Near Cape Thompson, Muir discovered a new species of Erigeron. Asa Gray was astounded. The asteraceous plant resembled a daisy and grew in clusters of three. Muir reported that it was abundant in the Arctic—confusing people who thought that the northern latitudes were a wasteland of ice. Gray classified it as Erigeron muirii (known to botanists as Muir’s fleabane). A decade earlier, Gray had challenged Muir to discover a new flower. “Pray, find a new genus, or at least a new species, that I may have the satisfaction of embalming your name, not in glacier ice, but in spicy wild perfume.”53
Although not published until 1917, The Cruise of the Corwin, Muir’s account of the Arctic trip, became one of his signature books. Unlike Travels in Alaska, which was primarily about glaciers, this new memoir expressed Muir’s deep compassion for animals. When members of the Corwin’s crew shot at a nearby harbor seal (Phoca vitulina), Muir flinched, writing that the creature had “large, prominent, human-like eyes,” and therefore it was “cruel to kill it.”54 When a steamer owned by the Western Fur and Trading Company pulled up next to the Corwin, Muir sadly inspected the huge bundles of black and brown bearskins, marten, mink, beaver, lynx, wolf, and wolverine. “They were vividly suggestive of the far wilderness whence they came,” Muir wrote, “its mountains and valleys, its broad grassy plains and far-reaching rivers, its forests and its bogs.”55 In The Cruise of the Corwin, Muir presented himself as an advocate of wildlife protection. Chapters were titled “Caribou and a Native Fair,” “The Land of the White Bear,” and “Tragedies of the Whaling Fleet.”
IV
Twenty years after Muir’s first visit to Alaska, the tycoon E. H. Harriman, owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, assembled a group of elite scientists and Thoreauvian naturalists for a ten-week cruise on the custom-built steamer George W. Elder to Glacier Bay and other Alaskan landmarks; the steamboat was, as Muir called it, “a floating university.”56 The entire party—including the ship’s crew and officers, and servants—added up to 126 persons from both the Atlantic and the Pacific coasts.57 This was Muir’s seventh trip to Alaska. After boarding in Seattle, the sixty-one-year-old Muir would get to visit Victoria, Fort Wrangell, Juneau, Glacier Bay, Sitka, Prince William Sound, Cook Inlet, Unalaska, and Saint Lawrence Island—and to play the distinguished glaciologist and resident wise man on the 9,000-mile voyage. He didn’t get back to Martinez, California, until late August. Never before had he seen such a variety of glaciers and ever-craggier peaks in such a short time span; the Chugach Mountains and Prince William Sound made him incredibly happy. Here was the greatest concentration of tidewater, calving glaciers in the world.58
The Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 voyaged up the Inside Passage, passing hundreds of forested islands, isolated coves, towering glaciers, and white-dipped mountains rising in waves against the mainland. The expedition—which included Muir’s fellow naturalist John Burroughs, the scientist William H. Dall, the botanist William Brewer, the conservationist and ethnographer George Bird Grinnell, the artist Louis Agassiz Fuertes, and the ethnographer and photographer Edward S. Curtis—eventually crossed the Bering Sea all the way to the Chukchi Peninsula to catch a glimpse of Siberian soil before heading back to Puget Sound. They spent five days in Glacier Bay—one of the first scientific expeditions to this ecosystem—with Muir as their teacher with regard to glaciers.
What shocked members of the Harriman Expedition more than the wild beauty itself was how imprudently coastal Alaska was being stripped of its natural resources. They noted deforestation, clear-cutting, overfishing, animal slaughter. Canneries and extraction companies were in the process of recklessly slashing many natural features. “At places,” Burroughs wrote, “the country looks as if all the railroad forces in the world have been turned loose to delve and rend and pile in some mad, insane folly and debauch.”59 Most troublesome of all were the fifty-five salmon canneries along coastal Alaska, many around the Inside Passage and far west at Bristol Bay. Refusing to pay Native Alaskans fair wages, these big canneries hired cheap Chinese labor. Determined not to be federally regulated, these canneries formed the Alaska Packers’ Association.60
In Prince William Sound the Elder explored the largest concentration of tidewater glaciers in Alaska. Many were actively calving. The surrounding Chugach and Kenai mountain glaciers were so powerful that they had cut more than forty fjords into the margins of the sound. The expedition spent perhaps the finest hours of the journey at College Fjord, twenty-five miles long and three miles wide. The members even discovered an unmapped inlet, dubbed Harriman Fjord as a tribute to their benefactor, containing over 100 glaciers. Muir burst with childlike excitement at seeing these glaciers. Instead of sleeping on the Elder, he pitched a tent along the shore to be closer to them. Grove Karl Gilbert, a glaciologist, always with binoculars in hand, likewise thrilled at seeing the Prince William Sound glaciers, taking invaluable notes on the stunning topography. “Gilbert’s work on the Harriman Expedition was a major contribution to glacial geology,” the historians William H. Goetzmann and Kay Sloan wrote in Looking Far North. “He had described the Ice Age horizons and he had outlined the physical mechanics of glaciers and glacial action.”61
What came from the expedition was the publication of the thirteen-volume Harriman Expedition reports (usually called the Harriman Alaska Series). These scientific volumes, organized around information gathered on the cruise, captured the public imagination about wild Alaska as nothing had before. The fact that the northern third of Alaska (above the Arctic Circle) had yet to be properly explored or mapped excited people’s imagination. Want to have a mountain named after yourself?—head to the Brooks Range or the Aleutian Range. Also, Harriman’s eminent scientists brought back a wealth of data that opened up Alaska to natural history for the first time. Muir, however, was frustrated with the penchant of the expedition’s members for hunting bear and catching the biggest fish. Muir also found the opulence aboard the Elder (the expedition’s ship) off-putting; too much faux positioning went on. “Why, I am richer than Harriman,” Muir bluntly declared. “I have all the money I want and he hasn’t.”62
Some fifty scientists compiled the Harriman Alaska Series; editorial work was done in New York; Washington, D.C.; and Berkeley, California. Harriman, as always, was generous with pay. The team modeled the scientific volumes on the old U.S. Geological Survey reports once famously issued by Clarence King and John Wesley Powell. Never before had coastal Alaska been analyzed from so many scientific perspectives. Every contributor revealed in detail what he had learned on the Elder. Grove Karl Gilbert wrote on glaciers; John Burroughs provided the definitive summary text; John Muir also wrote about glaciers and the harmony of nature; George Bird Grinnell wrote on the Tlingit, Aleuts, and other Native Alaskan peoples; Charles Keeler wrote on birds (with Louis Agassiz Fuertes brilliantly illustrating the descriptions of tufted puffins, harlequin ducks, and cormorants); B. E. Fernow wrote on forests. Unlike the expedition’s other intellectuals, Muir wrote his reports in a lyrical tone. Upon seeing College Fjord’s Western Wall in the Chugach, he wrote of the glacier group that “they came bounding down a smooth mountainside through the midst of lush flowery gardens and goat pastures, like tremendous leaping, dancing cataracts in prime of flood.”63
What these reports accomplished was to teach Americans that Alaska was a unique, untrammeled, sui generis wilderness in need of preservation on many levels. In Henry Gannett’s General Geography, written after Gannett participated in the Harriman Expedition, Alaska is envisioned as a future gigantic national park. “For the one Yosemite of California,” he wrote, “Alaska has hundreds.” Doubtful that mining gold, coal, and copper could be sustainable in the long run, Gannett prophesied that Alaska’s destiny was wilderness tourism. “The Alaska coast is to become the show-place on earth, and pilgrims, not only from the United States, but from beyond the seas, will throng in endless procession to see it,” Gannett wrote. “Its grandeur is more valuable than the gold or the fish or the timber, for it will never be exha
usted. This value, measured by direct returns in money, received from tourists, will be enormous. Measured by health and pleasure, it will be incalculable.”64
Muir has been called the “mentor of the conservation movement”; it’s a reasonably apt accolade. Better than George Bird Grinnell, John Burroughs, or C. Hart Merriam, he understood nature’s rhythmic cycles both emotionally and scientifically. While Muir has been given a lot of well-deserved credit for helping to create Yosemite National Park and starting the Sierra Club in 1892, he was also America’s most enthusiastic Alaskan glaciologist prior to 1900. His teaching method wasn’t merely to illuminate listeners about snouts, crowded bergs, calving, or retreating ice. Glaciers, to Muir, were great indicators of weather, climate change, and tectonic plate shifts. As a glaciologist he held his own with the brilliant Gilbert. But as a preacher of the “glacier gospel” Muir was a one-man show. Burning with enthusiasm, Muir promoted Alaska’s seacoast wilderness, temperate rain forests, and green-ice glaciers as ever-changing masterpieces of creation. When Muir was on top of glaciers, he could see the ocean. Muir even dug a snow pit to study the layers within; all of Glacier Bay was his field laboratory; every inch of ice was a psalm.
By championing Alaska’s Glacier Bay as a site that had to be seen to be believed, Muir helped create today’s national park as surely as he had done with Yosemite. Muir had asked Americans to imagine glaciers along a stretch of mountain-hemmed sea . . . to crave calving ice . . . prehistoric forests . . . gamboling orcas . . . thousands of bald eagles . . . salmon runs . . . ice floes like bottles with messages drifting in clear waters. In southeastern Alaska, he was like a happy-go-lucky marooned seafarer, pleased to uncork the frozen essence of pressure melting when ice flowed around to the downhill side and then froze. Muir believed that a glacier had five main parts: the face was the front; the terminus was the downhill end; the surface was the top; the base was like a belly where it scraped against the valley bottom; the source was the area from which it flowed.65
The Harriman Expedition of 1899 was Muir’s last visit to Alaska. Nevertheless, Muir continued to espouse the protection of the eighteen tidewater glaciers (the glaciers that reach the sea) as Glacier Bay National Park. The sheets of living ice were thousands of feet thick and a few miles wide. If lucre was the reigning force of American life, then Muir wasn’t above promoting tourism to Alaska to protect the “solitude of ice and snow and newborn rocks, dim, dreary, mysterious” of the Inside Passage, Prince William Sound, and Cook Inlet.66 Glaciers existed in the entire southern perimeter of the state from just north of the Canadian border in the southeast to the last Aleutian Islands. Glaciers bespread the Fairweather Range, in the Coast Mountains, on the peaks of the Saint Elias Mountains, and the Alaska Range. The Chugach, Kenai, and Wrangell mountains all have glaciers—though more are melting. Muir was the protector and poet for all of Alaska’s more than 100,000 glaciers.
Today more than 1 million tourists a year head up the Inside Passage and Prince William Sound on cruise ships, loosely tracing Muir’s routes from 1879 to 1899. What Muir—like the Harriman Expedition itself—was offering Alaskans was another revenue stream besides the extraction industries: ecotourism. The heavy cruise ship traffic in Glacier Bay and Prince William Sound, in fact, has caused the National Park Service to turn away business rather than overly disturb the harbor seals, orcas or icebergs. Few passengers study glaciation processes in detail, but Muir believed that the more people saw of Alaska’s frozen wonders, the more likely they were to become conservationists. “Muir believed with evangelical passion that nature’s glaciers could form men as well as mountains, and he might well have viewed the proposed trip to Alaska as a pilgrimage as much as a scientific expedition,” the historians Robert Engberg and Bruce Merrell wrote. “In this way, his motivation may not have been so clearly distinct from that of the modern tourist who wishes to get away from it all by a visit to Alaskan wilderness.”67
Alaska . . . the three syllables had a magic radiance in 1899. And its primeval tundra north of the Brooks Range had yet to be explored by a single Darwinian biologist. Serious dry-fly anglers of the Izaak Walton League sort had yet to feel the weight of the clear, cold, fast streams against their legs. Few sportsmen had ventured anywhere near Lake Clark–Lake Iliamna to hunt the free-ranging moose. (But Native Alaskan hunters were part of these ecological systems for more than 10,000 years.) Most adventurers, however, weren’t interested in the glories of Mother Nature—they were after a quick fortune in mining, promised to them by recurrent come-ons: “There’s gold in them thar hills.” With the gold rushes of 1897 to 1899, more than 30,000 people stampeded to the Alaska and Yukon territory, most with the sole intention of extracting riches from the suddenly valuable land. Alaska, once derided as “Seward’s folly,” the most foolish real estate deal in American history, was suddenly a glittering boom land where gold nuggets could be panned out of any swift-moving stream. For every John Muir who came to see the grandeur of huge glaciers spilling over the rough-hewn landscape, a hundred others stood by, ready to harvest the glacier ice and sell it for a profit.
A battle was on between those who wanted to preserve Alaska’s wilderness and those who wanted to extract wealth from minerals, salmon, glacier ice, timber, and, later, oil. The Nobel Prize–winning novelist Knut Hamsun, of Norway, once described Americans’ obsession with get-rich-quick commerce in this way: “They never allow themselves a day of quiet. Nothing can take their minds off figures; nothing of beauty can get them to forget the export trade and market prices for a single moment.”68 His words perfectly describe the mentality behind the dozens of Alaskan gold rushes and all the Alaskan oil rushes ever since. Yet there was from the get-go a cult of determined “wilderness believers” who fought against the private sector’s extraction mania in Alaska. To these nature lovers, often supported by the U.S. government, Alaska was a paradise for poets, scientists, recreationists, and tourists alike.
“In God’s wildness lies the hope of the world,” Muir wrote, with timeless Alaska in mind, “the great fresh unlighted, unredeemed wilderness. The galling harness of civilization drops off, and the wounds heal ere we are aware.”69
Chapter One - Odyssey of the Snowy Owl
I
Young Theodore Roosevelt could barely believe his good fortune. Taking a long break from studying for his Harvard University entrance exams in Manhattan, he headed to Long Island for an outdoor ramble in the calming woods. A dedicated birder, the seventeen-year-old Roosevelt was hoping to add a couple of new species to his growing North American list. Suddenly, Roosevelt heard a faint barking hoot and looked up. Blessed with a marvelous aural ability, as if in compensation for poor eyesight, Roosevelt stopped dead in his tracks. There in front of him in the sylvan stillness was an inscrutable migrant from somewhere around the Arctic Circle, the imaginary line that runs around the globe at a latitude 66° 33' 43" north.1 It was a snowy owl (Bubo scandiacus). Bright white in plumage, with velvety, fine-textured downy feathers, this huge owl had a flat humanlike face with piercing yellow eyes that glowed like railroad lanterns. The bird’s insulating white plumage protected it from ambient temperatures of minus forty degrees Fahrenheit. The protective coloration of the snowy owl, much like that of the polar bear, arctic fox, or Dall sheep, was a marvel: evolutionary adaptation principles on gallant display. To Roosevelt’s amazement this circumpolar Odyssean from the dim blue north was overwintering in—of all places!—Oyster Bay, New York. Instead of preying on lemmings or voles around Arctic Alaska, it was gulping down small rodents in the frozen fields of Nassau County.2
One by one, and with an ornithologist’s care, Roosevelt checked off the owl’s otherwordly anatomical features, marveling at its biological ingenuity. He was awed by the purity of its evolutionary composition. Even the owl’s talons were camouflaged with white feathers and had extra-thick pads designed to endure subzero weather. They were strong enough to carry off an arctic vole or medium-size goose. Although freeze-tolerant snowy owls ha
d reportedly been encountered as far south as the Rio Grande valley of Texas, it was a genuine aberration for Roosevelt to stumble randomly upon one in Greater New York City. For a few moments Roosevelt must have held his breath, determined not to break the tranquillity, mesmerized by this living testimony of migration. Then, without further hesitation, he raised his shotgun and killed the snowy owl. Proudly carrying the carcass back to his parents’ house in Manhattan, the future president of the United States performed taxidermy on the adult male bird, using arsenic to preserve the skin, as was typical during the Victorian era.
The snowy owl—the official bird of Quebec—is still among the most coveted, by bird lovers, photographers, ornithologist-collectors, of the world’s 200 owl species. It is often regarded as a talisman from the aquamarine ice lands of the North Country—along with the white morph gyrfalcon (Falco rusticolus) and ivory gulls (Pagophila eburnea). Human fascination with snowy owls is as old as recorded history. Paleolithic hieroglyphics of these owls were etched on stone walls in ancient France. In recent years the author J. K. Rowling used the snowy owl as a symbol of eternal wisdom in her Harry Potter books. When Roosevelt entered Harvard in September 1876, his stuffed owl was a prized possession in his apartment on Winthrop Street in Cambridge, encased by a bell jar on the mantel. Oddly, the bird’s plumage became whiter as it aged.
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