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

by Douglas Brinkley

  Douglas was wise to recommend Udall. Raised on an Arizona ranch, a Mormon, Udall was a civil rights activist with a deep love for wild America. Udall was elected to Congress from Arizona’s second district in November 1956. A gifted raconteur and a true outdoors enthusiast, soon to be an indispensable member of Kennedy’s cabinet, Udall was both poet and politician. One of his closest friends was Robert Frost. The Alaskan wilderness movement was lucky to get him involved to start off the new decade of the 1960s. During his years as secretary of the interior, from 1961 to 1969, Udall would lead the heroic effort to get four national parks, six national monuments, seventeen seashores and lakeshores, and scores of new recreation areas established. His book The Quiet Crisis (1962) galvanized opposition against the desultory stewardship of land, sea, and air by irresponsible corporations and uncaring consumers.

  III

  Olaus Murie was not well in early December 1960; he was still recovering from a recent lymph gland operation that he had undergone in Denver. Sometimes it seemed that his urgent work for The Wilderness Society was keeping him alive. Mardy had prayed that Olaus would live long enough for them to experience the Sheenjek River together one last time; and in 1961, just before he died, they did. Olaus, however, didn’t live long enough to see his dream of a Wilderness Act—born out of Bob Marshall’s Gates of the Arctic explorations of the 1920s—come to fruition in 1964. That December 1960, however, Olaus was proud that the Murie Ranch—which became part of Grand Teton National Park in 1960—had become the “heart” of the wilderness movement. It was a salon where many conservation ideas had been developed. The mimeograph machine at Dogpatch and the Muries’ P.O. box in Wyoming were the cables charging the battery of the Arctic NWR movement at the decade’s end. Mardy Murie would take on the role of watchdog of the Arctic NWR until her death in 2003 at the age of 101.

  Nobody in the Alaskan wilderness movement knew exactly when President Eisenhower would formally issue a public land order designating the Arctic NWR. All the proper paperwork had been filed. Seaton, with renewed force around Thanksgiving, had signaled to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner that it would happen soon. Still, it came as something of a surprise when on December 7, bright and early, Mardy Murie walked to the Moose post office and was handed a telegram by the postmaster. It was a press release from the previous day, issued by Seaton. The Muries had been testifying in Idaho against the damming of the Snake River and missed the historic moment; their home had no telephone service, and so they had not received the news about the Arctic NWR the night before. “I floated back that half mile through the woods on a cloud, burst through the front door,” she recalled in her memoir Two in the Far North. “Oh darling, there’s wonderful news today!”24

  Beaming like the Cheshire cat, her eyes flashing with the excitement of a glorious achievement, Mardy waved proof that their steady, protracted effort to save the Arctic had succeeded. The press release by the Department of the Interior read: “Secretary Seaton Establishes New Arctic National Wildlife Range.”25 To Mardy it was a dream come true. Also, both Izembek and Kuskokwim (later renamed for Clarence Rhode) were designated national wildlife ranges. “Olaus was at his table at the back of the room, writing,” Mardy wrote. “I held out the telegram to him; he read it and stood and took me in his arms and we both wept. The day before, December 6, Secretary Seaton had by Executive Order established the Arctic National Wildlife Range!”26*

  Why did President Eisenhower approve it? This can only be conjectured, since the paper trail is so thin; but for one reason, Eisenhower trusted Seaton’s instinct on Alaskan land issues. And since Eisenhower had worked so gallantly to demilitarize Antarctica, his doing something for conservation in the Arctic made sense. It’s impossible, however, to measure the degree of sympathy Eisenhower felt for the Arctic NWR. There is virtually no paper trail of his views. The only public mentions that Eisenhower ever made about the Arctic NWR—his administration’s crowning conservationist legacy—were minor, a notice in his “Public Papers of the President,” and a bureaucratic line in his 1961 budget address.27 Yet Eisenhower, though his rationale is unrecorded, approved the establishment of what became America’s largest national wildlife refuge. Saving those 8.9 million acres was perfectly consistent with his signing of the Antarctic treaty. Few individuals had done more to preserve polar environments than Eisenhower. “Seaton told me that he didn’t want to make a big deal about the Arctic Refuge because it would create a backlash with the incoming Kennedy Democrats,” the incoming secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, later recalled. “Governor Eagan was squawking about it being unconstitutional. Somehow because I was from the west, Eagan thought I’d side with him and turn what became known as ANWR over to the state.”28

  When Udall was asked if he had ever considered buckling under Eagan’s pressure, he said, “The thought never crossed my mind. All the Arctic Refuge meant to me when I became secretary of the interior was that our [Kennedy’s] administration could do big things. If Eisenhower and Seaton could create an Arctic Refuge, then we could do similar preservationist deals in California’s redwoods country and the Ozarks and Utah. All those places were of real excitement to me. They hadn’t yet been completely ruined.”29

  The circumstances of Eisenhower’s approval of Public Land Order 2214, during his last days in the White House, officially designating the Arctic NWR, weren’t entirely unusual for an outgoing president. (It should be noted that Eisenhower did not sign PLO 2214; Seaton did.) Theodore Roosevelt, for example, had saved the Olympics just forty-eight hours before leaving the White House in 1909. Such public lands acts offered an opportunity for a timely gesture. What was odd, however, was the farewell address that Eisenhower delivered on January 17, 1961—the most memorable since George Washington’s in 1796. Clearing his throat and shuffling his pages behind a pair of old paper clip–shaped radio microphones on his desk in the Oval Office, Eisenhower said, “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. Yet, in holding scientific research and discovery in respect, as we should, we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”30

  The journalist Carl Rowan, who carefully studied the president’s second term, thought that Eisenhower had a deeply ingrained skepticism about technology and its effects on the environment. Rowan—who interviewed members of the administration associated with Team Seaton—believed that Eisenhower’s protection of Antarctica and the Arctic NWR was part and parcel of this speech. “Second-term Eisenhower was a surprise,” Rowan says. “Just like he helped boost civil rights—sending federal protection to Little Rock, appointing anti–Jim Crow federal judges throughout the South—he became a conservationist, too. Not enough of one to want to push through wilderness bills and the like. Not enough of one to stop nuclear testing. But he thought the Arctic and Antarctica shouldn’t be destroyed. They were sanctuaries for all people.”31

  Rowan had a point. Eisenhower did help save Antarctica and Arctic Alaska from potential industrial ruin. On the other hand, a truly ecologically-minded president would never have dreamed of allowing the Atomic Energy Commission to detonate nuclear devices around Point Hope. Perhaps the best way to understand the Arctic NWR, then, is through Eisenhower’s initial skepticism about Alaska’s statehood. Eisenhower saw Alaska, in a sense, as a possession of the federal government: a site where the Pentagon could conduct defense exercises, the USDA could experiment with harvesting seafood, and the Department of the Interior could create national parks and wildlife refuges. Eisenhower was, it seems, skeptical about big oil, coal, timber, and the antitax movement. As Eisenhower intimated in his farewell address, huge corporations like Standard Oil, Boeing, and McDonnell-Douglas served their shareholders’ interests. The U.S. government shouldn’t ever be bought off with corporate d
ollars. Also, science, as Douglas used to say, had its drawbacks. “Science has produced instruments that make man lazier and less inclined to explore woods, valleys, ridges,” Douglas would complain, in a sense echoing Eisenhower’s Farewell Address. “The machine is almost a leash that keeps man from adventure.”32

  Regardless of his motivation, Eisenhower’s creation of the Arctic NWR for “the purpose of preserving unique wildlife, wilderness and recreational values” was a peak moment for conservationists in the tradition of Theodore Roosevelt and Aldo Leopold. In Alaskan history this was the first time a federal unit was preserved as a national heirloom by the application of ecological principles. The founding purpose of the Arctic NWR was to preserve a wilderness, so this was a legislative harbinger for the Wilderness Act of 1964 that the Muries, Zahniser, and Douglas had been diligently working on throughout the 1950s.33 “Wilderness,” Leopold had written, “is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization.”34

  Ginny Wood and Celia Hunter were giddy with joy. Lois Crisler said that the wolves had also won, giving “heart and hope” to lovers of wildlife. Walt Disney wondered if there was a movie in all this. Mardy Murie, remembering that Fairfield Osborn had really started the Arctic NWR movement in 1956 by sponsoring the Sheenjek Expedition, wrote him a letter of thanks: “Sometimes it’s good to have a little victory, isn’t it? Even though we know also that there still has to be watchfulness, thinking and persuasion to keep the area natural, not ‘developed’—a treasure for the sensitive ones, the vigorous ones, the searchers for knowledge, for all the years to come. Surely there should be a few such places on this plundered planet!”35

  When Justice Douglas heard about the Arctic NWR, he was elated. His dream of a National Wilderness Preservation System was coming to fruition. Nobody knows what he thought that December day as rain turned to snow.* After performing his duties at the Supreme Court, he retreated to his low-ceilinged study on Hutchins Place to work on his new book for young readers, Muir of the Mountains. If My Wilderness could help save the Brooks Range, imagine how the wilderness movement could flourish with John Kennedy in the White House and old John Muir reintroduced to a new generation of readers. Also, receiving bigger headlines than the Arctic NWR that December 7 was the news that Douglas’s friend Stewart Udall had been officially chosen to replace Seaton as secretary of the interior. “Stewart and Bill were extremely close,” Cathy Stone, Douglas’s fourth wife, recalled. “They hiked the C&O Canal together. They’d wear old clothes and just take off down the towpath. Once they got soaked in the rain and were mistaken for hoboes.”36

  That Christmas season, while other insiders in Washington, D.C., were attending parties, Douglas sat quietly at his desk composing Muir of the Mountains (to be published in June 1961 by the Sierra Club). Working with the children’s illustrator Daniel San Souci, Douglas reviewed Muir’s life from the Scottish Highlands to his death from pneumonia in Los Angeles on Christmas eve 1914 (around the time Hetch Hetchy was turned into a reservoir). He gave great attention to Muir’s memoir Travels in Alaska. Douglas, in fact, had broadened his own knowledge of glaciation with Muir as his teacher. Writing a chapter about Muir’s “short-legged, rather houndish, and shaggy” dog, Stickeen, Douglas was comforted that his own best friend—Sandy, the border collie—was curled up by his side. “Muir learned much about glaciers on this trip with Stickeen,” Douglas wrote. “What he saw of the workings of these gigantic Alaskan icefields confirmed many of his theories about glaciation in the Sierra. Yet he learned more than this. He now knew how warm and joyous the friendship between a man and a dog can be. He learned that dogs as well as men can rise to heroic heights when danger threatens. He learned that a man and his dog, working as a team, can sometimes make a contribution to human knowledge.”37

  If Douglas had a philosophy, it was his dauntless belief that freedom of thought and freedom of expression were unalienable rights of all Americans. He tirelessly stated that at all costs these fundamental principles of individual freedom, protected by the Constitution, had to be preserved. Against all odds, bucking huge powerful blocs like the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate, the Harding administration, McCarthyism, and the industrial-military complex, the wilderness movement had doggedly persevered. Some battles—a lot, actually—had been lost. But in Alaska the land skinners and despoilers had been checkmated in a number of important instances. Like trickster ravens, the Muirian preservationists often outwitted big business. The enlightened pro-wilderness minority, promoting kinship with all animal life, had a knack for pulling rabbits out of hats. Groups like the ACS, Douglas believed, were essential in a democracy. “We need Committees of Correspondence to coordinate the efforts of diverse groups to keep America beautiful and to preserve the few wilderness alcoves we have left,” Douglas wrote. “We used such committees in the days of our Revolution, and through them helped bolster the efforts of people everywhere in the common cause. Our common cause today is to preserve our country’s natural beauty and keep our wilderness areas sacrosanct. The threats are everywhere; and the most serious ones are often made in unobtrusive beginnings under the banner of ‘progress.’ ”38

  Starting with Muir, a noble band of conservationist revolutionaries—TR, Hornaday, Pinchot, Leopold, Marshall, FDR, the Muries, the Crislers, and Carson among them—stood up and said no to the exploiters of Alaska’s wilderness kingdom. Their mythos was becoming popular on college campuses in 1960. Some places, such as the coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea or Mount McKinley, were simply too awesome to molest. The illustrator Rockwell Kent; the WASPs; the forest beatniks like Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, and Kerouac—Douglas was proud to be in their victorious ranks that December. Refusing to be a cloistered justice, Douglas crisscrossed America dissenting against reckless oil drilling, clear-cutting, strip-mining, and superhighways. He worried that the Arctic NWR and other tracts of wilderness were going to fall victim to legal clauses allowing mining and timbering on federal property. “After they gutted and ruined the forests, then the rest of us could use them—to find campsites among stumps, to look for fish in waters heavy with silt from erosion, to search for game on rivers pounded to dust by sheep.”39

  But because of the Arctic NWR Douglas felt a strong current of optimism in the air. With Kennedy coming into the White House, the stage seemed to be set for a new environmental movement. Ecological consciousness was becoming mainstream. Rachel Carson was near finishing Silent Spring, and Stewart Udall was tapping talents like the novelist Wallace Stegner to help him write the classic ecological manifesto The Quiet Crisis. The new “green” movement was spreading worldwide. The legacy of John Muir was still strong; his name was becoming almost as well known as that of Paul Revere or Betsy Ross in schoolrooms. “Knowing of people’s love of beauty and their great need for it, Muir gave his life to help them discover beauty in the earth around them, and to arouse their desire to protect,” Douglas wrote in Muir of the Mountains. “The Machine, Muir knew, could easily level the woods and make the land desolate. Humankind’s mission on earth is not to destroy: it is to protect and conserve all living things. There is a place for trees and flowers and birds, as well as for people. Never should we try to crowd them out of the universe.”40

  Muir, who preached the gospel of glaciers, surely would have said, “Amen.”

  Acknowledgments

  Since graduating from Ohio State University in 1982 I’ve traveled to Alaska many times. Kayaking around Glacier Bay National Park and hiking in the Chugach Mountains have become two of my smarter summer habits. Back in 1994, as a university history professor, I brought students on my natural-gas-fueled “Majic Bus” all the way from New Orleans to Fairbanks. We would go up the Alaska Marine Highway—which offered overnight ferry service from Prince Rupert, British Columbia, to Haines, Alaska—on the most amazing and visually impressive journey imaginable. Glaciers, bald eagles, horned puffins, blue whales, 10,000-foot snow-crested peaks, and lush forested islands were just part of the b
reathtaking experience of journeying through the Inside Passage described by John Muir in Travels in Alaska. We read classic books by Jack London, Mardy Murie, and John McPhee along the way.

  I was hooked on Alaska. From this Majic Bus journey I learned that there is no more beautiful state flag than Alaska’s bright gold stars on a field of blue, that the town of Homer truly is the “Cosmic Hamlet by the Sea,” and that the wood bison (Bison bison athabascae) should be reintroduced into the Yukon Flats NWR. I’ve also become convinced that in the age of climate change the polar bear (Ursus maritimus) belongs on the endangered species list, and that Teshekpuk Lake, whose name means “the largest lake of all” (located in the National Petroleum Reserve of the western Arctic), should be designated a national park or national monument.

  Out of all the books I’ve written, this is my favorite because it brought Alaska back into my life so fully. The Quiet World was conceived as the second volume of my multivolume Wilderness Cycle (the inaugural volume was The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America). Allan Nevins wrote eight volumes on the Civil War, and Dumas Malone wrote five volumes on Thomas Jefferson; my plan is to do something similar for U.S. conservation history. This present volume takes up the battles to protect wild Alaska from 1879 to 1960. The third volume of the Wilderness Cycle—Silent Spring Revolution: John F. Kennedy, Rachel Carson, Stewart Udall, and the Modern Environmental Movement, 1961–1964—will be published in 2014, to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the Wilderness Act of 1964. Similarly, The Quiet World was written with the fiftieth anniversary of the Arctic NWR (created in December 1960) in mind.

  HarperCollins was brave to publish The Quiet World (a rather hefty volume, with color-photo inserts) in our rather dreary economic times. The firm’s commitment to the Wilderness Cycle—my lifework—is steadfast. The quarterback of HarperCollins is the publisher Jonathan Burnham (who embraced my multivolume concept from day one). It’s a pleasure doing business with him. The editor Tim Duggan was his usual dependable self. In a hundred different ways, he helped me whip this manuscript into shape. He is a wonderful friend whom I implicitly trust. His assistant, Allison Lorentzen, is always hardworking, diligent, and kind. She helped facilitate publication with her trademark good cheer. I’m grateful to them all. Special thanks are also in order for the associate publisher Kathy Schneider and design manager Leah Carlson-Stanisic. My old buddy Kate Blum (publicist) also deserves a nod for always organizing my visits to America’s esteemed independent bookstores. Lisa Bankoff, my ICM agent for almost twenty years, kept all the paperwork in order, helping me meet deadlines and commitments. At Rice University I teach a course every fall semester on U.S. conservation history; it’s a terrific way to stay current in environmental history. And a nod to all my North Dakota friends.