grinnell and Sheldon—remained determined to save Alaska’s declining bear population, and to make sure that Admiralty Island would not be ruined. They had their work cut out for them. Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane—appointed by President Woodrow Wilson—opposed the protection of bears. Sheldon also reported to Grinnell that the Alaskan legislature was lampooning members of eastern sportsmen’s clubs like the Boone and Crockett Club as aristocratic New Yorkers who were out of touch with the hardscrabble north country. Alaskan newspapers derided bear protection as Hornadayism. “There are rumors that Hornaday is writing a pamphlet on the protection of the Alaska bear,” a worried Sheldon wrote to Merriam on February 28, 1920. “If he does, this will finally prevent future possibility of ever agreeing with the Alaskans on the protection of it and will consider it on the basis of their dislike of him. I hope that these reports are not true.”29
Within the Biological Survey a feud developed. Sheldon had bitten his tongue instead of criticizing Hornaday’s extreme animal rights rhetoric while the Colonel was alive. Although Roosevelt had prevented Hornaday from joining the Smithsonian Institution’s safari in British East Africa (not wanting to deal with a loose cannon for months at a time), in 1910 he had firmly endorsed Our Vanishing Wild Life in the Outlook. Sheldon, an unrepentant hunter, thought Roosevelt had made a mistake linking himself with such an uncompromising maverick as Hornaday. Now, with Roosevelt gone, Sheldon tried to discredit Hornaday as being an irresponsible rabble-rouser with only a few good ideas about protecting seal rookeries. Sheldon worked hard as a lobbyist to build bridges. Hornaday, by contrast, was always accusatory, always at war, and he always used the sharpest language possible. Even though Hornaday had legions of enemies, he continued leading the wildlife protection crusade until his death in 1937.
Clearly, the deaths of Roosevelt, Muir, and Burroughs were a political setback for a conservation movement with Hornaday at the helm. While these three wilderness warriors were alive, there had been a sense that victory was certain, a radiant confidence that corporate despoilers would be contained. All Roosevelt had to do was shout Those swine! and the conservationists felt empowered, felt that history was on their side. Muir, through the Sierra Club, was influential and even feared: his every article or utterance seemed to be etched for the ages like the Ten Commandments. Burroughs, admired by everybody, was always able to get financial titans such as Thomas Edison, Andrew Carnegie, and Henry Ford to lobby Congress for bird protection laws—his clout (aided by his twinkling eyes of good faith) was strong, and his influence was compelling, even with profit-driven industrialists.
With these conservation leaders gone, the public debate over the value of wildlife in America degenerated. Presidential leadership for conservation during the 1920s, in fact, was anemic. The cause suddenly seemed out of joint with the antiregulatory spirit of the times. A popular belief in eastern business circles was that Alaska’s Brooks Range and Arctic Circle were nothing but wastelands, frozen flats where only caribou and lemmings lived, valuable only if oil or gold could be extracted. Lacking any order except nature’s own, the North Slope, according to the pro-development argument, could be divided, surveyed, regulated, mapped, and separated into homestead sections that anyone could own for a minimal fee. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce in Alaska promoted private ownership rather than forest reserves and wildlife reserves. Mount McKinley National Park, with its famous peaks, inviting to the eye, was accepted by Alaskan boomers because it would attract tourists to the railroad stop and curio shop of McKinley Station, a leg-stretch junction between Seward and Fairbanks with North America’s tallest mountain looming in the near distance. But the rest of Alaska was available for the plundering of natural resources. In America during the booming 1920s, greed was king, and coal and oil were the prized sources of energy. Also, a new technology was being applied off the beach near Santa Barbara, California—offshore drilling. Oil speculators were starting to look for oil leaks all around Alaska’s seas.30
Every decade in Alaska brought a new buzzword to promote industrialization and the conquest of the wilderness. During the Great War, the newest things in large-scale mining were hydraulic mining and dredging. Roosevelt had promoted both of these techniques to construct the Panama Canal. But now, in Alaska, wealthy absentee owners were buying up or leasing claims along rivers, shipping in heavy machines, and ripping into the land. The dredges were boatlike vessels that floated in artificially formed ponds. Using an array of steel buckets, they dragged gravel from the bottom of a pond, searching for gold. By the time of Roosevelt’s death there were more than twenty-five dredges in the Seward Peninsula alone. A mill could process more than 12,000 tons of ore daily. By 1920 the Alaska Juneau Mining Complex along the Gastineau Channel was the biggest low-grade-lode gold mine on earth.31
And oil was starting to be discovered all over Alaska—good news for the territory. Between 1902 and 1933 twenty-seven new oil wells were dug. Eight of these failed to reach oil-bearing rock, and eleven were “no shows” (the term used at the time), but eighteen—all in the Katalla Slough claim—did produce oil. According to Alaska Business Monthly, the depth of the wells ranged from 366 feet to 1,810 feet. It was understood by conservationists that once Alaska became a desirable oil field, saving vast tracts of wilderness through congressional action or even by executive orders would be a far more difficult proposition.32
III
Aldo Leopold took the deaths of Roosevelt, Muir, and Burroughs just as hard as Merriam, Nelson, Hornaday, and Sheldon did. All three had, to one degree or another, been Leopold’s inspirations. No longer would Leopold defer to anyone in his own area of expertise—he himself was the new front line. Quitting the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce, he rejoined the U.S. Forest Service to help protect more than 20 million acres of the Southwest. Leopold’s partially formed vision of roadless wilderness lands inside national forests started to take firmer shape. In 1922, he submitted a formal proposal to the chief of the U.S. Forest Service, William B. Greeley, to have the Gila National Forest of New Mexico administered as a wilderness area; it was approved on June 3, 1924. That same year Leopold, a father of four, moved to Madison, Wisconsin, and started working for the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory as an assistant (later associate) director. Daily, Leopold grew perturbed that in the 1920s, the idea that bigger was better held sway. What worried Leopold was the fortune seekers’ insistence that having steam shovels create ditches to drain marshes dry or giant circular bandsaws to cut up sequoias was somehow a technological advancement for modern America. In a series of letters and articles, he described big companies as being blind to the ecological destruction they often wrought.33
Leopold felt that the market hunting in Alaska was reminiscent—morally—of what had happened to the Great Plains buffalo in the nineteenth century. Without proper game laws, Alaskan caribou and Dall sheep would vanish. His revulsion at such slaughter of wildlife deepened. Wildlife resources, he insisted, should be handed down to future generations undiminished. “It appears to be a fact that even in the remotest region of Alaska indiscriminate slaughter is spelling the doom of the game supply,” he said, at around the time of Roosevelt’s death. “No wilderness seems vast enough to protect wildlife, no countryside thickly populated enough to exclude it.”34 The U.S. Biological Survey urged Alaskan fur wardens to arrest and prosecute poachers, whose carnage amounted to criminality. “No people,” Ernest Walker warned Alaskans in 1921, “should forget that it is their duty to pass into posterity all that can be saved of our wil
dlife, for future generations likewise have a claim to it.”35
Following the lead of Roosevelt—who had created fifty-one federal bird reservations—Leopold started calling for new wildlife refuges to protect threatened species such as the ivory-billed woodpecker (Campephilus principalis). “It is known that the Ivory-bill requires as its habitat large stretches of virgin hardwood,” Leopold wrote in an article in American Forests. “The present remnant lives in such a forest, owned and held by an industry as reserve stumpage. Cutting may begin, and the Ivory-bill may be done for at any moment. The Park Service has or can get funds to buy virgin forests, but it does not know of the Ivory-bill or its predicament. It is absorbed in the intricate problem of accommodating the public which is mobbing its parks. . . . Is it not time to establish particularly parks (or their equivalent) for particular ‘natural wonders’ like the Ivory-bill?”36*
While Leopold—like Sheldon—continued hunting, he had become an activist like Hornaday with regard to species protection. But, haunted after shooting a wolf in New Mexico and watching its eyes as it died, Leopold was repentant by the 1920s. Over his objection, roads had been constructed in the Gila National Forest to allow hunters easier access to deer. By killing off wolves to make the Gila “safe” for sportsmen looking for a few days of kicks in the controlled wild, Leopold had inadvertently robbed the Gila of its primeval wildness. Leopold, along with his wife, Estella Bergere, started hunting with a bow instead of using a rifle, as part of the concept of a “fair chase.” And he worked overtime to save North American species from extinction.37 Whether it was a refuge for the condor in California, antelope in Nebraska, grouse in Missouri, or spruce partridge in Minnesota, Leopold was for it. Dispelling the misperception of bears as predators to be eradicated, he promoted their abundance everywhere. “That there are grizzlies in Alaska,” he wrote, “is no excuse for letting the species disappear from New Mexico.”38
An ardent supporter of Leopoldian conservation in Alaska was Frank Dufresne. Nobody knew the Alaskan wilderness quite as intimately as Dufresne. Brrrr . . . was a regular condition in his life. The hyperactive, wiry Dufresne traveled 17,000 miles by dogsled to inspect herds of moose, caribou, seals, otters, deer, and walrus.39 He lived for months at a time in solitude. He could predict the weather. And as early as April, before the bushes bloomed, he could tell whether it was going to be a good year for wild mountain cranberry, salmonberry, or rose hips. Dufresne first came to Alaska from New Hampshire to both hunt and protect big game. More naturalist than game warden, he ended up writing three influential books about his outdoors life: Alaska’s Animals and Fishes (1946), My Way Was North: An Alaskan Autobiography (1966), and No Room for Bears (1965).40
What made Dufresne unique among agents of the U.S. Biological Survey were his elegant dispatches from the Arctic, coupled with his soldier’s sense of duty. Influenced by Roosevelt and Sheldon, Dufresne wrote government reports with panache, as if he were submitting them to The New Yorker. They conveyed a sense of life cycles; of death from old age and disease; of January’s hardships; of desolation. When he saw a raven or a magpie hovering overhead, he knew there was a fresh kill. “There comes a particular uncanny, deathly stillness in the air at seventy below zero,” he wrote in his report of January 1924, to E. W. Nelson at the Biological Survey. “No wild thing seems to stir. . . . The heavy breathing of our dogs, the squealing of the sled runners and the crackling of our own breaths in the air sound loud and harsh and seem to be violating this brooding silence of the north woods. It seems we are the only things that dare move—But no! There in the riffling shallows of an open waterhole a tiny, grey bird dashed and flits about with all the grace of a flycatcher. . . . Our map tells us we are forty miles north of the Arctic Circle; our thermometer tells us it is seventy below zero, yet there is a frail little bird seemingly unsuited to cold weather having the very time of its life. It is, of course, the Water Ouzel, or Dipper. . . . It requires considerable steeling of one’s conscience to blast that little life into eternity for the cause of science.”41
Dufresne was collecting specimens for the Biological Survey by killing and tagging them. Because Dufresne was respected as a hunter—and everybody knew he was the Alaskan outdoorsman, amazingly adept with a gun or a coil of rope—many sourdough Alaskans listened to his pleas to squeal on poachers in the backwoods and to make citizen’s arrests of game hogs. Regularly he reached out to fellow Alaskans about protecting both bears and salmon. Dufresne refused to travel with ultra-conservationists like those in the Sierra Club. Nevertheless, he recognized the essential role that such preservationist groups played in protecting wild Alaska. “In a way I believe we owe something to the ultra-conservationists,” he wrote, “who, by the very unreasonableness of their demands, have rationalized the press of Alaska to assume the middle ground.”42
Preservationists of the 1920s and 1930s in turn owed Dufresne a debt for holding the fort in Alaska, for methodically teaching citizens of the territory to recognize that their wildlife resources weren’t limitless. By taking a good old boy’s approach to being a warden, being part of the day-to-day Alaskan milieu, Dufresne helped conservation principles take firm root in outback towns and hamlets. At public forums, his firm persuasiveness—expressed on his face by something halfway between a grin and a scowl—was palpable. “Help us keep this kind of fishing,” was his simple plea to civic groups. “Your own boy might want to come up here some day.”43
Chapter Ten - Warren G. Harding: Backlash
I
Oil—that was the new rush in Alaska. Between 1910 and 1920, huge oil and gas reserves had been discovered at Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Appetites were whetted. Alaskan boomers believed that it was only a matter of time until oil was struck in their vast backyard, and that oil would make them as rich as John D. Rockefeller. Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, James Garfield, spoke for all ultra-conservationists when he described Rockefeller in his diary, now housed at the Library of Congress, as a cold-blooded reptile: “Never have I seen a more sinister, avaricious face—repulsive and deceitful. I disliked to shake his hand, but of course could not cause comment by not doing so. . . . I wonder if anyone—outside his family—really cares for him apart from his money.”1
The election of Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the twenty-ninth president of the United States, in November 1920, deeply depressed Leopold, Sheldon, and Merriam. Harding, who had owned a newspaper in Ohio, believed that the pro-business Republican old guard had received a mandate vote—which was certainly true. He felt duty-bound to act on Rockefeller’s principle that the only good oil field was a drilled one. No sooner had Harding been sworn in as president, on March 4, 1921, than he opened up public lands in Alaska for development. Taking aim at the Bull Moose conservationists, he issued Executive Order No. 3421, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture was to abolish the designation of Fire Island in Alaska as a national moose refuge.2
But the conservationists’ sense of muted desperation after Harding’s election in 1920 didn’t last long. Citizens in Wyoming, angered over corruption in government, demanded that Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, a known foe of the conservationist clique inside the U.S. Forest Service, be investigated for land fraud. Fall’s shady dealings became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. The courts eventually decided that the Harding administration had illegally leased the U.S. Navy’s petroleum reserve No. 3 in Wyoming (near a rock outcropping resembling a teapot) to Harry F. Sinclair of Standard Oil without competitive bidding. At that point Harding had been in office for barely a year. Teapot Dome was just another sleazy grab of public lands, like the Alaskan coal mines controversy of 1909 over which Pinchot and Ballinger feuded. The decent folks of Wyoming, however, wouldn’t tolerate it. In 1921, Fall was indicted for conspiracy and accepting bribes. He was fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison, earning the ignominy of being the first U.S. cabinet officer in history to serve a prison term for misdeeds in office. The
oil fields were restored to the U.S. government by court order, and Teapot Dome remained the symbol of political corruption until Watergate in the 1970s.3
Although Teapot Dome captured the newspaper headlines, Alaskan public lands also suffered under Harding’s pro-development administration. But plagued by various scandals, and looking for an escape from journalistic criticism in the spring of 1923, Harding scheduled a trip to Alaska. As the historian Thomas Fleming aptly put it in the New York Times, Harding wanted to “get [away] from the stench that was rising in Washington” over graft in his administration.4 Harding, accompanied by three members of his cabinet—Herbert Hoover (State), Henry Wallace (Agriculture), and Hubert Work (Interior)—and others in the administration, went aboard the SS Henderson, steaming northward from Tacoma, Washington. Harding would be the first U.S. president to visit the Alaska territory. Excitement ran high in the territory because on February 27, by Executive Order No. 3797-A, Harding had withdrawn 23 million acres, extending from the Arctic Ocean to the Brooks Range, as Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 4. Although the Naval Petroleum Reserve was too remote to be drilled, there were reports of oil seepage, and Harding was encouraging private companies to make claims there.5
The Harding party arrived in Seward on July 13. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner called it “The Glory of the Coming.” The first lady, Florence Harding, had also come on the tour, and the rumor mill was full of speculation that Harding was trying to mend a break caused by his adultery. Following World War I the Republican Party had started encouraging non-Native settlement in Alaska, and now Harding immediately started preaching the doctrine of prosperity to Alaskans. After a rally in Anchorage, he headed out to inspect the Chicaloon coalfields. Starting in 1914, Alaska’s coalfields had been placed in public entry—a low bid would get an entrepreneur a lease for extraction. A gouging of Alaska was under way, particularly in the coal seams just north of Mount McKinley. Bored by the grand scenery, not even stopping to hear a bird trill when he visited the national park, Harding seemed indifferent to the blue skies and green woods of Alaska. No meetings with game or forest wardens were included in the itinerary. Even when a moose crossed the road, Harding yawned. Complaints from fishermen that the coal and timber industries were polluting the Gulf of Alaska fell on deaf ears. Harding never had any burning curiosity about the natural world. Talking to handpicked audiences, he implied that he wanted to hear the kaboom of dynamite across the last frontier. Someday Ketchikan would be bigger than Seattle and Fairbanks, a new Minneapolis at the top of the world. On July 15, Harding played the part of an engineer on a railroad run from Wasilla to Willow. And then he drove a golden spike with a maul at Nenana, a new railroad hub to symbolize the completion of the 470-mile line connecting Seward and Fairbanks.6