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

by Douglas Brinkley

  President Harding missed two hammer blows in driving the gold spike; but this event was actually a high accomplishment compared with his folly regarding his wardrobe. Listening to Admiral Hugh Rodman, a supposed climatologist, Harding told his entourage to wear heavy wool sweaters, parkas, galoshes, gloves—the whole array of winter clothing—even though it was mid-July. The temperature hit ninety-five degrees, and some members of Harding’s party collapsed from heat prostration and dehydration. Knowing nothing about Alaska except the profitability of drilling, timbering, and mining had its downside. Meanwhile, reports reached Harding, as he crossed Prince William Sound in a naval ship, that many of his “Ohio gang”—cronies who used a green house on K Street in Washington, D.C., as their headquarters—were being indicted. This was unsettling to the president.7

  Nevertheless, Harding pressed on with his Alaskan junket. What he hoped to convey in Alaska was his desire for mechanized progress in this last frontier. No longer were a pick and shovel needed to look for gold. Technology had turned the search into a corporate endeavor complete with large-scale machines and hydraulic mining techniques.8 There was still wilderness to be conquered—lots of it. Harding, serving as a mouthpiece for big business, also announced his plan to take a ride on the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, owned by the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate. This seemed a deliberate insult to Pinchot, who was now governor of Pennsylvania but who remained an ardent opponent of the syndicate and its development efforts in Alaska. As it turned out, the ride was canceled at the last minute. The first lady, who was five years older than the president, had a bad stomach and fallen extremely ill. A few years earlier she had lost a kidney, and this had caused her health to deteriorate in general.

  Harding’s Alaskan trip then took an awful turn. On the voyage back to San Francisco aboard the Henderson, he himself became gravely ill, possibly from shellfish poisoning. Severe stomach cramps overcame him. He felt clammy and dizzy. His usual ruddy complexion had gone sheet-white. Somehow the president managed to deliver a speech in Vancouver, British Columbia, before a crowd of 40,000 well-wishers. But once offstage he continued complaining of abdominal pains. He was not only sick but in a foul mood. When told that the ship had serious maintenance problems, and that water was flooding into a cargo compartment, Harding snapped, “I hope this boat sinks.”9

  Conspiracy-minded Alaskan boomers suspected, crazily, that some associate of Pinchot’s, or a bitter fisherman, had deliberately poisoned the physically exhausted Harding. No evidence of such poisoning has ever been found; but a few days after becoming sick in Sitka, a spent Harding died in a San Francisco hotel suite on August 2. Reporters called it the “curse of Alaska.” The official diagnosis was a heart attack, but physicians said that the possible bout of food poisoning might, hypothetically, have triggered the infarction. Progressives had long called for American seafood to be inspected by the Food and Drug Administration so that people wouldn’t get sick from shellfish, but Harding and his associates had scoffed at the notion. A cross-country funeral procession took place, and then Harding’s flag-draped coffin was placed in the U.S. Capitol’s rotunda. A few days later Harding was buried in a mausoleum in Marion, Ohio. American conservationists were scathing in their assessment of Harding as a steward of the land. They believed that since the creation of the U.S. Department of the Interior in 1849, Harding had been its poorest custodian. But many Americans loved Harding.

  II

  Replacing Harding as president was Calvin Coolidge, perhaps most remembered for his famous line “The business of America is business.”10 In terms of personality, the taciturn Coolidge seemed the polar opposite of Roosevelt. But Coolidge, even with his belief in limited government, recognized that Roosevelt had been a force of nature. He praised Roosevelt’s efforts to build the Panama Canal, the Great White Fleet, and reclamation dams throughout the West as great American work. As much as Coolidge abhorred Roosevelt’s penchant for what he considered excessive federal spending and overtaxing, he felt that his predecessor’s desire to protect America’s wildlife and create national parks wasn’t such a bad thing. Coolidge—despite his image of being as lifeless as a waxwork—was an avid fly fisherman; he spent much of the summers of 1926, 1927, and 1928 in waders, gleefully looking for trout.11

  When, in 1924, Congress at last allowed Native Americans to become citizens, Coolidge had marked the event by wearing a feathered headdress; and he was glad when a Tlingit, William Paul Sr., became the first Native elected to the Alaskan territorial legislature. Coolidge thought natural resource management should be decentralized. He encouraged states to develop their own conservation plans. In a highly symbolic act, Coolidge worked to protect Alaska’s moose population, perhaps demonstrating with this small gesture that he cared about the natural world. And on a summer fishing vacation in the Black Hills (Custer State Park), President Coolidge suggested to the sculptor Gutzon Borglum that Roosevelt should be included on Mount Rushmore along with Washington, Lincoln, and Jefferson.12

  Somewhat surprisingly, and to his everlasting credit, Coolidge did create (with Congress) five spectacular new national parks—Bryce Canyon (Utah), Great Smoky Mountains (Tennessee), Grand Teton (Wyoming), Shenandoah (Virginia), and Mammoth Cave (Kentucky). But he ultimately rubber-stamped Alaskan oil and gold development projects promoted by treasure seekers. Sportsmen’s clubs, such as the Boone and Crockett Club, hoping to protect wilderness in Alaska, would be marginalized by his administration. Much like wetlands, swamps, and deserts, Arctic tundra was considered a wasteland by Coolidge—devoid of aesthetic value. Besides the scenic new national parks, Coolidge’s most notable measure with regard, presumably, to conservation was changing the name of TR’s Reclamation Service (which had become an independent agency in 1907) to the Bureau of Reclamation in 1923.13

  While the eminent ecologist William Skinner Cooper was fighting to have Glacier Bay saved as a national monument, in homage to John Muir,14 Charles Sheldon was still trying to shame Congress into being a good steward of Mount McKinley. In December 1920, Sheldon testified to a House Appropriations Committee that the national park desperately needed federal funding for more game wardens, more law enforcement, and tougher laws to prosecute poachers who hunted Dall sheep. His voice had an almost scolding quality, with no suggestion of humor. Once again Sheldon defended the idea of protecting brown bears in Alaska. For Sheldon, watching Harding and Coolidge try to undo so much preservationist work in Alaska was disheartening.

  Sheldon died suddenly of a heart attack in Nova Scotia in 1928. He had been vacationing at his family’s summer cabin when he collapsed. It was a hard loss for the movement to absorb. Sheldon was buried in Rutland, Vermont. Besides his crusade for Mount McKinley, he had been lobbying to protect North American antelope on the eve of his death. The Boone and Crockett Club, always ready to memorialize its leaders, joined with the National Audubon Society in purchasing 4,000 acres of Nevada’s Great Basin and creating the Charles Sheldon Antelope Refuge in 1931. President Herbert Hoover, who admired Sheldon, had issued the executive order. Today the Nevada refuge has more than 575,000 acres administered by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, protected land that constitutes one of the few intact sagebrush steppe ecosystems in America. The reserve was enhanced by the introduction of bighorn sheep in 1968.*

  Dr. C. Hart Merriam, heartbroken at the loss of his dearest ally, made sure that Charles Scribner’s Sons posthumously published Charles Sheldon’s naturalist diaries as The Wilderness of Denali (1930). It became a classic of the “hook and bullet” genre. Denali’s rugged mountains, glacial streams, boggy plateaus, rushing rivers, and green-blue glaciers had found their most enduring chronicler in Sheldon. From the plaintive whistle of the golden plover (which flew from Central America to nest in Denali) to a lordly moose (with sixty-seven-inch antler spears), Sheldon had captured the drama of an entire ecosystem for posterity to ponder. The Wilderness of Denali was a gift to the nation. Its publication inspired a new wave of preservationist sentiment f
or Alaska’s mountain ranges, such as the Fairweather, the Saint Elias, and the Wrangell. Taken together, these Alaskan places formed a huge semicircle of more than 1,000 miles from the Sitka region to the end of the Alaska Peninsula. Inspired by The Wilderness of Denali, Franklin D. Roosevelt, sworn in as U.S. president in March 1933, immediately allocated federal funds to Mount McKinley National Park. From the grave, the “father of Denali National Park” had been heard.15

  III

  While 1928 was known in conservation circles as the year Sheldon died, the big national event was the election of Herbert Hoover as U.S. president that November. Hoover, from the outset, was a conundrum to conservationists. He was a Wall Street–big business Republican, and he believed strongly in deregulating business. His chamber-of-commerce attitude didn’t bode well for conservation- ists. But he was also an avid fly fisherman and an active leader in the Izaak Walton League. Hoover, in fact, was a true believer in “fish reservations.” To Hoover—unlike Harding—the outdoors mattered a great deal. As secretary of commerce, for example, Hoover had considered the very existence of dirty and polluted water barbaric. Pushing forward tough antipollution laws with the zeal of Gifford Pinchot, he had called for the Bureau of Fisheries to end the “steady degeneration” in “commercial fisheries in the Northwest of Alaska.” Speaking to the U.S. Fisheries Association in September 1924, Hoover said that he wanted to “cultivate a sense of national responsibility toward the fisheries and their maintenance . . . to make a vigorous attempt to restore the . . . littoral fisheries on the Atlantic Coast; to secure the prevention of pollution from sources other than ships both in coastal and inland waters; to undertake the reinforcement of stocks of game fish throughout the United States.”16

  Sadly, as U.S. president, Hoover refused to put his idea of “fish reserves” forward in a meaningful way. The Republican Party had become a hostage to corporate interests. Looking for a way to promote his big business agenda in Alaska, Hoover focused on reindeer farming, believing that the territory needed more slaughterhouses and packing plants to compete with the cattle stockyards of Chicago, Omaha, and Kansas City.

  IV

  If there was a symbol of Alaska’s vanishing wildlife in the 1920s and 1930s, it was the bald eagle. When the Pilgrims first arrived on the curled toe of Cape Cod, 500,000 eagles soared in the American sky. But colonists blamed these raptors for disturbing livestock, and an open season commenced. “For my part,” Benjamin Franklin had stated, “I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen as the representative of our country. He is a bird of bad moral character; he doesn’t get his living honestly. . . . Besides, he is a rank coward.”17 This anti-eagle attitude spread to Alaska, where half of America’s eagles lived. In 1917, the territorial legislature enacted a bounty on eagles in support of fishermen and fox farmers who claimed that the raptors were snatching their livelihood from streams, rivers, and lakes. “Our national symbol, sad to say,” Peter Matthiessen wrote in Wildlife in America, “subsists largely upon carrion; its alleged depredations on the salmon of Alaska, like its other crimes, have been grossly exaggerated.”18

  From 1920 to 1940, the National Rifle Association (NRA) in Alaska was intensely promoting the shooting of eagles. Aldo Leopold, who was conducting game surveys of midwestern states as a private consultant, later took the matter up with the NRA’s president, Karl T. Frederick. “We gun enthusiasts are constantly complaining of restrictive legislation on firearms,” Leopold wrote. “Is it likely that the public is going to accord us any more respect and consideration than we earn by our actions and attitudes? . . . I would infinitely rather shoot the vases off my mantelpiece than the eagles out of my Alaska. I have a part ownership in both. That the Alaska Game Commission elects to put a bounty on the eagle, and not on the vase, has nothing to do with the sportsmanship of either action.”19

  In July 1933, Leopold accepted a new chair of game management in the Department of Agriculture and Economics at the University of Wisconsin. As the desolate news of eagle loss continued unabated, Leopold tried to stir public consciousness against bounty hunting of birds of prey in Alaska. Besides being glorious to look at, eagles were part of the web of life in Alaska. But those who considered eagles a nuisance continued slaughtering tens of thousands of these birds. To counter Benjamin Franklin’s negative view of eagles, Leopold quoted Ezekiel 17, telling how one of the raptors broke off the top of a cedar “and planted it high on another mountain, and it brought forth boughs, and bare fruit, and was a godly tree.” Although skeptical about Hebrew silviculture, Leopold used the Old Testament, when it was convenient, to give eagles a better image in the public mind.20

  Coming to the rescue of the American bald eagles was the veteran women’s suffragist and raptor conservationist Rosalie Edge. Long before Rachel Carson described the dangers of DDT in Silent Spring, her environmental manifesto of 1962, Edge, from her Hawk Mountain Sanctuary in eastern Pennsylvania—the first rehabilitation center for birds of prey—warned against the chemical companies, gun manufacturers, and logging conglomerates that were trying to exterminate these magnificent creatures. Edge was a fearless activist, a feisty, independent spirit who couldn’t accept the idea of America without eagles, hawks, and owls. A New York socialite reared with patrician values, Edge defended wildlife by writing stinging articles and giving lectures and speeches. When Roosevelt, Burroughs, and Muir died and the conservationist movement was losing its spirit, Edge came to the fore. In a fourteen-page profile, the New Yorker accurately described her as somehow resembling both Queen Mary and an excited pointer on the hunt (adding that her crusade to rehabilitate eagles was “widespread and monumental”).21

  What concerned Edge in general, however, was the degradation of nature by industry. Without her activism, it’s doubtful that Congress would have created Sequoia–Kings Canyon National Park in California in 1940, or that developers would have been prevented from diverting Wyoming’s Yellowstone Falls in Yellowstone National Park. Stoop-shouldered, with a face remarkably like Eleanor Roosevelt’s, Edge refused to be complacent. She contended that huge companies and manufacturers were interested only in dollars. They weren’t to be trusted when it came to protecting nature. In the West they had to be tightly regulated by the U.S. Department of the Interior, but it was often in cahoots with the companies to which it was leasing land. Teapot Dome, Edge believed, was merely the tip of the iceberg with regard to corruption occurring between the U.S. federal government and private corporations.

  Edge also believed that conservation began at home, and she led a crusade to ban the shooting of hawks and eagles in the Kittatinny Ridge of Pennsylvania. Every year these birds migrated from Canada to roost along fish-rich streams in Schuylkill County. She used the word “sanctuary” to connote that protecting birds of prey had a religious or missionary element. Edge was by 1920 the new William Temple Hornaday, an indomitable protector of species. She frequently claimed that killing bald eagles was as sacrilegious as slashing Emanuel Leutze’s painting Washington Crossing the Delaware would be. Every fall, Edge was disgusted by the annual sparbenbarich, a local term (derived from German) for a massacre of thousands of hawks. The unethical hunters, with dozens of dead hawks strewn about them, would proudly smile for photographers.

  When Edge was in Paris, she received a provocative pamphlet written by Willard Van Name, W. Dewitt Miller, and Davis Quinn: “A Crisis in Conservation: Serious Danger of Extinction of Many North American Birds.” According to these authors, eagles, hawks, and owls were being systematically wiped out in the United States. Edge was repelled: Wasn’t the bald eagle our national emblem? Didn’t owls help farmers by eating small rodents? Having fought for women’s suffrage with Carrie Chapman Catt at her side, Edge knew something about grassroots activism and about winning battles. Dissatisfied with the Audubon Society, which was sitting on the sidelines, and critical of its active founder Gilbert Pearson, who seemed rather lackadaisical about protecting eagle, hawk, and owl populations and habitats, Edge founded the Emergency C
onservation Committee (ECC). There were about 300 species of raptors in the world—including hawks, eagles, and falcons—and the EEC wanted them protected.22

  Edge marshaled a number of leading scientists to defend wildlife. She also sued the Audubon Society for misrepresenting itself as protecting birds. She believed that the society had become compromised by trophy hunters, timber barons, the pesticide industry, and government bureaucrats on the take. A lawyer for the Audubon Society tried to humiliate Edge by calling her “a common scold.” Years later, recalling how she had first learned of the insult, Edge scoffed, “Fancy how I trembled.”23 Edge’s lawsuit sent a wave of fear through conservation societies, impelling them to support her action. Roger Baldwin of the ACLU helped her as the plaintiff; the ornithologist Frank M. Chapman documented her claims; and a court ruled in favor of the ECC.