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

by Douglas Brinkley

  Because Olaus Murie had defended the Crislers’ and Disney’s Winter Wonderland from accusations of nature faking, Lois’s rebuke stung. Murie, who had devoted much of his life to helping Alaskan wildlife prosper, was now being painted by the Crislers and by Rachel Carson as having sold out to the hunting lobby. Frustrated, Murie wrote to Osborn, who had remained above the fray as a mediator in the dispute, that—unequivocally—environmentalists “should not bring into this wilderness project the controversial wolf question.”13 Killing Canis lupus was a traditional Alaskan ritual that would be stopped only by endangered species laws. By contrast, Alaskans who loved the land wanted the caribou herds to be permanently protected: the caribou were an embodiment of wild Alaska itself. Both Olaus and Mardy wanted to promote the Arctic NWR with Robert Service’s poetry, memorized in grade schools from Ketchikan to Nome—not scold Alaskans for believing that wolves were menacing predators.

  Olaus Murie, whose views used to be in the avant-garde of wildlife biology, was now being denigrated as passé. Crisler and Carson represented the new, uncompromising voice of the environmental movement of the late 1950s. No longer were activists interested in making trade-offs with hunters about slaughtering animals for sport. The Crisler-Carson forces considered the Boone and Crockett Club, the Camp Fire Club of America, and the TVSA antiquated and the enemy, not much better than, say, Humble Oil. Destroying wildlife didn’t make any sense in the era of toxic chemicals, plastic, and DDT. They thought that debating the intricate rules of hunting licenses was an exercise for numbskulls. A new ecological consciousness had arrived. If the Gwich’in hunted caribou for subsistence and as a spiritual quest, that was one thing; the Crislers and Carson thought their traditions should be honored. But for sport hunters to shoot animals, and to pay NRA membership fees, was degenerate, murderous behavior.

  In the essay “Where Wilderness Is Complete” in Living Wilderness magazine, Crisler—now a member of The Wilderness Society’s governing board—wrote poignantly about the immense complex called the Brooks Range. From Crisler’s perspective Arctic wonders such as Mount Michelson, Mount Chamberlin, and Togak Peak needed full protection: hunters should not be allowed to slaughter wolves indiscriminately or to kill migrating caribou for the antlers. The Brooks Range, Crisler wrote, was the “only authentic living wilderness left for humans to learn from—to learn something more important than scientific knowledge; to learn the feel of a full response to a total situation involving other lives.”14 Crisler said that Alaskan roughnecks were actually sick-minded cowards who would derive “great fun” from flying a plane in circles to terrify a “small furred animal veering and running beyond what the heart of flesh and blood can endure.” In Fairbanks when hunting season started, these “slob hunters” would celebrate by getting drunk in bars such as the Big-I Pub and Lounge on Turner Street. Sounding like Cassandra, Crisler warned that “tomorrow” would bring “that final sportsmen’s weapon the jet helicopter with silencer.”15

  Crisler set up the debate over the Arctic Refuge in terms of evil versus good. God was telling businesses to weave their commercial webs elsewhere; here at the top of the world the environment should be left alone. Only a gambler infected with boom fever and willing to defy the odds would believe that oil could be safely drilled in the Arctic. The environmentalists and the Gwich’in and Inupiat (who considered themselves the “caribou people” because of their reliance on caribou for fundamental subsistence and socioreligious values) were David, while extraction corporations and hunters were Goliath. The Gwich’in lived in villages to the south of the Brooks Range and believed the coastal plain had to be protected because it was where the sacred Porcupine caribou thrived. These people needed caribou to make boots, sleeping robes, mittens, shirts, and tents. The Gwich’in used every part of the caribou: for example, rawhide (to make tambourine drums), antlers (to make knives), and skin bladders (to haul water).16 Crisler feared that in the long term, “big oil” would come to the calving grounds. Shortsighted, dollar-obsessed oil companies, she believed, would lay waste to the caribou and the landscape with rigs, roads, drills, and spills. “Here in the Brooks Range the biggest of all historical moments, man against nature, meets actual living wilderness making its last stand,” she wrote. “So far man has always won; living wilderness has always perished into desert or mere scenery.”17

  II

  Alaska’s North Slope in the mid-1950s was still a land of life that had not yet been depredated. Not much had changed in the Brooks Range since the first Alaskans arrived somewhere between 33,000 and 13,000 years ago across the Bering Strait from Siberia during the second stage of the Wisconsin glaciation. Native village elders in Point Hope and Wainwright, it seemed, had little interest in turning the serene Arctic tundra into oil fields like those in Texas or nuclear testing grounds like those in New Mexico. All the indigenous tribes had learned to survive in extremely low temperatures and to live in “peaceful intimacy with all the animals.”18 These humans had found ways to use everything from whale blubber to polar bear fur to stay warm. Some parts of Arctic Alaska (the Brooks Range, in particular) had experienced at least twenty periods of glaciation during the past 2.5 million years, and here as everywhere, the fittest species survived. In summer, hundreds of thousands of birds hatched on the Arctic tundra. Tens of thousands of caribou congregated, calved, and migrated along the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea, as they had done during the Pleistocene epoch. As Ernest Thompson Seton wrote in his 1911 book The Arctic Prairies: “The Caribou is a travelsome beast, always in a hurry going against the wind. When the wind is west all travel west, when it veers they veer . . . but they are ever on the move.”19

  Olaus Murie, struggling against cancer (a melanoma), understood that there is no peace unto the wicked. Today’s wilderness could be a garbage dump a year later. An oil company, for example, would not hesitate to flout any scruple or ignore any communal value, for profit. The forces of light, the ecologically conscious people who were stewards of God’s land, had to make a public stand over Arctic Alaska. When you’re sick, as Murie was, surviving felt pointless unless there was a last act aimed at helping preserve beauty for tomorrow’s children. Murie knew life was transitory. All biologists understood this unalterable Darwinian fact. If the wilderness movement could establish a huge Arctic NWR, with no roads for hundreds of miles in all directions, where the evolutionary processes were left to continue their natural ebb and flow, then the 1950s generation of conservationists would be able to claim that they had stood up to the postwar industrial beast. By saving Arctic Alaska—or at least a swath of the Beaufort Sea coast, the tundra plain, the glacier-capped peaks of the Brooks Range, and the spruce and birch forests of the Yukon basin—Murie could die content.

  Throughout 1957–1958 the proposed Arctic NWR was a bureaucratic conundrum, which the Muries wanted solved. Nobody knew for certain whether to push for withdrawal under the Antiquities Act, as Theodore Roosevelt had done with landscapes such as the Grand Canyon and Devils Tower from 1906 to 1909. Roosevelt’s approach tended to infuriate Congress. This mechanism of executive orders had helped the Alaskan wilderness movement establish Katmai National Monument in 1918, Glacier Bay National Monument in 1925, and Kenai Moose Range in 1941. Bypassing Congress had the virtue of avoiding brouhahas and filibusters. Obviously, this approach also had the appeal of quickness.20 But in the long term, working through Congress also had virtues. “The area will be safer for all time if Alaskans themselves are behind it,” Olaus Murie wrote to Osborn about the Arctic campaign. “That’s why I am so concerned over developing this general Alaskan attitude.”21

  The Sierra Club entered the effort in March 1957 during the club’s Fifth Biennial Wilderness Conference, held at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco. George L. Collins of the NPS, serving as chair, spoke eloquently about the Arctic’s seemingly infinite space with his usual fullness and strength: its exultant grandeur, solemnity, forlornness, abundant wildlife, and dancing northern lights. To most of the conservati
onists in San Francisco, the Brooks Range was the last great wilderness. The conference served as a clearinghouse for all the best proposals for saving the Arctic. Lowell Sumner spoke about the Malthusian population explosion. Starker Leopold—who had written the fine introduction to Lois Crisler’s Arctic Wild—dealt with the morality of saying no to “big coal” and “big oil.” Howard Zahniser pushed forward his wilderness bill (which had just been introduced in the House and Senate). How amazed Bob Marshall would have been that his wilderness ethos—vast tracts of pristine land with no roads—had gathered so much momentum in the nearly twenty years since his death.

  Because the gathering at San Francisco totaled more than 500 people, a small group of Marshall’s admirers reconvened after the event in a boardroom to definitively determine whether to promote the 8.9 million-acre Arctic reserve as ANP (Arctic National Park) or Arctic NWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge/Range). Time was precious. An appropriate name could make a huge difference in the long run. This smaller meeting brought insiders together—high-profile outdoors enthusiasts whose careers had taken them into national conservation politics. Representing the NPS were Collins, Sumner, and Conrad. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had Dan Janzen and Clarence Rhode (Rhode was an advocate of protecting Alaskan wildlife but nevertheless wanted wolves shot on sight). The Bureau of Land Management was represented by its director, Edward Woozley. The Sierra Club had the husband-and-wife team of Richard and Doris Leonard (best known in San Francisco for running the Cragmont Climbing Club, which promoted modern rappelling around Berkeley). But it was The Wilderness Society—represented by the Muries and Zahniser—that delivered the facts and the firepower to the discussions. In Alaska the Sierra Club deserved a lot of credit for pushing Glacier Bay forward to eventual national park status. But the Arctic NWR was the pet cause of The Wilderness Society. When, a couple years later, Zahniser testified before Congress about establishing the Arctic NWR, he claimed that in the Lower Forty-Eight true wilderness had been displaced by development.22

  Oddly, the consensus at San Francisco was that collaborating with Secretary of the Interior Seaton made the most sense, and that the 8.9 million acres should be called the Arctic National Wildlife Range. Range was a designation given to areas with big-game animals. The words sanctuary and refuge were rejected as sounding too “environmental,” in Crisler and Carson’s sense. Later, in 1980, range was replaced with refuge. Everybody present at San Francisco thought the Arctic Range (what became the Arctic NWR) would have made an ideal national park. But it was seriously doubted whether Secretary of the Interior Seaton would ever sign off on such a grand preservationist scheme. “The majority favored wildlife range designation, so we made it unanimous,” Collins explained. “The main thing was to get agreement on something.”23

  Another important activist had also signed on for the effort to create the Arctic NWR; at the San Francisco meeting, Sigurd Olson entered the Arctic movement for the first time. His book The Singing Wilderness, published in April 1956, had found a cult readership for its promotion of the joy and wonder of the outdoors. There was much to recommend Olson, a Minnesotan environmentalist and canoeist who would later be credited with creating Voyageurs National Park in 1975. Never did Olson know a day of leisure when it came to protecting the American wilderness. The handsome, silver-haired Olson felt such oneness with the “boundary waters” of Minnesota that he called his state of mind a “wilderness theology.” A “great peace” engulfed Olson when he was in the outdoors. As the naturalist Roger Tory Peterson noted in the New York Herald Tribune, Olson wrote the best prose ever about the “northwoods country.”24 Unusually for a book about conservation, The Singing Wilderness appeared on the New York Times’ best-seller list (as number sixteen).

  As president of the National Park Association, Olson, who also taught biology at Ely Junior College (now Vermilion Community College), made an appointment to see Seaton within weeks after Seaton’s confirmation as secretary of the interior. A fast friendship ensued. Olson, in fact, served as a consultant to the Department of the Interior and to the NPS from 1956 to 1961. If any pro-wilderness activist could be said to have Seaton’s ear, it was this deeply honest, soft-spoken Minnesotan, who epitomized generosity of spirit. Conservationists of all stripes, enthralled by The Singing Wilderness, were heartened when Olson pronounced Seaton a “fine chap” who “wouldn’t repeat the mistakes of McKay.”25

  Fred Seaton was born in Washington, D.C., on December 11, 1909. His father, Fay Seaton, served as assistant to a progressive Kansas Republican, Senator Joseph Bristow (a Bull Moose in 1912). When Fred was a child, the Seatons moved to Manhattan, Kansas, where his father owned the Manhattan Mercury (later the Manhattan Chronicle). Eventually the family had a financial stake in newspapers in Alliance, Nebraska; Sheridan, Wyoming; and Deadwood, South Dakota. Outgoing, friendly, and a solid B student, young Fred attended Kansas State Agricultural College (which later became Kansas State University) from 1927 to 1931; there, he held the post of director of sports publicity. But because he was nine science credits short, Seaton never officially graduated from college—although this situation was rectified when Kansas State University awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1955. Fred’s father purchased the financially troubled Daily Tribune of Hastings, Nebraska. It was another newspaper trophy. In 1937 Fred moved to Hastings to run acquisitions. As the elder of two boys and the first out of college, Fred took over publishing responsibilities at the Daily Tribune. Seemingly overnight, he turned it into a profitable business. He went on to become city editor of the Manhattan Mercury. As a pioneering publisher, Seaton figured out how to develop the newspapers’ stories from the wire services.26

  Of medium build, with grayish blond hair and sharp blue eyes, Seaton was a real white-shirt downtown Republican, proud to be in the party of Lincoln and TR. He was always meticulously groomed. During the 1936 presidential election Seaton served as the personal secretary of the Republican nominee Alfred Landon. Always a great team player, Seaton was a consistent Republican, never once casting a vote for a Democrat. As a political consultant, Seaton accumulated Republican jobs in both Kansas and Nebraska. While brash in temperament, he had fine manners. When he died in 1974, the New York Times noted: “It was said of him that no one in politics was wiser in the ways of not giving unnecessary offense.”27

  When a legendary U.S. senator, Kenneth S. Wherry of Nebraska, died in December 1951, Seaton was selected by Governor Val Peterson to fill the sudden vacancy. Earnest, unflagging, and more cerebral than ideological, Seaton served only a little over a year in the Senate, just enough time to be called “senator” by constituents. But Eisenhower liked Seaton, considering him a fellow Midwesterner full of modest intensity. That wasn’t unusual. Everybody liked Fred because Fred liked everybody. In a long public career in the Great Plains, he never really received bad press. Now, Seaton’s career took off. When Seaton got married, Alf Landon attended the wedding. Seaton and his wife, Gladys, adopted four children. From 1945 to 1949 he was elected to the Nebraska unicameral legislature. His first real political hero was Harold Stassen, the boy wonder who had been elected governor of Minnesota at the age of thirty-one. In 1948, Seaton managed Stassen’s unsuccesful bid for the U.S. presidency.28

  When Eisenhower became president in 1953, he appointed Seaton as assistant secretary of defense for legislative affairs (1953–1955), then as administrative assistant for congressional liaison (1955), and then as deputy assistant to the president (1955–1956). Like a utility infielder in baseball, he could fill various slots. When Secretary of the Interior McKay fell ill in 1957, Eisenhower asked the forty-six-year-old Seaton to be McKay’s successor. McKay’s tenure had been rocky; he had been accused of making sweetheart public land deals with industries. The deeply ethical Eisenhower didn’t like having a new Albert B. Fall on his hands. Seaton, who served as secretary of the interior from June 8, 1956, to January 11, 1961, proved to be an inspired choice.

  Fair-minded, and not wanting to see Ameri
ca’s natural resources mismanaged, Seaton also had the all-important advantage of being extremely close friends with L. W. Snedden, publisher of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, a fierce lobbyist for statehood. From 1956 to 1961, whatever Snedden thought needed to occur on the North Slope, Seaton concurred with him.29 And from the outset, Seaton was determined to take a fair and balanced approach to both industry in Alaska and conservation of natural resources. Whereas McKay had tried to avoid traveling around America, preferring to operate from his desk, Seaton did travel, and he delivered about sixty speeches per year.30

  During Eisenhower’s second term, however, Herb and Lois Crisler were far greater celebrities than the Muries or Seaton, thanks to the Walt Disney Company’s magic. Expressing their belief in the value of keeping the Arctic Refuge undeveloped forever, the Crislers wrote to Seaton to urge saving the “only place left on the continent where great authentic wilderness can be reserved.”31 Their letter was filled with ecological buzzwords such as otherness, vanishing, and technical environment—rather pretentiously for a couple who had stolen wolf pups from a den for a Disney movie. Instead of answering the Crislers directly, Seaton had Assistant Secretary Ross Leffler write them a courtesy reply, informing them that if the Arctic NWR was created, then in all likelihood mining, hunting, and trapping would be permitted.32

  If the Arctic NWR movement had an unsung hero, it was Snedden. He admired the “fair chase” ethics of the TVSA and loathed the new generation of aerial hunters and guides, whose activities were becoming a trend in the late 1950s. Using Super Cub bush planes, pilots would land in the middle of a caribou herd, and then the hunters would fire at the frightened animals. If this deplorable kind of hunting was allowed to continue unabated, the Arctic would be depopulated of game animals. “With American population—and world population—growing at an explosive rate,” Snedden warned, sounding like TR, “the natural pattern of life which existed in the area since the dawn of time . . . its game and primitive scenic beauty—could cease to exist.” With statehood pending, Snedden urged Alaskans to act “now” to “prevent the destruction and slaughter of game animals tomorrow.”33