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Preservationists of the 1920s and 1930s in turn owed Dufresne a debt for holding the fort in Alaska, for methodically teaching citizens of the territory to recognize that their wildlife resources weren’t limitless. By taking a good old boy’s approach to being a warden, being part of the day-to-day Alaskan milieu, Dufresne helped conservation principles take firm root in outback towns and hamlets. At public forums, his firm persuasiveness—expressed on his face by something halfway between a grin and a scowl—was palpable. “Help us keep this kind of fishing,” was his simple plea to civic groups. “Your own boy might want to come up here some day.”43

Chapter Ten - Warren G. Harding: Backlash

I

Oil—that was the new rush in Alaska. Between 1910 and 1920, huge oil and gas reserves had been discovered at Elk Hills, California, and Teapot Dome, Wyoming. Appetites were whetted. Alaskan boomers believed that it was only a matter of time until oil was struck in their vast backyard, and that oil would make them as rich as John D. Rockefeller. Theodore Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, James Garfield, spoke for all ultra-conservationists when he described Rockefeller in his diary, now housed at the Library of Congress, as a cold-blooded reptile: “Never have I seen a more sinister, avaricious face—repulsive and deceitful. I disliked to shake his hand, but of course could not cause comment by not doing so. . . . I wonder if anyone—outside his family—really cares for him apart from his money.”1

The election of Warren G. Harding of Ohio as the twenty-ninth president of the United States, in November 1920, deeply depressed Leopold, Sheldon, and Merriam. Harding, who had owned a newspaper in Ohio, believed that the pro-business Republican old guard had received a mandate vote—which was certainly true. He felt duty-bound to act on Rockefeller’s principle that the only good oil field was a drilled one. No sooner had Harding been sworn in as president, on March 4, 1921, than he opened up public lands in Alaska for development. Taking aim at the Bull Moose conservationists, he issued Executive Order No. 3421, under which the U.S. Department of Agriculture was to abolish the designation of Fire Island in Alaska as a national moose refuge.2

But the conservationists’ sense of muted desperation after Harding’s election in 1920 didn’t last long. Citizens in Wyoming, angered over corruption in government, demanded that Harding’s secretary of the interior, Albert Fall, a known foe of the conservationist clique inside the U.S. Forest Service, be investigated for land fraud. Fall’s shady dealings became known as the Teapot Dome scandal. The courts eventually decided that the Harding administration had illegally leased the U.S. Navy’s petroleum reserve No. 3 in Wyoming (near a rock outcropping resembling a teapot) to Harry F. Sinclair of Standard Oil without competitive bidding. At that point Harding had been in office for barely a year. Teapot Dome was just another sleazy grab of public lands, like the Alaskan coal mines controversy of 1909 over which Pinchot and Ballinger feuded. The decent folks of Wyoming, however, wouldn’t tolerate it. In 1921, Fall was indicted for conspiracy and accepting bribes. He was fined $100,000 and sentenced to a year in prison, earning the ignominy of being the first U.S. cabinet officer in history to serve a prison term for misdeeds in office. The oil fields were restored to the U.S. government by court order, and Teapot Dome remained the symbol of political corruption until Watergate in the 1970s.3

Although Teapot Dome captured the newspaper headlines, Alaskan public lands also suffered under Harding’s pro-development administration. But plagued by various scandals, and looking for an escape from journalistic criticism in the spring of 1923, Harding scheduled a trip to Alaska. As the historian Thomas Fleming aptly put it in the New York Times, Harding wanted to “get [away] from the stench that was rising in Washington” over graft in his administration.4