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

by Douglas Brinkley

  Even though Marshall was studying at Harvard Forest, his life and attitude had been dramatically changed by the Cascade Range, the sweeping Columbia River, the volcanic mountains, and south-central Washington’s evergreen stands. Full of exciting tales about the Pacific Northwest, Marshall started presenting himself as an honorary Sierra Club type to his fellow students, who were enraptured by his stories of the utter solitude to be found in western forests. Several pursuits were simultaneously important to Marshall. Besides forestry, he was enamored with phenology, studying periodic biological phenomena such as flowering, breeding, and migration, in relation to geology and climate. How the insect world damaged forests was another enduring interest. His friends in New York started calling him Mr. Silviculture or Little GP (after Gifford Pinchot).

  Marshall earned his master of forestry degree at Harvard in the spring of 1925. To celebrate, he headed to his beloved Adirondacks backcountry to climb a few 4,000-foot peaks with stalwart friends. Shedding his suit of black broadcloth for alpine wear, he eventually ascended all forty-six mountains in the Adirondacks that were over 4,000 feet high. At the summits he studied unusual lichens and mosses. His high-altitude climbing also led to the creation of a New York mountaineers’ club, the Adirondack Forty-Sixers. Whenever Marshall hiked, he took careful notes about the health of thickets of spruce and balsam. The outdoors life became his theology. Refreshed and invigorated from climbing so high that even the treetops below were not distinguishable, Marshall reported for duty at the U.S. Forest Service in Washington, D.C. He asked to be dispatched to Fairbanks, Alaska, but found himself assigned to the Northern Rocky Mountain Forest Experiment Station in Missoula, Montana.

  Missoula was an attractive college town with coffeehouses, outfitters’ shops, taprooms, and a giant stone M emblazoned on the west face of Sentinel Mountain. The forestry club at the University of Montana was considered one of the best in America. And everybody in town, it seemed, had harrowing stories to tell about March blizzards, sheep-thieving cougars, or a rampaging grizzly named Old Ephraim. Marshall found himself feeling strangely at home among the blue-collar hunters and no-nonsense ranchers. The aristocratic expression left his countenance, for in Montana he was a forest scientist, not merely a bright boy with a trust fund.

  In Glacier National Park country, he learned that forestry was a hard taskmaster. Timbering had to be controlled along the Idaho-Montana alpine border, and forest fires were a menace to the thickly wooded region. Sparks from a fast-traveling train could cause more extensive fire damage than an arsonist. Ever since the “Big Burn” in 1910, fire lookouts had been constructed from Missoula to the Canadian border. In July 1925 Marshall was principally responsible for extinguishing more than 150 fires in Idaho’s Kaniksu National Forest. Watching mountainsides of ponderosa pine and sweet cedar burn like a “nebulous planet” taught Marshall a lesson about the “unconquerable, awful power of Nature.”15 All the firefighting supplies available were hauled up the Priest River. But they weren’t enough to save the western white pine forests of Mount Watson. More than 2,000 virgin acres were burned. Only after a “thousand man-days of labor” was the fire suppressed.16

  From June 1925 to August 1928 Marshall ranged all over Montana and Idaho, in and out of every threadbare frontier outpost in the heart of the northern Rockies. Meticulously he applied his Harvard training to analyzing sensible methods for cutting and replanting. Wandering high into a jagged line of snow-covered peaks, he often would stay at a forlorn ranger shack or a lumber camp. The loggers gossiped about his long-distance hikes, which he took despite hailstorms and downpours; his adventures became local folklore. Because Marshall explored widely, he made a memorable impression. These were the days before Outside magazine; hiking forty miles a day just for fun was viewed as aberrant behavior. Many people thought Marshall must be engaged in a coming-of-age rite to prove his manhood. With his toothy smile, his young man’s beard, and his pack full of all-seasons gear, he seemed outlandish. He’d grow a mustache for a week, then shave it off, then let it grow again. With ropes around his waist and a boyish grin, he was a most arresting presence.

  Further baffling hard-bitten Missoulans was Marshall’s pride in being an American Jew. Most Jews in Montana downplayed their identity; some changed their names. But no matter where Marshall was in the wild, he’d observe the Sabbath. In September 1925, on Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, Marshall hiked into the backcountry. The glory of autumn was on display; the aspen leaves looked like gold coins. He believed that nature was a synagogue, that fasting in a virgin pine forest along the Continental Divide allowed him to clear his mind of frivolous thoughts. Being mindful of God’s wild creation was religious for Marshall. That observance of Yom Kippur, fittingly enough, made Marshall even more committed to devoting his life to forest preservation.

  Throughout his months in alpine Montana Marshall corresponded with his family and friends about the Northern Rocky Mountain Forest Experiment Station. Nobody before or since has written about western Montana’s green-gold somnolence with as much grace as Marshall, who described everything from jackrabbits to larch needles. And his personality as a naturalist was gaining tangible professional benefits. Between 1925 and 1928 he wrote several articles on forestry, lumberjack culture, and wilderness preservation. Using the Forest Service’s national newsletter (the Service Bulletin) as his pulpit, Marshall sided with the case against roads that the young forester Aldo Leopold was making for Gila National Forest in New Mexico. Leopold and Marshall both wanted primitive areas of national forests to be declared roadless, free of all construction—vast tracts of public lands saved from the press of modern humanity.

  Sometimes the death of one conservationist seemed to coincide with the birth of another. On September 21, 1928, Charles Sheldon died in Nova Scotia, Canada, leaving behind his voluminous unpublished Alaskan journals (known in the Boone and Crockett Club to be immensely rich in detail about the Denali wilderness). Sheldon had received modest public acclaim—he was called the father of Mount McKinley National Park. And he had a legion of friends, having served on the board of directors of the National Parks Association, the National Recreation Committee, and the National Geographic Society, and as chairman of the Commission on the Conservation of the Jackson Hole Elk. Indeed, his list of affiliations was so long that he probably lost track of them himself. Nobody, it seemed, had done more than Sheldon to save interior Alaska. The snowcapped mountains of the Alaska Range were his life story. There was a lyrical intensity to everything Sheldon did on behalf of Dall sheep and caribou. As when Muir died in 1914, Sheldon’s death left a void in the conservation movement, particularly in Alaska—a void that Bob Marshall would soon fill.

  Meanwhile, in the fall of 1928, Marshall enrolled in Johns Hopkins University’s PhD program in plant physiology. His goal was nothing less than permanently altering the course of U.S. forest policy. Already, his landmark article in the U.S. Forest Service Bulletin—“Wilderness as a Minority Right”—was being acclaimed by nature enthusiasts of all stripes as a major intellectual breakthrough, a long-overdue articulation of the right to open space, miles upon miles in extent. Much of his time in Baltimore was spent in greenhouse laboratories conducting experiments with evergreen and conifer seeds. Companies such as Weyerhaeuser Lumber had destroyed great forestlands, and Marshall vowed to reverse this trend. Rising at five o’clock in the morning, Marshall would toil away until eleven at night, determined to learn the secrets of soil composition. Defining himself first and foremost as a conservationist, he believed scientists should engage in political advocacy: that is, more stringent federal regulation of “big timber.” He published articles in the Nation (“Forest Devastation Must Stop”) and in the Journal of Forestry (“A Proposed Remedy for Our Forestry Illness”).17 The League for Industrial Democracy issued a thirty-six-page pamphlet written by Marshall, promoting the undeniable virtues of public forests over private ones. Minimal impact became his creed.

  Bored by his academic career but
refusing to feel boxed in, the twenty-eight-year-old Marshall organized a scientific trip to the unmapped Brooks Range—named after Alfred Hulse Brooks, who served as chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) from 1903 to 1924—to study the northern timberline. Independently wealthy, he was ready to leave academia and make a career as an iconoclast for wilderness preservation. He had been spending his downtime at Johns Hopkins poring over topographical maps of Alaska printed by the USGS. More than 100 million acres had not yet been mapped. The Arctic tundra held an immediate—and lifelong—fascination for Marshall. Wanting to work north of Fairbanks, Marshall set his sights on the central Brooks Range, which stretches west to east across northern Alaska and into Canada’s Yukon Territory. Any stream north of this range flowed into the Arctic Ocean. The meandering Yukon north of Denali and south of the Brooks Range flowed into the Bering Sea (technically an extension of the North Pacific). Marshall, the forester, was interested in how black spruce flourished even in subzero weather. He hoped to plant spruce seeds, wanting to prove exactly where the North American tree line ended.

  II

  In 1929 Marshall made his first trip to Alaska. Prior to this he had looked at a blank spot on a USGS map around the Koyukuk River and had wanted to fill in the vast white space. At long last, he got to see the northern lights. When he arrived in Fairbanks, wearing thick flannel shirts, insulated pants with suspenders, and a rainproof jacket, the bearded Marshall looked like an Amish model for an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. Eager to get to work, he bought a ride on a plane to Wiseman, a mining hamlet located along the middle fork of the Koyukuk River in the central Brooks Range. What an adventure! Marshall’s eyes popped in wonderment as he peered out the plane’s window at the awesome scenery. The Brooks Range had no central feature like Denali or Saint Elias, but it was nevertheless breathtakingly magnificent. Its beauty, however, was subtle. The size and remoteness of the Brooks Range—all those peaks without names and never climbed—made it the wildest roadless area in North America. Marshall was surprised that there was so much sedimentary rock, and so little metamorphic rock. Clearly, these peaks had once been under a sea. If you climbed any peak you’d be almost certain to find marine fossils. It astounded Marshall to think that the Brooks Range was the northernmost part of the Rocky Mountains.

  Only 127 people lived in Wiseman when Marshall arrived. Dusty, ramshackle, and without modern conveniences, the place was lost to the world, with not even a railway connection or a decent road to somewhere else. The centerpiece of the town was Pioneer Hall, where trappers, Eskimos, and prospectors congregated to sing old Canadian folk songs or dance the Hesitation Waltz (a two-step-count, forward-and-back waltz with a prolonged pause) late into the night. Isolation wasn’t merely a part of living near the snow-blanketed Brooks Range; it was the all-encompassing reality. Nature was the reigning king in Wiseman, so remote from the daily rhythms of even Fairbanks that it might as well have been Tierra del Fuego. It was hard to make even a brief call out on a shortwave radio. But even though there was not a single railroad depot, not a single room wired for electricity, and not a single tin lizzie within 200 miles along a dogsled trail, and the closest accredited doctor was more than two hours away, with only a grudging concession made to modern medicine (pills), Wiseman was, in Marshall’s estimate, “the happiest civilization on earth,” a magical place where alcohol flowed freely to help people cope with the long dark winters.18

  Wiseman had the appeal of a hillbilly moonshine hollow in Tennessee. The house joints were caulked with mud. The best one-room homes were made of hewn pine with rusty corrugated tin roofs. Everything looked haphazard and hurriedly constructed. West of town were the austere Endicott Mountains, an ideal wilderness. Hiking the range, Marshall felt elevated to previously unimagined spiritual and moral heights. In the wind-torn rawness, the desolate bleakness, he shed New York, Massachusetts, and Maryland to become, as far as possible, a primitive Alaskan. He hiked a lot. Building bonfires to stay warm, staring into the flames of resinous wood, Marshall thought of Baltimore as useless and mediocre compared with the north fork of the Koyukuk River.

  Getting up at dawn, Marshall would camp around the Brooks Range with feelings of awe, disbelief, and tense excitement. He didn’t even mind the weather locals called “freeze-up.” Just as John Burroughs had the Catskills and John Muir the Sierra Nevada, Marshall now had the Brooks Range. With great preciseness he recorded every craggy ridge and glacier-carved valley in the notebook he always kept handy. Because so few outdoorsmen had actually lived in the Brooks Range, Marshall felt that he was discovering summits virgin to Euroamerican footprints. Being alone in the Brooks Range created a sense of total removal, a supernatural out-of-body experience, stripping his spirit from the body as in a Chagall painting. The Arctic terrain made him feel cosmically alone.19

  Two imposing portals Marshall explored north of Wiseman—Frigid Crag and Boreal Mountain—soon became altars to him.20 Watching clouds clear off the summits seemed holier than a prayer. Incalculable geological forces had clearly been working here. Previously unexplored by conservationists, this unforgiving part of the Brooks Range had no equal in America for rugged beauty. It bore silent witness to a great cataclysm that geologists still didn’t quite understand. “His joy,” Marshall’s brother George recalled, “was complete when, standing on some peak, never before climbed, he beheld the magnificence of a wild timeless world extending the limit of sight filled with countless mountains and deep valleys previously unmapped, unnamed, and unknown.” Standing in a blowing wind, Marshall declared these towering portals the “Gates of the Arctic.” The name stuck. On December 1, 1978, Gates of the Arctic became a national monument. The four words—Gates of the Arctic—conveyed a sense of exploration, discovery, and freedom to conservationists all over the world. On December 1, 1980, 7.95 million acres of this majestic landscape were officially designated Gates of the Arctic National Park (the second largest in the U.S. system). In Gates of the Arctic country, Marshall said, an outdoorsman could “get away from the rat race.”21

  Marshall’s intense explorations in the Gates of the Arctic region is legendary in Alaska. He saw the Brooks Range as unique among all recreational assets owned by the U.S. government because it was pristine wilderness, with scarcely an industrial imprint anywhere. All around were peaks and glaciers over 9,000 feet in elevation. Like Charles Sheldon before him, he tested himself against rising rivers, the midnight sun, and hungry bears. Wearing caribou-skin parkas, boots, socks, and mittens, he looked like a Nunamiut hunter. Hiking for Marshall became an aerobic endeavor that set his heart and lungs pumping. Caribou liver became his staple food, a marvelous source of iron and protein. He euphorically marveled at the abundance of Arctic birds such as the semipalmated plover (Charadrius semipalmatus) and spotted sandpiper (Actitus macularius). While Louis Marshall was in Switzerland leading an effort for Jews to resettle in Palestine, Marshall was discovering the Gates of the Arctic. And when word reached him that his seventy-three-year-old father had died in Zurich, he took the news stoically.

  III

  A few weeks after Louis Marshall’s death came Black Tuesday: the New York Stock Exchange crashed. America was in a panic. The Great Depression had begun. For Marshall, who had been moving toward socialism since his days at Syracuse University, the economic downturn was proof that capitalism was a flawed system. Companies such as Weyerhaeuser, Long Bell, and Pacific Lumber didn’t give a damn about working families. The Great Depression—like World War I—strained the resources of the U.S. Forest Service in the West. Starting in the fall of 1929 the Hoover administration had the deteriorating economy as an excuse to dismantle the expansive federal reserves. The administration now argued that clear-cutting federal reserves brought jobs. The forest-products industry, predictably, agreed. Then Gifford Pinchot, now serving as governor of Pennsylvania, stepped in. Pinchot, who had considerable standing among foresters, called for an emergency meeting of America’s best and brightest conservationists—inclu
ding Marshall. They were to convene at Pinchot’s home in Washington, D.C., in late January 1930. Pinchot was furious about a “wishy-washy” report issued by the Society of American Foresters pertaining to woodlands preservation.22 To Pinchot, the report was disingenuous and was actually aimed at opening up public lands. Although he had retired from the U.S. Forest Service in 1910, Pinchot was not at all hesitant to oppose clear-cutting. Pulling an activist committee together, he tasked Bob Marshall and Ward Shepard with drafting “A Letter to Foresters.” Marshall, a master of invective, gleefully lambasted foresters as infected by capitalistic greed. It was sacrilegious, Marshall wrote, for any real forester to condone the “spiritual decay” of America’s forestlands. Later, Marshall would accurately describe this open letter as “the most radical action any forestry organization had ever taken.”23

  Pinchot’s summit had an inspirational effect on Marshall. Clearly, Marshall was more socialist than Pinchot, but their political differences—romantic preservation versus utilitarian conservation—were inconsequential compared with the differences between them and the Hooverites they were fighting. Actually, Pinchot and Marshall were both visionaries, were both nature lovers, and were both undoubtedly among the most colorful figures in the history of U.S. forestry. “Governor Pinchot,” Marshall declared, “is one of the most amazing men I have ever met. After 35 years of forestry battles, instead of being discouraged and cynical, he is entering this new fight with as much enthusiasm and interest as a boy of 20.” Perhaps after the loss of his father, Marshall had found a surrogate in Pinchot. At the very least Marshall enjoyed sharing enemies with the legendary Pinchot. “He thinks Hoover, Hughes, and Mellon are all terrible,” Marshall said, “believes in government ownership of natural resources, is strong for civil liberties and really is interested in everything a liberal should be.”24