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

by Douglas Brinkley

  If the passenger pigeon, once 1 billion strong, could go extinct, what of Arctic Alaska’s polar bears, caribou, and willow ptarmigan? What of the shorebirds that bred along the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea: the American golden plover, semipalmated plover (Charadrius semipalmatus), lesser yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes), wandering tattler (Tringa incana), spotted sandpiper (Actitus macularius), whimbrel (Numenius phaeopus), surfbird, least sandpiper (Calidris minutilla), Baird’s sandpiper (Calidris bairdii), Wilson’s snipe (Gallinago delicata), and red-necked phalarope (Phalaropus lobatus)? It wasn’t enough for Mardy and Olaus Murie merely to count caribou for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Arctic Alaska. They would have to fight to save the Arctic Range along the Beaufort Sea, as Bob Marshall had done with the Gates of the Arctic and as Leopold had done in the Gila wilderness. They needed to lobby the Department of the Interior not to build roads in the Arctic, because changes in drainage patterns adversely affected habitats.3

  What Leopold most admired about Mardy Murie was her confidence that someday U.S. citizens would stand up and say no to the obsession of the “harassed world” with industrialization. While other conservationists grew discouraged by toxic smokestacks and coal-burning power plants, Murie continued to simply marvel at the unmarked Arctic, where the aurora borealis beamed forth hope.4 Her touchstone place was the 200-mile Sheenjek River, which flowed south to the Porcupine River from the highest peaks of the eastern Brooks Range, joining the Porcupine just northeast of Fort Yukon, Alaska. Anybody rafting down the smooth Sheenjek—which had only a few Class II rapids—had a good chance of seeing some of the 123,000-strong Porcupine caribou herd, because this herd often partly wintered in the Sheenjek valley. (The largest caribou herd was the 500,000-strong Western Arctic group, which ranged the National Petroleum Reserve.) Cradled by the Davidson Mountains, the Sheenjek was also the water’s edge for Dall sheep, grizzlies, moose, and beavers.

  Among Olaus and Mardy Murie’s close friends, only Starker Leopold (Aldo Leopold’s son, a professor of zoology at the University of California), Lowell Sumner, and George Collins knew the Sheenjek River well. The Muries realized that Mardy herself would have to spread the word about it, as John Muir and Ansel Adams had done for Glacier Bay. Certainly, Alaska needed farms, paved highways, modern industries, and mineral development—but the wilderness that made the territory unique should also be protected. The Muries hoped that saving a vast portion of the Arctic along the Canadian border could be promoted by national conservation groups (the Sierra Club, The Wilderness Society, Audubon Society, Izaak Walton League, etc.) and by a new local nonprofit, the Alaska Conservation Society. The Muries felt that the Glacier Bay area was being overrun with tourists on cruise ships (which Mardy called “floating nursing homes”). The Arctic needed to be preserved for the Gwich’in people and for true “Leopoldian” outdoors types. “Thoughtful people both in and out of Alaska were concerned, for the Age of the Bulldozer had arrived,” Murie wrote in Two in the Far North. “Scientists like Starker Leopold, Lowell Sumner, F. Fraser Darling, and George Collins, who had recently traveled in Arctic Alaska, began writing and talking to Olaus.”5

  II

  Collins—taking advantage of the momentum created by the publication of Darling and Leopold’s Wildlife in Alaska—thought about how best to protect the Arctic from despoliation. His foot-numbing explorations in the region (frostbite was in fact a constant risk) weren’t holidays on the tundra, but despite the hardships he amassed reams of biological data for the Department of the Interior. Ideally, Collins concluded, the Gates of the Arctic area would become a national park. But the Arctic Range along the Canadian border—particularly the scenic Sheenjek River—should be designated a roadless wilderness where not even tourism would be promoted. There would be no gateway villages to the Arctic Refuge—nothing like Gatlinburg or Jackson Hole. The Wilderness Society’s concept of “roadlessness” would be established in Arctic Alaska. Otherwise, tracked vehicles would wreak havoc on the tundra.6 “While we were out in camp with Leopold and Darling, we had many discussions about this park idea,” Collins wrote to the Arctic archaeologist Louis Giddings. “Every one of us came to the same conclusion—that a national or international park is the only solution. No other form of land use is a sufficient guarantee of security in our opinion.”7

  What the Arctic conservationists were proposing was a national park (or wilderness area) four times greater than Yellowstone. Flying over the Yukon Territory, both Collins and Sumner began thinking of a vast international park. As coauthors of a “Progress Report,” Collins and Sumner wrote that the Arctic Refuge had to remain free of “artificial disturbance,” and sportsmen’s activities there would need to be strictly controlled. Theodore Roosevelt had saved the Grand Canyon by means of the Antiquities Act of 1906 for “scientific reasons.” Similarly, the early cold war generation in Alaska, inspired by A Sand County Almanac, wanted a baseline virgin ecosystem to compare and contrast with other Arctic Circle lands damaged by the industrial order. The Sierra Club’s president, Benton MacKaye, wrote in Scientific Monthly that an “Arctic Park” would be a “reservoir of stored experiences in the ways of life before man.”8

  If The Wilderness Society liked using the word wilderness, the National Park Service was invested in the notion of primeval lands. It was, at face value, a semantic issue. Wilderness seemed more commonplace than primeval, which harked back to efforts at the turn of the twentieth century to protect ruins such as Mesa Verde in Colorado and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico. The Oregon Caves had been saved in 1909 as a national monument, with local boosters calling themselves “cavemen.” The Izaak Walton League (the premier anglers club) and the Federation of Western Outdoor Clubs both supported an “Arctic Wilderness” because it was based on honoring “primeval values.” Numerous Darwinian scientists and Arctic Eskimo leaders in the early 1950s used the term primeval to explain the evolution of Homo sapiens. “We hurt because we see the land being destroyed,” Trimble Gilbert, an Arctic chief, lamented. “We believe in the wild earth because it’s the religion we’re born with. After 10,000 years our land is still clean and pure. We believe we have something to teach the world about living a simpler life, about sharing, about protecting the land.”9

  In November 1952 Collins and Sumner offered the Department of the Interior a twenty-three-page paper, titled “A Proposed Arctic Wilderness International Park” and illustrated with handsome photographs. A version of this report appeared in the Sierra Club Bulletin as “Northeast Alaska: The Last Great Wilderness.” “Unless an adequate portion of it can be preserved in its primitive state,” the report claimed, “the Arctic wilderness will soon disappear.”10 Because no single country owned the north pole, it made sense to the authors to form a collaborative agreement with Canada. After all, polar bears, caribou, and wolves didn’t recognize artificial borders. Ottawa hadn’t yet dealt in earnest with Washington, D.C., about the “one habitat” concept; but President Eisenhower was a hero in Canada for having staged the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-day during World War II. While he was not a conservationist himself, Eisenhower had a vision of working closely with Canada on building the Saint Lawrence Seaway, which would link the Great Lakes to the Atlantic Ocean; and with regard to conservationist proposals, he was known to be cautious and slow, but not automatically opposed. Perhaps the Arctic International Park could be sold to Eisenhower as a bilateral initiative between two members of NATO?

  Only half a year later, Collins and Sumner abruptly changed their minds about the international park. The Eisenhower administration was going to be pro-development in Alaska. The Department of the Interior might approve a Gates of the Arctic National Park—with extensive recreational facilities for visitors to the central Brooks Range—but it was unquestionably opposed to Bob Marshall’s concept of wilderness simply for the sake of wilderness. Aging New Dealers were being retired from Interior, and it became clear that Eisenhower was more friendly toward Humble Oil than Franklin D. Roosevelt had been—
and that this attitude would affect Alaska’s wilderness. Advocates of wilderness at the Department of the Interior had been pampered by Harold Ickes. Now, greed and shortsightedness, two threats to conservationism, had returned to the forefront of the American public lands system, where they had been in the 1920s. The cold war was on, and the CCC had been dismantled. Minerals were in and mallards were out; and the president of General Motors, “Engine” Charlie Wilson, proclaimed that what is “good for General Motors is good for the country.”11

  But President Eisenhower—who tremendously respected the legacy of Theodore Roosevelt—wasn’t an unreasonable man. That would prove vital for the conservation movement. There were murmurs at Interior that Eisenhower wanted to keep the cold war out of the Arctic and Antarctic, that he was considering international treaties to protect the poles. Also, Disney’s film White Wilderness, about the Crislers’ wolf pups, was being edited for release in 1958. Disney had also optioned Ernest Thompson Seton’s book Lobo, the King of Currampaw to be made into a pro-wolf documentary filmed in New Mexico.12

  III

  In the early 1950s, following the publication of A Sand County Almanac and Round River, the U.S. government, for the first time, earnestly pondered how to save Arctic Alaska. However, with the Korean War being fought and Senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin looking for communists under every bed, Alaska was a low-priority issue. But to conservationists the time seemed near, if it hadn’t exactly arrived, when millions of acres in the Arctic should receive permanent protected status. While the Crislers were making their film with Disney and Ansel Adams was measuring the light around Mount McKinley, many well-to-do conservation societies had a newfound interest in Arctic preservation. Photographs of the Brooks Range—impressive summits, monotone shoulders, and empty white spaces—appeared in the glossy pages of National Geographic. Readers could almost hear the booming wind. Robert Marshall’s Alaskan Wilderness became a cult work within the conservation community; Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas handed out copies to office visitors as if the book were his business card.

  Capped by the gaunt summits of the Brooks Range, the inviolate Arctic offered timeless permanence in a postwar era characterized by transience and consumerism. Sir Frank Fraser Darling, a Scotsman whom the Sierra Club called the “Einstein of ecology,” joined with the New York Zoological Society (which Theodore Roosevelt had helped found) to advocate protecting the Alaska-Yukon Arctic as a counterpart to Africa’s Serengeti, centered on the Porcupine caribou herd. Darling worked with Starker Leopold to publish the landmark Wildlife in Alaska: An Ecological Reconnaissance. Comprehensive in approach, this book explored the interconnectedness of caribou herds, wolf dens, snowy owls, brown bears, and the entire North Slope. Darling and Leopold believed that the U.S. Department of the Interior had a “national responsibility” to save this primeval animal range, marine sanctuary, and nourishing landscape. Each American generation since TR had its own rendezvous with the wilderness, and Arctic Alaska was suddenly the landscape of the moment. Because Alaska was still a territory, without influential U.S. senators to represent it, the Interior Department could be directed to parcel out vast wilderness reserves relatively easily. The big question was which agency would be the best steward of Arctic Alaska.

  Collins, head of the Alaskan Recreation Survey, had traveled far and wide across the territory in the mid-1950s, being flown around the North Slope and island-hopping in the Aleutians. He was a walking field guide to Alaska, able to predict ice and virga. By plane, he surveyed 147 Alaskan sites, from Bristol Bay to Clark Mountain to the Beaufort Sea, for potential protection by the National Park Service. Sometimes in flight Collins encountered the mysterious fata morgana (a mirage caused by layering of intensely cold or cool air against the water, sea ice, or land). His comprehensive 1955 report—A Recreation Program for Alaska—was aimed at widening tourists’ opportunities for bird-watching, hiking, cross-country skiing, river rafting, and mountain climbing. According to the historian Roger Kaye in Last Great Wilderness, Collins—a career officer in the National Park Service from 1927 to 1960—envisioned a “fuller range of wildland values” through “transcendental and romantic concepts and new perspectives” promoted by conservationists such as Bob Marshall, Aldo Leopold, and the Muries.13 Collins believed the postwar rush to over-timber, over-mine, and over-drill in Alaska had to be thwarted. Already the wildlife biologist Lowell Sumner was warning the Department of the Interior that spraying DDT would kill Alaskan lakes and forests as well as the insect hordes it was aimed at. Nature was under attack; there was an increased risk of species extinction and overexploitation of natural resources in Alaska.

  Collins was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota, in 1903. Many of America’s most effective environmentalists came from the upper Midwest. Aldo Leopold and William Temple Hornaday were from Iowa. So, too, was Congressman John F. Lacey, who from 1892 to 1906 did more than any other U.S. politician except Theodore Roosevelt to protect wildlife by means of federal legislation. Besides the Muries, Sigurd Olson (a staunch wilderness advocate and biologist), Gaylord Nelson (a Democratic senator and founder of Earth Day), and Joseph Hickey (who served Wisconsin and the conservation cause as both state governor and senator), all came of age in Wisconsin. If you grew up in Wisconsin, you could explore Leopold’s shack in Sand County and Muir’s childhood home, Fountain Lake Farm, as historical landmarks of conservation. In photos of Collins as a young man growing up in Wisconsin, he has the look of Gene Autry, but with bushier sideburns. Usually Collins kept the top button of his checkered shirts fastened, as if he might want to attach a bolo tie at a moment’s notice. Collins was a master of surveying the public domain and offering plans for preservation. “George had a hilarious sense of humor,” Ginny Wood recalled. “And whatever he wrote about Alaskan lands was absolutely true, solid geography. He wasn’t a lot of hoey.”14

  Encouraged by Horace Albright, head of the National Park Service, Collins had a conservationist résumé in the Lower Forty-Eight that helped make him highly effective in wild Alaska: serving as superintendent of Lassen Volcanic National Park in California; working as a ranger at the Grand Canyon from 1930 to 1935; running a CCC camp at Lake Mead (which had been created by Boulder Dam in 1936); establishing a district office for the National Park Service in Santa Fe; protecting the Channel Islands off the coast of Oxnard, California; and overseeing the survey that saved Point Reyes National Seashore. But Collins isn’t praised in college courses in environmental history, for a single reason: he supported the construction of Glen Canyon Dam.

  Glen Canyon Dam was indeed folly. In 1956, the Upper Colorado River Storage Bill was introduced in Congress. For $756 million, a huge dam would be built near Page, Arizona. To environmentalists, damming the wild Colorado River was sacrilegious. The construction area—along the Arizona-Utah border—constituted some of the world’s most gorgeous canyon scenery. Governor J. Bracken Lee of Utah, however, declared that the Glen Canyon Dam was “just the beginning of a long range program that will build up the West.”15 Eventually the bill was passed, and construction began on one of the largest reclamation projects in American history. President Dwight D. Eisenhower announced the official construction of Glen Canyon Dam—which formed Lake Powell—on October 15, 1956, by pushing a remote control at the White House, triggering an immense explosion in the Southwest. Huge hunks of Glen Canyon’s west wall tumbled down thunderously.16

  The Sierra Club, which had stopped Echo Park Dam, was silent about Glen Canyon Dam, evidently influenced by people like Collins and cognizant that Arizona would get 6 percent and Utah 13 percent of the electricity generated by the blocked Colorado River. “Glen Canyon died in 1963, and I was partly responsible for its needless death,” the club’s executive director, David Brower, lamented in his autobiography, For Earth’s Sake. “Neither you nor I, nor anyone else, knew it well enough to insist that at all costs it should endure. When we began to find out, it was too late.”17 But the feisty novelist Edward Abbey had known that Gle
n Canyon was the Colorado River’s “living heart.” For decades he protested against the dam—and against the men who promoted it, like Collins. Abbey’s novel of 1975, The Monkey Wrench Gang, begins with protesters dropping a huge black plastic banner showing a lightning-like crack down the dam as if the concrete were ruptured and crumbling. And the local Navajo predicted that the sandstone holding the dam in place couldn’t last more than fifty years; nature would someday liberate the Colorado River.18

  Still, Collins did a lot of good in Alaska. By drafting recreational plans for the territory he proved that there were ecologically responsible ways for tourism to be a boom industry in Alaska. His ordering of a biological survey of Katmai National Monument—known primarily for its volcanoes—led to new knowledge that the area was among the best brown bear refuges in the world. And his recognition that today’s Arctic NWR was, in fact, one of the greatest wildlife corridors in North America earned him a place on the Alaska Conservationist Hall of Fame honor roll.19 “That is the finest place of its kind I have ever seen,” Collins said of the Arctic Range. “It is a complete ecosystem, needs nothing men can take to it except complete protection from his own transgression.”20

  Collins—who was famously photographed with his two Saint Bernard dogs at his side when he was in Alaska, and bundled up in fur-lined parkas for long Arctic treks—was enamored of the central Brooks Range. Looking eastward toward the Yukon Territory border, Collins pronounced his determination to create an “Arctic International Wildlife Range”—a pure wilderness zone not subjected to sabotage for the sake of oil, gas, or coal, but intended for “the everlasting benefit and enjoyment of man.”21 Collins obtained money from the National Park Service to prepare a survey on the potential boundaries of an Arctic park; his plea for restraint pertaining to oil development in the Arctic was being taken seriously in Washington, D.C.