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

by Douglas Brinkley

  If only in terms of grit, Edge became the most effective reformist champion of national parks and wildlife habitat preservation of her era. Biodiversity and ecology informed her public dissent. Reporters loved to interview Edge, whose candor had become legendary by the time Herbert Hoover was president. She was called the “Hawk of Mercy,” and her Pennsylvania sanctuary for birds of prey attracted visitors from all over the world. She became a celebrity. Always beautifully dressed, with a silver dragonfly brooch on her lapel, Edge became the conservationist darling of progressives and inspired an outpouring of concern for the survival of birds of prey.

  According to the biographer Dyana Z. Furmansky, the pamphlets that Rosalie Edge published for the ECC had a profound effect on both Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harold Ickes. Here was the old Bull Moose conservation spirit being dispensed by a deeply informed woman whose wit matched that of TR’s first child, Alice Roosevelt Longworth. By representing her crusade as David versus Goliath, Edge easily won public sympathy. Smitten with her pluck, Ickes regularly summoned Edge to the Department of the Interior for friendly chats. A friendship developed between Ickes and Edge. “Their relationship became as uniquely symbiotic as the one she had developed with scientists and bureaucrats reluctant to advocate publicly on behalf of their unpopular views, and sometimes as secretive,” Furmansky writes. “Edge understood that for conservation’s new breed of national policy makers to stem the tide of nature’s destruction, they needed help from the ECC. Its pamphlets built ‘public support in advance of action,’ so that leaders could point to how they were fulfilling the informed will of the people. The policy makers needed the fresh input from the policy shapers, and fresh input is what the ECC would give them repeatedly.”24

  But for most Americans of the 1920s, Alaska’s declining bald eagle populations—Edge’s widely disseminated ECC pamphlets notwithstanding—seemed very remote, of interest only to the conservation cult. Hawk Mountain was near New York City whereas Haines, Alaska, where eagles roosted by the thousands, might as well have been Greenland or Timbuktu. Once the Klondike gold rush had faded from memory, Alaska wasn’t much in the news in the East, except for Warren Harding’s fatal junket. The first motion picture ever filmed in Alaska, The Cheechakos, released in 1924 by the Alaska Motion Picture Corporation, bankrupted the company. To tourists, visiting Yellowstone or Yosemite seemed possible on a week’s vacation. Going to Mount McKinley, by contrast, seemed to be a summer-long endeavor for which an outfitter was needed.

  Yet, thanks to National Geographic magazine, there was a growing public fascination with Alaska’s polar bears and snowy owls. The far north had its fans and produced some fads. Santa Claus had reindeer. Salmon was a favored dish in New York restaurants. The Isaly Dairy Company of Youngstown, Ohio, was marketing a square of vanilla ice cream dipped in chocolate and wrapped in icy-looking silver foil: the logo for these Klondike bars was a smiling polar bear, as cuddly as a teddy bear. Walt Disney, the great cartoonist, also had an eye on Alaska, gearing up to make the Academy Award–winning documentary Winter Wilderness, which starred polar bear cubs and wolf pups.

  And Rockwell Kent, as irascible as ever, continued promoting the far north with his expressive Alaskan paintings. Always pushing nearer to the north pole, Kent eventually wrote three books about his adventures in Greenland: N by E, Salamina, and Greenland Journal. Perilous treks with dogsled teams in below-zero weather became his persistent theme. His strongest supporter was Marie Ahnighito Peary, daughter of the great explorer Robert Peary. As Barry Lopez noted in Arctic Dreams, Kent found Alaska and Greenland holy shrines at which sojourners discovered “Godlike qualities” in themselves.25 To Kent, the gatekeepers of the Arctic paradise were bald eagles (the fact that Ben Franklin thought these prey birds had “questionable moral character” only increased Kent’s admiration for them).26 For the dust jacket of Salamina—the title was the name of his Eskimo housekeeper in Greenland—he drew an inspired portrait of a bald eagle defending the quiet world from industrialization and mechanized progress.27

  Leopold, Edge, Kent, and other conservationists were continually infuriated from 1917 to 1953, because Alaska’s territorial legislature established a bounty system for eagles. It was originally 50 cents an eagle and rose to $2 over the years. The Biological Survey joined forces with the defenders of wildlife and pleaded with the territorial government to rescind its open season on eagles. During those years well over 128,000 bald eagles were shot or poisoned. The crux of the problem was that Alaskan fishermen believed bald eagles were gorging on salmon, depleting rivers, streams, and bays. Every eagle nest found by a professional Alaskan fisherman was destroyed or ransacked. According to the territorial governor Ernest Gruening—a Harvard graduate and a former managing editor of the New York Tribune—the mass slaughter of eagles had “become more or less an established custom.”28 The National Rifle Association (NRA) called shooting bald eagles the “purest of all rifle sports.”29

  Giving scientific credence to the pleas of Leopold, Edge, and Kent was Olaus Murie of the Biological Survey, who had spent 1936 and 1937 writing detailed reports on the bald eagle populations of the Aleutian Islands. These Alaskan eagles courted in March and laid eggs in April. Hatching took place in June and fledglings emerged in late August. Most important, Murie (and Hosea Sarber) concluded from studying eagles’ stomachs that salmon weren’t essential to an eagle’s daily diet. Alaskan fishermen were grossly exaggerating the situation, just as Florida’s fishermen had exaggerated the situation with pelicans. Stepping up to defend the rights of bald eagles was Flying Strong Eagle of the American Indian Association. It was sacrilege, Flying Strong Eagle argued, to massacre the national emblem of America because of a dispute over fishing; eagles, he argued, were a sacred species. They were the embodiment of wilderness, freedom, and strength. “Although the evidence did not persuade Alaskan legislators,” the historian Morgan Sherwood wrote, “over the years the eagle’s case was heard sympathetically by a variety of outsiders.”30

  Triumph came on June 8, 1940, with the passage of the Bald Eagle Protection Act. Congress at last recognized that eagles were essential to Alaska’s ecosystem. No longer could Lower Forty-Eighters pursue, shoot, poison, wound, kill, capture, trap, collect, molest, or disturb bald eagles for “any purpose.” But there seemed to be no attitude of self- congratulation in ornithological circles regarding the legislation. Congress, although it prohibited the destruction of eagles in the states, exempted the Alaskan territory from this ban.31

  Eventually, killers of bald eagles could be fined up to $10,000. But by the 1960s chemicals such as DDT were starting to wipe out the species in the Lower Forty-Eight. Alaska was not an important agricultural area and, consequently, much less DDT was released there, so its bald eagle population held firm. However, the continued reckless clear-cutting of Alaska’s old-growth trees was troubling. Bald eagles built their nests up to eight feet across and seven feet deep on top of Sitka spruce and western hemlock. These trees continued to be timbered in the Tongass and Chugach at an unhealthy, even maniacal rate. This loss of habitat looked as though it might spell doom for the bald eagle. But committed activists started an effective campaign after World War II to rescue these magnificent birds from going the way of the dodo and the passenger pigeon.

  Chapter Eleven - Bob Marshall and the Gates of the Arctic

  I

  When it came to translating conservationist ideas into preservationist action, spreading the idea of wilderness across the North American continent, Robert Marshall had no peers. Born in New York City the year Theodore Roosevelt became president—1901—Marshall became the first university-trained forester to promote the urgent need to save Alaska’s Brooks Range and Arctic tundra from commercial despoliation. Marshall’s father, Louis, was a high-priced constitutional lawyer, regularly dining with the Manhattan social set, but young Bob became infatuated with “Knollwood,” the family’s summer camp at Lower Saranac Lake in New York’s Adirondacks. During his childhood, his fir
st heroes were Lewis and Clark, whose brave exploration into an “unbroken wilderness” he wanted to imitate in Arctic Alaska.1 Marshall’s boyhood hikes in the Adirondacks and his hero worship of James Fenimore Cooper’s buckskin-clad pathfinders were the genesis of what would eventually become the Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And in 1935, four years before his death, Marshall cofounded with Aldo Leopold and six others The Wilderness Society, a nonprofit organization that has led the conservation movement in “battling uncompromisingly” for wilderness protection, helping to save 56 million acres from commercial development in Alaska alone.2

  Committed philanthropy came naturally to Bob Marshall, who was raised in Manhattan’s upper-class world of comfort and ease. His father had routinely doled out five-digit checks to New York–based nonprofits defending minority rights, including the American Jewish Committee. Infuriated by anti-Semitism, Louis Marshall led ferocious civil rights campaigns. With the U.S. Constitution as his sword, Marshall regularly sued institutions that barred Jews, in particular, from membership. He believed American Jews had an ancestral obligation to end their silence and confront anti-Semitism head-on. His most famous showdown against the WASP establishment was fought over the Adirondacks’ Lake Placid Club, founded by Melvil Dewey (originator of the Dewey decimal system and state librarian of New York). The club’s wealthy patrons had waged a surprisingly fierce campaign to bar Jews from membership in their exclusive 9,600-acre resort. After a bitter stalemate and under extreme legal pressure from Marshall, Dewey was eventually forced to capitulate. Dewey, in the end, admitted that in the United States exclusion of Jews from private clubs should always be forbidden. “I have succeeded in getting Dewey’s scalp,” Marshall bragged to a friend. “The result is most gratifying.”3

  Impressed by Marshall’s legal prowess, the Jewish Tribune soon described him as the fourth most influential Jew in the world, after Albert Einstein, Chaim Weizmann, and Israel Zangwill; Marshall was the only American among the top five.4 Like most Jews during the progressive era, Louis Marshall saw Theodore Roosevelt as a stalwart champion of their cause. In 1906 Roosevelt had become the first U.S. president to appoint a Jew to a cabinet position: Oscar S. Straus, as secretary of labor and commerce. Unusually for a politician of his era, Roosevelt supported a Zionist state around Jerusalem.5 Furthermore, when Roosevelt won the Nobel Peace Prize for mediating in the Russo-Japanese War, he donated part of his cash award to the National Jewish Welfare Board. For his part, Louis Marshall backed many of Roosevelt’s conservation initiatives to protect state-owned forestlands in upstate New York. According to Marshall’s well-constructed argument, the cutting of oak, elm, and spruce to get logs for sawmills should be balanced by the formation of permanent wilderness reserves. “Blister, rust, canker, and insects are infinitely less dangerous than Homo sapiens,” Marshall declared, “who, whether he takes the form of a lumberman, or a tax title exploiter, a vandal, or a commercial hotelkeeper, is the real enemy of the forest.”6

  Young Bob Marshall—pleasant-mannered, funny, and enormously energetic—was a chip off the old block. A hyperactive, rugged athlete, Marshall wasn’t so much a bookish prodigy as a full-bodied, ravenous enthusiast for learning. He had a bubbling intensity that suggested pent-up steam. Marshall’s piercing eyes were certainly his most notable feature and helped distract attention from his protruding front teeth. As a second-grader (or thereabouts) he was already saying, parroting what adults had told him, that recklessly destroying a forest was akin to treason against humanity. He had an intense passion for the history of North American forests. He was able to quote the venerable John Burroughs verbatim. He declared that nature was a cure for the “strangling clutch of a mechanistic civilization.”7 He all but memorized Ralph Bonehill’s Pioneer Boys of the Great Northwest.8 And he even found Darwin’s principles of natural selection easy to grasp.

  Marshall’s mother, Florence, died in 1916, leaving Bob in the hands of a succession of nannies and assorted help. He took emotional refuge in Knollwood, tramping around the deep woodlands with his brothers George and James, silently thinking in the mountain coolness. Like Meriwether Lewis at the Continental Divide, Marshall started naming places around Lower Saranac Lake: Found Knife Pass, Squashed Berry Valley, Hidden Heaven Rock.9 Routinely he examined tamarack, white spruce, and red spruce, peeling off their coarse bark for closer scrutiny. The Adirondacks encompassed a variety of forest communities including conifer swamp, lowland conifer, hardwood conifer, northern hardwood, mountain conifer, and alpine—ideal for an aspiring forester. After spending twenty-five summers at Knollwood, Marshall would consider himself an amateur expert on the Adirondacks State Park ecosystem. Sparrows chirruping, basins hollowed for clear lakes, engulfing solitude, the distant sound of timbering, the swarming insects—all were relished by Marshall. Influenced by his father, he emphasized the concept of reforestation. The interconnected Adirondacks ecosystem had a mystical harmony that made perfect sense. The sheer physicality of the great forestland molded Marshall into manhood.

  Congress had passed the National Park Service Act in 1916 to protect America’s natural wonders. Under the leadership of Stephen Mather, the National Park Service launched a public outreach effort to engage young people with the outdoors. Marshall heard the call. Between 1918 and 1934 he climbed forty-two peaks, all over 3,000 feet, some days hiking more than thirty miles. Adopting Verplanck Colvin, a post–Civil War surveyor of coniferous forests, as his new role model, he pledged his life to the “Forever Wild” movement in the Adirondacks. Alaska became far more than facts to be memorized for a geography class. He began wanting to hear bears growling and lynx screeching. He imagined the slants of evening light around Mount McKinley. Preparing for the ordeal, he started getting into tip-top physical shape. In September 1901 Theodore Roosevelt (who was then the vice president) had climbed to the top of Mount Marcy (5,343 feet). Marshall naturally followed in his idol’s footsteps, camping atop the summit. “I love the woods and solitude,” Marshall wrote in a school essay. “I like the various forms of scientific work a forester must do. I would hate to spend the greater part of my lifetime in a stuffy office or crowded assembly, or even in a populous city.”10

  Forgoing Ivy League schools, Marshall instead attended the New York State College of Forestry in Syracuse. (The environmental service school was founded, in large part, by his father.) Marshall aspired to the forestry skills of Pinchot, the all-seeing naturalist’s eyes of Muir, and the stiff spine of Roosevelt. Although Marshall was of average height, he gave the impression of being shorter because his shoulders were stooped from too much reading. What made Marshall unusual among forestry scientists was that the spirit of Thoreau stayed with him as he worked at experimental stations throughout the Rocky Mountains. Dutifully Marshall kept notebooks of his outdoor hikes. He wasn’t yet twenty when, during his free time, he developed a new trail system for the Adirondack Forest Preserve. Believing in the restorative qualities of the New York woods for city dwellers, he compiled a thirty-eight-page guidebook, The High Peaks of the Adirondacks, aimed at helping greenhorns enjoy boreal forests.

  Upon graduating from Syracuse in 1924 with a BS in forestry (he was fourth in a class of fifty-eight), Marshall followed the Lewis and Clark Trail for a summer, up the Missouri River and across the Continental Divide to the Oregon coast. In letters home he extolled the beauty of Lolo Pass and The Dalles. He happily hiked around the Willamette Valley with bulging backpack and trusty compass. One look at the three great Pacific Northwest mountains—Hood, Baker, and Rainier—made him feel full of vitality.11 Nature could, he understood anew, lord it over civilization. Everywhere Marshall rambled in the Cascades he tried to strike up conversations, saying, “Hello, I’m Bob Marshall” as if he were running for public office.12 With low mists in the dimples between the hills behind him, he set up his tent on a vacant beach. Although he never mastered the art of canoeing, Marshall became an early advocate of hiking as a sport, routi
nely marching thirty or forty miles a day. Often he wore tennis shoes instead of heavy leather boots for these long rambles; the tennis shoes provided far better traction.

  Footsore, Marshall returned to the East in the fall of 1924 and headed for Harvard Forest in Petersham, Massachusetts. In 1907, Harvard University—not wanting to be outshone by Yale University’s world-class Forestry School—acquired a 2,100-acre tract of woodlands in north-central Massachusetts. All the new modern forestry techniques were being taught at this experimental station in Worcester County.13 Approximately 1,000 types of trees grew in America, and Marshall was determined to study the seed-to-growth rate of them all. He could take classes in forest ecology, harvesting, and fire management, and he learned about a burgeoning field called forest recreation. He improved his skills with saw, wedge, and ax. Pine trees were examined as potential forest products for turpentine and resin. Thousands of Americans earned their living in the lumber industry. Timbering was big business. One common denominator of “big timber” and conservationists, Marshall learned at Harvard, was that both loathed the insatiably destructive bark beetle. But eradication of this common pest was about all the two feuding factions could agree on.

  Marshall also learned about conservation land trusts, whose birthplace was in nearby Waverly, Massachusetts. In 1891 Charles Eliot, the son of Harvard University’s president, led a successful effort to save two dozen ancient white oaks in Waverly along the sand hills of Beaver Creek. His logic was simple. Just as libraries acquired rare books and museums collected fine art, communities should treat groves of trees as a local heritage. Under Eliot’s leadership, the United States’ first regional land trust was established (today it is referred to as the Trustees of Reservations). The Waverly oaks taught Marshall an important lesson: forestry preservation wasn’t just about large-scale national reserves. It must also be localized and community-based.14