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

by Douglas Brinkley

  But the Anchorage Museum of History and Art circa 2010—funded in part by BP and Shell—doesn’t consider beats, Buddhists, or Barefooters* a part of state history worth remembering. Instead it prominently displays under glass the bronze boots worn by William G. Bishop when he ordered the Richfield Oil crews to drill the discovery well for the Swanson River oil field on the Kenai Peninsula in 1957. This was a gift from the Anchorage Chamber of Commerce, which was promoting the slogan “Drill today, drill tomorrow.” Down south in Homer, however, every summer a “Howl” camp was held, at which naturalist instructors took children backpacking, rock climbing, and bird-watching.

  Chapter Twenty-One - Sea Otter Jones and Musk-Ox Matthiessen

  I

  If contestants on a quiz show were asked to identify the most valuable market fur in the world, “sea otter” would be the right answer. Sea otters have a close-packed dark coat with silvery streaks. It’s lush to touch and gorgeous to look at. By the time the team of Theodore Roosevelt and William Temple Hornaday came to the rescue of sea otters in 1911, a single pelt was worth about 2,000 pounds in London. In documentaries, Walt Disney portrayed the species as cuddly and doglike, but in truth sea otters aren’t to be messed with: they are on average four to six feet long, weigh ninety pounds or so, and have razor-sharp teeth that can rip into flesh. In Alaska, they have long been pursued for their fur by Native tribes, and in the early nineteenth century these otters could be seen floating on their backs eating shellfish, and frolicking in kelp beds and around offshore rocks. “A sea breaks, the gull lifts, and the otters slide beneath the surface,” Peter Matthiessen wrote in Wildlife in America, “to rise again like black shadows in the semitransparent water beyond the foam.”1

  Banning the sale of sea otter fur helped the species survive in the Aleutian Islands. But during World War II, troops stationed in Alaska often shot at them recklessly, forcing them to the brink of extinction. At last, however, the species found a steadfast ally in an employee of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who was known in the Alaska circuit as Sea Otter Jones. He was the happiest in the spring, when floods of migratory birds returned to the Aleutians, following the primordial “river in the sky”—flyways that lured birds to Alaska from five continents.

  Bob “Sea Otter” Jones, who worked for U.S. Fish and Wildlife from 1947 to 1980, was born on August 3, 1916, in Millbank, South Dakota, a farm town of 2,500 people along the South Fork of the Whetstone River. Jones was an animal lover from a very early age. By the time he was ten, he wanted to be a field biologist. A beneficiary of a conventional midwestern upbringing, Jones excelled in high school. His father, an attorney, encouraged him to learn how to operate a ham radio. Skilled in electronics, Jones graduated from South Dakota State College in Brookings.2 “After college all he wanted to do was go to Alaska,” his wife, Dorothy, recalled. “People think he was an outdoorsman wearing a flannel shirt, but he liked ruffled shirts and opera.”3

  When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in December 7, 1941, the twenty-five-year-old Jones enlisted in the U.S. Army’s Signal Corps. He became a licensed radio operator. Although the army initially assigned him to New Jersey, he had a persistent vision of himself working in Alaska. The colossal territory appealed to his intense interest in wildlife resource management and in long-distance radio. “I had conceived a desire to come to Alaska,” Jones recalled, “so I made that known. There were no assignments in Alaska at the time, so I was sent to Fort Lawton in Seattle, that was the nearest opening.”4

  Ruggedly handsome, with sandy hair and aristocratic features, Jones—a welterweight—wasn’t tall. But his personality was so huge that he seemed as big as a linebacker. Fascinated by meteorology, Jones dreamed of someday living in the Aleutian chain, considered the stormiest area in North America. In August 1942 he got his wish. He was assigned to Adak Island (part of an island arc between Alaska and Asia), to radio-monitor Japanese air traffic and use high-powered telescopes to watch for Yokohama’s naval fleet. Even for a Dakota boy, used to blue winters, Adak took some getting used to. The winter months on the forlorn island were unbearable. Living in a tent, First Lieutenant Jones and his colleagues cobbled together a diesel-burning stove to stay warm. The wind came at them like needles; its baritone howl was deafening. South Dakota seemed like a tropical rain forest by comparison. Jones developed a new appreciation for Aleuts who had made clothing from bird skin to stay warm. “It isn’t an extremely wet climate but it’s damp all the time and a little moisture in a 40 to 50 knot wind is enough to go a long ways,” Jones recalled. “Some of the guys couldn’t hack it and they’d lose their marbles. Well, sometimes in the middle of the night the tent would collapse, a pole would break, or the whole damn thing would blow away. And this didn’t happen just now and then, it was a routine sort of business.”5

  Wearing blue jeans, three layers of long underwear, a wool hat, Canadian work boots, and a bulky green parka, Jones learned the art of survival in the Aleutians. He felt like a marooned pilot shot down over enemy lines in Amchitka and Adak, monitoring Japanese aircraft. He was responsible for installing radar on Adak (the frequency was about 100 kilocycles). “There were seven or eight of us, a small detachment,” he recalled. “We were sent out with portable radar, the first portable radar the U.S. Army ever put in the field. We went to Bird Cape, at the west end of Amchitka, where we could look into Kiska Harbor (fifty miles away).”

  The Aleutians were a huge bow-shaped chain of seventy islands extending for 1,000 miles from the Alaska Peninsula to Kamchatka. These treeless islands had survived the upsurge of mountains and their erosion through the ascent and descent of ocean waters. Amchitka was therefore a tectonically dangerous place for Army Air Corps troops to be stationed. If the freezing temperatures didn’t get them, hot lava could. Since 1832 no Aleuts had lived on the island. But rafts of sea otters populated isolated coves and bays; this kelp-rich ecosystem was their last stand. The army used the southernmost of the Rat Islands group as an airstrip throughout World War II. Planes regularly flew in and out. Huge maneuvers were sometimes held as a decoy to distract the Japanese. The U.S. government ordered forced evacuations of Aleut villages—an unfair imposition on blameless citizens. The waters around Amchitka were extremely rough; the destroyer Warden (DD-352), for example, was grounded and sank in 1943, drowning fourteen men. But for a South Dakotan outdoorsman like Jones, Amchitka was a wild and wonderful place. He kept regular field diaries of the spectacular waters teeming with exotic waterfowl. “I was especially interested in the emperor goose,” he recalled. “I had never seen that goose before, coming from the Great Plains.”

  At Amchitka, Jones started studying sea otters in earnest, learning how to skin-dive in the coldest waters in the world. He criticized army troops who used the sea otters, a fairly depleted species in 1943, for target practice, as if otters were filthy vermin. Incensed, Jones later reminded his trigger-happy colleagues that part of the U.S. mission was to protect the wildlife in the Aleutian chain—not devastate a charming endangered species. The legend of Sea Otter Jones was born. “We knew the presence of sea otters there was important,” Jones recalled. “The military command was aware of that and wanted to protect them to the degree possible, so that those of us who were interested found our way into that extra activity.”

  Whereas other servicemen in the Aleutians couldn’t wait to get back to Nebraska or New York, Jones wanted to be a wildlife biologist there. Bouncing around Amchitka, Adak, Ogliuga, and Little Sitkin islands, he marveled at the high density of wildlife. Sweeping in a curve more than 1,000 miles long from the end of the Alaska Peninsula toward Kamchatka, the Aleutians connected North America with Japan, China, Korea, and all the Asian nations of the far east. “To the traveler from the south, approaching any portion of the chain during the winter or spring months, the view presented is exceedingly desolate and forbidding,” Muir had written in The Cruise of the Corwin about the Aleutians. “The snow comes down to the water’s edge, the solid winter-white being int
errupted only by black outstanding bluffs with faces too steep for snow to lie upon, and by the backs of clustering rocks and long rugged reefs beaten and overswept by heavy breakers rolling in from the Pacific Ocean or Bering Sea, while for ten or eleven months in the year all the mountains are wrapped in gloomy, ragged storm clouds.”6

  When World War II ended, Jones decided to live in Alaska permanently, and his dream was to make a career as the biologist of the Aleutians. He was one of the rare breed who enjoy calamitous weather. Generous homesteading provisions were offered to veterans like Jones by the U.S. government. Adding to the appeal of Alaska were enhanced communication systems, highways, and a road connection to the Lower Forty-Eight. As a first step Jones moved to Kodiak Island, bought a skiff so that he could go shopping, and started studying sea otters on his own. Working on the salmon boats for day wages—a truly hard way to earn a dollar—Jones decided that he preferred roadless areas to roads. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, but his experiences studying otters continued. If Jones could have promoted himself as well as Crisler, Hollywood might have made a movie about his life.

  No single person did more than Jones to help sea otters become a protected species on the remote Aleutian island communities between the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The Aleutian fishermen despised otters because they raided oyster beds, but Jones educated the geographically scattered people on Akutan, on Unalaska, and at the port of Dutch Harbor to leave the sea otters alone. His own headquarters and home were at Cold Bay, a main commercial center on the Alaska Peninsula. His combined base of operations there was a tiny structure in which he kept his few belongings: binoculars, framed pictures, a shaving mug, and shotguns. On his iron bed was a quilt from South Dakota. And on his record player, often at odd hours, there was typically something by Mozart or Bach.

  In 1948 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hired Jones to oversee the entire Aleutian chain for the Department of the Interior. Paid meager wages, Jones at least was his own boss for about 340 days a year; his immediate supervisors didn’t like flying much farther south than Homer. Although Theodore Roosevelt had started protecting Aleutian mammals in 1908, Jones was the first college-trained warden-manager appointed.* The gateway town to the Aleutians’ East Borough, Cold Bay, was only a block long. The deprivations there were considerable. Fewer than 100 people lived in the town. Every week, it seemed, the land trembled with an earthquake.

  During World War II, Fort Randall was created as a base camp for the 11th Air Force at Cold Bay. Quonset huts housing nearly 20,000 U.S. troops were built near the shore. Japanese bombs fell on the nearby village of Unalaska in 1942, but Cold Bay was unscathed. After the war the soldiers left the aptly named Cold Bay. But Jones stayed, living with a couple of weather-service specialists, a few fishermen, and occasionally some stopover wildlife tourists—Audubon Society types—who lodged at the wind-chafed World Famous Weathered Inn. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hoped Jones could help create the 300,000-acre Izembek NWR, a rocky outcropping for 130,000 Pacific black brant (Branta bernicla nigricans), 62,000 emperor geese (Chen canagica), 50,000 Taverner’s Canada geese (Branta canadensis taverni), 300,000 ducks, and 80,000 shorebirds. During the windy months, the Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri)—one of the most beautiful birds in the world—wintered along the thirty-mile Izembek Lagoon, which had the world’s largest eel grass beds. No wetlands in all of America held an abundance of wildlife that could rival the Izembek. Its panorama of a U-shaped valley, ancient glaciers, and hot springs made it the best-kept secret in America. “In my opinion, it was the finest assignment the [U.S. Fish and Wildlife] Service had,” Jones said of Cold Bay. “I wanted to be where there were animals and not many people, and it fulfilled both categories.”7

  In 1953 Jones married Dorothy, a native of California. What made Dorothy unique as a bride was that she tolerated Bob’s pet sea otter, Harriet. Dorothy quickly learned that the future of sea otters was bleak, and that conservation biologists had to come to their rescue—fast. What most worried her husband was the scarcity of sea otters in the Aleutians. The Aleutians, in fact, were long the home of the greatest concentration of sea otters in the world.8 Every day he dutifully studied their goings-on. The 1911 Hornaday-Roosevelt Treaty had temporarily saved the sea otters from extinction. But the illegal black-market slaughter of sea mammals by Japanese and Russian pirates continued. Jones was determined to bring the otters back to their full glory. In California, a historic home of sea otters, only a small band of 638 were alive.9

  As Jones worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, dividing his residency between Anchorage and Cold Bay, he was intrigued by the thickness of the sea otters’ fur—the thickest mammal fur in the world. Pushing a finger through the dense fur was futile; you couldn’t get to the skin. Children, in particular, adored the sea otter because it seemed so frisky and joyful, showing off in the kelp, lying on its back eating oysters and clams. Most otters slept on their backs in the water, usually amid the tangled kelp and seaweed. At the Cold Bay station Jones had another pet otter, named Hortiser. Nothing seemed to exhaust this pet. What Jones learned about sea otters (as a species) from the ones he befriended on the Aleutians was their apparent joie de vivre. As in a scene from Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, these otters would dive 300 feet down, then would surface, seemingly full of glee and laughing among themselves about their underwater antics.

  Frolicking with the sea otters around Cold Bay and counting the birds that congregated around the Izembek Lagoon constituted the entertaining part of Jones’s U.S. government job. Far more menacing was taking his dory out in rough Bering Sea weather to patrol the other islands in the chain. The giant surf on Buldir Island was particularly rough for landing a small boat with a small outboard motor. Rain . . . hail . . . sleet . . . snow . . . storm . . . surf. No matter what the weather was like, Jones would make the rounds along the rugged islands of today’s Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. Over the years he had a lot of colorful names for his boats: Water Ouzel, Phalarope, Dipper, and Wandering Tattler. Daily he took field notes about seabirds, invertebrates, transplant geese, and foxes in need of removal. “On bright clear days the approach of the dory by a cascade of cormorants and puffins from the cliffs and then we traveled under a veritable canopy of wings,” Jones jotted in a notebook in 1959. “When a sea fog lay close and we ran on compass courses, quite out of sight on land though we knew it to be near, the smell of whitewashed cliffs was a beacon guiding us and a sudden avalanche of birds, bursting out of the murk, pinpointed our location.”10

  Safeguarding the Aleutians brought Jones a lot of satisfaction. The biologist Olaus Murie, always circulating around Alaska, shared with Jones much of his research pertaining to birdlife in the Aleutians. Murie was overseeing a project to rid the islands of the foxes introduced in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s: these foxes were leading to the demise of the Aleutian Canada goose. Wanting to experience the underwater life of sea otters, Jones got a wet suit and started scuba diving in the kelp beds, nearly living with the otters (an unheard-of practice before Jones). Conditioning allowed his body to become almost immune to the powerful numbing effect of the water. “It became apparent that if we were to get information about what happened below the water surface,” he said, “we’d better go down to take a look.”11

  Jones was perplexed about why the sea otters were dying off in record numbers during the winter months. His scuba dives off fogbound Amchitka and Adak produced an answer: the otters’ food source was depleted. Rock oysters weren’t alive on the bottom; the shells were without much muscle. Every time the otters seemed to be feasting, cracking open shells, they weren’t getting much meat. “The otters kept on eating sea urchins, but they weren’t getting any nutritional value,” Jones recorded, “and downhill they went.”

  Owing to the sea otter rehabilitation project undertaken by U.S. Fish and Wildlife in the Aleutians, a recovery took place. Under Jones’s leadership, sea otters were reintroduced to Attu in the mid
-1950s. Starting in 1954, the otter population increased at a healthy rate of at least 5 percent annually. A comeback was happening, one oyster bed at a time. “The number of animals we released at Attu was well below the level where the population could sustain itself,” Jones wrote. “I concluded it was for the better to expand the necessary protection to otters and let them expand than to try to introduce them. When a sea otter population really begins to grow, it will swamp the survival of any artificial introduc- tion.”

  Another of Jones’s jobs was to make sure that people in boats or other trespassers didn’t hunt sea otters, which were like sitting ducks. Sometimes he would trap otters by using tranquilizer guns. “Unlike a seal that often sinks,” Jones explained in an official oral history of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, “sea otters float.” From 1958 to 1959 he introduced caribou to Adak Island. On Amchitka, working with the newest science, Jones helped reestablish the Canada goose by trying to get rid of island rats. Agattu, in particular, was plagued by these rodents. Sometimes Jones would use a slide-action 12-gauge Winchester Model 12 to shoot them. “All we had access to was poison and that was not good enough,” Jones reflected, “and besides, you have to watch where the poison goes. You don’t want it to go into the eagle population.”12

  Although Jones felt good about his work for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, including the introduction of caribou on Adak Island, he was apprehensive when he heard rumors that the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) wanted to conduct a series of underground nuclear explosions on Amchitka Island. Ironically, the Aleutians’ greatest strength as a wildlife incubator—their remoteness—was now their most dangerous liability. To Jones, it was strange to think that the U.S. government wanted to detonate an atomic bomb in the “ring of fire,” also called the “volcano belt”). “He blasted the AEC,” his wife recalled in an interview in 2010. “He went to Fairbanks to protest. His outspokenness came from a disbelief that a U.S. government agency could be so reckless.”13