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

by Douglas Brinkley

  Eventually, on July 7, 1958, Eisenhower reluctantly and unenthusiastically signed the statehood bill. The deed was done in the privacy of the White House; no Democrats were in sight, and only a couple of reporters were allowed to witness the historic event. “OK,” Eisenhower said, sounding almost disgusted, “now that’s forty-nine.” Alaskans threw a Statehood Day party. The Anchorage Daily News ran a huge headline: “We’re In.” Suddenly, Alaska was in the glare of the media. A lot of upbeat stories were published under headings such as “Visit Wild Alaska.” There were also upbeat stories about Alaska’s four producing oil wells and the further exploration that was under way. And Japanese companies were now interested in procuring Alaska’s raw minerals.53 Much was made of all the roads and infrastructure that had been built during World War II and had opened Alaska for commerce.

  In late August 1958, with statehood being finalized, the proposed Arctic NWR was jarring front-page news throughout Alaska because of an aviation disaster. Clarence Rhode, his twenty-two-year-old son Jack, and the federal wildlife enforcement agent Stanley Frederickson flew their twin-engine “Grumman Goose” on a roundtrip mission around the Brooks Range on a law-enforcement patrol, in part to locate caribou herds exactly so that these herds could be shown to a group of conservationists in the coming days. The Rhodes and Frederickson were also going to check up on Dall sheep in the Porcupine Lake area.54

  But then tragedy struck Rhode. The plane crashed somewhere in the vast Brooks Range. For weeks search-and-rescue missions were ordered, but nobody could find the wreckage. The search involved 260 people in almost thirty geographic zones. Rescuers traveled up and down the Koyukuk, Alatna, Chandalar, Porcupine, and Old Crow rivers by plane, all to no avail.55 Plane wreckage was almost impossible to find in the forbidding Brooks Range in 1958, without modern radio links, flight black boxes, or downed-plane tracking devices. After months of failure, the men were at last pronounced dead. The wreckage was not found until 1979. “He died on the divide of his beloved mountains on the eve of what would become the national environmental movement of the 1960s,” Debbie S. Miller wrote in Midnight Wilderness after personally seeing the wreckage. “His life ended at the very time the battle began to establish his northeastern corner of Alaska as a wildlife range.”56

  What concerned conservationists like the photographer Ansel Adams about the movement for statehood was that the Department of the Interior was willing to make deals with big oil-gas and mining concerns. Instead of trying to cultivate a cozy relationship with Seaton, as Sigurd Olson had done, Adams thought the Sierra Club should hold out until after the 1960 presidential election, in which Lyndon Johnson or John F. Kennedy—both Democrats, and both far more in favor of national parks than Eisenhower was—had a good chance of beating Vice President Richard Nixon (the likely Republican nominee). “I think,” Adams wrote to the environmentalist J. F. Carithers on December 19, 1959, “the conservation organizations are too scared of Uncle Sammy’s briefcase men for their own good.” Adams was sickened by the way the U.S. Forest Service, in particular, was trying to “milk wilderness for all it is worth.”57

  On January 3, 1959, Eisenhower signed the official proclamation transforming Alaska from a territory to a state. This time Eisenhower stood with a number of Alaskan dignitaries—senators-elect E. L. Bartlett and Ernest Gruening; representative-elect Ralph Rivers; the former territorial governor Mike Stepovich; the acting governor, Wayne Hendrickson; and Bob Atwood, publisher of the Anchorage Daily Times. Also present, and beaming with joy, was Fred Seaton. Signing pens were handed out by the handful. An American flag with forty-nine stars was unfurled—now a collector’s item because Hawaii became the fiftieth state on August 21, 1959. As Eisenhower had feared, Alaska’s first two U.S. senators were indeed Democrats. The first two senators from Hawaii were Oren E. Long (a Democrat) and Hiram Fong (a Republican), so the addition of the two new states brought three Democrats and only one Republican to the Senate.

  What nobody knew for certain throughout 1959 was what Alaskan statehood meant for the wilderness movement. But Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society and Ira Gabrielson of the Wildlife Management Institute kept up the intense lobbying effort. In May they got a big break. Senator Warren G. Magnuson of Washington, a Democrat, introduced legislation to create the Arctic NWR. The Department of the Interior would be the administrator of the refuge, through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Predictably, Senator E. L. Bartlett denounced the legislation as a federal land grab in the new state. A fight was under way.

  To ecologists of the late 1950s, something larger was at stake in the debate over the Arctic NWR: the planet Earth. If the last great wilderness was wrecked by humans, exploited for profit, what did that say about the future of the Amazon, Serengeti, or the Yangtze River? Shouldn’t some places remain inviolate? The politics of the Arctic NWR fight coalesced in such a way that if the environmental movement suffered a loss, a dozen growing wilderness nonprofits would lose the momentum they had achieved in the controversy over Dinosaur National Monument. With the world population predicted to be 7 billion by 2010, wouldn’t some truly wild places be needed as ecological buffers? Hadn’t Eisenhower done the right thing by declaring Antarctica a free zone? Shouldn’t the same type of global preservation take place in the Arctic?

  Was the Atomic Energy Commisson’s Project Chariot really going to explode approximately 2.3 megatons of nuclear bombs and other nuclear devices—equivalent to about half of all the explosives of World War II—to construct an artificial harbor at Cape Thompson on the North Slope? Was Edward Teller so committed to nuclear weapons that he didn’t care about radioactive contamination from the blast? It was the threat of Project Chariot that impelled Ginny Wood and Celia Hunter—the two WASP pilots from Washington State—into grassroots conservationism in 1960. If Seaton needed petitions for the Arctic NWR signed by Alaskans to deflect criticism that the Eisenhower administration had turned as soft as the Sierra Club, they could gather the signatures. They would do anything to prevent Arctic Alaska from becoming an atomic test range or an American version of a Saudi oil field.

  Epilogue: Arctic Forever

  This is the place for man turned scientist and explorer, poet and artist. Here he can experience a new reverence for life that is outside his own and yet a vital and joyous part of it.

  —WILLIAM O. DOUGLAS

  I

  For anybody planning a trip to what became the Arctic NWR, William O. Douglas’s engrossing My Wilderness, published in early 1960, should be mandatory reading. When he was north of the Brooks Range—the great watershed dividing the Arctic from the Alaskan interior region—Douglas felt as if a time machine had taken him back to the beginning of the world. Everything was primordial, uncontaminated, and fresh. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote that the “world laughs in flowers.” Nowhere was this metaphor truer than in the Arctic, where primroses and forget-me-nots bloom in the summer along the Sheenjek River, suffusing its banks with pink and purple. Botany and animal life fill every page of My Wilderness. In the chapter on the Brooks Range, Douglas wrote about seeing caribou hooves crush grass, befriending an arctic ground squirrel (Spermophilus parryii), and watching grizzlies dig hummocks. There are scenes of golden eagles nesting near his base camp, and happy-go-lucky pintail ducks scouring for food in the velvety hummocks of the range. To Douglas, Arctic Alaska—like Antarctica—was too precious to permit destructive oil-gas and mining activity, particularly since the future would bring clean energy.

  Douglas made clear in My Wilderness not only that the Eisenhower administration should create the Arctic NWR, but that its 8.9 million acres should remain untouched by civilization. It would be a laboratory for biologists intent on discovering the natural order before man changed the rhythm of creation. Douglas had done the math in 1960 and had learned that only 2 percent of American land was roadless or a wilderness. Fuming at utility corporations, federal agencies, stockmen, timber barons, and oil-gas executives—“the modern Ahabs” who saw a cliff and
thought in “terms of gravel”—Douglas insisted that the Arctic must remain a living wilderness for both scientific observation and aesthetic wonderment.1 “Potbellied men smoking black cigars, who never could climb a hundred feet,” Douglas said, referring to the intrusion of corporate developers into the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, “were now in the sacred precincts of a great mountain.”2

  My Wilderness was illuminating about Arctic life and, considered simply as literature, elegantly written. Douglas wrote about 300-year-old white spruces, about wild cranberry, and about measuring a wolf’s paw print (six inches by 5.1 inches). At an Arctic campsite in the upper reaches of the Sheenjek River alongside Last Lake (the latter designation credited to the Muries), Douglas went fly-fishing and recorded the experience. The reader could almost feel the grayling tug at the line. As camp chef for a few nights, Douglas cooked grayling for dinner on the creek-side grill for fellow members of the Sheenjek Expedition of 1956. There was also a sense of urgency in My Wilderness regarding alternative sources of energy. Fossil fuels, he worried, were choking the planet to death. My Wilderness was also clearly the work of an erudite globetrotter. Without showing off, Douglas compared the wolves of Sheenjek Valley to wolves he had previously studied in Afghanistan and Persia. Alaskan wolves, in fact, found a very effective defender in Douglas. “The sight of a wolf loping across a hillside,” Douglas wrote, “is as moving as a symphony.”3

  Ethel Kennedy—whose husband, Robert F. Kennedy, was murdered in 1968 while running for U.S. president—fondly remembered Douglas’s nonstop promotion of the Pacific Northwest and Alaska. To Douglas, the region from Big Sur in California to Homer, Alaska, 3,000 miles away, was an ecotopia. When he talked about the lush green zones along the Pacific coast, he would also promote the notion of a “wilderness bill of rights” to protect “the region’s rivers and lakes, the valleys and ridges,” from “mechanized society.”4 In 1962 Robert and Ethel Kennedy had joined Douglas and his wife Mercedes for a week of camping in the Olympics. Douglas loved cooking rainbow trout for the Kennedy party and gave his recipe as follows: “Set rock at 45 degree angle, and heat upper side with fire; salt and pepper trout and roll in flour and place on heated face on rock; do not turn; rock will cook underside and campfire will cook topside; serve when trout is deep brown.”5

  “Bill had an enormously open mind around the campfire, talking about the world,” Ethel recalled. “He didn’t pontificate. He was refreshing. He took us to the rain forests—which, I might add, are appropriately named. We all got soaked on the trail, day in and day out, but Bill didn’t seem to notice. He was serious about us seeing his wilderness. A lot was made of the fact that Bill had gotten Mercedes a special gift for their anniversary. Our group, a few couples, kept speculating what it was: a diamond brooch or necklace. When the big moment came, Bill presented her with her own ax for chopping wood. That was the big romantic gift.”6

  The Kennedys learned on the trail just how devoted Douglas was to deep silence and utter seclusion. To Douglas, the great American outdoors was quiet medicine for the shattered urban soul. Douglas, in fact, knew a lot of U.S. veterans who ended up staying in Alaska because the open land offered healing and solace. In a marvelous extended essay published by the Orion Society, the poet Terry Tempest Williams called Alaska’s wildlife refuges, with their liberating effects, the “open space of democracy”; Douglas would have liked that phrase.7 Men who had seen combat in World War II—such as Morton Wood, who ran the Denali Lodge with his wife, Ginny Wood—needed the Alaskan wilderness to spiritually heal after seeing so much blood spilled. Wild areas such as the proposed Arctic NWR, Douglas believed, could bring God back into the lives of disillusioned ex-soldiers like Wood. These war veterans would backpack for days, weeks, or even months. Fresh air was the real curative for a soldier. The clean air off the Arctic Ocean, for example, was far more healthful than the psychotherapeutic drugs or morphine distributed at a dozen facilities similar to Walter Reed Hospital. A profound sense of humility fell over people on the tundra. The soul became whole again. Many veterans of World War II and the Korean War were proud that so much of Alaska was public land—it was wild America for the people.

  With regard to the politics of wilderness, however, Douglas was a pragmatist, not a dreamer. He understood that with regard to conservation, no important cause was ever permanently won or lost. The combat always had to be renewed and the rationale for preservation reiterated. Every time America went to war, opportunistic companies, capitalizing on national fears and anxieties, claimed that the Tongass should be clear-cut or that Cook Inlet should become an oil field. Executive orders and legislation, once so potent, would over decades become dim and faded documents with none of their original preservationist passion. Thus Sitka National Historic Park—America’s great totem pole field—was seized in 1942 by the U.S. military, which removed huge quantities of gravel from the park’s shoreline, devastating the environment. No part of wild America was safe when an economic crisis arose. Every new generation would have to fight for the integrity of the Denali wilderness or Glacier Bay. The money-grubbers, Douglas believed—those who couldn’t recognize God’s artistry—were always going to swarm like a plague of locusts onto the land, destroying its splendor. The mistake conservationists made was believing in total victory. No wild place was ever safe from Moloch.

  To the Muries the fight for the Arctic NWR was about the Brooks Range and coastal plain, caribou calving areas, and polar bears’ denning. Douglas concurred with these sentiments. But he also saw the preservation of those 8.9 million acres as a victory of the quiet world over the sonic boom. He wanted corporate noise polluters regulated, fined for selfishly stealing people’s right to quiet so that their boards of directors could become multimillionaires. In his opinion in United States v. Causby, Douglas agreed with a chicken farmer who claimed that noise from U.S. military airplanes had caused his poultry to die of panic. Douglas also felt that he personally had a God-given right to ride horseback on a “precarious mountain trail” without a sonic boom or the roar of jet engines frightening his mount and putting himself in danger of being tossed.8

  II

  On February 26, 1960, just a few weeks after My Wilderness was published, the Alaska Conservation Society (ACS) was founded. Realizing that Olaus and Mardy Murie needed local help with their campaign for the Arctic NWR, a group of activists in Fairbanks began a policy assault that continued throughout 1960—and worked. The goal of the ACS was to marshal local opinion for the Arctic NWR and thereby help Secretary of the Interior Seaton get the job done in Washington, D.C. The driving forces were Celia Hunter and Ginny Wood, the women who had been WASP pilots during World War II and who were now committed to what would come to be called ecotourism. If Costa Rica could attract tourists to its tropical rain forests, then, logically, Alaska could promote temperate rain forests. Spiritual reward, however, not profit from tourism, was the primary motivation for creating the ACS.

  To Wood and Hunter, the Arctic was unlike any other place they had flown over in Alaska. The light, the sedge, and even the soil were different. When Hunter flew from Fairbanks to Kotzebue in late August and early September, the flaming yellow birch and aspen combined with reddish brown meadows and blue waterways to form a patchwork of dramatically mixed Arctic habitats. She would see hawks circling overhead, identifiable by the multibanded tail with a broad, blackish subterminal stripe. Ice fog would roll in for hours, causing strand bands.

  The harsh country outside Fairbanks had always attracted women of fortitude, with an appreciative eye for the land’s expansiveness and courage enough to heed its summons, in sync with the power of the Alaskan wilderness. Both Wood and Hunter were part of this frontier tradition. On clear days, toiling at her desk in Fairbanks during the first months of 1960, Wood could see the distant mountains outside her kitchen window, through the towering birches. Since World War II, she had flown all over that range; she knew every peak like the palm of her hand. She had landed on runways and gravel b
ars. Along the way she had made a lot of friends in the North Slope.

  The Alaska of the pioneer days was always part of Wood and Hunter’s consciousness—the Klondike gold rush, aviation in the 1920s, Mount McKinley and Gates of the Arctic, the salmon runs of Bristol Bay, and, stretched out north of Fairbanks, beyond the Arctic Divide, the Brooks Range, which Robert Marshall had written about in Alaskan Wilderness. Having organized tours from Camp Denali from 1954 to 1959, Hunter and Wood were determined to help create the Arctic NWR before President Eisenhower left the White House. Closing Denali Lodge for the winter season from October to May, Hunter and Wood, taking advantage of their freedom during the off-season, started to organize from Fairbanks on behalf of their beloved Arctic Range. Their headquarters was a birch log home in the Dogpatch area of Fairbanks (not far from the university), and the ACS was from the beginning a typical small, personal nonprofit organization. Aspens surrounded the handsome cabin; at their Dogpatch headquarters, Hunter and Wood felt at one with nature. An owl nesting box was hung in a nearby tree, to attract wisdom.