After his encounter with the snowy owl, Roosevelt maintained a deep-seated fascination with all Arctic Circle creatures—even the Alaskan beetle (Upis ceramboides), which can live at temperatures as low as minus ninety degrees Fahrenheit; and the wood frog (Rana sylvatica), which hibernates beneath the snow and is protected by a concentration of glucose in its cells and bloodstream.
A voracious reader of literature about the Arctic Circle (or the region above the tree line), Roosevelt particularly treasured the eyewitness reports of polar bears (Ursus maritimus) in William Scoresby’s An Account of the Arctic Regions with a History and Description of the Northern Whale Fishery (1820) and James Lamont’s Yachting in the Arctic Seas (1876). Stories about the Hudson Bay bears also interested him. Roosevelt, however, was skeptical of Scandinavian and Dutch reports from the Arctic seas that polar bears regarded humans as merely “an erect variety of seal.” Polar bears, he correctly believed, were generally aloof and skittish, instinctively scattering when people appeared. “A number of my sporting friends have killed white bears,” Roosevelt wrote, “and none of them were ever charged.”3*
Arctic Alaska’s signature species, the polar bear, is Earth’s largest terrestrial carnivore. Polar bears, like the snowy owl, were isolated in the north on an ice sheet during glaciation; in the course of adaptation to this extreme environment, their coat became entirely white. A male polar bear measures eight to nine feet long and weighs up to 1,500 pounds. Females are typically around six to seven feet long and weigh around 600 pounds. The Beaufort and Chukchi seas make up America’s Arctic Ocean. (Most Americans don’t realize that Alaska has roughly 50 percent of the contiguous U.S. coastline.) Blanketed primarily by sea ice, this shore habitat along the Beaufort and Chukchi is considered one of the finest polar bear denning areas in North America; the Harriman Expedition, however, wasn’t able to find a single one on its Alaskan voyage in 1899.4 Every December through January a mother polar bear will give birth to one to three cubs along these Arctic seas. The cubs accompany their mother for two years before striking out on their own. There are also polar bears along the Chukchi Sea between Point Hope and Point Barrow in Arctic Alaska. Of the eight bear species currently studied, only the polar variety are exclusively carnivores. Their diet consists of one thing: meat. Unlike brown bears, which have round faces, polar bears have a more slender head with a pointy nose: an excellent snout for sniffing out elusive seals burrowed in snow or ice (seals are their primary food source).5
Enraptured by forbidding Arctic tales, Roosevelt affectionately called polar bears the “northern cousin” of grizzlies.6 Reading about polar bears by lamplight amid the comforts of Manhattan or Cambridge, however, was not comparable to exploring Arctic Circle landscapes himself. He dreamed of someday kayaking down wild Arctic rivers where the sun didn’t set from May to August. Imagining himself an outback citizen in Nome, Nunivak Island, or Kotzebue—where simply to inhale fresh air in winter was to frost one’s lungs—Roosevelt dreamed of someday hunting a polar bear in the unforgiving Bering, Chukchi, and Beaufort seas.7
In the late nineteenth century, Alaska—from southeastern rain forests to Aleutian volcanoes to barrier islands along the Arctic coast to the ice glaciers of the Inside Passage—was a never-never land of unnamed mountains, unnamed rivers, and unnamed species. For sheer spatial perception, Alaska’s 591,004 square miles dwarfed the Mojave Desert, the Rocky Mountains, or the Appalachian chain. Stand on any mountain in the Brooks Range or Alaska Range, peer out over the gray granite upthrusts, and you were bound to see a hawk pass a raven in the strongest headwinds known to mankind outside Patagonia and Antarctica. How to describe Alaska’s prodigious natural world in mere words, art, or photography is daunting. As Muir understood, a single Aleut word—Alaska—encompassed so much dramatic geographic beauty, intricately laced mountains, glaciers, valleys, and coastline that it seemed surreal; the territory encompassed four different time zones. Whether you lived in Homer, Fort Wrangell, Fairbanks, or Point Barrow, scenic wonders worthy of a national park abounded. Alaskan place-names themselves, as provocative as Ed Ruscha’s minimalist word paintings, are far more evocative of Alaska’s wild austerity than even the National Geographic’s best photos. The North Slope. Wrangells. Beaufort Lagoon. Mount McKinley. Tongass. Chugach. Kenai Peninsula. The Yukon and Tanana rivers. Mendenhall Glacier. Gates of the Arctic. Plover Glacier. Bristol Bay. Lake Clark. Nunivak Island. Izembek. The Alexander Archipelago. There was wildlife in abundance in all these varied Alaskan places—bears, caribou, wolves, whales, otters, moose, sea lions, and seals. There were Alaska’s Native peoples—among them Tlingit, Haida, Athabascan, Eyak, Yupik, Inupiat, Tsimshian, and Aleut tribes. There were two major “Eskimo” peoples: the Yupik (of western Alaska from the Kuskokwim Bay area to Unalakleet northeast of the Yukon River mouth) and the Inupiat (from that point northward and eastward to Barter Island and beyond to the Beaufort Sea). There was the new breed of far north wanderers—lumberjacks, whalers, salmon merchants, hikers, oil sniffers, dogsledders, fishermen, seal hunters, missionaries, sourdoughs, prospectors, and the occasional John Muir—the wanderer in nature. All these colorful character types shared one undeniable reaction: amazement at the bounty of wild Alaska.
It was Alaska’s abundant wildlife that first brought Asian hunters to cross the Bering Strait land bridge—which joined eastern Siberia with North America—more than 25,000 years ago. These nomads wandered from Asia, surrounded by the world’s northernmost ocean, chasing such grazing mammals as the woolly mammoth, camel, mastodon, antelope, ground sloth, and bison. Following the jagged berglike pressure ridges—today’s Seward Peninsula to Brooks Range to the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea—they trekked across the Bering Sea land bridge, hundreds of miles wide, with no intention of returning to Asia. Then a cataclysm occurred. At the close of the Pleistocene ice age, the Bering Strait land bridge was swallowed up by rising seas. Most of this land bridge today lies beneath the icy waters of the Bering and Chukchi seas. (The U.S. Interior Department now oversees the Bering Land Bridge National Preserve, which contains heritage sites of prehistorical and geological interest.) Stuck along the Arctic rim, these nomadic hunters made the best of the new situation. They survived by harvesting whales, fish, caribou, and other game.8
Enter Vitus Bering, a Danish sea captain, 10,000 years later. Commissioned by Peter the Great in the 1720s to determine if North America and Asia were linked by land, the brave explorer set sail from eastern Siberia in a square-rigged ship for Alaska on a couple of occasions. In 1741 Bering made landfall on Kayak Island (located off Cape Suckling on the southern coast of Prince William Sound). Russia wanted to exploit these Alaskan lands in search of furs, timber, and minerals. Survivors of Bering’s expedition brought back from Alaska all sorts of luxurious sealskins and sea otter pelts. Walrus were easily found in groups numbering ten to fifty. This, however, didn’t bode well for the future of these great rook- eries.
As a consequence of his voyage, Bering’s name became famous. Residents in twenty-first-century Alaska are regularly reminded of Vitus Bering because of the Bering Strait, the Bering Sea, Bering Island, the Bering Glacier, and the Bering land bridge. Early Russian explorers, for their part, named other geographical features after people favored by the czar: Cape Tolstoy, Belkofski, Olga Rock, Poperechnoi Island, and Wosnesenski Island are just a few.9 In 1790 Lieutenant Salvador Fidalgo of Spain voyaged to Alaska in search of the Northwest Passage. The shortcut to Asia was never found, but the Spanish did find Prince William Sound, and named today’s Valdez, Port Fidalgo, Gravina, and Cordova.10
Germany’s most eminent naturalist-botanist, Georg Wilhelm Steller, a physician by training, was the first scientist to document the unique flora and fauna of wild Alaska. Vitus Bering, at the request of the Russian Academy of Science, had invited Steller to come along on the 1741 voyage to record wildlife sightings. Working quickly under severe time constraints, Steller took excellent notes on climate, soil, and resident flora and fauna. Allowed only
ten hours on Kayak Island, principally to help collect freshwater, he nevertheless discovered Steller’s jay (Cyanocitta stelleri), recognizing it as resembling the eastern American blue jay. “This bird,” Steller wrote, “proved to me that we were really in America.”11 The same afternoon he found Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri), Steller’s sea eagle (Haliaeetus pelagicus, now endangered), and Steller’s white raven (a mystery). He discovered all sorts of new fish. As the historian Corey Ford pointed out in Where the Sea Breaks Its Back, Steller never missed an opportunity to attach his name to an Alaskan discovery in need of instant classification. There were also Steller’s greenling (Hexagrammos stelleri), a colorful rock trout; Steller’s sea cow (Hydrodamalis gigas), a giant northern manatee; and Steller’s sea monkey (which was never formally identified). That was a lot of naming for a single working day.12
Steller also stumbled on a Native encampment, where the campfire coals were still warm but nobody was to be seen. Fearful that enemies were lurking around, Steller swiped a few Indian artifacts and fled back to the ship.13 Steller’s naturalist studies were sui generis in eighteenth-century Alaska. He was a man far ahead of his time. On the return voyage to Russia many of the sailors on the Bering Expedition were sick with scurvy. Serving as a herbalist, Steller administered antiscorbutic broths that were credited with saving lives. “He was brilliant; he was arrogant; he was gifted as are few men,” the former director of the Alaska Game Commission Frank Dufresne wrote of Steller. “Though he spent no more than ten hours on Alaskan soil, his accomplishments in that short day were such that his name will live on forever.”14
Alaska’s biological diversity seemed to explorers a strange remnant from the ice age. American geographers around the time of the Harriman Expedition divided the territory into five very distinct ecosystems: (1) the Arctic, (2) Western Alaska, (3) the Interior, (4) Southwestern Alaska, and (5) the Southeastern Panhandle (including the Inside Passage cities of Sitka, Skagway, Ketchikan, Wrangell, Haines, and Juneau). Depending on where you went, there were icy fjords, sedge meadows, glacial fields, volcanic ranges, and tundra regions. What the Mississippi River had been to Mark Twain’s imagination, the 1,980-mile Yukon River—whose watershed comprised nearly half of Alaska—was to the new generation of fortune seekers. For a natural scientist wanting to start a career, the banks of the Yukon River were (and still are) an all-you-can-gaze-at smorgasbord of wildlife. Despite the presence of scientists on the Elder, mysteries such as caribou migratory routes or wolf ecology were largely propagated by unreliable oral tradition. A university-trained biologist, one who wrote well, could make a distinguished reputation seemingly overnight by trekking north from the Lower Forty-Eight and investigating the biological face of roadless Alaska.15
Alaska belonged to the Native tribes and wildlife while Roosevelt was growing up in New York City following the Civil War. Muir in The Cruise of the Corwin had deemed the Indians “the wildest animals of all.”16 Alaska was far removed even from the slow crop-growing pulse of rural American life. Farmers had yet to settle there. A few rogue gold miners made their way from British Columbia hoping to strike a vein. But wandering fur hunters from the Rockies and whalers from Russia, Great Britain, and Canada were the most prevalent new arrivals. During the summer months, whales swam the coastal waters in pods; their sheer numbers would have baffled and delighted a New Englander. Musk oxen (Ovibos moschatus) roamed wild, shaggy relics of the ice age. But Danish, Norwegian, and American hunters were quickly driving them toward extinction. Walrus (Odobenus rosmarus)—evolved from eared seals more than 20 million years ago—lived in and bred on remote Alaskan islands in the Bering and Chukchi seas; these pinnipeds would hook their two tusks on ice floes to help haul themselves out of the water. Dall sheep (Ovis dalli), native to Alaska-Yukon, climbed snowcapped peaks; their curled keratin horns were coveted by trophy hunters. There were more brown bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) on Alaska’s Admiralty Island alone than in all other U.S. states and territories combined. John Muir, as perspicacious as ever, wrote that in Alaska grizzlies wandered “as if the country had belonged to them always.”17 Today there are 31,000 brown bears in Alaska, while their populations have been drastically reduced in the Lower Forty-Eight.18
The Native totem poles (“story poles”) of Alaska celebrated ravens, bald eagles, and halibut as the holy spirit of life incarnate.19 Discovering these tall carved monuments, central icons of the northwestern coast region, became a rage at New York’s American Museum of National History during the “gilded age.” Roosevelt himself was fascinated by Tlingit, Haida, Kwakiutl, and Nootka craftspersons who honored animal life in Alaska. The totems weren’t inspired by religion or sorcery. Rather, totem poles matter-of-factly told the life stories of Indian tribes. The wooden poles, sometimes fifty feet high, were, in a sense, a substitute for books. And every totem pole was different. A hawk, whale, or bear often crowned the log-post top. Feuds sometimes broke out between villages over who had the highest pole. Tribal elders perceived the totem pole as a monument to nature and to village life, an emblem of human strength and the bounty of the land and sea. To New Yorkers the poles were Indian art and were coveted for museum collections. A movement was started to help preserve them from weather, rot, and vandalism. “The carved totem-pole monuments are the most striking of the objects displayed here,” Muir reported in 1879. “The simplest of them consisted of a smooth, round post fifteen or twenty feet high and about eighteen inches in diameter, with the figure of some animal on top: a bear, porpoise, eagle, or raven, about life-size or larger.”20
The scientists of the Harriman Expedition liked Native Alaskan artifacts too much. The photographer Edward S. Curtis told how the steamer George W. Elder came upon a deserted Tlingit village; everybody was probably out hunting or fishing. Hurrying to shore, the Harriman crew stole everything from children’s clothing to pottery to bring back to New York as museum-worthy artifacts. Muir, who refused to participate, described the incident as “robbery” in his journal. Curtis didn’t record whether he participated in the raid, but he later openly criticized three scientists who stole “a ton of human bones” from a Native cemetery.21
Whereas American settlers saw the wilderness as an adversary, an obstacle to overcome, Alaskan Natives saw nature as something they belonged to; the totem pole was a symbol of oneness between people and animals. The heyday of Alaskan totem poles occurred between 1820 and 1890. (In 1893 twelve totem poles were displayed at the Chicago World’s Fair, to great acclaim.) Carvers were ordered by tribal chiefs—who preferred using red cedar—to honor wildlife in wood effigies. The storytelling aspect of the totem pole was prioritized over its external appearance. Still, to decorate the poles, carvers made glowing paints from animal oil and blood, charcoal, salmon eggs, ocher, wildflowers, and moss. The Bella Bellas of the Kwakiutl nation of British Columbia learned astonishingly innovative ways to mix colors. Some moonlighting carvers also chiseled wooden boats to resemble killer whales. But mainly the totem poles paid respect to favored species such as the halibut, frog, and beaver.22
II
The Alaska Purchase by the Andrew Johnson administration had taken place on May 28, 1867, when Roosevelt was only eight years old and Muir had just recovered his eyesight. Through the bold initiatives of Secretary of State William Seward, the United States acquired more than 586,000 square miles of northern territory from Russia for a song—$7.2 million (less than 2 cents an acre).23 Seward defended the purchase as the final act of western expansionism, claiming that Alaska would provide salmon runs, mineral wealth, and forest resources. (Alaska was also where Seward planned on having lines laid for the international cable being promoted by the American Telegraph Company.) At the time, anti-expansionists called the purchase “Seward’s Folly,” considering the region a frozen wasteland not worth a trillionth of a dollar. But expansionists, including Theodore Roosevelt, later celebrated the Alaska Purchase as a trophy of great worth. Roosevelt described Alaska as glacier-streaked territory of “infinit
e possibilities” that the U.S. government had wisely purchased “despite bitter opposition” of many small-minded men.24 And Seward himself, who visited Sitka in 1869, understood that his purchase of Alaska would someday be seen as the high-water mark of his long, distinguished career in public service.25
For a few decades the Russians prized Kachemak Bay as a source of lignite coal. In 1855 alone the Russian-American Company, operating out of Port Graham, employed 131 men and produced 35 tons of coal daily. The coal was shipped to San Francisco, but sold at a loss, so the company abandoned the export trade. Russia, which never claimed more than 800 settlers in the colony, was beginning to see that, given the harsh weather and the vast export distances, mining Alaskan coalfields wasn’t particularly profitable. The Russian Orthodox Church, however, flourished in the Kenai Peninsula. The Old Believers split from the main church in 1666, refusing to implement reforms. In Alaska the Old Believers clung to Slavonic texts, used two fingers for the sign of the cross, and practiced triple-immersion baptism. They colonized little villages such as Ninilchik, Nikolaevsk, Razaldna, and Kachemak Selo. They resembled the Amish of Pennsylvania in some ways, such as their old-fashioned clothing—these Russian women wore head scarves—and they represented Russian Alaska well into the twenty-first century.
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 4
