The Quiet World
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SAVING ALASKA’S WILDERNESS KINGDOM, 1879–1960
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DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
To
SAM HAMILTON
Visionary at U.S. Fish and Wildlife . . . stout friend of Alaska’s Arctic Refuge . . . and a true believer in the Quiet World.
&
STONE WEEKS
My twenty-three-year-old assistant at Rice University . . . killed in a trucking accident in Virginia on July 23, 2009. . . . He was an angel of pure future . . . with an intense love of wild Alaska.
&
EDWARD A. BRINKLEY
My father . . . who served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant with the 196th Regimental Combat Team during the Korean War from 1950 to 1952, based out of Fort Richardson, Alaska. . . . For telling me many great army stories about encountering grizzlies on his Alaska Range ski patrols from Haines to Fairbanks.
And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an abomination.
—Jeremiah 1:6
When roads supplant trails, the precious, unique values of God’s wilderness disappear.
—William O. Douglas, My Wilderness: The Pacific West (1960)
Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way been lost. . . . Mystery whispered in the grass, playing in the branches of trees overhead, was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the prairies. . . . I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep semi-religious influence that was formally at work among our people. The flavor of it hangs over the best work of Mark Twain. . . . I can remember old fellows in my hometown speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet.
—Sherwood Anderson, letter to Waldo Frank (November 1917)
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Prologue: John Muir and the Gospel of Glaciers
Chapter One - Odyssey of the Snowy Owl
Chapter Two - Theodore Roosevelt’s Conservation Doctrine
Chapter Three - The Pinchot-Ballinger Feud
Chapter Four - Bull Moose Crusade
Chapter Five - Charles Sheldon’s Fierce Fight
Chapter Six - Our Vanishing Wildlife
Chapter Seven - The Lake Clark Pact
Photographic Insert 1
Photographic Insert 2
Chapter Eight - Resurrection Bay of Rockwell Kent
Chapter Nine - The New Wilderness Generation
Chapter Ten - Warren G. Harding: Backlash
Chapter Eleven - Bob Marshall and the Gates of the Arctic
Chapter Twelve - Those Amazing Muries
Chapter Thirteen - Will the Wolf Survive?
Chapter Fourteen - William O. Douglas and New Deal Conservation
Chapter Fifteen - Ansel Adams, Wonder Lake, and the Lady Bush Pilots
Chapter Sixteen - Pribilof Seals, Walt Disney, and the Arctic Wolves of Lois Crisler
Chapter Seventeen - The Arctic Range and Aldo Leopold
Chapter Eighteen - The Sheenjek Expedition of 1956
Chapter Nineteen - Dharma Wilderness
Chapter Twenty - Of Hoboes, Barefooters, and the Open Road
Chapter Twenty-One - Sea Otter Jones and Musk-Ox Matthiessen
Chapter Twenty-Two - Rachel Carson’s Alarm
Chapter Twenty-Three - Selling the Arctic Refuge
Epilogue: Arctic Forever
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Douglas Brinkley
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue: John Muir and the Gospel of Glaciers
Glaciers move in tides. So do mountains. So do all things.
—JOHN MUIR
I
How sad John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, would be to learn that in the first decades of the twenty-first century many of the great glaciers of Alaska were melting away at an astonishing rate. Like the Creator himself, glaciers were architects of Earth, sculpturing vast ridges, changing bays, digging out troughs, making concavities in bedrock, and creating fast-flowing rivers.1 Global warming—the alarming increase of the Earth’s near-surface air temperature exacerbated by carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles and by the burning of coal—was stealing away the glacial ice fields of Alaska. Nevertheless, big oil companies such as Shell, Exxon-Mobil, and BP still put climate change and greenhouse gases in scare quotes, as if the hard science were a myth conceived by tree huggers. Fossil fuel merchants were determined to keep Americans hooked on petroleum-based products until they choked. The Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius was worried, in 1896, as the automobile revolution was just taking hold, that widespread fossil fuel combustion could someday cause enhanced global warming. Arrhenius, now considered the “father” of climate change, understood that the doubling of carbon dioxide (CO2) concentration would lead to a temperature rise of five degrees Celsius; glaciers would melt, seas would rise, and the Arctic would slowly vanish.2
John Muir—the naturalist whom Ralph Waldo Emerson called “more wonderful than Thoreau”—had erected a tiny observation cabin near a thirty-mile-long glacier that was one of Alaska’s stunning heirlooms.3 Born in Dunbar, Scotland, in 1838, Muir had immigrated to America in 1849, just after Mr. James K. Polk won the Mexican-American War. When Muir turned twenty-nine, following an industrial accident in Indianapolis that had caused temporary blindness, he made a far-reaching personal decision to dedicate his life to the natural world and to enduring wilderness. Although he was a talented machinist, nature was his muse. Solitary and on foot he roamed through America’s wide valleys, towering mountains, pristine woodlands, sublime deserts, and flower-filled meadows, filling his voluminous notebooks with vivid descriptions of plants, animals, and trees. Recording his scientific observations along the way, the peripatetic Muir tramped through the primordial forests and smoky ridges of the Appalachian Mountains, then headed south to survey the humid swamplands of Georgia’s Okefenokee and the golden beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast. Shedding the dictates of his strict Presbyterian upbringing (his father was a fundamentalist minister), in 1867 Muir scrawled his home address on a weathered journal cover as “John Muir, Earth-Planet-Universe.”4 Eventually making wild California his North Star, Muir, a pioneer ecologist, began climbing the peaks of his beloved Sierra Nevada, camping under the stars, memorizing botanical details through the timeless art of sitting still. “The more savage and chilly and storm-chafed the mountains,” Muir wrote, “the finer the glow of their faces.”5
Despite all of Muir’s cross-country tramps, nothing prepared him for the sheer poetic depth of the Alaskan wilderness. Muir considered himself a student of Louis Agassiz, an internationally celebrated Harvard zoologist and geologist, whose Études sur les glaciers (1840) was the definitive word on glaciers in the 1870s. Agassiz had explored live glaciers, studying their origins in the Piedmont and Tidewater regions. Glaciers could be snow-white like typing paper or a brazen virtual blue, as gray as a gravel pit or as clear as H2O. Some extended over twenty square miles and could be as smooth as velvet or as wrinkled as a bull walrus’s neck. They had blotches, slashes, stripes, and swirls. Other cirque glacier remnants covered less than a square mile. When calving, a glacier rumbled and roared, then as the ice sank or float
ed a strange vibration, like wind chimes, curled the air as if a tuning fork had been bonked. Unbeknownst to most Americans of the late nineteenth century, glaciers constituted the biggest freshwater reservoir on Earth.6
Muir was frustrated that in Yosemite he could analyze only the effects glaciers had on mountains; it was all the geological past. For his professional glaciology career to advance, he needed to see the real deal—to experience glaciers themselves, in raw action. Alaska was, to Muir, the ideal laboratory for studying “frozen motion” as it flowed downhill as if icy blue lava. All glaciers were cold, solid, scalloped, and slippery. But besides those four basic features, each glacier had a distinct personality of its own. Muir, with the keen eye of a farmer inspecting his crops, was looking for fresh scientific evidence of glacial deformation, recession, and retreat. Every nuance mattered. Keys to Earth’s geological history could possibly be found by studying ice fields. Alaska’s umpteen glaciers were to become his field teachers. “When a portion of a berg breaks off, another line is formed, and the old one, sharply cut, may be seen rising at all angles, giving it a marked character,” Muir reported. “Many of the oldest bergs are beautifully ridged by the melting out of narrow furrows strictly parallel throughout the mass, revealing the bedded structure of the ice, acquired perhaps centuries ago, on the mountain snow fountains.”7
Muir, America’s legendary naturalist, first traveled to southeast Alaska’s Inside Passage from June 1879 to January 1880.8 Throughout his seven months in the district he wrote “wilderness journalism” for the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin; one expanded article actually became a tourist booklet for the Northern Pacific Railroad.9 In April 1879 Scribner’s Monthly had published Witt Ball’s article on Alaska, “The Stickeen River and Its Glaciers.”10 A creatively competitive Muir probably figured he could top the pedantic Ball. Seeing the live glaciers of Alaska, and writing about them factually but with gusto, would allow Muir to verify his long-held hunches on glacial action and tectonic activity. Known for his abiding love of Yosemite Valley. Muir promoted the somewhat controversial notion that the gorgeous California Valley had been carved out by glaciers (not rivers). Muir’s first published work, for what was then a handsome fee of $200, was an article for the New York Tribune, “Yosemite Glaciers”; it appeared on December 5, 1871.11
Muir’s journey began aboard the Dakota, which steamed out of San Francisco near Alcatraz Island and two days later churned past the high cliffs and tree-lined shores of Puget Sound, and then entered the waters of British Columbia. The Inside Passage, through which Muir was traveling, included all the waterways from north of Puget Sound to west of Glacier Bay. Next the Dakota threaded through the Alexander Archipelago islands to Sitka, Alaska. The ship, though occasionally protected by land, was terribly vulnerable to the Pacific gales. To the lean, bearded Muir, however, these 10,000 miles of southeastern Alaskan islands and fjords (long, deep arms of the ocean, carved out by a glacier) and 1,000 camelback islands, dense with western hemlock and Sitka spruce, were “overabundantly beautiful for description.”12 Giant cliffs billowed straight out of the seawater, rising 500, 600, 700 feet over the Pacific Ocean. A frustrated Muir kept pleading with the captain to stop and let him quickly climb a mountain, but to no avail.
As the Dakota ventured farther up the Inside Passage (now the longest protected marine waterway in the world), Muir—a taut man of forty, with red-brown hair and beard, always stooping over to jot notes—played the populist professor. He kindly explained to tourists aboard that the snouts of glaciers shed blocks of ice in a “calving” process. With his thick Scottish brogue, Muir, a natural raconteur, made even the most citified tourist ready to paddle into quiet coves around Baranof Island, to kayak down a cleaved river as it roared out into Sitka Sound and then out to the Pacific. So excited had Muir become by the breathtaking scenery that he fantasized about climbing mountains up to Alaska from California someday, exploring Mount Shasta, Mount Hood, and Mount Rainier. What made Muir so special, the quality in his character that had made Emerson take note, was the way the enthusiastic naturalist fully integrated scientific knowledge with romantic wildness. Nobody could resist Muir’s charm.
That fall of 1879 Muir furiously scribbled astute observations about Native Alaskan people, gold seekers, lumberjacks, canneries, and cosmic natural features. Muir even developed his own “glacial gospel”: that fjords and wilderness, like gentle magic, lifted the soul on a journey of self-discovery filled with an infinity of unknowns. Inner peace could be found in glaciers. Southeastern Alaska was an immortal land that would, in turn, immortalize him.13 Picking his way through a sea of sparkling bergs, sometimes leaping across slippery, deteriorating ice floes, Muir reveled in the innate dignity of his surroundings. “A new world is opened,” Muir wrote in his journal, “a world of ice with new-made mountains standing vast and solemn in the blue distance roundabout to it.”14
It took Muir only a day to become a booster for Alaska’s magnificent Glacier Bay. The land uplift rate—1 inch per year—was among the highest in the world, because the glaciers receded, thus removing their considerable weight from the land. In his wilderness journalism Muir urged Americans to journey to paradisiacal Alaska and let their jaws drop. Although Muir didn’t discover Glacier Bay, his enthusiasm made the bay internationally celebrated. “Go,” Muir cried, “go and see.”15 Alaska, purchased from Russia for $7.2 million only twelve years prior, had just started to be discovered by nature lovers who cruised up the southeast coast from Seattle. Muir, in a way, was the first great ecotourist of Alaska. Go to Kachemak Bay . . . Catch a halibut . . . Go pick yellow-reddish salmonberries and currants on the banks of the Chilkat River . . . Tramp the glacier ice mantle of the Coast Range . . . Go eye bald eagles nesting in Juneau . . . Go gather seashells at Calvert Island beach during low tide . . . Go spy on the white mountain goats of Howling Valley . . . Go to the boulder-bound Chugach Mountains . . . Go see the northern lights’ “auroral excitement” and “bright prismatic colors” flash across the starlit night at the Yukon River . . . It was the Earth’s halo . . . Didn’t you know?16
Muir’s first landfall aboard the Dakota was Fort Wrangell, Alaska. Here he joined thirty-year-old S. Hall Young, a Presbyterian missionary hoping to Christianize the Chilkat Tlingit. Together Muir and Young would travel all over the Inside Passage, constantly in ice range, to Sitka, the Stikine River, Fairweather Range, and, last but not least, Glacier Bay. Young later wrote a memoir—Alaska Days with John Muir—about their fine times together. But Fort Wrangell, crude and vulgar, devoid of even an iota of charm, was an end-of-the-line outpost where lawlessness reigned supreme. A grumbling Muir didn’t cotton to the devil-may-care attitude of the Euro-Americans looking for quick mining profits in such a picturesque setting. Fort Wrangell was an ugly row of low wooden buildings (not too far as the crow flies from today’s Misty Fiords National Monument Wilderness). Some of Muir’s “Go . . . go . . . go to Alaska” evangelism tapered off in Fort Wrangell, where he slept on the dusty floor of a carpenter’s shop. Muir described his quarters as “a rough place, the roughest I ever saw . . . oozy, angling, wrangling Wrangell.”17 Locals didn’t know what to make of Muir. “What can the fellow be up to?” one resident inquired. “I saw him the other day on his knees looking at a stump as if he expected to find gold in it. He seems to have no serious object whatever.”18 A few years earlier, Young had tried breaking colts but had ended up with both shoulders seriously dislocated. Carrying a backpack up glaciers was understandably challenging for him. “Muir climbed so fast that his movements were almost like flying, legs and arms moving with perfect precision and unfailing judgment,” Young wrote. “I must keep close behind him or I would fail to see his points of advantage.”19
Clad in a Scottish cap and long gray tweed ulster, Muir could have been a shepherd from the island of Skye. Lured by his ethereal surroundings, he even wandered around in a rainstorm, eager to learn what “songs” the Alaskan trees “sing” when wet.20 Muir wanted to map Glaci
er Bay—shaped like God’s horseshoe and opening out to the Gulf of Alaska, with immense glacial walls of ice tumbling out of snouts at Icy Strait—as a freelance service for the U.S. government. No cartographer had yet done the job. Mapmakers aren’t keen on moving ice. Yellowstone—America’s first national park—was only seven years old in 1879. Muir—who in 1901 would write Our National Parks, perhaps the most seminal preservationist essay in American history—wanted to see many such public wonderlands created by Congress. Perhaps Glacier Bay, he intuited upon his first visit, would someday meet that criterion. “Muir’s depiction situates Alaska as the New World’s ‘new world,’ ” the ecocritic Susan Kollin argued in Nature’s State, “a Last Frontier that enables the United States to once again unmap and remap itself.”21
Passing the coast of Admiralty Island, Muir and Young, canoeing amid the fjords, saw a couple of brown bears, which seemed to smell their leaf tobacco, rice, bread, and sugar. It was monumental scenery, wild beyond reach, with deep vistas and glacier-carved valleys that surpassed the Swiss Alps or the Norwegian fjords.22 Eventually they discovered an amazing ice expanse, soon dubbed Muir Glacier. Its terminus was at a maximum during the Little Ice Age around 1780 (between 1914 and 2010, this thirty-mile glacier retreated by almost twenty miles).23 Frequently paddling into eddies for breaks, their arms always sore from fighting currents, Muir and Young bonded. The Chilkat Tlingit village up the Lynn Canal, where they camped, became the village of Haines in 1884 (named after Mrs. F. E. Haines, chairwoman of the committee that raised funds for its construction). “I know of no excursion in any part of our vast country where so much is unfolded in so short a time,” Muir wrote. “Day after day, we seemed to float in a true fairyland, each succeeding view more and more beautiful. . . . Never before this had I been embosomed in scenery so hopelessly beyond description.”24
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