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

by Douglas Brinkley

  “Most of the people of this country are wholly in error when they think of the mines as being the sole, or even the chief, permanent cause in Alaska’s future greatness,” Roosevelt said in his address in Seattle. “Let me tell you just exactly how I mean it. In the case of a mine, you get the metal out of the earth. You cannot leave any metal in there to produce other metal. In the case of a fishery, a salmon fishery, if we are wise—if you are wise—you will insist upon its being carried on under conditions which will make the salmon fishery as profitable in that river thirty years hence as now. Don’t take all of the salmon out and go away and leave the empty river to your children and your children’s children.” Then Roosevelt went after Pacific Northwestern timber companies that were already at the gates of southeastern Alaska, waiting to clear-cut vast stretches of forestlands. Limited logging was fine, Roosevelt said. But at all times, the “preservation of the forest for the settlers and the settlers’ children that are to come in and inherit the land” had to be the governing ethic.21*

  As the Arctic Brotherhood learned, when it came to protecting Alaska’s natural wonders and wildlife resources, there was no gentleness or delicacy in Roosevelt’s manner. Whether you entered Alaska by the Copper River, the Kuskokwim delta, or the Yukon territory didn’t matter—the conservationist doctrine had to be followed. As a forest conservationist, fascinated by America’s different physiographic conditions, Roosevelt was particularly worried about the fate of Alaska’s boreal woodlands, which extended from the Kenai Peninsula to the Tanana valley near Fairbanks and stretched northward to the Brooks Range. Trees with high commercial value—white spruce, quaking aspen, paper birch, western balsam, poplar, and larch—blanketed Alaska in immense stands. Roosevelt knew that once the Klondike gold veins dried up, timber corporations such as Weyerhaeuser Lumber would be ready to speed up the logging of old-growth forests without even replanting, leaving places such as the exquisite Tongass barren. Roosevelt was determined to protect Alaska’s millions of forested acres from senseless destruction.

  Roosevelt’s brain trust for Alaskan forestry was Gifford Pinchot. Born just after the Civil War in Simsbury, Connecticut, to a father who made a fortune in timbering and land speculating, Pinchot probably knew more about the perils of deforestation than anybody else of his generation. Over six feet tall with a handsome full mustache, Pinchot, Yale University’s silvicultural prodigy, was a mighty fighter for the cause of forest protection. Pinchot, in fact, was considered the father of the modern forestry movement. He became the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service, appointed by President Roosevelt in 1905.

  A virtual fixture in Washington, D.C., society from 1890 to 1946, Pinchot could often be seen walking in the streets around Dupont Circle, noticeable in an instant by his broad-brimmed, floppy brown hat. A believer in the wise use of natural resources, Pinchot also devoted his life to preserving many of America’s pristine forestlands. Congress had passed legislation creating forest reserves in 1897, and this gave Pinchot his opening to make history. Working under Roosevelt, Pinchot helped save more than 150 million acres—mainly in the American West—as protected national forests between 1901 and 1909.

  One problem Pinchot faced in Alaska was that surveys were scant. In 1902 he had dispatched William Langille—a Canadian-born Oregonian known in the Forest Service as Pinchot’s eyes and ears—to do reconnaissance in both the Chugach and the Tongass forests of Alaska. Using dogsleds and dugout canoes to get around, Langille immediately recognized that the Alexander Archipelago, Chugach, and Tongass were richer in trees than the entire Rockies of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana combined. “Special attention should be paid to species, age, and distribution of the forest bodies in different sections,” Pinchot had instructed Langille, “noting relative sizes, etc. in reference to geographical, physical, and altitudinal position.”22

  According to people associated with Roosevelt and Pinchot, unless Forest Service rangers like Langille continually hiked or patrolled by canoe, timber trespassers around Puget Sound, backed by Wall Street capital, would swoop into Alaska, destroy forestlands, never replant, and leave the tiny timber communities to starve. Tree stumps, runaway unemployment, and silted rivers would be the legacy of “big timber.” Instead of sustainable communities built by pioneer families, ghost towns would spread from Homer to Seward to Ketchikan. Roosevelt had seen this trend all over the Wild West. Determined Rooseveltian conservationists like Langille envisioned the coastal forests of southeastern Alaska—an extension of the rain forests of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia—remaining as national forests. There would be no huge cities, no steel mills like those in Pittsburgh, no Tacoma cable running from hill to hill, no seal-skinning slums on the disappearing glaciers. Instead, little Alaskan fishing and lumber towns would be settled by permanent populations like those found in British Columbia, unencumbered by the gospel of greed. Langille, who kept scrupulous record books, would soon be tasked with arresting timber thieves, issuing occupancy permits, enforcing game laws, and working closely with the Biological Survey, Fish Commissions, and Geological Society.

  When it came to Jack London’s tales of prospecting in Alaska and the Yukon, Roosevelt was a scold. Although he admired London’s heartiness, he hated The Call of the Wild, deeming it tacky “nature-faking.” Roosevelt—a cheerleader for the Harriman Expedition—wanted Alaska studied for its caribou herds, its grizzly and polar bears, the giant walrus, its seabirds. He was not interested in phony wolf stories. The heroes of Alaska, to Roosevelt, were the U.S. Forest Service agents like Langille, the conservationist law enforcers who arrested the dirty, unkempt gold seekers who thought Alaska was a casino to gamble their lives in. Roosevelt disdained “cheechakos,” avaricious miners flooding into southeastern Alaska who had no family values, no fashion, no manners, no code of ethics. To Roosevelt these gold seekers were like ice worms, digging into the land without any sense of community-building. London described prospectors on the California iron trail feeding Native Americans liquor, but this sad notion sickened Roosevelt. As a former police commissioner in New York City, who admired explorers, army officers, foresters, and biologists, he had zero tolerance for boozers, rabble-rousers, and malcontents, many so dirty that they stank, who didn’t know a snow bunting (Plectrophenax nivalis) from a dusky shrew (Sorex monticolus). What he admired about cowboys was their work ethic, cleanliness, homestead lifestyle, and equestrian skills; none of these rancher qualities were apparent in the “let’s blow up a mountain” ice worms.

  On public lands leased from the U.S. government in Alaska, Roosevelt preferred mining coal from the ground rather than dynamiting mountains in search of coal seams. When he could—as in the cheerful cases of designating Crater Lake (Oregon) and Mesa Verde (Colorado) as national parks—he worked in tandem with Congress. But if legislators resisted him, he steamrollered over them, invoking the new Antiquities Act to protect, for example, the Grand Canyon of Arizona or Devils Tower of Wyoming. The Antiquities Act gave any U.S. president the prerogative, on behalf of scientific investigation, to prevent public land from being exploited. On eighteen occasions Roosevelt used this act to set aside national monuments by means of executive orders. In addition, Roosevelt issued executive orders creating fifty-one federal bird reservations, four game preserves, and more than 150 national forests. Roosevelt had also introduced a host of modern wildlife protection laws. Calling in 1909 for a World Conservation Congress, Roosevelt wanted to protect the world’s oceans against overfishing, habitat destruction, and pollution from oil and sewage. Because Alaska had so much shoreline, he saw it as an ideal place to usher in a new marine conservationism, one enlightened by the image of Earth as a single pulsating biological entity, in peril from industrialization. (As the historian T. J. Jackson Lears has argued in No Place of Grace, Roosevelt was antimodern in his belief that “country life” was superior to urbanization.23)

  By the time of his address to the Arctic Brotherhood in 1903, Roosevelt had already made a first bold pre
servationist strike in Alaska. On August 20, 1902, he set aside the Alexander Archipelago, a 300-mile-long group of forested islands off the southeastern coast of mainland Alaska (named after a former head of a Russian fur-trading company). On that day more than 4.5 million acres of Alaska were protected in perpetuity. Muir, Merriam, Grinnell, and Burroughs had been eloquent about the Alexander Archipelago in the Harriman Expedition’s reports. These islands contained huge rugged mountains, high tundra, plunging valleys, and blindingly green rain forests. The fir-timbered islands in the Alexander Archipelago were an incubator for tens of thousands of hermit thrushes (Catharus guttatus), pine siskins (Spinus pinus), harlequin ducks (Histrionicus histrionicus), northern goshawks (Accipiter gentilis), black oystercatchers (Haematopus bachmani), and a large number of whale species. There was no such massing of wildlife anywhere else. In his memoir Travels in Alaska, Muir said that the Alexander Archipelago, whose melting glaciers were powerful enough to carry mountains to the sea, was his new “home” of “pure wilderness.”24 Native tribes called the archipelago the “Great Raven’s World” (the raven being considered cleverest of all animals). This lavishly diverse land was interlaced with spectacular inlets, fjords, glaciers, mountains, estuaries, thick meadows, muskegs, and high tundra.25

  Roosevelt also saw this new Alaska reserve—modeled after the Thousand Islands reserve of upstate New York—as a preemptive strike against Great Britain and Japan, whose cold-blooded market hunters were still clubbing fur seals in American waters around the Pribilofs. “We have taken forward steps in learning that wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of the people alive to-day,” Roosevelt said, “but the property of the unborn generations, whose belongings we have no right to squander.”26 Roosevelt also wanted to make sure the land rights of the Native Alaskan peoples—the Inupiat (in the Arctic), the Tlingit, and the Haida (in the panhandle)—would be protected. On a map, the Alaska Panhandle looked like an extension of British Columbia. But now, owing to William Seward’s fine diplomacy of 1867, and to Roosevelt’s conservationist convictions, the Alexander Archipelago was permanently safeguarded. Accepting advice from Grinnell, Roosevelt hoped that the Tlingit and Haida would be his watchdog rangers around the islands, making sure the luxuriant stands of tall natural timber remained. Roosevelt encouraged the residents to be whistle-blowers for the U.S. Forest Service if any illegal activities were being pursued by canneries.

  Because Roosevelt’s uncle Robert Barnwell Roosevelt had been the leading American ichthyologist from the 1860s to the 1910s, protecting fish populations and creating hatcheries was something of a family business. The Roosevelts were early believers in the idea of artificial fish propagation, useful in Alaska, where the salmon runs were getting thin. Roosevelt insisted that for every red salmon taken from Alaskan waters, at least four new fish had to hatch. This was a variation of his policy “Plant two trees for every one cut down.” In 1903 Roosevelt moved control of Alaskan fisheries from the U.S. Treasury Department to the recently founded U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, which was tasked with regulating the industry. Roosevelt wanted the Bureau of Fisheries to fund Alaska’s growing salmon propagation program. Tension rose between Alaskan citizens and the federal government. But Roosevelt, bypassing Congress, created two huge fish hatcheries in Alaska, which were vehemently opposed by fish packers. Toughening his regulation policies even more, Roosevelt wanted Secretary of Commerce William C. Redfield to regulate the mouths of all Alaskan rivers, streams, and bays within a three-mile radius. A reluctant Congress grappled with Roosevelt’s scheme; in the end it changed the limit to 500 yards as a compro- mise.27

  III

  The notion of creating an Alexander Archipelago National Forest first came to George T. Emmons, a former naval lieutenant. Emmons gloried in Alaska’s wilderness; he supervised Alaska’s display at Chicago’s World Columbian Exposition.28 At the time, Emmons was considered America’s reigning authority on Tlingit and Haida totem poles, and major museums worldwide collected Native pieces acquired by him. Nobody in the East, in fact, knew more about the islands, glaciers, and waterways of southeastern Alaska than Emmons (with the possible exception of John Muir). At a glance Emmons could distinguish edible plants like nagoonberry, fiddlehead fern, and wild celery from poisonous ones. Although he was based in Princeton, New Jersey, Emmons spent long summers in Sitka, studying everything from orcas (Orcinus orca) to short-tailed weasels (Mustela erminea). A true Renaissance man, he also considered himself a novice cetacean (whale) biologist, polar authority, and climatologist.29 When the Harriman Expedition’s ship anchored in Sitka, he brought the members to a hunter who had brown bear skulls for Merriam to study properly. Emmons was a disciple of Robert Barnwell Roosevelt and considered the Gulf of Alaska one of the finest marine biological zones in the world. Serving as Roosevelt’s eyes and ears concerning fishing regulation, he was determined to make sure the Alaskan coastal waters weren’t overfished or degraded.

  At Roosevelt’s request, Emmons wrote a cut-and-dried report—“The Woodlands of Alaska”—promoting the Alexander Archipelago as a national forest and protected waterway. Emmons’s knowledge of these southeastern Alaskan islands was based on personal exploration—a practice that always found favor with Roosevelt. Emmons’s report noted that much of Alaska’s wilderness was a patchwork of tundra, not suited to become a forest reserve. There were millions of acres of permafrost (frozen soil but not ice) in Arctic Alaska where thermometers regularly shattered in the severe cold. In the Arctic Ocean, there were solitary icebergs the size of Saint Louis or New Orleans. No cartographer had ever properly mapped the vast Brooks Range or coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea.30 Anchorage wasn’t even a city yet. Emmons didn’t think the extraction industries could do much damage that far north. But he worried that in a generation the great primeval forests of southern Alaska would be clear-cut if the federal government did not intervene. And the offshore waters were teeming with marine life; the departments of Commerce and Labor needed to police Alaskan fishing villages like Sitka and Katalla to send a broad message: the U.S. government, not fish-packing companies, controlled the waters.

  After careful scientific consideration, Emmons suggested that the Alexander Archipelago islets should remain “one immense forest of conifers,” a sacred place where the coast hemlock and Sitka spruce could thrive along protected coastlines.31 Only limited timbering would be allowed on the Alexander Archipelago islands, without the threat of the pulp industry’s sawmills. Emmons, in fact, concocted a plan for how the Roosevelt administration could work around fishing camps, sawmills, and canneries, and oversee a first-rate forest reserve.32

  With his “dream of a national forest in Alaska” accomplished by way of the Alexander Archipelago, Roosevelt set his sights on protecting other forest ecosystems in the aftermath of the Harriman Expedition.33 Roosevelt boldly proclaimed the 4.9 million-acre Chugach National Forest—adjacent to Anchorage—in 1907. (The new forest reserve absorbed the Afognak.34) Vast stands of Sitka spruce (Picea sitchensis), western hemlock (Tsuga heterophylla), western red cedar (Thuja plicata), and Alaska cedar in south-central Alaska were saved by the U.S. Forest Service from the maw of the timber and coal industries. To Muir’s delight, more than 10,000 glaciers were also part of the Chugach; currents regularly broke off chunks of ice and carried them out to sea. Roosevelt was worried that the Chugach, if not managed by the federal government, would be destroyed by the pulp industry and by fish packers. Much of the federally protected ancient forest was located around Prince William Sound, which extended from the Copper River on the east to the Kenai Peninsula on the west.35

  The Chugach National Forest—a subpolar rain forest—was perhaps Roosevelt’s most ambitious move with regard to conservation. Throughout the Chugach Mountains, which provided Anchorage with an ideal natural backdrop, rivers and creeks interlaced with snowfields, salmon wove their way to the Gulf of Alaska, wolverines (Gulo gulo) and bears were on the prowl, and explorers could easily get lost in w
hipping mists and rain squalls. Geographic features were named after animals: for example, Ptarmigan Lake and Caribou Creek. (All around the Kenai Peninsula, there were natural features eventually named after former U.S. presidents, such as Harding Icefield, Grant Lake, and Johnson Pass Trail.) Overnight the Chugach became the northernmost addition to the portfolio of the U.S. Forest Service; there were many gurgling creeks and milky blue-green rivers that nobody had yet named. All along Resurrection Creek, however, could be found the scars of mining. Heaped-up cobble and gravel marred the riverbanks.36

  Nobody in the East—with the exception of the faculty of Harriman’s “floating university”—could have imagined the diversity of Chugach National Forest. Essentially there were three bioregions within its boundaries: the Copper River delta (site of the premier salmon run in the world), Prince William Sound, and the Kenai Peninsula. The mantles of glaciers—which Muir had described on the expedition of 1899—were world-class around Prince William Sound. The members of the Harriman Expedition, having a little fun, named glaciers they encountered after schools: Columbia, Yale, Bryn Mawr, Radcliffe, Dartmouth, Holyoke, Barnard, Smith, Wellesley, Amherst, Williams, and Harvard among them.37 There were numerous tidewater glaciers calving into Prince William Sound. Other glaciers clung to mountains; Muir, poet of the Chugach wilderness, wrote about them in a journal: “The sail up this majestic fjord in the evening, sunshine, picturesquely varied glaciers coming successively to view, sweeping from high snowy foundations and discharging their thundering wave-raising icebergs, was, I think, the most exciting experience of the whole trip.”38