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

by Douglas Brinkley

  In April 1939, the unassuming but revolutionary wildlife biologist Adolph Murie appeared on the scene in Alaska. He had recently published a landmark study, Ecology of the Coyote in Yellowstone, in which he argued that predator species such as coyotes and wolves were beneficial, not detrimental, helping to maintain healthy populations of other species. As one of the first biologists in the National Park Service, Murie moved to Mount McKinley to study the relationship between Dall sheep and gray wolves; in truth, he was working in the historic shadow of Charles Sheldon and was hoping to protect the threatened species.2 Living in a hidden meadow and sometimes spending time in Sheldon’s old lean-to cabin along the Toklat River, Murie wanted to change the “shoot at sight” mentality of most Alaskans with regard to wolves. Murie discovered that Alaska’s wolves, for the most part, subsisted on old, injured, and diseased animals. Seldom would a pack or a loner raid a ranch; for one thing, there wasn’t much livestock in Alaska.

  When Adolph Murie was watching wolves in interior Alaska, sometimes in the biting cold, he must have been quite a sight: he often wore Indian snowshoes or knee-length leather boots, and he carried a week’s worth of provisions in his backpack. He didn’t have to hear a howl to intuit when a wolf was nearby. Like all good animal trackers and saddle tramps, he looked for obvious clues: paw prints, specks of blood, dung, broken branches, and decayed animal carcasses. He had developed a sixth sense for Canis lupus. Although Murie knew he was unlikely to be attacked by a wolf, he nevertheless carried a loaded automatic pistol in a holster as a precaution.

  Murie also carefully analyzed many wolf-dog hybrids, of the kind Jack London described in The Call of the Wild. Alaskans had marvelous sled dogs that were a quarter-breed wolf; Murie could spot them easily because their muscular legs were longer than those of a typical sled dog. What worried Murie was that many wolves and mush dogs had body scabs—a sign of mange. He also worried about rabies and distemper; both viruses affect motor functioning. The decreasing number of wolves at Mount McKinley was also due to aggressive hunting and poisoning of them all around the perimeter of this national park. Because wolves in the Alaska Range were struggling to survive, Murie was overjoyed whenever he discovered a healthy den. “Wolves vary much in color, size, contour, and action,” he wrote. “No doubt there is also much variation in temperament. Many are so distinctively colored or patterned that they can be identified from afar. I found the grey ones easier to identify since there is more individual variation in color pattern among them than in black wolves.”3

  Wolves were already considered predators of livestock throughout America, from the Rio Grande to the Beaufort Sea, and a sizable bounty was offered for wolf pelts, so Murie had his work cut out for him. To Alaskans, it seemed, killing wolves wasn’t a sport but an imperative. Fur trappers, bounty hunters, and cattle barons all abided by the “culture code of the pioneer,” which was to “kill what couldn’t be dominated.”4 In the vernacular of the territory it was called “getting your meat.”5 The Denali wilderness, Murie would write, had a wildlife population almost as diverse as Yellowstone’s; he was grieved by Alaskans’ reckless attitude toward predators. It was Murie’s mission to make sure that Mount McKinley maintained its original wolf population.6

  The counterforce to Adolph Murie in Alaska was Frank Glaser (also known as the “Wolf Man”). Never before or since has Alaska produced such an efficient exterminator of wolves as Glaser. From 1915 to 1966 Glaser killed wolves. It didn’t matter to Glaser whether a client was an Eskimo enclave wanting to save caribou from wolf packs or the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service wanting to contain the spread of rabies; he would kill wolves for cash. His weapon of choice was his “coyote getter,” a set device that fired cyanide if triggered by a coyote. But he had other tools of the trade as well. He could kill wolves with strychnine bait, a rifle, snares, and traps. “Frank was like an Indian at picking up a wolf sign that was all but invisible to me,” Charles Gray, an Alaskan game warden, recalled. “He knew which clump of grass they urinated on and which little ridge they preferred to travel on. I was always in awe of his knowledge of wolves, for he was almost always right.”7 Glaser’s motto, “The only good wolf is a dead wolf,” summarized his hatred of predators.

  Wilderness surveyors like Charles Sheldon also saw wolves as a menace to big game, “the chief enemy of the caribou,” always “hovering about the feeding herd and following them around as they roamed, usually in a fairly well-defined circuit.”8 Hikers in the uninhabited Yukon Flats told of wolf packs shadowing them for days, seemingly looking for an opportunity to kill.9 The Biological Survey itself turned against wolves throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Influenced by Vernon Bailey’s booklet Wolves in Relation to Stock, Game, and the National Forest Reserves (1907), Merriam considered all predators lesser species than big game. Bailey, who married Merriam’s sister Florence, wanted Alaskan wolves exterminated wherever they encroached on civilization.10 “The fierce destructiveness of large wolves and of mountain lions,” the 1924 Annual Report of the Biological Survey read, “both to domestic animals and game, is so great that it becomes a necessity to eliminate them from certain areas.”11

  Only a few weeks after Franklin D. Roosevelt moved into the White House in March 1933, Aldo Leopold published Game Management with Charles Scribner’s Sons. In 481 pages, Leopold created the discipline of modern wildlife management. Pioneering in the burgeoning fields of systems ecology and genetics, he supported protecting wolves in ecosystems (albeit managed). A lifelong hunter, Leopold explained exactly why big game such as moose, Dall sheep, deer, antelope, and elk needed large habitats to survive properly. Filled with scientific charts and survey studies, interspersed with ideas espoused by Darwin and Malthus, Game Management introduced Leopold to the general public as the most distinguished conservationist of the New Deal years. He argued that predators such as wolves and coyotes were an essential component in any healthy ecosystem. To Leopold, the environment wasn’t a marketplace commodity. It was a biotic community in which all living creatures belonged. “How shall we conserve wildlife,” he asked, “without evicting ourselves?”12

  Adolph Murie was thrilled to read about Leopold’s philosophy of game management in his articles and surveys during the early 1930s. Murie had rarely, if ever, encountered such sound ecology expressed in such lean, elegant prose. Analytically Leopold’s works mirrored his own thinking in Ecology of the Coyote in Yellowstone. Leopold’s chapter “Predator Control,” from Murie’s perspective, was a weapon in the new effort to save wolves, cougars, coyotes, and bears from systematic extermination. What made Leopold such an important conservationist was his sense of judicial fairness, even though he was dubious about technological advancements that ate away at wild lands. Regularly Leopold, as if taking a poll, asked fellow wildlife biologists about wolf populations in various ecosys- tems.

  “I do not find the coyote a bad fellow at all,” Murie wrote to Leopold from Wyoming. “As far as the elk are concerned he is not nearly as big a factor as several other things. I will not go into detail here, but would point out that a considerable number of people enjoy the coyote in the hills, he is part of the environment, and his entire removal would make elk hunting less attractive to some people. I feel that if sportsmen and non-shooting conservationists could get together, progress would be so much more rapid. If sport could be placed on a higher plane, and some recent plans might work in that direction, nature lovers in general would be likely to help in game matters. We all have the same interests and must work together to accomplish anything.”13

  In 1897, Frederic Remington painted Moonlight Wolf, an eerie, frightening scene of a lone Great Plains wolf (Canis lupus nubilus) creeping around a corral in a blue winter snow. It is one of Remington’s best works. In the dead of an Alaskan winter not much moved. But Remington’s wolf doesn’t hibernate—it hunts in the dark. What we don’t see in this painting is the wolf being shot by the rancher or pulling down livestock. What happens is up to the viewer’s imagination. Unfortunate
ly, the Great Plains wolf that Remington painted had nearly gone extinct by the time Murie arrived at Mount McKinley in the 1920s. “Alaska is the last North American stronghold of the wolf,” Barry Lopez wrote in Of Wolves and Men, “with Eskimos and Indians here, with field biologists working on wolf studies, with a suburban population in Fairbanks wary of wolves on winter nights, with environmentalists pushing for protection, there is a great mix of opinion. The astonishing thing is that, in large part, it is only opinion.” Even biologists acknowledge, Lopez noted, that there are some things about wolves’ behavior that you just have to guess at.14

  II

  Given the hatred for wolves in Alaska, protecting them was going to be a tall order. But Adolph Murie was up to the task. Much like his older brother Olaus Murie, Adolph (nicknamed Ade) had become well known in wildlife protection circles by the 1930s. He was raised along the Red River of the North, and his résumé revealed a man who couldn’t sit still. After earning a BS degree in biology at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota, Murie became a ranger at Glacier National Park.15 His hope was to write a series of definitive scholarly papers on various North American mammals. In 1926 happenstance helped him pursue this goal. Professor Lee R. Dice, a pioneer in animal ecology, offered Murie a PhD fellowship at the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. Murie decided to become an expert on the common deer mouse (Peromyscus), prey extremely important to understanding predators. There was one main advantage of starting this low on the food chain: nobody had done it before. Professor Dice—a mammalogist by training—was not only a pioneering American ecologist but also a geneticist.16

  By the time Dice took Adolph Murie under his wing, he had made the University of Michigan a leading opponent of predator-control practices such as steel traps and meat laced with strychnine. The Bureau of Biological Survey had become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, but eradicating predators—wolves, coyotes, and cougars—remained the policy of the federal government. As a U.S. government report (as mentioned above) declared in 1924, “The fierce destructiveness of large wolves and of mountain lions, both to domestic animals and game, is so great that it becomes a necessity to eliminate them from certain areas.”17 Such policies infuriated Dice. A bioprospector ahead of his time, Dice shamed the government’s scientists for being more concerned about protecting livestock than wildlife.

  Adolph Murie became a favorite student of Dice’s. Not only did Murie complete his dissertation, in 1929—“The Ecological Relationship of Two Subspecies of Peromyscus in the Glacier Park Region”—but he was hired to revamp the University of Michigan’s Museum of Zoology to reflect the ecological revolution.18 Perhaps to demonstrate his adeptness at both extremes of the wildlife kingdom, he went from spying on field mice to assessing herds of the lordly moose. Slipping away from Ann Arbor during the summers of 1929 and 1930, Murie ventured north to Isle Royale (a thickly wooded island in Lake Superior teeming with unmolested wildlife). The moose population Murie encountered at Isle Royale was thriving. There were 300 moose on the island during the Great War—and by the time of the Great Depression the number had risen to 3,000.19 Murie helped bring their population back.

  During the late 1930s, Adolph Murie bounced around a lot outside Michigan. He collected 700 mammals in British Honduras (now Belize), emphasizing gophers and bats.20 He spent time in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, with his brother Olaus and Olaus’s wife, Mardy, watching moose herds browsing in the fields. He wrote the still widely influential book Ecology of the Coyote (1940). On a visit to Twisp, Washington, he fell in love with Louise Gillette (Mardy’s stepsister); they married in Wyoming. Fox species—red, gray (Urocyon cinereoargenteus), and arctic—grabbed Murie’s professional attention. Filling burlap bags with fresh fox scat, he analyzed its composition under a microscope back in Ann Arbor. In his 1936 study Following Fox Trails, Murie documented how red foxes would often kill shrews merely for fun, not to eat. This finding reinforced Murie’s belief that backyard mesopredators—medium-size predators such as coyotes and skunks—were an essential part of any healthy ecosystem. Without them, garden pests such as shrews would become menaces. But he also promoted the aesthetic notion that foxes were charming creatures to watch up close. “The feeling of a woods is much improved by the presence of fox,” he wrote. “It is good to know that the fox is present in a region for it adds a touch of wickedness to it, gives tone to a tame country.”21

  After nine years at the University of Michigan, and backed by the powerful sponsorship of Dice, Murie made a career change. Frustrated that animal ecology was being ignored by the U.S. government, he joined the new Wildlife Division of the National Park Service.22 Murie was now in a position to help the greater western parks achieve something close to natural conditions. Murie’s biological expertise could be applied to bring back species like wolves, cougars, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, lynx, minks, weasels, and otters. The days when the National Park Service had promoted picture-postcard tourism—when the outdoors experience was rigged in favor of the “Kodak moment”—were ending.23 (During the early 1990s, in an article in Wild Earth, this discarded approach was famously called ecoporn.) Besides ranchers, Murie was at war with backcountry people who still hunted and trapped furbearing animals for pelts; this was a primary source of winter income.

  Realizing that introducing wolves into a national park was going to be a long battle, Murie set his sights on Mount McKinley. It was unlike the national parks in the Lower Forty-Eight because the surrounding area had no organized stockmen’s associations to protest. However, Alaska did have a bounty for predator species: $15 for every wolf and the same for every wolverine, not an insubstantial sum for a backcountry family. Finding ways to protect packs of gray wolves in the Denali wilderness from twelve-gauge shotguns and 30.06-caliber rifles would not be easy. During World War I surplus Springfield weapons had been sold to Alaskans, so the territory was well armed.

  As a wolf ecologist, Murie had a sublime ability to watch wolves undetected by the packs in their dens.* He wrote notes about their sleeping habits, tail wagging, and long jaunts looking for prey. Because wolves have no predators besides humans and other wolves, Murie was able to creep within a few yards of their dens. When they suddenly became alert, however, their defense mechanisms were aroused, and their eyes did not miss much. Sometimes Murie would set up a movie camera to capture their behaviors, such as cubs catching mice and males sniffing each other in greeting. “The strongest impression remaining with me after watching the wolves on numerous occasions is their friendliness,” Murie wrote. “The adults were friendly toward each other and amiable toward the pups, at least as late as October. This innate good feeling has been stronger marked in the three captive wolves which I have known.”24

  The Biological Survey and the Bureau of Fisheries were merged in 1939 to become the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service of today. Around Juneau little snub-nosed government motorboats patrolled the Alexander Archipelago. On April 14 Adolph Murie dogsledded into the Denali wilderness and began a two-year stint studying the wolves of Mount McKinley. Using the log shack Sanctuary as his base camp—located twenty-two miles from the border of the national park—Murie started tracking wolf packs for preliminary insights. A cold spring wind whistled around him as he studied wolf stool for signs of Dall sheep hair. At high altitudes, his lips turned purple from the frigid temperatures. A new park road helped Murie survey a vast amount of Denali territory. Murie hiked nearly 2,000 miles that year, exposed to vicious spells of cold and heat, procuring data that he hoped would help the wolf survive in midcentury America.25

  Using methods that he first developed at Yellowstone on behalf of coyotes, Murie carefully estimated the ages of Dall sheep supposedly killed by renegade wolves. He studied the tooth marks on the carcasses and analyzed the rams’ horn rings. He also took climate change and varied diseases into account in his wolf studies. No one before Murie had undertaken such a serious biological study of North American wolves. The popular author Ernest Thompson Seton had written a series of a
rticles about wolves, but scientists dismissed these as fiction.* Egerton Young’s My Dogs in the Northland—a memoir Jack London liberally mined for The Call of the Wild—dealt with domestic sled dogs and wolves. Stanley P. Young had cowritten a landmark work, The Wolves of North America, with color plates provided by Olaus Murie. In 1939 Stanley Young, who wanted wolves to survive only when “not in conflict with human welfare,” was appointed senior biologist in the Department of the Interior’s branch of Wildlife Research. But it was Murie who became the defender of wolves, submitting reports to the National Park Service urging it to end its wolf-control efforts.26

  Through the 1930s Native Alaskans also started protesting against the slaughter of wolves, although they didn’t speak with a unified voice. New Dealers sought to help Native Alaskan populations prosper during hard times. Congress allowed the Tlingit and Haida Indians, for example, to sue the U.S. government over tribal lands; this helped curtail market hunting in the territory. In 1935, Congress included all Native Alaskans in the Social Security Act. And, more helpfully in the long run, Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes set aside lands for Native Alaskans as hunting and fishing sanctuaries. Wolves in these Native lands were safe from slaughter.27