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

by Douglas Brinkley

  III

  World War II transformed Alaska, seemingly overnight, from a backwater territory to a major strategic asset that was well worth defending. Following the attack on Pearl Harbor the Japanese navy actually seized two outer Aleutian islets—Attu and Kiska—as part of its North American campaign. The Roosevelt administration quickly established a military command in Alaska and moved defense forces to Adak, Dutch Harbor, and Cold Bay. Because the U.S. government censored news from Alaska in the 1940s, this campaign is called the “forgotten war.” The United States engaged Japanese troops in the Aleutians from June 3, 1942, to August 15, 1943. The wind and fog were obstacles for both sides. Many B-24 pilots, in fact, described the Aleutian campaign as a three-sided battle waged between the United States, Japan, and the uncooperative weather.28 Samuel Eliot Morison, in his magisterial volume History of United States Naval Operations in World War II, wrote that the Aleutians were the “Theater of Military Frustration.”29

  After World War II ended, the U.S. armed forces’ presence in Alaska declined dramatically, from 152,000 troops in 1943 to 19,000 in 1946.30 During the war, the U.S. government had spent more than $1 billion on Alaskan infrastructure projects like building the 1,523-mile Alaska-Canada Highway and modernizing Alaskan railroads. The overland road built from Delta Junction (southeast of Fairbanks) to Dawson Creek (in British Columbia) forever changed how Alaska’s lands would be managed. Huge D-8 Caterpillar bulldozers with enormous cutting blades uprooted towering spruces. Gravel was hauled in dump trucks and other vehicles from alluvial riverbeds and hillsides. When it rained or snowed, four-wheel-drive convoys often got stuck in mud craters and impassable ravines.31

  The U.S. Navy also dramatically improved Alaska’s docks, wharves, and breakwaters. Pan American Airways had introduced a commercial link between Seattle and Juneau. Alaska was ready for business. As more and more civilians moved to the territory, the postwar movement to reinstate the timber industries swelled. Both of Theodore Roosevelt’s great national forests—the Tongass and Chugach—were now under siege. During the war, also, the U.S. Bureau of Mines had started surveying Alaska’s North Slope for oil. Reports of seepage between Cape Simpson and Point Barrow were becoming commonplace. Congress gave a $1 million grant to begin oil extraction work at the Naval Petroleum Reserve on November 4. A big question was whether oil drilling was feasible in the subzero Arctic conditions. By September 1945 Alaskans were saying that Point Barrow was located at one of the world’s great oil fields. Secretary of the Interior Ickes wrote to an oil booster in Seattle, “Time alone will show whether there is oil . . . and, if so, what its quality and quantity may be.”32 But Ickes was merely stalling. The U.S. Navy was all over the North Slope, considering how best to drill Unimat Mountain along the Colville River. Seabees were busy with pipeline mitigation issues. By late 1945 Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal said that the U.S. government was ready to invest $150 million in Arctic Alaskan oil. Seabees drilled the first well that year.

  IV

  While the U.S. armed forces were defending Alaska from the Japanese during World War II and the U.S. Navy was promoting the drilling of oil wells, Adolph Murie worked on his book The Wolves of Mount McKinley. Every page was informed by his shrewd taxonomic analysis of the family Canidae. Focusing on wolves’ home life, Murie created a sympathetic portrait. Wolves’ fur was usually gray, or mostly gray, but could vary from white (in the tundra) to black. Their denning habits, pack frolics, cunning, and preference for sheep meat were all thoroughly analyzed by Murie. When The Wolves of Mount McKinley was published in 1944, Aldo Leopold deemed it the classic wildlife study of Lupus. Since his speech before the American Game Conference in 1935, Leopold had insisted that the U.S. government’s “predator control” programs were wrongheaded. Echoing Leopold, periodicals such as Audubon and Natural History called Murie the world’s foremost wolf ecologist.

  Throughout the 1940s Leopold had been putting together A Sand County Almanac, a book about conservation that is equaled only by Walden Pond as a meditation on the need for the wild in our commerce-driven lives. Because of his strong scholarly bent and his “micro-knowledge” of silviculture, it is somewhat surprising that Leopold could write so philosophically and with such poetic grace. Leopold worked for thirteen years on the book and had written hundreds of articles in preparation for undertaking the task. Every line and every comma seems exactly right in this reflective memoir, which is also a work of natural history. Prefiguring the “deep ecology” movement of the 1960s, Leopold reasoned that land wasn’t a commodity to be possessed. Instead humans should be caretakers of the Earth, and wild places should be saved. Famously, Leopold wrote the essay “Thinking Like a Mountain” in 1944 for inclusion in A Sand County Almanac. Filled with an anguished regret, Leopold told of a sad afternoon when, in Arizona’s Apache National Forest, he killed a mother wolf and her pups. “In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf,” Leopold wrote. “In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks.”33

  What happened next became one of the most profound moments in the annals of the wildlife protection movement. Leopold had an epiphany in the Apache, a pang of conscience. All those bloody hunt stories, the machismo, and the random slaughter of species that came to signify the winning of the West seemed perverse as Leopold watched the pup drag its bleeding body toward cover, away from its mother lying dead in the dust. It was a scene of carnage. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” Leopold wrote. “I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the great fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.”34

  Thanks to Murie and Leopold, national park superintendents started considering wolves an asset. Poisoning animals was now frowned on in public lands. After spending the summers of 1940 and 1941 studying Alaskan wolves in their dens, Murie refuted the popular perception of wolves as savage and morose.35 Although far more elusive than bears or raccoons, wolves began to attract tourists, who would brave the cold, damp winds around Mount McKinley and train their binoculars on the horizon hoping to spot a pack. Murie had succeeded in changing the reputation of gray wolves from sheep-killers to wild dogs that maintained long familial ties with their pups. But he encountered negative reactions as well as accolades. When Murie returned to Mount McKinley in 1945 to continue writing articles about protecting wolves, the Alaska territorial legislature derided him. Outdoors groups such as the Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association had preferred the conservationists of Charles Sheldon’s era who saved Dall sheep; these sportsmen disliked the Minnesotan ecologist—Murie—who was bent on protecting wild wolves and who seemed to be trying to turn gray wolves into teddy bears. A grassroots countermovement, in favor of killing wolves, developed across Alaska; and Alaskans turned against the U.S. Department of the Interior as never before.

  Murie was a nice Midwesterner, disdainful of overwrought conflict; he had no overweening desire to battle with Alaskans over wolf conservation. But reports that bush pilots were now shooting wolves from the air sickened him. Very discreetly, he returned to Mount McKinley to conduct more field research on wolves and to protect packs from being slaughtered. Murie was annoyed by the false dichotomy that forced a choice between Dall sheep and wolves. He thought it was childish that in the atomic age people still accepted the image of the wicked wolf presented in Aesop’s fables and the Grimms’ fairy tales. Determined to amass more scientific evidence, Murie would disappear into the trackless wild for weeks at a time, dutifully recording the real behavior of wolves, not the legends. Mount McKin
ley without wolves, Murie concluded, would be mere scenery.

  Wonder Lake, near the base of Mount McKinley, became Murie’s favorite place to watch the wilderness. In the spring of 1948, in preparation for a visit by the famous photographer Ansel Adams, Murie went to clean up a five-room log bungalow maintained by the National Park Service near Wonder Lake. Upon opening the front door, Murie found that grizzly bears had torn the place apart. Flour bins and pantry cupboards had been ravaged. The bears had also gotten into the basement and had ripped into boxes of army surplus Hershey bars. The bears had opened up cans of brown paint, tracking it throughout the bungalow. The basement windows were smashed. “The building was repaired,” Murie wrote in A Naturalist in Alaska, “but the bear could not forget those chocolate bars.”36

  It took Murie an arduous day to make the bungalow bear-proof. Using a mop, he wiped away all traces of chocolate. A few days later, however, after a long day hiking the tundra observing wolves, an exhausted Murie went straight to bed. It was around midnight and still light outside. Murie, peering out of his bedroom window before drifting off, saw a grizzly running across the tundra headed right for his cabin. The bear, curiously spectral in the moonlight, circled the cabin, unable to find a way inside. Murie felt triumphant and went to sleep. “In a few minutes big chunks of wallboard were torn loose, and soon a hole was big enough to allow him to pass into the dining room beside the fireplace. He did not come the few steps down the hall to my bedroom, but sat down in front of the kitchen door. With his powerful paw he wriggled the doorknob, and soon I started hearing the rattle in my sleep. I awoke and heard the fumbling at the doorknob.”37

  Although 50 percent of a brown bear’s diet consists of vegetation, bears were also known to bring down caribou in the soft snow. Around Mount McKinley, locals claimed that if you wanted to attract a bear, you should put chocolate on your porch. Brown bears were diurnal, but if they smelled even a whiff of chocolate, they could suddenly became nocturnal.38 Now Murie, grabbing his rifle, prepared to shoot the intruder at Wonder Lake. But, perhaps sensing danger, the bear jumped out the dining room window and ran off.39

  Murie and Leopold’s ethos had made inroads in the Department of the Interior after World War II. A turning point for the protection of wolves in Alaska occurred in December 1945. A bill, H.R. 5004, was introduced in Congress stipulating that wolves could be protected around their historic range in Mount McKinley National Park, but only if their population was very strictly controlled. Conservationists—including Aldo Leopold—saw this bill as the first major step in protecting a predator. Because wolves dispersed over huge distances and easily colonized new habitats, a lot of federal land would have to remain unmolested in order for packs to survive. “The wolf has been demonized, defeated, and defended by humans,” National Geographic declared. “It must now renegotiate its place in a changed habitat.”40

  From 1947 to 1950, Adolph Murie served with the National Park Service at Mount McKinley as resident biologist.41 Ostensibly, his job was to control the wolf population and protect the Dall sheep, even in blizzards and crawling fog, but his real aim was to persuade the service to permanently ban shooting wolves within this park. America’s largest national park would be a wolf haven. Olaus Murie (who had retired from U.S. Fish and Wildlife in 1944) and Mardy Murie (who was interested in writing a novel with a Siberian-Alaskan setting, to be titled Island Between) locked up their log home in the Tetons—which had become a mountain headquarters of The Wilderness Society—and temporarily moved to the Mount McKinley area to help Adolph. They set up shop at a cabin in Igloo Canyon during the summer and lived at park headquarters in the winter, home-schooling their children. The Muries—all three of them—believed that all wildlife in Mount McKinley needed federal protection. Adolph would go on long patrols on snowshoes, always collecting biological data about the species’ natural resilience and adaptability. He identified four principal vocal communications by wolves: howls, little whimpers, prolonged talklike mumbling growls, and a passionate talking bark. To quell local suspicion that he wasn’t properly performing his duties—thinning out wolves to protect the Dall sheep—Murie selectively shot a few sick-looking older wolves. “Ade knocked off a couple of wolves,” a former park ranger, Bill Nancarrow, recalled, “just so they wouldn’t send Fish and Wildlife to start killing them.”42

  Victory was at last achieved in 1952 when Conrad Wirth, director of the National Park Service, unequivocally prohibited killing wolves at Mount McKinley.43 The Muries went back to Wyoming, and young activists of The Wilderness Society, such as Howard Zahniser of Pennsylvania and Sigurd Olson of Minnesota, journeyed to the Murie ranch there to discuss wildlife protection strategy in the aftermath of the successful outcome at McKinley.44 Hoping to continue the momentum, the park service now asked Adolph Murie to write a follow-up book, The Cougar of Olympic National Park. “If you could put out a publication on the Olympics featuring the cougar as well as you did the wolf,” his brother Olaus wrote, “you will certainly have made a big mark in the conservation world.”45

  Adolph Murie wasn’t enthusiastic, however. Some people, if lucky, discover an ecosystem that speaks to them spiritually—scattered woodlands in the Ohio River valley, for example, or a chasm like the Grand Canyon. Mount McKinley, to the Muries, as to Charles Sheldon before them, was a special place. Adolph decided to devote his life to protecting those 2 million acres* of interior Alaska, using the periodical Living Wilderness as his forum. When a biologist or an ecologist like Murie falls in love with a treasured place, it usually occurs as a result of arduous fieldwork in all types of weather. This process—called “thrumming”—allows the outdoors enthusiast to feel the pulse of the ecosystem.46

  A pedagogical change had occurred in U.S. natural history since the late 1920s. Collecting biological specimens in the field—i.e., shooting wildlife for mounts and studying skins—was now outdated. The new impulse emanating from places such as Woods Hole Laboratory in Massachusetts and the Scripps Institute in La Jolla, California, called for analyzing animals in their own distinctive habitat. Farley Mowat, the wildlife naturalist from Belleville, Ontario, who wrote nearly forty books, was already documenting Arctic Canada in realistic novels such as People of the Deer (1952). Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us, published in 1951, celebrated starfish, coral reefs, squid, and dolphins. Famously, Carson, a biologist with U.S. Fish and Wildlife working at the Woods Hole Laboratory in Cape Cod, collected sea urchins along the coast and then released the creatures back into the ocean, without killing a single one. Her science writing at the time was instrumental in developing a public understanding of ecosystems. No longer did a trophy-lined wall (like TR’s) signify a naturalist’s prowess. Ecology was the new ethos: understanding the unity of an ecosystem, documenting the habitual condition of species.

  And a new biological field of study—ethology, the science of animal behavior—was becoming extremely popular in the nature periodicals of the 1950s. New ethological approaches were necessary to deal with the ecological issues raised during the postwar era by the concept of “better living through chemistry.” For instance, DDT was causing a decline of peregrine falcons, pelicans, ospreys (Pandion haliaetus), and eagles; habitats were lost when people moved to urban and suburban areas (there were fewer family farms and fewer people living close to the land); and there was a general loss of habitat. The scientific community was determined to learn how to better manage conflict between humans and wildlife. Instead of being killed as livestock predators, for example, coyotes were now being praised for their sonorous song.

  Professor Lee R. Dice became president of the Ecological Society of America and also worked closely with the Ecologists Union (later the Nature Conservancy). Ever since Professor Cooper had successfully advocated for the creation of Glacier Bay National Monument, the Ecologists Union having persuaded him to sponsor the idea, there was a real feeling of making a difference in Alaska. The early 1950s saw many great photographers of Alaska wildlife working in the temper
ate zone—in the Katmai, the Kenai, and Mount McKinley National Park. Was there a more beautiful sight in the world than Kachemak Bay from Homer Spit or the glacier lands from the John Muir Trail? Creatures such as wolves and grizzlies, moreover, were appealing to moviegoers of the 1950s, who were intrigued by Arctic lore. “People were accustomed to the idea that animals had a wide range of behavior and individual mannerisms,” Thomas R. Dunlap wrote, in Saving America’s Wildlife, of the postwar era. “They were used to the idea that people could establish links with animals.”47

  Meanwhile, however, a particularly objectionable form of hunting was being practiced in Alaska. Aerial hunting of wolves started in 1948 and became popular as a sport. Guns and planes were a wicked combination. Some hard-core Alaskan hunters would fly over the tundra and blast away at wolves with increasingly powerful automatic weapons. Two men in a plane might sometimes shoot ten to fifteen wolves in this way. The grim sport called aerial hunting attracted trophy hunters from all over the world, and the plane services catered to tourists. “Back in Kotzebue or Bettles or Fairbanks the story was embellished and hunters and pilots were congratulated for their bravery and daring,” Barry Lopez wrote in Of Wolves and Men. “It is both ludicrous and tragic that the death of a wolf so cheaply killed confers such prestige.”48

  Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Adolph Murie continued trying to ban the aerial hunting of wolves, but with only modest success. Not until 1959, when Alaska became a state, was there serious recognition that wolves had value. In 1963 they were upgraded to the classifications of fur bearer and big game. Bag limits and hunting seasons were established.49 Yet state-sponsored aerial wolf gunning continued unabated throughout the 1960s. It was an ingrained behavior.