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

by Douglas Brinkley

  The Forest Service—the largest bureau within the U.S. Department of Agriculture—had its work cut out for it in policing the sprawling Chugach. Its rangers, emboldened by Pinchot’s esprit de corps, sometimes had sole responsibility for overseeing millions of acres of both land and sea. From 1903 to 1911 Langille worked like an FBI agent, hunting down timber scoundrels in the Chugach and illegal fishermen in Prince William Sound. Simultaneously, he kept pushing for more Alaskan lands to be run by the Forest Service. Locals thought the Alaskan wilderness should be clear-cut and turned over to the pulp and paper industry. Langille scoffed at the “corporate frontiersman,” interested only in exploiting land for a single generation and not in preserving it for the long run. Among all the places managed by the Forest Service, only the Philippines were as isolated from the Lower Forty-Eight as the Chugach. In 1909 the boundaries of the Chugach included all of Prince William Sound along with such landmarks as Montague Island, Controller Bay, and the thousands of unnamed glaciers that Muir treasured. Sometimes it seemed to Langille that all the non-Natives in Alaska were corruptible. Even Governor Brady, Roosevelt’s friend in Sitka, had been hoodwinked by a con man, Harry Reynolds, into investing in a sham home-rule railroad. Reynolds had persuaded Brady to be a member of the railroad board even though he was still governor. An embarrassed Roosevelt had Brady fired in 1906.39

  Langille had made Yes Bay, a cannery village near Ketchikan, his Forest Service headquarters. Having grown up along the Hood River of Oregon, he was an expert skier. During the Klondike gold rush of the late 1890s he had traveled from Dawson to Nome looking for gold. For a while Jack London had been his cabin roommate in the Yukon, and he had known the dog “Buck” from The Call of the Wild. Rough-hewn, as fit as a lumberjack, endowed with the guts of a pioneering Arctic explorer, Langille was the kind of rugged outdoorsman the Forest Service hired to oversee Alaska’s forestlands. While in Nome, prospecting for gold, Langille received a wire from Gifford Pinchot asking him to oversee federal forestry in Alaska. Langille, wearing his only suit, went to Washington, D.C., in 1902 to plot a strategy for Alaskan lands with President Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. His annual salary would be around $2,000.

  Upon returning to Alaska, Langille went on a reconnaissance mission all over the territory. Like a French-Canadian voyageur during the old days of fur trapping, Langille canoed up the Stikine River, inspecting sawmills, canneries, and Native villages. His reconnaissance was extensive. In April 1904, he traveled from Juneau to Controller Bay all across Prince William Sound and then onward to Norton Sound. Living off the land, Langille shot rabbits and ptarmigan with his .22 rifle, reeled in grayling with homemade flies, collected wildflowers to be studied back in the East, and mapped boundaries for potential forest reserves. Langille was a one-man Corps of Discovery operating in the twentieth century, watching over Alaska. Or, perhaps more accurately, Langille was Roosevelt’s top cop in the big woods.

  Roosevelt, influenced by Langille, withdrew the Tongass National Forest in 1907; it consisted of nearly all of southeast Alaska from Dixon Strait (in the south) to the Yakutat forestlands (in the north). Within the forest were parcels of private land.40 Not long after the creation of the Tongass reserve came the great consolidation. In 1908, TR combined the Alexander Archipelago reserve (which he had saved in 1902) with the new Tongass reserve to form one huge entity of 6.7 million acres. The entirety was now designated the Tongass National Forest (named for the Tongass tribe of the Tlingit people).41 The Tongass—carved out of the public domain—stretched over 500 miles from north to south in Alaska and included more than 11,000 miles of rugged coastline (a figure equal to nearly 50 percent of the entire coastline of the Lower Forty-Eight). To look at it another way, the new national forest blanketed an area exceeding 61,000 square miles—about 80 percent of southeastern Alaska.42 Today it is one of the world’s largest surviving temperate rain forests, with a biomass comparable to tropical rain forests in Venezuela, Brazil, or Costa Rica.

  While the Tongass was certainly a large landmass, it wasn’t all forestland; there were many glacial waterways as well as limestone rock and varied vegetation. What mattered was keeping all the elements of the Great North Forest ecosystem intact. Roosevelt knew that soon, with the statehood movement advancing, entrepreneurs would start imagining clear-cuts, smokestacks, and roads. He wanted only a few sawmills, locally run, to be licensed for timber. No huge outside companies would be allowed. “The history of the Alaska territory up to that time had been a history of exploitation,” Kathie Durbin wrote in Tongass: Pulp Politics and the Fight for the Alaska Rain Forest. “The exploiters had come in waves, seeking sea otter pelts, gold, salmon, and crabs from the Aleutians, and ivory from the Arctic coast. These raids had depleted Alaska’s bounty, producing brief booms and generating great wealth for a few.”43 Roosevelt believed that the U.S. Forest Service could protect the Tongass in perpetuity. An array of chartered fishing vessels—purse seiners, halibut boats, gill netters, and trawlers—were allowed, but there were highly regulated catch limits.44

  With scores of high, tumbling waterfalls; five salmon species in the streams; and brown and black bears around every bend, the Tongass was a wilderness paradise, considered by many to be among America’s most beautiful national forests. There were eagles and ravens everywhere. Nearly one-third of the Earth’s old-growth temperate rain forest grew in the Tongass coastal ecosystem. The estuaries and coastal meadows in the Tongass have been called a “biological buffet” of marine life. Annually, anadromous wild salmon leave the ocean and return to their Tongass freshwater birth streams to perish. Every spring humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) journey nearly 3,000 miles from Hawaii to the waters around the Tongass to breed and calve. “The Tongass is a place where people live with salmon in their streams and bears in their backyards,” the naturalist Amy Gulick, granddaughter of Sierra Club’s founder Edgar Wayburn, wrote. “It’s a land of remarkable contrasts.”45 Like Muir, Roosevelt wanted these lands and waters to be a cherished part of the American heritage forever. To desecrate such islands of the Alexander Archipelago as Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof was akin to rape and unbefitting of a conservation-minded citizenry working to benefit future generations. The Forest Service would hold the line in the Tongass and the Chugach, refusing to lease land tracts to huge corporate extraction businesses.

  Unfortunately, many Alaskans loathed Roosevelt’s two national forests, the Tongass and the Chugach. The prevailing sentiment in Juneau-Sitka was: How dare Washington, D.C., tie up so much land to prevent strip-mining and clear-cutting? Before long, the Alaska boomers and sourdoughs complained, the maniacal public land conservationists would even try to save worthless muskeg bogs and thaw lakes. First- and second-generation Alaskans, particularly those in extraction and cannery businesses, turned livid at what they considered two blasphemous words: national forest. Mentioning Roosevelt’s name at a flapjack shack in Seward or a general store in Valdez guaranteed a negative reaction. Wisely, Roosevelt kept Langille—a forester, scholar, and artist to boot—as his first federal forest officer in Alaska. Locals couldn’t help liking Langille for his self-effacing, honest demeanor; he was always ready with a corny joke, though his hand was never far from his holster. Langille recommended to Roosevelt that Admiralty and Montague islands—offshore from Cordova in Prince William Sound—become protected wildlife reserves. “There is room for the frontier settler and fisherman on the shore land,” Langille wrote, “but keep out the fire and wanton game destroyers.”46

  To put Roosevelt’s Alaskan forest reserves into perspective, the Tongass National Forest was the size of West Virginia and the Chugach National Forest approximately equaled Massachusetts and Rhode Island combined in acreage. This was clearly not just a clump of trees (eventually 6 million acres of the Tongass would be designated a federally protected wilderness). It was a first-round knockout punch for the naturalist side of the feud over the “two Alaskas.” Only California held more acres of federal reserves than Alaska.47
Limited, regulated logging would be allowed in the Tongass and Chugach forests, as would licensed hunting and fishing. But the Roosevelt administration was opposed to wholesale clear-cutting. Alaskans could chop down trees in the Tongass and Chugach to build houses, but out-of-state corporations wouldn’t be allowed to annihilate the virgin forests for quick profit. Southeastern Alaskan sawmills had to be community-based, family-owned operations. Each stage of logging on U.S. federal property in Alaska—marking, cutting, skidding, transporting, and milling—would be carefully regulated. The diverse wildlife—including deer, bears, eagles, and salmon—in these national forests would likewise be managed. Logging in Alaska, Roosevelt declared, had to be consistent with wildlife protection objectives. Simply put, Roosevelt vehemently objected to the harvesting of these national forests by timber barons or giant multinational corporations. As he had told the Arctic Brotherhood in 1903, smaller localized pulp mills should instead get the land leases. The rest of Alaska belonged to Uncle Sam.

  There was in Roosevelt’s Alaskan wilderness withdrawals an element of aristocratic and scientific elitism, which had arisen from the white-linen tablecloth on the luxurious Elder. While Roosevelt did consider the Chugach and the Tongass “people’s forests,” his aim was to create wildlife sanctuaries for his fellow Ivy League–educated outdoorsmen to enjoy. Roosevelt always believed that wildlife and forestry were among the noblest professions. He intuitively trusted science-minded people because they hadn’t built their lives around earning fortunes. There truly were two types of Alaskans: those who saw the Chugach and Wrangell mountains as coal, gold, lands, and oil, and those who wanted to hike in magical places like Bagley Icefield and Kayak Island (where Vitus Bering had landed in 1741).

  Alaska was abuzz, during Roosevelt’s presidency, with the news that oil seeps had been found fifty miles southeast of Barrow near Cape Simpson (locals would cut out oil-soaked tundra to use as fuel). In the easternmost part of the Chugach National Forest, oil was discovered seeping out of the ground near Katalla. In 1896, a prospector, Thomas White, shouted oil, in a voice that was heard loud and clear in the nearby Prince William Sound community of Cordova. White filed the first petroleum claim in Alaska, at the time that McKinley was assassinated and Roosevelt became president. What concerned Roosevelt was that the Alaska Development Company started getting an oil flow in 1902. Well Number 1 had been successfully drilled at 366 feet. By declaring all the lands surrounding the Katalla well part of the Chugach National Forest, the U.S. government suddenly controlled the future of the area as an oil field. Alaskans saw Roosevelt’s action as a federal land grab and decidedly not as nature preservation.

  Not all the president’s reasons for creating the Chugach and Tongass national forests were inspired by preservation. He also wanted to address the economic concerns of southeast Alaska. Plenty of exemptions and withdrawals were allowed for local settlers. Roosevelt also had continual concerns about Canadians raiding U.S. forestlands and smuggling timber across the international line. Rangers and fire wardens of the U.S. Forest Service would serve as border protectors. As president, Roosevelt had enforced a federal law prohibiting the export of timber boards harvested from the Chugach or Tongass to any non-American market. These trees—alive or chopped—belonged to the American people. Southeastern Alaskan businessmen, in particular, protested against what they perceived as a federal stranglehold on potential timber crops. Why should citizens of Sitka or Ketchikan be denied global free trade? Roosevelt—and his small cadre of Pinchotian forestry experts operating in Alaska—argued that the Tongass and Chugach national forests actually helped frontier enclaves become sustainable communities instead of boomtowns. The Chugach and the Tongass were an inheritance to be passed on to future generations like jewels, gifts for time immemorial.

  IV

  Besides the Tongass and Chugach reserves, Roosevelt created gigantic bird refuges of inestimable merit in the Alaskan territory. Far from being an empty icebox, Alaska, Roosevelt knew, was green for half the year, owing to the long days of the Alaskan summer, and swarming with great flocks of birds in every direction. The various loons—common (Gavia immer), yellow-billed (G. adamsii), red-throated (G. stellata), Pacific (G. pacifica), arctic (G. arctica)—were so commonplace that their haunting call was heard even in the Brooks Range, and it came to symbolize the North Slope. The significant date for Alaskan wildlife protection was February 27, 1909, during Roosevelt’s last two weeks as president, while all the political pundits were focused on the appointees of the incoming Taft administration. In 1909, TR proclaimed six federal bird reservations in Alaska by means of executive orders: Tuxedni, Saint Lazaria, Yukon Delta, Bering, Pribilof, and Bogoslof. They were far bigger in scope than all of his administration’s previous bird reserves in places such as Florida, Oregon, and Louisiana. And the Alaskan reserves were unsurveyed. To Roosevelt, hunting game birds for sport or science wasn’t a sin, but as a die-hard member of the Audubon Society he believed that killing an American dipper (Cinclus mexicanus) or black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapilla) just for the hell of it was a crime against God.

  First among Roosevelt’s Alaskan bird sanctuaries was the Yukon Delta Reservation (today known as Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge)—eventually more than 16 million acres of flat delta stitched with rivers (mainly the Yukon and Kuskokwim) and dotted with hundreds of lakes, creeks, sloughs, and ponds. Roaming this huge lake-spattered tundra along the Bering Sea—the second largest in the United States, after the Mississippi—were caribou, lynx (Lynx canadensis), bears, and wolves (Canis lupus). Roosevelt knew, from E. W. Nelson of the Biological Survey, that in terms of density and biological diversity, the Yukon Delta terrain, like the Sacramento Valley, was an essential shorebird nesting area in the United States, the size of South Carolina. In the 1870s Nelson had brought back to Washington, D.C., nests and eggs from the salmon-rich Yukon Delta, to study them more carefully than he could on the marshy tundra.48 The reserve Roosevelt created was the size of South Carolina.49

  Birds from six major flyways—from the Atlantic Ocean to the eastern coast of Asia—would nest on the Yukon Delta or stop to rest and feed on their way to farther-off nesting grounds. Almost the entire world populations of bristle-thighed curlews (Numenius tahitiensis) and black turnstones (Arenaria melanocephala) breed there. Sheets of white birds often blanketed the landscape, making it look like a cotton field in Dixieland. Clouds of geese and ducks regularly swept across the sky, headed for the vast marshland during the great rush of spring. (Two of the sea ducks that regularly visited the Yukon Delta—the spectacled eider (Somateria fischeri) and Steller’s eider—are now listed as threatened and are protected under the Federal Endangered Species Act.50

  On February 27, 1909, Roosevelt created the Tuxedni Federal Bird Reservation (consisting of Chisik Island and Duck Island) with Executive Order No. 1039. The order provided for the protection of the nesting habitat for the largest aggregation of seabirds in Cook Inlet. Pelagic birds that congregated on the gravel beaches in these reservations included black-legged kittiwakes, common murres, horned puffins, glaucous-winged gulls, double-crested cormorants, the common eider, tufted puffins, and black oystercatchers. A fair number of passerine birds and raptors also thrived on the islands. This executive order actually exceeded bird-lovers’ hopes.51 Roosevelt, like a trickster raven, was brazenly confronting the “malefactors of great wealth,” claiming that a smew (Mergellus albellus)—the smallest Arctic sawbill—had more intrinsic value than a pulp mill.52

  Roosevelt had first learned about the birdlife on Chisik Island from Dall, who was tasked with mapping Cook Inlet for the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1895. Dall had published detailed field notes about Tuxedni Island for the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (these notes were complemented with numerous maps). Roosevelt was enthralled by the scientific exactitude of Dall’s prose pertaining to volcanoes, talus slopes, Mesozoic fossils, and glacial plains. But it was Dall’s vivid description of birdlife that got Roosevelt’s
juices flowing. “Near the beaches the rocks are worn into cave arches and pillars,” Dall wrote, “about which circle innumerable multitudes of sea birds.”53 But still, there was a dearth of reliable ornithological information, owing to a lack of local records, about the birds of Alaska until the late 1950s.

  Perhaps the most enduringly fascinating of the Alaskan places that Roosevelt saved as a federal bird reservation was Saint Lazaria, a sixty-five-acre islet in the middle of the Alexander Archipelago. It supported an astonishing 500,000 seabirds. Why did Saint Lazaria attract these birds when other nearby islets didn’t? Roosevelt wanted an answer from the ornithological community. He got one. First, Saint Lazaria was a good incubator because of an absence of ground predators: there were no foxes, raccoons, or wolves. Second, the soft soil was ideal for seabird burrows. A third factor was that the birds on Saint Lazaria had an endless supply of fish in the surrounding waters. Saving Saint Lazaria had been recommended to Roosevelt by Edward A. McIlhenny—founder of the company that makes Tabasco, a Louisiana hot sauce—who had donated Arctic birds (representing sixty-nine species) to be studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.54