Because Camp Denali was a seasonal business, taking people to see Wonder Lake only from April to November, Hunter relocated the office mimeograph machine to Dogpatch, and installed it on the cabin’s second floor. At that time, the low-cost mimeograph, which worked by squirting ink through a stencil onto paper, was a common way to disseminate gossip and news. Ginny Wood, in fact, lived at the Dogpatch headquarters with her husband; she was always on call. Just one house over, down the dirt road, resided Celia Hunter. Both women were beloved in Fairbanks. Ginny emerged as the dauntless workhorse of the ACS, forming alliances and recruiting an impressive mélange of volunteers, networking all over the state to knit the conservation community together so that the Eisenhower administration would be forced to take the Arctic NWR seriously. Hunting guides, fishing charters, glacier tours, kayak retailers, outdoor gear shops, organic food stores—all joined the cause of the Arctic NWR because it promoted wild Alaska, the business they were all in. With regard to promoting state tourism, Hunter had an address file filled with all the right people, lovers of the wilderness who gladly signed petitions to save the Arctic NWR.
Celia Hunter testified on October 20, 1959, before the Committee on Interstate and Foreign Commerce in Ketchikan, and had made a series of arguments that deeply influenced the acceptance of the Arctic NWR by ordinary Alaskans. Quite convincingly, she showed how tourism had supplanted mining as Alaska’s second-biggest revenue-generating industry. (Military construction was still first.) There was more long-term economic benefit to be gained from tourism than from hiring, say, 100 temporary tie pickers or timber testers. “The years 1958 and 1959 have seen tourist income at least double,” she said, “and estimates as high as triple the figures have been given by the tourist industry. And, yet, in spite of the decline in importance of mining, and the increasing emphasis on tourism, the whole tone of our state administration is set by the mining interests.”9
As with all successful new nonprofits, a hierarchy was quickly established at the ACS. Ginny Wood collected dues and wrote hundreds of recruitment letters. Her work ethic meant a lot of envelope licking and a lot of work through the night and into the morning hours. Conservation politics, she soon learned, involved nonstop paperwork. Throughout 1960 Wood corresponded daily with state senators, college students, restaurateurs, small business owners, outfitters, and travel agents, and, most important, kept the mimeograph machine humming. She pored over territorial records, land deeds, and loads of newspapers to extract information about the Arctic. Wood’s motto, printed on the first newsletter bulletin, was “Alaskans Organize.” And at the Dogpatch headquarters, caulked against winter weather, various funny, quirky aphorisms were taped to the wall: “For God’s sake don’t let them make any more progress!” and “Next week we gotta get organized!”
Wood preferred typing letters to calling people on the telephone; for one thing, letters were cheaper. There were hardly any exceptions to this preference, but whenever Lowell Sumner of the Department of the Interior called, Ginny Wood felt cheerful. She liked robust men who appreciated life to the fullest. Along with the Muries, he always offered the soundest counsel on how to make the principal issues—like saving 8.9 million acres of the Arctic—heard in the right way by the powers that be in Washington, D.C. “We both loved our airplanes as much as the Arctic,” Wood explained about her friendship with Sumner. “Whenever I’d be in the most remote Arctic places like Nome or Barrow or Coldfoot, I’d invariably bump into Lowell. Olaus was very mellow, always taking his biology seriously. Lowell liked to see things from the sky . . . like me.”10
Wood called the ACS newsletter, which began getting mimeographed in March 1960, the by-product of a “subversive” press.11 Because Hunter also did serious fund-raising for The Wilderness Society, she added a wider conservationist net to the homemade newsletter from Dogpatch. By contrast, Wood tended to fill the ACS newsletter with folksy woodlore. Visually, the five-page newsletter was like a church bulletin. People in Fairbanks committed to Ginny Wood were known as Friends of Ginny, or FOGs. The acronym was a perfect fit because Wood flew her Cessna even in the worst weather imaginable, feeling responsible for linking North Slope bush communities to Fairbanks when an emergency occurred. If, say, a physician or funeral director was needed in an Arctic town, Wood always volunteered her pilot services pro bono to fly the person out from Fairbanks. Locally, she was known as an ace bush pilot, an all-around good Samaritan, and an Arctic activist. Nobody ever accused Ginny of harboring any confusion on issues related to conservation.
Hunter and Wood did a few clever things when creating the ACS. Like Edna Ferber in Ice Palace, they boisterously touted Alaska’s unequaled greatness. In particular, they bragged about how abundant Alaskan wildlife was, compared with the depleted wildlife of Oregon; how superior their air quality was to that of smoggy California; and how many more vodka-clear lakes Alaska had, compared with those in Minnesota. “Fortunately, we came into statehood with our natural resources relatively intact and we have the chance to profit by the mistakes made by other states,” the first newsletter read. “Whether we choose to learn by the mistakes of others, or to learn by making them over again ourselves was up to the individual citizens as well as our representatives in government and the professionals in public service. In most other fields of endeavor, mistakes may cost time or money, but they can be corrected. With wilderness and with wildlife resources, you don’t get a second chance. When they are gone, they are gone.”12
Nobody ever sold the idea of saving 8.9 million acres with quite the gusto of Ginny Wood circa 1959–1960. Whether she was writing in the ACS newsletter or testifying before a congressional committee, Wood insisted that saving the Arctic Refuge was in the tradition of Daniel Boone. Both Hunter and Wood knew the right buzzwords to use for Alaska: individual and wilderness. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, established in 1903, set the tone with its motto: “Independent in All Things . . . Neutral in None.” The ACS appealed to Alaska’s chauvinistic sense of being the last frontier. Harking back to the days of 1898, when the Klondike gold rush transformed Alaska into a boom land, Wood claimed that the descendants of the early pioneers now had a sacred preservationist obligation to uphold the traditions:
We Alaskans must reconcile our pioneering philosophy and move on to the realization that the wild country that lies now in Alaska is all there is left under our flag. Those who see the wildlife range as a threat to their individual rights refuse to face the fact that unless we preserve some of our wild land and wild animals now, the Alaska of the tundra expanses, silent forests, and nameless peaks inhabited only by caribou, moose, bear, sheep, wolf, and other wilderness creatures can become a myth found only in books, movies, and small boys’ imaginations as the Wild West is now. And I regret as much as anyone that the frontier, by its very definition, can only be a transitory thing. The wilderness that we have conquered and squandered in our conquest of new lands has produced the traditions of the pioneer that we want to think still prevail: freedom, opportunity, adventure, and resourceful, rugged individuals. These qualities can still be nurtured in generations of the future if we are farsighted and wise enough to set aside this wild country immediately and spare it from the exploitations of a few for the lasting benefit of the many.13
There was another factor in the debate of 1960 over the Arctic NWR. In Alaska—with a population of only 250,000—politics were personal. For more than a decade Wood and Hunter had done neighborly favors for people living in Nome, Cold Bay, and all points between. Few Alaskans trusted the federal government much—with the notable exception of the armed forces. Wood and Hunter’s notion of having the U.S. Department of the Interior control the 8.9 million acres of Arctic Alaska wasn’t something the average citizen of Juneau, Anchorage, or Fairbanks would automatically approve of. But doing a favor for Ginny Wood or Celia Hunter—that was a different matter entirely. Cashing in all their chips, recruiting friends to join the ACS, Wood and Hunter started circulating the pro–Arctic NWR newsletter all around Alaska.
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br /> Another obvious step for ACS was lobbying in tandem with Alaska’s premier conservationist groups—the Alaska Sportsman’s Council, Tanana Valley Sportsmen’s Association, Fairbanks Garden Club, and others—to keep the movement for the Arctic NWR going. There was power in unity. Everything was so hurried for the ACS during the first months of scurrying to line up allies during 1960 that there wasn’t a minute to be bored. The next step for the “Arctic Forever” cause involved ensuring that the national conservation societies, such as the Sierra Club and the National Wildlife Federation, would not feel poached upon by an upstart outfit like the ACS. All these organizations had worked for the Arctic for years. Hunter and Wood reassured their allies that the ACS wasn’t going to eclipse them or compete with them. The ACS never urged anyone to defect from other groups; but additional financial support for their Dogpatch operation was welcomed.
Tourists from other states, particularly those who had been at Camp Denali with Wood and Hunter, would be tapped for both moral and financial support. To give the ACS immediate credibility, Les Viereck (a veteran of World War II who had become a biology teacher at the University of Alaska) was the unanimous choice for president. The treasurer was John Thomson, an information specialist with the Agricultural Extension Service at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks, who had climbed Mount Michelson in the Brooks Range in April 1957. He would be responsible for paying the bills. In truth, the ACS was a shoestring operation, tasked with getting the disagreeable business of haggling over the Arctic NWR finished and done with.
But it was Sigurd Olson’s visit to the Arctic Refuge over the summer of 1960 that seemed to influence Seaton the most. Seldom has a reconnaissance trip by a conservationist produced such fruitful results as Olson’s whirlwind trip to Alaska, at the behest of the Department of the Interior. Olson was awed by the idea of the proposed Arctic NWR. He quickly understood that as with Antarctica, saving this living wilderness would make the world happy forever; if you lived in crowded Beijing or overpopulated Mexico City, you would want to be assured that the polar cap regions were flourishing. “I stood on one plateau one morning and could see 75 to 100 miles in all directions to four immense mountain ranges with snow-capped peaks,” he wrote to friends. “Such a sense of immensity and distance, I had never known before.”14
Olson—“Captain Wilderness”—reported on Mount McKinley and Glacier Bay national parks and recommended that the Mission 66 road plans be downsized. After counting 161 Dall sheep and reaching a better understanding of Charles Sheldon’s rigorous legacy, Olson promoted the Wrangell Mountains of south-central Alaska as a potential new national park. (They became one in 1980.) At the Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes he experienced the immediate aftermath of a volcanic eruption: the stench of acrid sulfur nearly suffocated him, and gray ash blew in the air like snow.15 As the author of The Singing Wilderness, Olson raved about “big, bold, beautiful” Alaska. “I’ve been traveling for three or four days,” he wrote to his son, “and it’s just been one national park after another.”16
Olson hadn’t been as important as the Muries in getting the movement for the Arctic NWR started, but the fact that Seaton trusted him mattered tremendously in 1960. Olson came back to Washington, D.C., that summer with three policy recommendations: sign executive orders creating the Arctic, Izembek, and Kuskokwim wildlife refuges. If Congress did not take up these crucial proposals, Olson recommended that Seaton implement them by an executive order.
Also helping with the ACS lobbying was Mardy Murie. Many women would have wanted the glory of being credited in history with saving a treasured landscape like the Arctic NWR. But Mardy was different. She considered Olson, Hunter, and Wood heroes of conservation. Ever since her honeymoon in 1926, when a dogsled had pulled her over the tundra once gouged by glaciers, she had dreamed of a Brooks Range wilderness park including the coastal areas. Sharing credit with Wood and Hunter wasn’t an issue for her. In 1958 Mardy had sailed with Olaus across the Atlantic Ocean to attend Finland’s International Ornithological Conference. Besides marveling at how much better Scandinavians treated their landscapes than Americans, the Muries recalled the old days when Alaska didn’t even have a major road.
Another shrewd organizational maneuver by the ACS was getting accredited as a nonprofit only thirteen months after Alaska achieved statehood. That single strategic decision, which took a lot of hustle to accomplish, proved crucial as the ACS sought federal protection for the Arctic NWR. On February 15, 1960, after Congressman Ralph Rivers—Alaska’s only representative—withdrew his opposition, the House passed HR 7045. Rivers had proved to be a tricky ally, changing his vote continually, depending on who he was talking to. However, the Arctic Range bill—S 1899—was now in the hands of the Senate. And this was problematic. Both Democratic Alaskan senators—Bob Bartlett and Ernest Gruening—seriously objected to the establishment of the Arctic NWR. A battle was developing. It was doubtful that the Senate would pass S 1899. Therefore, the ACS knew it needed to have its ducks in a row before the arrival of Seaton, who was scheduled to speak at the University of Alaska–Fairbanks on March 3.
The audience inside the New Bunnell Building auditorium that evening included members of the ACS and supporters of the Arctic NWR who would inveigh against oil, gas, and coal development on the proposed refuge land. It was like walking into a trap. These were the Alaska intelligentsia, able to quote from A Sand County Almanac and identify a bird species from a distance with just a single glance. If Seaton believed that real everyday Alaskans like Wood and Hunter were pro-refuge, this would influence him mightily. “I had voted for Eisenhower in 1956,” Wood recalled. “I thought his new Interior Secretary [Seaton] would do the right thing for the Arctic.”17 Seaton was impressed that the ACS had led Alaskans in backing the Arctic NWR even though the U.S. Chamber of Commerce thought it was a terrible idea. When asked in Fairbanks what would happen if the Senate didn’t pass S 1899, Seaton snapped, “I could withdraw the wildlife range this afternoon if I choose to do so.”18*
Throughout the fall of 1960, the fate of the Arctic NWR remained undecided. The presidential election—Kennedy versus Nixon—was preoccupying the nation. Seaton, campaigning for Nixon, postponed the decision on the Alaskan lands until after November 4. Governor William A. Eagan of Alaska made a last-ditch effort to have the Eisenhower administration turn the proposed Arctic NWR over to the state. Eagan believed that the 8.9 million acres could easily be opened to both mining and nature preservation. That meant the “big three” politicians in Alaska—all Democratic—were against it. “It is my conviction,” Eagan said on September 26, 1960, “that conservation needs of the Nation and the State for an unspoiled Arctic Wildlife management area can only be achieved under State Management.”19 In a misleading letter to Seaton the governor threatened that the Arctic NWR, if established by the Eisenhower administration, would be a gross violation of state law.20
Sensing a threat from Eagan, Gruening, and Bartlett, the ACS attacked the governor in a press release. The ACS mocked the governor’s notion that mining conglomerates had wilderness values. Seaton refused to respond to Eagan’s plea. This snub infuriated Eagan. When Kennedy won the presidential election, Seaton knew his days were numbered. After Thanksgiving, he started clearing out his desk and preparing to move back to Nebraska.
Luckily for the wilderness movement, Sigurd Olson was invited to visit Seaton at the Department of the Interior on C Street one afternoon in early December to say hello. Olson brought up the Arctic NWR. Was Seaton at long last ready to sign off on the 8.9 million acres? To Olson’s astonishment, Seaton was still of two minds. He was preparing to head back to Nebraska to run for governor in 1962. He didn’t want to be vilified by the mining industry. But his heart was with Olson and the ACS. Owing to their smaller acreage, Seaton was ready to establish national wildlife refuges at Izembek and Kuskokwim. But Seaton was up in the air about the Arctic NWR, asking, “What will the Alaskans think?” Mustering all the conviction he could, looking straight at the ap
prehensive outgoing secretary, Olson assured his trusted friend that the smart folks in Alaska “would fall into line.”21
Olson wasn’t alone in gently pushing Seaton to do the right thing regarding the Arctic NWR in November–December 1960. Although Douglas didn’t write a letter to Seaton about the Arctic NWR, two of his former wives—Mercedes Eicholz and Cathy Stone—both thought it was “highly likely” that he had lobbied the secretary of the interior. Everybody in Washington officialdom had heard Douglas hold forth on the Brooks Range, insisting that U.S. Fish and Wildlife had to protect the Serengeti of America, including its profusion of wildflowers. “The vast, open spaces of the Arctic are special risks to grizzlies, moose, caribou and wolves,” Douglas would tell anybody who would listen. “Men with field glasses and high-powered rifles, hunting from planes, can well-nigh wipe them out. In this land of tundra, big game has few places to hide. That is another reason why this last American living wilderness must remain sacrosanct.”22
One legitimate concern Seaton had was the fact that Alaska’s leading Democrats—Senator Bartlett and Senator Gruening, in particular—weren’t enthusiastic about the Arctic NWR. What if the Kennedy administration overturned it? Why should Eisenhower establish it with an executive order only to have the Democrats reverse him? That was a paralyzing thought for Seaton, but this is where Douglas reentered the drama. Extremely close to the Kennedys, Douglas hoped he might be chosen as Kennedy’s secretary of state. Nobody knew whether Douglas would step down from the Supreme Court to take over the State Department, but it was a persistent rumor circulating around Washington that December. When Robert Kennedy asked Douglas whom his brother should nominate as secretary of the interior in November 1960, the justice had an immediate answer: Stewart Udall. “Douglas was one of my biggest promoters,” Udall recalled. “We didn’t see each other much, but we were clearly on the same conservationist team.”23
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 60