Crisler’s Arctic Wild certainly wasn’t the first serious book about Alaska’s wolves—it had been preceded by Adolph Murie’s The Wolves of Mount McKinley and Stanley P. Young and Edward A. Goldman’s The Wolves of North America (both published in 1944). But Crisler, by using the first-person narrative style, brought the family life of wolves to a general readership in a touching, loving, and respectful way. Eight years later, the Canadian biologist Farley Mowat would publish Never Cry Wolf, to great acclaim; it clearly superseded Arctic Wild as literature. But during those crucial years of 1956 to 1960, when the fight to save the Arctic was particularly intense, it was Lois Crisler who most troubled the anticonservationists in Alaska.
Nothing, in fact, infuriated her opponents more than the fact that Lois Crisler was teaching wolves to cuddle, nurse, and howl. To the average Alaskan, wolves were useful only for their pelts. “Lois’s accounts of the wolves’ howling and using their incisors to finely lift her eyelids while she slept truly portrays the remarkable abilities of wolves,” the wolf ecologist David Mech later recalled. “No doubt such descriptions helped recruit a large number of people into the ranks of wolf admirers.”27
The biologist Rachel Carson of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was elated with Crisler’s Arctic Wild. A warmhearted correspondence ensued between the two women throughout the late 1950s. Carson’s articles of the 1930s and 1940s about marine ecosystems—which had appeared in the Baltimore Sun, the New Yorker, Field and Stream, and Yale Review—encouraged Crisler to write about wolves. When Carson’s The Sea Around Us was published by Oxford University Press in 1951, Crisler sat mesmerized, reading it over and over again. Whenever Lois felt lonely or depressed in the Olympics, Alaska, or Colorado between 1955 and 1963, she wrote to Carson. “We live in a [Silver Spring, Maryland] house that is too large for us, especially since my mother’s death, and it would be a joy to entertain you,” Carson wrote to Crisler. “We can promise you the song of mockingbirds and cardinals, and by mid-March we might even manage the beginnings of our frog chorus.”28
Although wolves were the stars of Arctic Wild, the 50,000-head Central Arctic caribou herd (so named in the 1970s) came in a close second. In Alaska every caribou herd on the North Slope claimed its own calving area, which was a fair distance from other calving areas. Because the caribou had large concave hooves, which made wide imprints in the tundra soil, they were relatively easy for a Disney camera crew to track. Newborn calves weighed only thirteen pounds. With their pretty suede-soft gray coats, these caribou were as appealing as Bambi. The crush-crush of Arctic caribou on frozen tundra, clumsy calves clinging to their mothers’ protective sides, captivated Crisler, who wrote that the mass migrations “beat like a pulse through our time.”
At first, the Arctic seemed to the Crislers barren of wildlife—an almost empty land. There were no throngs of caribou or packs of wolves. The Dall sheep came down to the rivers only during the winter months. Although the Crislers were well-known wildlife photographers, regularly giving slide shows on college campuses and at corporate retreats, they had assumed that the Brooks Range was like the Rockies, only colder. But once the Crislers sat still, didn’t look so hard, and actually lessened their expectations, a kingdom of wildlife appeared before them. Little voles were burrowing in the sedges. Asian bluetooths fluttered along the rivulets. Ptarmigans flushed put-p-p-p from the willows, turning from white to brown as the seasons dictated. Grizzlies patrolled streams, waddling away only when they picked up the scent of man. Perky eider duck mothers were followed by a single-file parade of youngsters. “There was a miraculous fact about this deadly white wilderness: it was alive!” Lois Crisler wrote. “Animals lived here and found food.”29
Ostensibly, the Crislers were going to follow the caribou’s migratory trail north of the Arctic Circle throughout the deep summer of 1955, as Charles Sheldon had tracked Dall sheep; but Disney had another idea. Why not adopt wolf cubs and raise them? As entertainment, tracking caribou in the golden Arctic light—despite the cute newborns—was boring. Raising wolves, by contrast, had immediate box office appeal. So, with money from Walt Disney Productions, two cubs were purchased from an Eskimo—a male, Trigger; and a female, Lady. (The names conjured up both Roy Rogers’s horse and Disney’s cartoon feature film Lady and the Tramp.) By day, Lois would observe wolverines—capable of bringing down prey five times their size—wading along sinuous creeks and gorging on caribou meat. At night, with willow bushes crackling away in the cabin fireplace, Lois would cuddle with the adorable wolf cubs. In her journal, Lois described being a mother to the wolf pack. She claimed that wolves, an extremely sociable wild species, “smiled” and “talked” and “read my eyes!” The concept was anthropomorphic, the film was filled with embarrassing hyperbole, and the raising of wolves was morally questionable. Nevertheless, the Crislers succeeded in their quest to make wolves more beloved the world over. “Wolves are not a menace to the wilds but orgies of wolf hate are,” Crisler wrote in Arctic Wild. “Wolves themselves are a balance wheel of nature.”30
The historian Vera Norwood has written insightfully about Lois Crisler in Made from This Earth: American Women and Nature. While admiring the Crislers for their advocacy for wolves, Norwood nevertheless raised smart questions about the ethics of the Disney film. Was this proper holistic ecology? To Norwood these habituated wolves were no better off than those behind bars at a zoo. Scenes of the Crislers releasing the wolves back into the wild only to have them scratch at the cabin door, seeking hearth and home, seemed cruel. One follow-up episode was unambiguously wrong. When Herb Crisler realized that two pet wolves weren’t generating enough entertainment value, Disney’s cameramen raided a den and swiped five more pups for Lady and Trigger to raise. The Crislers justified this raid by saying that bounty hunters would soon have slaughtered the pups.31 For real biologists, the Crislers were hard to take. But Arctic Wild, the memoir by Lois Crisler of their experiences in the Brooks Range, did make people think about the north country and about wolves. William O. Douglas (grumpy about the Disney film), the New York Times, and Rachel Carson all praised it as an educational work ideal for young people—and their approval alone was worth a lifetime of accolades for Lois Crisler. Disney ended up marketing the documentary as the feature film White Wilderness and also produced educational shorts from the footage, such as Large Animals in the Arctic and The Lemmings and Arctic Bird Life.
After filming White Wilderness for Disney in 1956, the Crislers took their four wolf pups home with them to Tarryall Peak in Colorado. They had no other choice. Because these wolves had been domesticated, they had never learned to hunt. Releasing them into the wild would have meant certain death. Killing them wasn’t an option. So the Crislers got government permits to keep them in Colorado as pets. Harper and Brothers advanced Crisler money to write a follow-up memoir—Captive Wild—about raising and breeding wolves at Crag Cabin, their ranch.32
Never known for holding his tongue, William O. Douglas lambasted Disney for the irresponsible nature-faking stunts in White Wilderness, though he was careful not to hold Lois and Herb Crisler responsible for the staged material: “In my time Walt Disney did more than anyone to distort and depreciate our wildlife,” Douglas wrote. “He had a wolverine fight a bear to death. Animals, other than men, do not follow that course. They have conflicts but soon withdraw. Disney got the wolverine to fight the bear by starving both animals for weeks in a Los Angeles zoo. The battle actually took place in a movie set in the city.”
In his memoir Go East, Young Man Douglas intensified his criticism: “Disney showed rams of the mountain-sheep family charging each other, their foreheads clashing to the tune of the ‘Anvil Chorus,’ ” he scoffed. “They charge, of course, but in between charges they rest, walk around, paw the earth, and the like. They do not follow the pattern of a Hollywood dancing troupe.”33
While the Crislers were raising wolves in Colorado, Frank Glaser, the wolf hunter, was still using his “coyote getter” from Seward to Nome. On most
mornings he loaded cyanide into his “coyote getter” (which was set off by animals attracted to a bait station) and headed out into the wild. He was also given access to a plane, making it easier for him to slaughter wolves far and wide. But a change was occurring in Alaska. Glaser, once considered an Alaskan hero, was starting to be viewed by the general public as a menace. Glaser’s idea of success was discovering a wolf den and slaughtering the pups: this practice was now frowned upon by an increasing number of Americans. Still, Eisenhower’s secretary of the interior, Douglas McKay, presented Glaser with a Meritorious Service Award for controlling predatory animals. Glaser moved around Idaho, California, and Oregon for a while in the 1950s. But there weren’t enough wolves to slaughter in other states, so he moved back to Anchorage. One night Glaser heard wolf howls in the distance. He seethed with rage. “They don’t belong in town,” he fumed. “They’ll kill dogs, and a lot of kids are running around too. I’m worried about them. Those wolves have to be killed.” Upset by the fear that wolves were going to lay siege to Anchorage, Glaser telephoned Dr. Louis Mayer for psychological help. “Mayer made a house-call,” Jim Rearden recalled in Alaska’s Wolf Man, “talked with Frank, gave him a sedative.”34
III
By a happy coincidence, 1956 brought another milestone publication that to many Arctic conservationists transcended Lois Crisler’s writings. The brother of The Wilderness Society’s cofounder Bob Marshall brought out, with the University of California Press, a posthumous work by Marshall, Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Central Brooks Range. Whereas Bob Marshall’s Arctic Village had dealt with the citizens of Wiseman, Alaska Wilderness offered meditations about the Upper Koyukuk drainage system to the Gates of the Arctic wilderness. Every page offered wisdom and enlightenment. Suddenly Marshall’s voice was alive again, nearly two decades after his death in 1939. He described battling Squaw Rapids below the mouth of the Glacier River and recounted “a furious blizzard” swooping down upon him and freezing his party’s “cheeks and necks.” It all made for riveting outdoors reading. Alaska Wilderness included scientific data and drainage maps, and it had a revivifying effect on Adolph, Olaus, and Mardy Murie. There were also twenty-two photos taken by Marshall in the Arctic. Alaska Wilderness was a welcome reminder of what was at stake in saving the Arctic Range from road construction and industrialization.
Hoping to arouse the Arctic preservation movement, Justice Douglas jumped at the opportunity to review Alaska Wilderness in The Wilderness Society’s periodical Living Wilderness. “This is America’s last frontier, as yet untouched by man,” Douglas wrote. “Bob Marshall saw them by plane, by foot, by dogsled. His account is an enduring one. It tells why this great area should be preserved in perpetuity as a wilderness area.”35
Alaska Wilderness particularly advocated roadless areas, and Douglas absolutely agreed. “This is a book for every man and woman who loves the wilderness,” Douglas said. “While it will bring back some echoes of one’s own experiences, it will remind even the expert that he yet has much to learn about the wilderness on our frontier. And it will help marshal public opinion to preserve the Brooks Range as a Wilderness, keeping it forever free of roads, lodges, and filling stations.”36
Disney’s movie Winter Wilderness, based on the Crislers’ experiences in the Arctic, wouldn’t come out until 1958. But before even a single frame was seen, conservationists knew it would put the Frank Glasers out of business. Bambi and Seal Island had already convinced conservationists that Walt Disney was the best publicist the wildlife protection movement had had since Theodore Roosevelt. Having Justice William O. Douglas as an advocate for the wilderness, ready to protect Arctic Alaska, was also good, with Robert Marshall gone. Help for wild Alaska also came from the pioneer Arctic archaeologist J. Louis Giddings, whose forte was the prehistory of northwestern Alaska. For the first time First Nation tribal history was being treated seriously: Giddings’s research made the notion of populations crossing the Bering Land Bridge respectable.37
Throughout the 1950s Disney was a die-hard supporter of both President Eisenhower and the wildlife protection movement. While America was going through the processes of suburbanization, bureaucratization, and the emergence of what William Whyte called the “organization man,” Disney’s Alaskan adventures were a journey back to the frontier. Eisenhower, for his part, considered himself a “Disney man,” and with good reason—Disney solicited campaign contributions and held fund-raisers for the Republican Party. According to his biographer Neal Gabler, the conservative Disney also put bumper stickers on the car he used on his Hollywood lot, endorsing Richard M. Nixon for president in 1960 over John F. Kennedy.38 It might very well be that Disney’s steadfast support of Arctic preservation and the Pribilofs influenced President Eisenhower’s Alaskan land policies. If the extremely popular Walt Disney thought that families might someday want to see polar bears and seal herds in Alaska, then who was Eisenhower to question his intuition?
Chapter Seventeen - The Arctic Range and Aldo Leopold
I
The Wilderness Society’s cofounder Aldo Leopold set the tone for saving Arctic Alaska. When Leopold died in 1948 while fighting a wildfire, A Sand County Almanac, his poetic meditation on protecting and renewing land, was not yet published; the typed manuscript remained on his desktop at his home in central Wisconsin. Luckily for the conservation movement, his son Luna, recognizing the importance of this work, had it published by Oxford University Press the following year. Sales were minimal, but conservationists immediately grasped that Leopold had written a tour de force. Rooting through his father’s file cabinets, Luna organized another volume of Aldo Leopold essays and journal entries as Round River. It was published in 1953. For conservationists during Eisenhower’s two-term presidency, these two texts were gems to be cherished. Leopold’s words were quoted throughout that decade to protest against the construction of unnecessary dams in the Pacific Basin region. Regarding Alaska, Leopold’s call to keep places “wild and free” was a rallying cry for the small band of determined conservationists.
Pragmatically recognizing that every farm woodland by necessity yielded lumber and fuel, Leopold urged his countrymen to recognize that what was on top of the land was more valuable than what was underneath the soil. “The wind that makes music in November corn is in a hurry,” Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac. “The stalks hum, the loose husks whisk skyward in half-playful swirls, and the wind hurries on. In the marsh, long windy waves surge across the glassy sloughs, beat against the far willows. A tree tries to argue, bare limbs waving, but there is no detaining the wind. On the sandbar there is only wind, and the river sliding seaward. Every wisp of grass is drawing circles on the sand. I wander over the bar to a driftwood log, where I sit and listen to the universal roar, and to the tinkle of wavelets on the shore. The river is lifeless: not a duck, heron, marsh hawk, or gull but has sought refuge from the wind.”1
For Mardy Murie, reading A Sand County Almanac was a profound experience. Nowhere was the wind Leopold rhapsodized about purer or more forceful than in her own beloved Arctic Alaska. Like the northern goshawks, common redpolls and gulls, she felt invigorated by torrential gusts. The Arctic wind in springtime was her life force, her muse, her harmonic revelation of the cosmos. Sobering, enlivening, and somehow bitingly wise about the ancient universal secrets, wind velocity was the power source of the ages. And to Mardy the drafts in the Brooks Range were particularly intoxicating as they swept down chillingly from the North Pole, always making her spirit feel whole again. Although the Arctic Range was difficult to get to in the 1950s (transportation consisted mainly of small planes landing on gravel bars), it offered a monumental experience. A hiker by predisposition, Mardy knew that rivers like the Kongakut, the Canning, and the Hulahula would someday be popular with river runners.
In 1946, Mardy had spent time with the studious Aldo Leopold during a meeting of The Wilderness Society held at her home in Wyoming. When Leopold spoke, conservationists paid rapt attention, and Mardy
knew he was the most far-seeing conservationist present—smoking cigarettes, wearing a white dress shirt with a pale necktie, squinting behind his rimless glasses while talking, calmly swapping information with Olaus about the biotic world. There was something noble about his low-key style. Leopold’s nerves were always steady; verbally, his passion was muted; a steely integrity emanated from his clear blue eyes. To have left behind, in dying, such an elegant meditation as A Sand County Almanac was an act so lovely that it seemed preordained.
Reading Leopold’s epitaph to the extinct passenger pigeon, Mardy thought of the fate of Arctic Alaska’s birds such as the snowy owl and the willow ptarmigan. To Leopold the passenger pigeon “was the lightning that played between two opposing potentials of intolerable intensity: the fat of the land and oxygen and air.” When Martha—the last passenger pigeon—died in captivity at the Cincinnati Zoo in 1913, the Audubon Society mourned. “Yearly the feathered tempest roared up, down, and across the continent, sucking up the laden fruits of forest and prairie, burning them in a traveling blast of life,” Leopold wrote. “Like any other chain reaction, the pigeon could survive no diminution of his own furious intensity. When the pigeoners subtracted from his numbers, and the pioneers chopped gaps in the continuity of his fuel, his flame guttered out with hardly a sputter or even a wisp of smoke.”2
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