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

by Douglas Brinkley

  “I believe that the natural resources must be used for the benefit of all our people, and not monopolized for the benefit of the few, and here again is another case in which I am accused of taking a revolutionary attitude,” Roosevelt said in Kansas. “People forget now that one hundred years ago there were public men of good character who advocated the nation selling its public lands in great quantities, so that the nation could get the most money out of it, and giving it to the men who could cultivate it for their own uses. We took the proper democratic ground that the land should be granted in small sections to the men who were actually to till it and live on it. Now, with the water-power, with the forests, with the mines, we are brought face to face with the fact that there are many people who will go with us in conserving the resources only if they are to be allowed to exploit them for their benefit. That is one of the fundamental reasons why the special interests should be driven out of politics.”10

  Besides preaching for conservation in the Midwest, Roosevelt was captivating audiences across the country with his riveting tales about British East Africa. The publication of his African Game Trails was a huge event throughout America in the fall of 1910, and the memoir became a best seller. The farther west Roosevelt traveled, the denser the crowds became. People lined up for miles just for a chance to touch the Colonel’s sleeve, and they would let out a collective yell at the sight of his famous toothy smile. Knickknack booths, refreshment tents, and toy stands were set up at many appearances. Roosevelt delivered short, impromptu speeches at book signings, denouncing plutocrats and financiers but also sharing stirring adventure tales about chasing lions, sleeping in the jungle, and inventorying the Kenyan forest belt for conservation purposes. Working for the Smithsonian Institution, the Roosevelt party had collected 8,463 vertebrates, 550 large and 3,379 small mammals, and 2,784 birds.11 Some wildlife biologists thought it was a slaughter. In city after city, Roosevelt met with conservationists, offering his support in local fights against rapacious land developers. He spoke of the need for a Global Conservation Congress—the multinational organization the Taft administration had nixed. “Conservation means development as much as it does protection,” Roosevelt told a crowd of farmers. “I recognize the right and duty of this generation to develop and use the natural resources of our land; but I do not recognize the right to waste them.”12

  African Game Trails became a popular boys’ book, selling more than 1 million copies.13 Everywhere Roosevelt went that autumn, huge groups of adolescents paraded after him, hungering for stories of the wilderness and adventure. Never one to disappoint children, the ex-president regaled them with tales of Mount Kenyan fantail warblers, giraffes eating out of his hand, and the honeyguide birds that always led to trees of sweets. As if foreshadowing the New Deal, he urged young people to form a youth army to protect wilderness areas from vandals. “There are no words that can tell the hidden spirit of the wilderness, that can reveal its mystery, its melancholy, and its charm,” Roosevelt wrote; “swamps where the slime oozes and bubbles and festers in steaming heat; lakes like seas; skies that burn above deserts . . . mighty rivers rushing out of the heart of the continent through the sadness of endless marshes; forests of gorgeous beauty, where death broods in the dark and silent depths.”14

  When Roosevelt stopped in Oak Park, Illinois, the ten-year-old Ernest Hemingway, awestruck, dressed in a khaki safari suit, stood with his grandfather in a receiving line to shake hands with his hero. Young Ernest had just received his first gun (a 20-gauge shotgun) from his grandfather, and he had been playing Teddy Roosevelt instead of cowboys and Indians. Hemingway also joined the Agassiz Naturalist Club, learned taxidermy, and pleaded to go on his own safari to collect specimens. The green hills of Africa were calling him. As a young adult Hemingway—aspiring to qualify for the CFCA—would retrace Roosevelt’s safari to British East Africa and would befriend one of the men who had been the ex-president’s guides in 1909.15 “More than any other individual in history, Roosevelt opened the African frontier to the imagination of America’s youths,” Sean Hemingway, grandson of Ernest, wrote in a helpful introduction to Hemingway on Hunting. “The fresh scent of a new frontier and the thrill of the hunt, both with their overwhelming sense of valor and excitement, would captivate Hemingway for the rest of his life.”16

  During Roosevelt’s absence in Africa, President Taft had tried to garner a little of the “teddy bear” magic for himself. At a dinner in Atlanta, Georgia, Taft had been served a southern dish, barbecued possum. Imitating Roosevelt, Taft swore it was a “dee-licious” meal. Cartoonists jumped on the anecdote, calling Taft “Billy Possums.” A few cartoons ran in syndicated newspapers, and although these cartoons lacked pizzazz, Billy Possums cookouts became a brief fad in the Deep South. Also, enterprising entrepreneurs in New York quickly manufactured a new stuffed toy, Billy Possum. The sales were dismal, however. “A dealer—one of the biggest in the country—got a telegram on the night of the dinner,” the New York Evening Post reported. “He immediately went to a manufacturer. They put their heads together and possum skins were obtained. But the genuine skin, stuffed, looked like a gigantic rat.”17

  The possum toy sank without a bubble. Nobody was going to get excited over a novelty associated with William Howard Taft. “Before long,” the biographer Kathleen Dalton noted, “cartoonists parodied Taft as a lost boy searching for his Teddy Bear.”18 By contrast, everything associated with TR, from stuffed toys to bobble-head dolls, boomed after his African adventure. Abercrombie and Fitch advertised a khaki “Roosevelt Tent,” completely waterproof. It was Taft’s misfortune to follow such a charismatic force of nature as Roosevelt into the White House. Nobody could connect with the average American youth like the old Rough Rider. Colonel William Selig of Selig Polyscope made a nickelodeon movie of Roosevelt on a studio lot, renting tame lions to simulate a safari. The film, Hunting Game in Africa, featured a bad actor as Roosevelt, always in “bully” mode. It was a disappointment at the box office but it inspired the trademark roaring lion at the opening of MGM movies.19

  In June 1910—owing in part to Roosevelt’s outdoors philosophy and his African safari—the Boy Scouts of America was founded in New York City by Robert Baden-Powell; it would soon become the biggest youth organization in the United States.20 The front porch of the CFCA headquarters in Chappaqua, New York, surrounded by beautiful wilderness, was the site where this founding had first been thought of. Young boys needed to learn how to survive in the wild, how to tell a poisonous plant from an edible one. According to Daniel Beard, a founder of the Boy Scouts, Roosevelt’s promotion of faunal naturalism was the main impetus for creating an outdoors-oriented youth organization. Beard had been concerned that young boys had admired antiheroes like Blackbeard, Laffite, and Billy the Kid, so he tried to promote the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Peary. He believed that boys needed to develop honor, as well as outdoor skills such as knowing how to build campfires, tie knots, fly-fish, and use a jackknife, if they were to develop into first-class men. Only when boys understood that a bird’s egg was the most perfect thing in the world would their character be strong enough to resist the lurid carnival of American decadence. Shortly after the Boy Scouts was created, Beard had a private audience with Roosevelt. There was a direct lineage from the Boone and Crockett Club to the CFCA to the Boy Scouts; Roosevelt linked all three. “The Colonel,” Beard later boasted in Outlook, “gave me the authority to use his own name.”21

  By September 1910, Roosevelt was praising the Boy Scouts and the CFCA on his book tour. American boyhood, Roosevelt often said, should be oriented toward the outdoors and woodcraft, and away from the open-hearth furnaces of Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. Youngsters needed to be able to identify a common rock wren, appreciate the beauty of the tall-grass prairie, and smell fir boughs beside a campfire at night. Being in touch with nature and honoring all humans and wild creatures would help develop high moral character. Instead of becoming apathetic brats whining about money and profits,
youngsters would develop into citizen conservationists of the highest order.22 “I believe in the Boy Scouts movement with all my heart,” Roosevelt said. “The excessive development of city life in modern industrial civilization which has seen its climax here in our own country, is accompanied by a very unhealthy atrophying of some of the essential virtues, which must be embodied in any man who is to be a good soldier, and which, especially, ought to be embodied in every man to be really a good citizen in time of peace.”23 Roosevelt regularly touted Alaska, the Rockies, and the Pacific Northwest as great places for a young man to climb mountains, camp, and hike—wilderness zones where the young man could test his mettle against nature. By 1914, in part owing to Roosevelt’s plea, there were five Boy Scout troops in Alaska, with four scoutmasters and thirty scouts.24

  As the Boy Scouts developed into a nationwide idea, Rooseveltian conservation became one of the organization’s central tenets. The new generation of American boys needed to be both citizen-naturalists and citizen-scientists. The original Boy Scouts Handbook sold 7 million copies in three decades, a number second only to the Bible.25 By 1914, the Boy Scouts had awarded its first William Temple Hornaday Gold Medal for “conservation excellence” and the Gifford Pinchot Award for “notable work in extinguishing forest fires.” And Roosevelt became an honorary vice president of the Boy Scouts of America. Urging that all Boy Scouts follow the “golden rules,” Roosevelt said the real qualities that made a boy a man were unselfishness, gentleness, strength, bravery, and protection of the wilderness. “One of the prime teachings among the Boy Scouts will be teaching against vandalism,” Roosevelt wrote. “Let it be a point of honor to protect birds, trees, and flowers, and so make our country more beautiful.”26

  II

  Throughout the summer of 1910, Roosevelt worked hard to get Pinchot to contain his anger at President Taft. After all, it was a midterm election year, and Roosevelt didn’t want to be blamed for causing the Republicans to lose congressional seats and governorships. Slowing down a conservationist hothead like Pinchot, however, wasn’t an easy matter. Recognizing that Taft’s political power was ebbing, Roosevelt took a paternal approach toward Pinchot, never saying that Pinchot was wrong, always showing affection and concern, but always signaling, Knock it off. In a fatherly way, Roosevelt told Pinchot to “husband” his influence, to “speak with the utmost caution” and not to “say anything that can even be twisted into something in the nature of a factional attack.”27 Secretly, Roosevelt admired Pinchot’s progressive-minded “Insurgents” movement and was pleased that Lincoln-Roosevelt clubs were being formed across the country as a Republican bulwark against Taft and “Morganism.” Outwardly, however, he continued to feign uninterest in seeking the White House again.28

  Nevertheless, Roosevelt did object that it was unacceptable for private concerns to despoil Alaska of its natural resources for the purposes of big mining, big timber, and big railroads. Pinchot cheered the Colonel on. Because Alaska was geographically huge, transportation was always going to be a contentious issue there. The territory had no reliable network of roads for moving cargo. In 1912 there were four practical ways to get around: walking, dogsled, horse, or steamboat (Alaska had more than 4,000 miles of navigable waterways, of which approximately 2,700 were in the Yukon watershed). The Yukon River, flowing bow-shaped for 2,300 miles, was the great artery for freight, effectively dividing Alaska east-west into two halves. Only three North American rivers were longer than the Yukon: the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the Mackenzie. Roosevelt was in favor of internal improvements in Alaska, such as roads, canals, and railroads, but only if the U.S. government was in charge of construction on leased public lands.

  To Roosevelt, who had lobbied against the railroad industry’s segregating Yellowstone National Park in the 1870s, too many Alaskan roads would mean too much Alaskan development. Places like the coastal panhandle of southeastern Alaska, an ecosystem of thousands of islands equalizing the size of Florida where huge schools of humpback whales, orcas, and sea lions swam along the forested shorelines of the Alexander Archipelago and the Tongass National Forest, should be treasured, not exploited. The Tongass had the world’s highest density of grizzlies, black bears, and bald eagles. Their habitat should be left alone. The real value of Alaska, to Roosevelt, resided in managing its wilderness better than land skinners had managed that of the Lower Forty-Eight.

  Everywhere Roosevelt looked there were scoundrels wanting to make quick dollars on dubious transportation or reclamation projects in Alaska. The Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate had finagled financing to construct a 1,550-foot steel-truss bridge on behalf of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway, to transport copper from the mines to the seaport wharf in Cordova. Dubbed the “million-dollar bridge” (it actually cost $1.4 million), the construction project smacked of a boondoggle from day one. To Rooseveltians, the bridge was an expensive ploy to eventually open up the Chugach National Forest to increased private-sector copper mining. The ribbon-cutting ceremony for the “million-dollar bridge” took place in 1910, with officials of the Taft administration smiling alongside Kennecott copper miners. Boomers in towns such as Seward and Cordova celebrated the bridge. Alaska was on the rise! But Rooseveltians were prescient about the foolishness of Alaska’s first “bridge to nowhere.” By 1930, the Copper River and Northwestern Railway had gone bankrupt. Few folks used the expensive train tracks.

  In 1910, every Alaskan mining town wanted a road built for its district. Likewise, a priority list was established by a territorial commission to deliver mail more efficiently. The U.S. Signal Corps led the way by connecting Valdez (then the most northerly open port in North America) to Fairbanks (the practical head of navigation on the Tanana River). A 385-mile road linking Valdez to Fairbanks allowed Alaska to become an economy based on exporting natural resources. When Roosevelt left the White House, there were about 770 productive placer mines in Alaska, employing about 4,400 men. Only a few years later, owing to transportation innovations, these numbers had grown dramatically. Coal deposits could be found throughout 12,600 square miles of the territory.

  At Copper Mountain, a 250-ton smelter was polluting the air, and long tramways had been built at Niblack, Skowl Arm, Karta Bay, and Hetta Inlet to transport the most valuable ores. On the Seward Peninsula auriferous lode mining was taking place along the Solomon River. The brownish-black coal on the peninsula was lignite, frozen solid. Like peat, it cracked and crumbled on exposure to sun. However, this coal, lowest-ranked in terms of energy, burned readily, leaving chalky ash billowing upward from factory smokestacks. Carbon dioxide emitted from plants using lignite coal was more toxic than that from comparable factories using black coal. Lignite was so combustible that railroad companies, fearing industrial accidents, didn’t like to transport it for long distances.29

  Clearly, Alaska wasn’t a worthless icebox, even though its nicknames, according to the Philadelphia Inquirer, were “Walrussia,” “Icebergia,” and “Frigidia.”30 It was the next West Virginia: a source of coal, a storehouse of limitless rock fuel ready to be extracted for an economic bonanza. (And probably at the cost of human lives. In 1907 alone 3,242 West Virginian miners perished in mining accidents.) The Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle had promoted this notion about coal in the “Great Land” to more than 3.5 million visitors in 1909–1910. Conservationists circa 1910, by contrast, saw Alaska as John Muir had seen it—as “nature’s own reservation”31 where “nothing dollarable is safe.”32 Huge dams or copper and coal mines, these wilderness advocates believed, would kill rivers and destroy the breeding areas of migratory birds. “Conservationists and boosters were united in admiration for the frontier and in agreement on its importance as an ingredient in American culture and history,” the historian Peter A. Coates wrote. “However, they differed, often diametrically, in the ways they expressed affection and how they formulated the best means to ensure the survival of their revered frontier.”33

  Writing to his twenty-two-year-old son, Ted, Theodo
re Roosevelt pined for the Alaska Range, longing to be thrust into a territorial wilderness with ospreys and eagles overhead.34 The distance from Point Hope, Alaska (a spit of land jutting into the Chukchi Sea), to Washington, D.C., was greater, in miles, than that from New York to Senegal. The Colonel loved this kind of remoteness.35 He wanted to be anywhere outdoors in Alaska where there wasn’t a book to sign or a hand to shake. Roosevelt had shipped his sixteen-year-old son, Archie, off to the Black Hills under the watchful eye of Seth Bulloch, a sheriff and forest ranger who was by nature a scoutmaster and who knew how to toughen up boys. Heading out to the University of California–Berkeley, Roosevelt wrote to its president, Benjamin Wheeler, about the difficulties of being overbooked as both father and speaker. Proudly preaching the “new nationalism,” Roosevelt made it abundantly clear that he wanted the Republican Party to prosper in the midterm election come November. He would hold his nose and vote for Taft. “I have a much larger following west of the Alleghenies than east of them,” Roosevelt wrote to his son Ted, “and have my own difficulties here in New York simply because New York is of course the center of big business, of the big lawyers who guide the big business men, and of the multitude of small business men and small lawyers who take their care from the men at the top of their respective professions.”36

  That November the Democrats gained fifty-seven seats in the House and ten in the Senate. The party of William Jennings Bryan now had outright control of the House (and working control of the Senate in combination with a smattering of progressive Republicans). The Democrats were pulling down the shade on the Republican Party for the first time since Grover Cleveland had worked his electoral magic in 1892. But Roosevelt didn’t feel paralyzed. The midterm defeats suffered by the Republicans turned his attention more toward his conservationism. Briefly swearing off politics, Roosevelt returned to wildlife biology, his lifetime passion, swapping information with professional peers. The entomologist Willis Stanley Blatchley, for example, had sent Roosevelt a book on beetles. Roosevelt knew that Darwin, just a few weeks before dying, had written about a water beetle that attached itself to a clam in a pond in the English Midlands. Feeling diffident about his own knowledge of beetles, Roosevelt was glad to study Blatchley’s fine new research. “There was one beetle found on Lake Victoria Nyanza that almost came in the category of big game,” Roosevelt wrote to Blatchley that Christmas, using a kind of insider’s shorthand. “It was considerably larger than a mouse. You of course know all about it, it is called the galia beetle.”37