Olaus and Mardy Murie were proud of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner for taking a pro-conservation stand. And they had another unexpected ally at U.S. Fish and Wildlife: Clarence Rhode, the aerial wolf hunter who nevertheless thought the Arctic should be a wilderness preserve. Rhode, an employee of U.S. Fish and Wildlife since 1935, had learned to respect the Arctic as a wilderness like none other. God, he believed, had made the Arctic perfect. According to Collins, Rhode had an “inside track” with Seaton on all issues concerning Alaskan lands.34
A law-and-order type, Rhode enjoyed busting salmon canneries around Bristol Bay and the Alexander Archipelago for overfishing. But animal rights activists such as Herb and Lois Crisler, who thought that wolves were cuddly dogs, left Rhode cold. Leftists, he believed, were hypocrites. “Raising a big moose crop,” he once declared, “is farming the land exactly as if [one] raised Hereford Cattle.”35
Nevertheless, Rhode had defended the integrity of Franklin Roosevelt’s Kenai National Moose Range. To Rhode, this moose range didn’t impede the economic advancement of the territory. The Bureau of U.S. Fish and Wildlife managed the range, from Rhode’s perspective, as if the Kenai moose (which had the biggest antlers of all the deer in the world) were a treasured species. That was a good thing. The Kenai Peninsula, however, was the best place to live in Alaska, and settlement there was being thwarted by the moose. When Richfield Oil Corporation of Los Angeles found petroleum in July 1957, the boomers in Anchorage turned against FDR’s moose range. Since World War II the Alaskan economy had been sagging. Now, with this discovery of oil, boomers anticipated a profitable new rush. “I have reports,” Seaton said, “that things are almost back to the gold rush days.”36
Rhode tried to prevent the Kenai Moose Range from being dismantled, and to persuade the TVSA to take up the preservationist cause. “There is much pressure in Anchorage, backed by the Chamber of Commerce and oil interests, to convince everyone oil exploration and development will not harm moose habitat in any way and might even enhance it on the Kenai Moose Range,” Rhode wrote to Olaus Murie. “Some of the proposals call for a road network in a grid fashion every quarter mile. I cannot agree that would be helpful in maintenance of the type of moose habitat, which appeals to me, but it is difficult to convince the hungry promoters. It even appeals to some moose hunters who feel they would have no difficulty with such a network or killing a moose where they could back up the car to load them.”37
The political dispute over moose became fierce. A real-estate developer in Anchorage, Marvin R. “Muktuk” Marston, circulated the slogan “Make these moose move over and make room for people.” In 1955 McKay, who was then still secretary of the interior, had granted Richfield operational drilling leases in the moose refuge. (During his tenure as secretary of the interior he had, however, created nine new wildlife refuges and had refused to let the U.S. Army take control of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, a buffalo range created by TR in 1905, from the Department of the Interior even though the refuge was adjacent to an ever-growing Fort Sill.) The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) defended the Kenai moose population, but the Alaskan zeitgeist in general was drill- drill-drill. The Alaskan politician Walter Hickel, later to become President Richard Nixon’s secretary of the interior, was furious that sentimentality regarding moose was slowing down economic development. Hickel reminded Alaskans that in 1910 the defiant Cordova “Coal Party” had organized citizens to dump crates of coal into Prince William Sound to protest against Gifford Pinchot’s federal policy of tying up resources.
After congressional hearings in December 1957, Seaton sided with the oil industry. In August 1958 he opened up 50 percent of the Kenai Moose Range for oil exploration. This action directly contradicted his claim in the New York Times that oil and wildlife refuges didn’t mix. To Seaton, in the end, it made little sense to allow every moose its own 500 acres of prime Kenai real estate to browse.
III
Why Rhode allied himself with the Muries so zealously with regard to the Arctic NWR is a mystery. Keep in mind, however, that in 1957 oil hadn’t yet been discovered there. (Richfield’s discovery was at Swanson River on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.) Also, despite his tough pose, Rhode knew that the migratory caribou of the Arctic (unlike Kenai moose) indeed did need thousands of miles of rangeland to survive: the conservationists weren’t making that up. In addition, Rhode, whose views on conservation were like those of the old-style homesteaders, believed that the Brooks Range, as it unfurled closest to the Beaufort Sea, was, along with Bristol Bay and Kachemak, perhaps the most beautiful part of Alaska.
The Muries, now working with Rhode, Snedden, and Seaton, set about the task at hand: the Arctic NWR. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner wrote a powerful endorsement of the refuge in the fall of 1957: “We favor the proposal for the Arctic Wildlife Range,” its editorial read. “We think the complaint of those opposing it is akin to that of a small boy who has just been given a pie much larger than he can eat but who cries anyway when someone tries to cut a small sliver out of it. We ask those who would raise strong protest over reserving this comparatively small sliver to stop and ponder the fact that the 20,000,000 acres now being made available for development by Secretary Seaton’s action comprises an area which exceeds the total land area of five New England states combined.”38
The attitude toward the Arctic NWR in Anchorage, however, was decidedly negative; this was considered just another federal lockup of Alaskan land. If the Arctic NWR drew tourists, Fairbanks would become the hub city. After victory in the Kenai, developers weren’t inclined to forget about Arctic real estate. Rhode candidly wrote to Olaus Murie that Alaskans opposed “everything” proposed by the U.S. government except “immediate statehood”; they felt almost unanimously that “exploitation” of the land should always be the first principle.39 In Kaktovik—the coastal village that in 1923 became a trading post for the Arctic NWR area—some Natives wanted assurances that their own tradition of caribou hunting would be preserved.
Once again, Olaus flew into Anchorage from Moose, Wyoming, to start working toward acceptance of the Arctic NWR. Osborn’s New York Zoological Society, along with its affiliate, the Conservation Foundation, financed Murie’s promotional and educational tour around Alaska. (Osborn also had his Conservation Foundation pay for a nine-minute film, Letter from the Brooks Range, which was narrated by Olaus and Mardy Murie.)40 Meanwhile, Olaus Murie’s little book A Field Guide to Animal Tracks, published in 1954, had become extremely popular with American outdoorsmen. That field guide—part of a series edited by Roger Tory Peterson for Houghton Mifflin—enabled Olaus to get interviews into which he slipped promotions for the Arctic NWR. Impressively, Murie had done all the intricate drawings of paw prints in Animal Tracks himself. From 1956 to 1960 a succession of radio interviews were set up for Olaus in Alaska so that he could discuss both his book and saving the Arctic NWR. Working in Olaus’s favor was the Inuit belief that nanook (the polar bear) had human intelligence—this anthropomorphic notion was the inspiration for a number of children’s books. Every souvenir shop in Anchorage or Fairbanks promoted the Arctic polar bears as lords of the last great wilderness. “The trip was evangelism, not adventure,” Mardy wrote, “Olaus was speaking and showing slides of the north country before every possible organization.”41
Olaus Murie struck paydirt when he lobbied the TVSA in Fairbanks for the second time. Never mentioning the issue of killing wolves, and refusing to grovel, Murie showed slides of caribou herds, white ptarmigan, and beautiful streams rich with grayling. Murie was subtly presenting The Wilderness Society’s plan for the Arctic NWR (“wilderness as wilderness”) with a few sportsmen’s provisions for mass “recreational use” that allowed non-airplane, non-helicopter hunting. That evening TVSA members voted on supporting the Arctic NWR, and Murie won, forty-three to five. Murie had been right to fight for the Arctic NWR on this level. As Mardy Murie later noted, her husband had “a natural ability” to deal with Alaskan outdoors types.42
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p; With the TVSA on board, Rhode moved quickly with the “Suggested Plan of Administration of Regulations” (the first of many U.S. Fish and Wildlife withdrawal documents). Zahniser’s imprint—a lot of cunning legal work—was obvious in this initial document. Murie now met with the Alaska Federation of Women’s Clubs and three garden clubs. His slides of caribou on their spring migration (photos that did not show the swarms of mosquitoes) were awe-inspiring. Many of the clubwomen were fascinated to learn that caribou were the only deer in which both sexes grew antlers.43 They unhesitatingly signed the Arctic NWR resolution. Murie also procured the support of the Izaak Walton League’s influential Anchorage chapter. Momentum was building for the Arctic NWR. Rhode started receiving supportive letters from conservation-minded clubs all over the territory. Bob Marshall’s dream of a roadless Arctic was finally becoming reality.
Besides pushing for the Arctic NWR, wildlife enthusiasts, such as “Sea Otter” Jones in Cold Bay, were pushing hard for federal protection for the Kuskokwim and Izembek refuges (brackish wetlands that were extremely important for the Pacific black brant.44 Overseeing the Aleutian district for U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Jones wanted the federal government to better protect otters and birdlife. The word was that President Eisenhower, who was negotiating with twelve other nations a complicated international treaty not to develop Antarctica, thought Alaska, which was seeking statehood, might be a good place to create a few additional wildlife refuges to burnish his conservation legacy. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner thought so, too. All three of the major refuges—Arctic (14,000 square miles), Kuskokwim (2,924 square miles), and Izembek (680 square miles)—made sense to the News-Miner. Unlike those on the Kenai Peninsula, none of these proposed lands were thought to be rich in timber, oil, or coal. As Eisenhower reluctantly moved toward admitting Alaska as the forty-ninth state, it made sense for the Department of the Interior to have these national wildlife refuge proposals drawn up, detailed, ironed out, perhaps ready for Congress to debate, and—it was hoped—signed into law.
With most Alaskans wanting statehood, arguments about letting U.S. Fish and Wildlife save 8.9 million acres of the Arctic had a low priority. If Alaska had already been a state in the spring of 1957, the opposition to the Arctic NWR would probably have carried far greater weight. Now, even the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce supported the Arctic NWR. The assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife, Ross Leffler, toured the proposed Arctic Range site in July 1957. Rhode piloted Leffler all around the Brooks Range, exploring the immense world of extremes, contrasts, enlightenment, and wonder as best he could. Leffler was awed by the presentation. The Department of the Interior issued a press release announcing its hope of establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Range. On July 13 the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner ran the headline “Arctic Wildlife Area Is Proposed.”*
For the Muries, Leffler’s announcement was a godsend (as was the Times’ story). The federal government was now fighting on their side to protect hallowed ground. In the dispute over the dam at Dinosaur National Monument, some 175 organizations had worked against a U.S. government project that threatened to destroy the environment. By contrast, the Arctic NWR had the Department of the Interior on its side.45 Still, the department wanted Alaskans to see the project. And the terms of engagement were now clear: congressional authority instead of executive order. The Muries didn’t get a pure wilderness: there was a provision that allowed “limited mineral entry” at the “secretary’s discretion,”46 and this clause worried Olaus and Mardy. But a deal had to be made. By approving the Arctic NWR, Eisenhower had suddenly become a friend of The Wilderness Society (at least for the duration of this particular fight). Having Fred Seaton as secretary of the interior was proving to be a boon to conservationists, as Sigurd Olson had promised. The Muries were acutely aware that there could be many more plot twists, but victory was in sight.
Working for Seaton at the time was Ted Stevens, a former Fairbanks district attorney and legal consultant to the News-Miner. Stevens, in his mid-thirties, had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II with the Army Air Corps, for heroism in the China-Burma-India theater. There was no limit to his enterprise. He was known as Mr. Alaska. Now, in 1957, wanting to rise quickly in the bureaucracy, Stevens was responsible for tweaking the legal intricacies of the Arctic NWR agreement. Ironically, Stevens, when he was a U.S. senator from 1968 to 2009 (at forty-one years, the longest Senate stint by a Republican in U.S. history), fought hard to open the Arctic NWR for drilling. But in 1957 nobody knew that there might be a lot of oil in the northeastern part of Arctic Alaska. And Stevens, an up-and-coming Republican, was glad to be working closely with President Eisenhower, creating alliances aimed at withdrawing lands for the Arctic NWR.
The U.S. government paper “Establishment of Arctic Wildlife Range” (released in November 1957) included the language of Olaus Murie, Zahniser, Collins, and Sumner, and also a lot of paraphrasing. The most significant statement was that the Arctic NWR offered the “ideal opportunity” for the United States to save an “undisturbed portion of the Arctic large enough to be biologically self-sufficient.”47 For the holiday season, Murie returned to Washington, D.C., with slides from his Sheenjek River Expedition of 1956 (including photos of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was busy writing up his stories about the Brooks Range for a memoir to be titled My Wilderness). Douglas, decidedly skeptical about technology, became a promoter of the Arctic NWR in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. “Here were pools never touched by man,” he wrote of the Arctic, “except perhaps by the awful fall-out from the atomic bombs that slowly disseminate [over] the whole earth.”48
As a clever strategy, a group of fifty-five Alaskan leaders—forty-nine men and six women—assembled at Constitution Hall on the campus of the University of Alaska near Fairbanks to draft a constitution. The event was modeled on the 1787 convention in Philadelphia where the Constitution of the United States was written. Tired of waiting for statehood, Alaskans were taking matters into their own hands. The constitution drafted at these sessions demonstrated that Alaskans were more than ready to become the forty-ninth state.49
But problems were brewing for Arctic Alaska. In the spirit of a quid pro quo, Seaton announced that Public Land Order (PLO) 82 of 1943 (FDR’s executive withdrawal of 48 million acres north of the Brooks Range from civilian exploitation or development) would be modified. The land withdrawn by this order had included Harding’s 23 million-acre Naval Petroleum Reserve plus about 26 million acres more. Seaton was in effect saying: allow the Arctic NWR to be saved for conservation and we’ll open other federal Arctic lands up for mining or drilling. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner applauded this, and on November 20, 1957, 20 million acres of PLO 82 land were opened for Alaskans to develop. Snedden, who was allied with Seaton, ran a 144-page edition of his Fairbanks Daily News-Miner extolling the decision: “Seaton Opens Arctic Gas Oil.” The 8.9 million-acre Arctic NWR was buried deep in the story as a secondary event.
Olaus and Mardy Murie were worried about PLO 82. They now understood that when the Department of the Interior endorsed the Arctic NWR, this was merely the first step along a tortuous road toward making it permanent. The whole effort could still be obstructed. They warned Osborn and Zahniser to be realistic and keep the champagne corked: premature celebration was a curse of political novices. Charles Sheldon, for example, thought he had saved Mount McKinley in 1906, but it took him until 1916 to get the job done in Congress—a full decade of nonstop lobbying. Alaska’s Territorial Department of Mines wasn’t going to allow the Arctic NWR without a hellacious fight. Vague language about allowing mining in the Arctic NWR wouldn’t placate developers and speculators. Once the Arctic NWR became America’s largest national wildlife refuge, they understood, drilling, trenching, and dynamiting wouldn’t ever be allowed. The miner Douglas Colp spoke for many when he described the Arctic NWR as a “preposterous fantasy” of New Dealers and wilderness fanatics of the 1930s, now suddenly being embraced by th
e Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. The Alaska Miners Association flatly rejected the idea of giving caribou herds and seagulls priority over people’s jobs.
Sensing that public opinion in Alaska was turning against the Arctic NWR, Snedden once again rallied to the side of the Department of the Interior. On January 29, 1958, his Fairbanks Daily News-Miner published another editorial in favor of the Arctic NWR. The newspaper said that the Arctic Range was “one of the most magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas in North America . . . undisturbed as God made it,” and that in coming decades tourists from all over the world would come to see the caribou herds, polar bears, and snow-white owls: “Thousands of tourists with cameras and fishing gear will leave many millions of dollars in Alaska, on trips to visit the Arctic Wildlife Range, the only one of its kind in the world.”50
While the Arctic NWR was hotly debated in Fairbanks, the big story in Alaska was statehood. President Eisenhower, it seemed, was lukewarm about admitting Alaska into the union as the forty-ninth state. A lot of Republican donors—particularly in the canned salmon industry—worried that statehood would mean higher taxes and stricter regulation of fishing. Austin E. “Cap” Lathrop of Fairbanks, Alaska’s only business tycoon, threatened to shut down operations if statehood came about. Lathrop was paying hardly any taxes on his coal mine, bank, theater, and other operations.51 “To my mind,” Eisenhower said in 1953 about statehood, “not yet has the Alaskan case been completely proved.” In his 1954 State of the Union address, Eisenhower championed statehood for Hawaii but not for Alaska. With the cold war on, Eisenhower thought Alaska should be fortified as a national defense headquarters. Why cede federal land to create a state after the U.S. government had poured so much money for infrastructure into Alaska during World War II? Politically, Eisenhower feared that admitting Alaska as a state would mean two new Democratic senators.52
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