The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [122]
When Charles Sheldon, the “father of Denali National Park,” heard of Roosevelt’s death, he felt discouraged. Without Roosevelt to rally the conservationists, many wildlife preservation initiatives in Alaska were bound to lose steam. Sheldon had hoped to bring Roosevelt with him to see the grizzlies of Denali; now that idea would never happen.
Sheldon turned more and more to his conservation-minded children to help him collect data for the Biological Survey and the Smithsonian Institution. He began seeing everything in terms of stewardship. His daughter Carolyn Sheldon, for example, published authoritative papers on Vermont jumping mice (genus Zapus).25 His son William Sheldon started collecting new biological information on Dall and stone sheep, and made an expedition in China to conduct comprehensive research on giant pandas.26 William went on to earn a PhD in biology from Cornell University. He later published a definitive work, The Book of the American Woodcock, with the University of Massachusetts Press, about the squat, short-legged shorebird whose range was the Atlantic coast and the Midwest in America.27
Anybody interested in wildlife and exploration in the 1920s eventually ended up spending time at Charles Sheldon’s home in Washington, D.C. His library of works about the outdoors had more than 6,000 volumes; Roosevelt had called it the “choicest” in America. Yale University later acquired the rare books to form the core of a special collection. Regularly, Sheldon hosted dinners at his home for polar explorers such as Richard Byrd and Roald Amundsen. Peary had died in 1920, and Sheldon deemed it necessary to embrace the new generation of Arctic and Antarctic pioneers. But it wasn’t all cold weather for Sheldon. Famously, he lived with the Sere Indians on Tiburon Island in the Gulf of Mexico, collecting artifacts and oral histories. He also became associated with the National Conference on Outdoor Recreation from 1924 to 1928, helping President Calvin Coolidge advance national wildlife policy in Alaska, and he joined forces with Professor William S. Cooper to stress the importance of a signed executive order to create Glacier Bay National Monument out of Muir’s Inside Passage wonderland.28
After Roosevelt’s death, Sheldon began corresponding intensely with George Bird Grinnell about fauna and flora. Both conservationists had been alive during the Civil War. And now, suddenly, it was 1920; automobiles had replaced horses, and new, younger, more technocratic types had entered the fields of wildlife biology and ecology. Taxidermy was fast becoming a lost art. But purposefulness, drive, and commitment never leave a person whose vocation or trade happens to be his lifelong passion. Together these outdoorsmen—Grinnell and Sheldon—remained determined to save Alaska’s declining bear population, and to make sure that Admiralty Island would not be ruined. They had their work cut out for them. Secretary of the Interior Franklin Lane—appointed by President Woodrow Wilson—opposed the protection of bears. Sheldon also reported to Grinnell that the Alaskan legislature was lampooning members of eastern sportsmen’s clubs like the Boone and Crockett Club as aristocratic New Yorkers who were out of touch with the hardscrabble north country. Alaskan newspapers derided bear protection as Hornadayism. “There are rumors that Hornaday is writing a pamphlet on the protection of the Alaska bear,” a worried Sheldon wrote to Merriam on February 28, 1920. “If he does, this will finally prevent future possibility of ever agreeing with the Alaskans on the protection of it and will consider it on the basis of their dislike of him. I hope that these reports are not true.”29
Within the Biological Survey a feud developed. Sheldon had bitten his tongue instead of criticizing Hornaday’s extreme animal rights rhetoric while the Colonel was alive. Although Roosevelt