Citizens of Fairbanks adopted some customs of the Midwest—quick coffee, saving pennies, school spelling bees, bake sales, trick or treat at Halloween—but it all seemed staged. Individualism was the core value here—the kind of libertarianism that Ayn Rand would celebrate in Atlas Shrugged (only they were pro-God). Still, ironically, the isolation and the rigor of the climate fostered deep codependency here. Virtually all the children—including Mardy—had a Siberian husky as a pet. Without dogsleds nobody could traverse the snowbound country. The unity between man and dog belied the go-it-alone posturing. Sled dogs loved to be harnessed, and Mardy was accomplished at harnessing them. “When the trail was good at all, I’d stand on the handlebars; otherwise, I’d have to run,” she recalled. “And those Alaska dogs were so eager to get into harness and go that you could hardly restrain them in the morning.”9
Dogsledding was a part of Native life in Alaska long before the gold rushes of 1897 to 1898. Around Fairbanks when the Muries got married, parts of dogsleds were found in Athabascan archaeological digs on the outskirts of towns. During the gold rushes, however, outfitters shipped dogs by the thousands—German shepherds, Saint Bernards, samoyeds, and enormous mongrels—to work in Alaska. A mixed dog with no real pedigree was called a husky (and sold as a “thoroughbred mongrel”). These huskies weren’t just for endurance mushing across rivers and gale-force blizzards. Copper miners used these hardy dogs as pack animals; they could easily pull five times their body weight. Others hitched them to wagons, buggies, and even boats. A common sight in Fairbanks while Mardy was growing up was dogsleds hauling firewood. The U.S. mail service gave yearly honors for the best dog mushing. The Nome Kennel Club organized the first Alaskan sled-dog races in 1908; it predated the Iditarod by sixty-five years.10
Perhaps because her stepfather was a stylish upper-crust lawyer, book learning came easily to Mardy. She was also blessed with social intelligence, and could make friends with nearly anyone—and especially with the restless seekers and backcountry idlers. Early on she decided that nomadic life was a virtue. Few people actually stayed in Fairbanks. Everybody, it seemed, was “striking out for the creeks” (a popular expression of prospectors and hunters). Along the mountain switchbacks were promyshlenniki (Russian traders looking for furs), stampeders from the Lower Forty-Eight intent on gold strikes, and Seattle businessmen seeking coal and copper.11
When Mardy turned fourteen, her father, Ashton Thomas, reentered her life. Like a “Wayfaring Stranger” in Carl Sandburg’s American Songbag, one day he showed up at her door, wearing a brand-new suit, asking to be forgiven. At first Mardy didn’t recognize him. Like some other Alaskans who had given up on gold, Thomas owned a salmon cannery; his was in Port Ashton, a handsome village of a few hundred people along Prince William Sound. Remarried, he wanted Mardy in his life. Seeing a chance for adventure, Mardy packed her suitcase and headed south to work in the cannery, with her mother’s grudging permission.
It was 375 miles by dogsled or horse carriage from Fairbanks to Port Ashton. Open sleds made it an arduous journey; the wind would rip at the travelers. There were, at least, plenty of roadhouses along the route. Many inns sold vegetables and refreshments at stands. What was amazing to Mardy was the engineering involved in constructing a road through a deep wilderness. She couldn’t believe men had been able to cut a five-foot trail in a cliff 1,000 feet above a raging stream. When the trail was misty with rain, plunging into the Copper River was a very distinct possibility. But Mardy relished every harrowing moment. Suddenly she understood that Alaska was far more than muddy little Fairbanks. Peak upon peak loomed over miles of wet, timber-rich mountains, purple immensities in the Pacific gloom that stretched all the way across the Aleutians to Japan. Mount McKinley’s south summit had been climbed in 1913, and mountaineers from the Lower Forty-Eight were coming to the area, looking for the right pass or ravine to test their mettle.
That summer of 1918, with America at war in Europe, Mardy became a young adult. The hamlets along the Valdez Trail (now the Richardson Highway)—Salcha, Sullivan’s Rapids, Big Delta—were sites of outdoors excitement. (This sled trail provided the only winter access to the Tanana Valley during the early decades of the twentieth century.) There was no end to the outdoors drama of the Valdez Trail, where a few hardy souls were even bicycling through the sixty-degree switchbacks and oxbows. Those on horseback spent every few minutes tightening the cinch for fear of falling down the mountainside. Mardy loved everything on the trail, from the trading stores’ imitation totem poles to Mount McKinley’s frozen grace. Spellbound, she vowed to climb McKinley someday. Many of Alaska’s 3 million lakes were in the area where she traveled. Caribou herds dotted the swampy peat bogs and blue-green pasturelands. Animal tracks were studied on “bathroom” breaks in berry thickets. Kingfishers dived into waterways. Alaska wasn’t just an icebox but also a green paradise teeming with wildlife. In Cordova, which was abuzz with the politics of coal, she boarded a Gulf of Alaska steamer and headed out into Prince William Sound to the offshore island of Port Ashton, officially part of Chugach National Forest.
Mardy’s new family greeted her heartily. Exhilarated and feeling grown up, Mardy spent the next three months learning the Alaska fisheries business, and also learning to row and use a compass as she explored the sound’s bays in a little boat with an outboard engine. The shoreline of the nearby Kenai Peninsula, where seine boats were working, was amazing; the mountains were vast and silent. “That first summer gave me a picture of that part of Alaska, a knowledge of camping stalls, and a respect for tide and storm,” she recalled. “We went through all the islands and their enticing coves. We hiked to the upper reaches of many of the islands. We watched a fight between a large whale and a killer whale.”12
After that summer, Mardy returned to Fairbanks full of Alaskan lore. Suddenly, learning the territory’s history and geography seemed important. Mardy wore boys’ lumberjack shirts and wanted to understand the mentality of stampeders who drifted into Fairbanks from Dawson. She wanted to know why the Tanana Valley, of all places, was the “garden spot” of Alaska. She took notice of pine grosbeaks feasting on frozen buds and berries in the upland spruce forests and woodpeckers scouring for hibernating insects under dark trees. She wondered about the smell of ozone after a big storm, and about the propagation of moss. Wild Alaska was a unique mystery to her. “Curiosity,” her stepfather said matter-of-factly, “that divine thing, curiosity. It will carry you when all else fails.”13 His words stayed with Mardy for the rest of her life.
Graduating from high school in 1919, the year Theodore Roosevelt died, Mardy enrolled at Reed College in Portland, Oregon. Down the 375-mile Valdez Trail she trekked again, arriving in Port Ashton a few weeks later. From there she caught a steamship to Seattle and then the train to Portland. Feeling carefree, Mardy explored the Cascades and the Columbia River and studied hard at Reed College. During the summer months she returned to Port Ashton to work as a cannery storekeeper, watching birds forage for fish whenever she had a free moment. Ashton Thomas’s cannery business was doing extremely well. In his derby hat and three-piece suit, and with his pocket watch, he epitomized the successful Alaskan businessman. When Thomas decided to move to Boston for a year to develop better contacts in the seafood distribution industry, Mardy seized the opportunity to go with him, to experience the glamour of New York City and Boston. After two successful years at Reed, she transferred to Simmons College in Boston for her junior year.
II
Gathering her belongings in Fairbanks before heading east, Mardy was introduced to a handsome wildlife biologist, Olaus Murie. She was saucer-eyed at her first sight of him. Intense, steely, and bursting with talent, Olaus was in Fairbanks to be outfitted for an arduous trek into the Brooks Range by dogsled to study the habits of caribou in winter. On chaperoned dates Olaus told Mardy about his life as a wildlife biologist, camping under the spruce boughs and constellations. A pursuer of silence, he unfeignedly liked the privations of traveling where there
were no roads but plenty of portages. Homelessness was his home. His precious dogs were all he usually had for companionship. Born in 1889—he was thirteen years older than Mardy—Olaus was blond and blue-eyed. Like so many great naturalists, he had been a bird lover since childhood. He was of Norwegian descent; his hometown was Moorhead, Minnesota; and his outdoors sanctuary was the Red River valley. “There were woods, birds, mammals,” he recalled of his happy youth in Minnesota. “It was living close to the earth—you know what that does for you. Gee, it was wonderful.”14 Flushing out grouse from the prairie grasses was a favorite outing of his; he knew how to put meat on the dinner table. Olaus had attended Fargo College in North Dakota, but wanting to get out of the flatlands, he transferred to Pacific University in Forest Grove, Oregon. After graduating in 1912, he stayed in Oregon for two more years. He was employed as a field naturalist for William L. Finley (a state game warden and perhaps the best photographer in America affiliated with the Audubon Society).
Much like Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, and Bob Marshall, Olaus Murie took trees seriously and considered deforestation a curse. Determined to make his mark as a scientist in the Arctic, he headed to Labrador and Hudson’s Bay on a paid assignment for the Carnegie Museum in 1914. Vilhjalmur Stefansson, the Canadian explorer and anthropologist, was starting to present Arctic habitats in a series of papers (in 1921 he would write The Friendly Arctic, a distillation of everything he had learned in below-zero temperatures, hoping to entice settlers to the north pole); but Murie was really the first serious biologist after Peary to adopt the Arctic as a laboratory. The Arctic, Murie believed, was very important to the new field of ecology. “Will we have the patience to understand what the northern part of the Earth has to offer?” Mardy Murie asked after traveling in the uncorrupted Arctic with Olaus. “Wherever we went in this country, there was something to see and wonder about. There were so many little things.”15
During World War I, Murie served with the Army Air Corps balloon troops based in Fort Omaha, Nebraska; he was therefore something of an expert regarding the impact of wind on high-altitude vegetation. Murie believed that scientists needed empirical data about the varied wildlife in the Arctic biosphere. He was displeased that no teams of biological experts had been dispatched to either pole. Looking around the saloons of Fairbanks he saw sea otters and polar bears stuffed and mounted. For a moment, a hatred seemed to clog his blood. It was one thing, he believed, to kill a moose for a steak or stew. It was quite another to use the antlers as a hat rack in a tavern or bar. His feelings ran particularly strong when he considered the free-roaming caribou—called the Fortymile Caribou Herd—that lived southeast of Fairbanks.16
In 1920 Olaus got his big break. Hired by the U.S. Biological Survey, he was tasked with studying the migration routes of Alaskan caribou. Olaus’s official title was assistant biologist and federal fur warden. He purchased a hooded oilskin poncho, thick wool socks, and the best snowshoes available from the mail-order catalogs. And romance was in the air. Before meeting Olaus Murie, Mardy Thomas had only a superficial appreciation of Alaska’s great caribou herds. She knew that the Gwich’in (“people of the caribou”) in the Brooks Range had prayed to the roving herds for 20,000 years. On dates with Olaus, Mardy now learned how caribou served this northernmost people’s utilitarian needs. The reverence that the Gwich’in (or Kutchin) felt toward the caribou was like the Plains Indians’ veneration of bison. Mardy had eaten caribou steak. She had worn caribou-skin boots. She had watched a hungry herd browsing on lichen in the tundra. She had heard caribou huff and hiss while being chased. When shot, caribou uttered a cry so anguished, so pleading, so terrified and mournful that Mardy winced with sympathy. In northern Alaska, caribou were as common as red squirrels. Mardy knew about caribou. But now she learned about their biological traits as if she were taking a college course. What Mardy liked most about caribou was that their fatness meant that at long last summer had arrived in frigid Alaska.
Olaus Murie soon taught Mardy more about the behavior of Alaskan-Yukon caribou. The U.S. Department of Agriculture had experimental stations at Sitka, Kodiak, and Rampart, aimed at trying to figure out how to grow vegetables in inhospitable terrain. However, no biologist was stationed in the Arctic. Murie volunteered for that duty. Charles Sheldon had an easy job in the Denali wilderness circa 1906, compared with Murie’s work at subzero Arctic temperatures where woolly mammoths once lived. Olaus’s brother was going to join him for his Arctic studies in 1922 but died of tuberculosis. Instead, his younger half brother, Adolph, joined him in Fairbanks to start a comprehensive study of the Alaskan-Yukon caribou. Working for the U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey, the brothers collected data on caribou in the noble tradition of Dr. C. Hart Merriam, head of the Biological Survey, a noble man who relished discovering new subspecies of North American mammals.
Olaus and Mardy fell in love. For Mardy, being the wife of a U.S. government caribou specialist from 1920 to 1945 meant that if their marriage was to work, a genuinely cooperative relationship would have to be formed. Olaus advised Mardy to take a series of business classes at Simmons College, on the theory that somebody would have to be the bookkeeper. While she was working to complete her degree at Simmons, Ashton Thomas suddenly died. Mardy was popular at Simmons, but there had always been some ridicule of the girl from Alaska who didn’t curtsey. Now, lonely and lost, the nineteen-year-old Mardy was homesick for the dogsled trails and country waltzes of Fairbanks, for the lullaby of the wind and sleet that swept down from the Brooks Range. Her approach to God was based on communion with nature.
Returning home, Mardy started working as a clerk for the U.S. attorney. She lived with her mother, who was employed by the Bureau of Mines. On Sundays she sang “Rock of Ages” at church, almost on pitch. Olaus was in town getting dog teams ready for a run to the Koyukuk country. As an octogenarian, Mardy would reminisce about how, in this idyllic summer of 1922, she taught Olaus ballroom dancing and the standard hymns. But as winter began, he vanished like the sun, going off to inspect herds, rookeries, or dens.
Knowing his north country itinerary, Mardy would mail letters—filled with empty pleasantries—to the forlorn Yukon Territory towns where Olaus planned to stay overnight. Fort Yukon was essentially Murie’s Biological Survey headquarters; it was about 110 miles south of Arctic Village. Mail was delivered by dogsled so infrequently that Mardy often got her beloved’s letters in batches of four or five at once. Olaus had brought along an art kit (a souvenir from the infantry), and he drew wonderful ink illustrations of all the mice and birds he encountered for Mardy. “How I wish you were with me right now,” he wrote in December 1922 from the Koyukuk Trail. “We are up on a summit, the night is silver clear, with twinkling stars and a pure crescent moon. I was out a moment ago to look at it and think of you at the same time.”17
By the summer of 1923 it was clear that Olaus and Mardy were meant to be together. An overjoyed Mardy joined Olaus at Mount McKinley National Park, as his assistant on a caribou count for the Department of the Interior. Olaus had established a base camp on the upper Savage River, where at night they whittled sticks and told stories. Mardy thought of marriage as the art of two being one—they might as well get started in the Denali wilderness. But how to achieve marital harmony when the spouse’s job is to disappear into the most remote reaches of North America on behalf of the Biological Survey? Before they could marry, both Mardy and Olaus decided it was essential to be better organized. Olaus would go to Washington, D.C., to officially submit his reports on the Yukon-Alaskan caribou. Mardy, who hadn’t graduated from Simmons College, would enroll in the one-year-old School of Mines at Alaskan Agricultural College, soon to become the University of Alaska. In 1924 Mardy became the university’s first female graduate.
Following her graduation in June 1924, Mardy prepared for an Arctic honeymoon. She would travel more than 800 miles down the Yukon River—which flows almost 2,000 miles from northern Canada to the Bering Sea—to the riverside hamlet of Anvik, whe
re she would rendezvous with Olaus. They were to be married in a log chapel at three o’clock in the morning, under the midnight sun, on August 19. She had marked the all-important date with a star on her calendar. Mardy’s trousseau was winter wear: fur parkas, wool mittens, and snowshoes. The couple’s most essential equipment on the three-month trek into the Upper Koyukuk River terrain included a weatherproof tent and a portable Yukon stove. Accompanied by her mother and bridesmaids, Mardy left Fairbanks on the stern-wheeler General J.W. Jacobs. Their complicated rendezvous was successful, and Mardy and Olaus were married.
The Muries then began their honeymoon, dogsledding 550 miles into the central Brooks Range, far away from prying eyes. They went north up the Koyukuk River to the area from Allakaket to Bettles and beyond. Rain was frequent: a thin, chilly spitting that came with squalls of wind. Canada geese graced the sky. Clouds of mosquitoes orchestrated a faint hum, which marred the romanticism. Mardy created comfort in their outback camps. Up the A-frame canvas tent would go; at night it was closed tight except for a peephole for air. Morning was always the most magical time; just being alive was lusty. They breakfasted like cowboys on coffee and oatmeal. During the day Mardy chopped wood, smoked salmon, concocted caribou stew, and made a large sleeping bag bed for her and her new husband to share. Fish—pike, grayling, or lake trout—was often their favorite course at dinner. When the sled dogs got dirty, she brushed them. She had mastered the primitive arts of survival. Dutifully she kept a diary recording times, places, and temperatures. “I remember once saying to Olaus on our dogsled honeymoon, ‘Whatever made you think I could do all this?’ ” Mardy recalled. “And he looked at me and said, ‘Oh, I knew you could.’ ”18
Olaus was honeymooning, but he was also intensely studying the habits of North Slope wildlife from red-throated loons to moose browsing on buggy patches of tundra. For all his scientific expertise Murie had an old-school, almost primitive way of looking at wild things. Field naturalists of that time were encouraged to submit ink drawings with their official reports. Besides shouldering a rifle, Olaus carried with him an art kit that had a porcelain slide to mix the watercolor paint. A fine taxidermist, unhurried and precise, he also set small traps to catch and analyze subspecies of mice. While grizzlies eluded them, he carefully monitored Arctic birds such as tundra swans or ravens. Most important, he observed the great barrenland caribou (Rangifer tarandus granti) herds amid the mountains. All the way to the Beaufort Sea, the herds of caribou browsed on the tundra. Caribou in Alaska were distributed into about thirty herds; the Muries hoped to document a fair number of them.
The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 Page 34
