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Reading Vreeland’s fact-filled field reports from Lake Clark and Macnab’s diaries in close succession is somewhat jarring. Their literary styles are diametrically opposite. Vreeland, like Muir before him, wrote with something of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s narrative verve. Macnab, by contrast, wrote in a clipped, Hemingwayesque style. It would seem that these two men didn’t belong on the same trail together. But that was the genius of the CFCA in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s. What brought these two high-profile, successful men together was the great Alaskan outdoors. There was no reason for either Vreeland or Macnab to gloss over the grim reality of the time: the big country was being bought, sold, subdivided, carved, and developed. If the CFCA acted fast, this stretch of Alaska could be forever wild. Vreeland wanted Lake Clark saved for photographers, hikers, and bird-watchers—a people’s wilderness in the Chigmit Mountains far away from the crunch of New York City. Colonel Macnab—a fervent gun lover who would serve on the board of the National Rifle Association (NRA) between 1925 and 1935—firmly believed that hunting and fishing turned men into soldiers. A day in the Lake Clark–Lake Iliamna region was far better basic training, he believed, than all the push-ups demanded by a drill sergeant at Camp Benning, Georgia.

The friendship formed between Vreeland and Macnab at Lake Clark became a model for how the conservation movement could stay politically potent in the age of Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover. Without a charismatic Roosevelt—neither Theodore nor Franklin—as a leader in prioritizing wildlife protection (particularly the saving of habitats), the “hook and bullet” recreational types (like Macnab) and the wilderness preservationists (like Vreeland) intuited that public policy would be enacted by Congress as law only when these factions collaborated in harmony. Each faction on its own, for example, was politically too weak to wage a sustained sixty-year campaign to permanently preserve the 4 million acres of the Lake Clark region. They were, after all, going against the “Big Three”: commercial fishing, mining conglomerates, and oil exploration. (There was no commercial logging in the Bristol Bay region in the 1920s.) If the hunters and anglers, however, could learn to tolerate the Vreelands, and if, in turn, the preservationists could accept the robust hunters like Macnab, then pristine landscapes and big-game species in Alaska could be saved.

Chapter Eight - Resurrection Bay of Rockwell Kent

I

During the summer of 1918, Alaska finally received the literary treatment it had long deserved—and in a far more effervescent style than what Jack London had delivered in Burning Daylight four years prior. The impoverished painter, illustrator, commercial designer, and printmaker Rockwell Kent moved with his nine-year-old son, Rockwell Jr. (nicknamed Rocky), to an abandoned cabin on picturesque Fox Island, across Resurrection Bay twelve miles from the little fishing town of Seward, Alaska. For seven months, the Kents abandoned the fast pace of New York City, turning their backs on the “beaten, crowded way” for the glories of raw nature on this largely uninhibited island owned by the federal government.1 A book-learned transcendentalist and wandering mystic, Kent recorded his impressions of Alaska from August 1918 to March 1919 in his journals (published in 1920 as Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska). Kent was an original voice, and his musings were cosmic meditations on the inherent liberty found in wilderness settings: sea, sky, islands, and icy fjords. Deeply misanthropic, Kent—a socialist, pacifist, misfit, and activist who was sickened by the Great War—found stark relief in the dark, lonely waters around Fox Island. “There are the times in life when nothing happens,” he wrote, “but in quietness the soul expands.”2

Holed up on a lonely island in south-central Alaska, taking a respite from city life, staring