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

1800 Pages·2011·15.8 MB·English

by  Douglas Brinkley

The Quiet World
......
SAVING ALASKA’S WILDERNESS KINGDOM, 1879–1960
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DOUGLAS BRINKLEY
To
SAM HAMILTON
Visionary at U.S. Fish and Wildlife . . . stout friend of Alaska’s Arctic Refuge . . . and a
true believer in the Quiet World.
&
STONE WEEKS
My twenty-three-year-old assistant at Rice University . . . killed in a trucking accident
in Virginia on July 23, 2009. . . . He was an angel of pure future . . . with an intense love
of wild Alaska.
&
EDWARD A. BRINKLEY
My father . . . who served in the U.S. Army as a sergeant with the 196th Regimental
Combat Team during the Korean War from 1950 to 1952, based out of Fort Richardson,
Alaska. . . . For telling me many great army stories about encountering grizzlies on his
Alaska Range ski patrols from Haines to Fairbanks.
And I brought you into a plentiful country, to eat the fruit thereof and the goodness
thereof; but when ye entered, ye defiled my land, and made mine heritage an
abomination.
—Jeremiah 1:6
When roads supplant trails, the precious, unique values of God’s wilderness disappear.
—William O. Douglas, My Wilderness: The Pacific West (1960)
Is it not likely that when the country was new and men were often alone in the fields
and the forest they got a sense of bigness outside themselves that has now in some way
been lost. . . . Mystery whispered in the grass, playing in the branches of trees overhead,
was caught up and blown across the American line in clouds of dust at evening on the
prairies. . . . I am old enough to remember tales that strengthen my belief in a deep
semi-religious influence that was formally at work among our people. The flavor of it
hangs over the best work of Mark Twain. . . . I can remember old fellows in my
hometown speaking feelingly of an evening spent on the big empty plains. It had taken
the shrillness out of them. They had learned the trick of quiet.
—Sherwood Anderson, letter to Waldo Frank (November 1917)
Contents
Cover
Title Page

Prologue: John Muir and the Gospel of Glaciers
Chapter One - Odyssey of the Snowy Owl
Chapter Two - Theodore Roosevelt’s Conservation Doctrine
Chapter Three - The Pinchot-Ballinger Feud
Chapter Four - Bull Moose Crusade
Chapter Five - Charles Sheldon’s Fierce Fight
Chapter Six - Our Vanishing Wildlife
Chapter Seven - The Lake Clark Pact
Photographic Insert 1
Photographic Insert 2
Chapter Eight - Resurrection Bay of Rockwell Kent
Chapter Nine - The New Wilderness Generation
Chapter Ten - Warren G. Harding: Backlash
Chapter Eleven - Bob Marshall and the Gates of the Arctic
Chapter Twelve - Those Amazing Muries
Chapter Thirteen - Will the Wolf Survive?
Chapter Fourteen - William O. Douglas and New Deal Conservation
Chapter Fifteen - Ansel Adams, Wonder Lake, and the Lady Bush
Pilots
Chapter Sixteen - Pribilof Seals, Walt Disney, and the Arctic Wolves
of Lois Crisler
Chapter Seventeen - The Arctic Range and Aldo Leopold
Chapter Eighteen - The Sheenjek Expedition of 1956
Chapter Nineteen - Dharma Wilderness
Chapter Twenty - Of Hoboes, Barefooters, and the Open Road
Chapter Twenty-One - Sea Otter Jones and Musk-Ox Matthiessen
Chapter Twenty-Two - Rachel Carson’s Alarm
Chapter Twenty-Three - Selling the Arctic Refuge

Epilogue: Arctic Forever
Acknowledgments
Index
Also by Douglas Brinkley
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue: John Muir and the Gospel of Glaciers
Glaciers move in tides. So do mountains. So do all things.
—JOHN MUIR
I
H
ow sad John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club, would be to learn that in the
first decades of the twenty-first century many of the great glaciers of Alaska
were melting away at an astonishing rate. Like the Creator himself, glaciers were
architects of Earth, sculpturing vast ridges, changing bays, digging out troughs,
making concavities in bedrock, and creating fast-flowing rivers.1 Global
warming—the alarming increase of the Earth’s near-surface air temperature
exacerbated by carbon dioxide emissions from gasoline-powered vehicles and by
the burning of coal—was stealing away the glacial ice fields of Alaska.
Nevertheless, big oil companies such as Shell, Exxon-Mobil, and BP still put
climate change and greenhouse gases in scare quotes, as if the hard science were
a myth conceived by tree huggers. Fossil fuel merchants were determined to
keep Americans hooked on petroleum-based products until they choked. The
Swedish physical chemist Svante Arrhenius was worried, in 1896, as the
automobile revolution was just taking hold, that widespread fossil fuel
combustion could someday cause enhanced global warming. Arrhenius, now
considered the “father” of climate change, understood that the doubling of
carbon dioxide (CO ) concentration would lead to a temperature rise of five
2
degrees Celsius; glaciers would melt, seas would rise, and the Arctic would
slowly vanish.2
John Muir—the naturalist whom Ralph Waldo Emerson called “more
wonderful than Thoreau”—had erected a tiny observation cabin near a thirty-
mile-long glacier that was one of Alaska’s stunning heirlooms.3 Born in Dunbar,
Scotland, in 1838, Muir had immigrated to America in 1849, just after Mr. James
K. Polk won the Mexican-American War. When Muir turned twenty-nine,
following an industrial accident in Indianapolis that had caused temporary
blindness, he made a far-reaching personal decision to dedicate his life to the
natural world and to enduring wilderness. Although he was a talented machinist,
nature was his muse. Solitary and on foot he roamed through America’s wide
valleys, towering mountains, pristine woodlands, sublime deserts, and flower-
filled meadows, filling his voluminous notebooks with vivid descriptions of
plants, animals, and trees. Recording his scientific observations along the way,
the peripatetic Muir tramped through the primordial forests and smoky ridges of
the Appalachian Mountains, then headed south to survey the humid swamplands
of Georgia’s Okefenokee and the golden beaches of Florida’s Gulf Coast.
Shedding the dictates of his strict Presbyterian upbringing (his father was a
fundamentalist minister), in 1867 Muir scrawled his home address on a
weathered journal cover as “John Muir, Earth-Planet-Universe.”4 Eventually
making wild California his North Star, Muir, a pioneer ecologist, began climbing
the peaks of his beloved Sierra Nevada, camping under the stars, memorizing
botanical details through the timeless art of sitting still. “The more savage and
chilly and storm-chafed the mountains,” Muir wrote, “the finer the glow of their
faces.”5
Despite all of Muir’s cross-country tramps, nothing prepared him for the sheer
poetic depth of the Alaskan wilderness. Muir considered himself a student of
Louis Agassiz, an internationally celebrated Harvard zoologist and geologist,
whose Études sur les glaciers (1840) was the definitive word on glaciers in the
1870s. Agassiz had explored live glaciers, studying their origins in the Piedmont
and Tidewater regions. Glaciers could be snow-white like typing paper or a
brazen virtual blue, as gray as a gravel pit or as clear as H O. Some extended
2
over twenty square miles and could be as smooth as velvet or as wrinkled as a
bull walrus’s neck. They had blotches, slashes, stripes, and swirls. Other cirque
glacier remnants covered less than a square mile. When calving, a glacier
rumbled and roared, then as the ice sank or floated a strange vibration, like wind
chimes, curled the air as if a tuning fork had been bonked. Unbeknownst to most
Americans of the late nineteenth century, glaciers constituted the biggest
freshwater reservoir on Earth.6
Muir was frustrated that in Yosemite he could analyze only the effects glaciers
had on mountains; it was all the geological past. For his professional glaciology
career to advance, he needed to see the real deal—to experience glaciers
themselves, in raw action. Alaska was, to Muir, the ideal laboratory for studying
“frozen motion” as it flowed downhill as if icy blue lava. All glaciers were cold,
solid, scalloped, and slippery. But besides those four basic features, each glacier
had a distinct personality of its own. Muir, with the keen eye of a farmer
inspecting his crops, was looking for fresh scientific evidence of glacial
deformation, recession, and retreat. Every nuance mattered. Keys to Earth’s
geological history could possibly be found by studying ice fields. Alaska’s
umpteen glaciers were to become his field teachers. “When a portion of a berg
breaks off, another line is formed, and the old one, sharply cut, may be seen
rising at all angles, giving it a marked character,” Muir reported. “Many of the