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By Root 3197 0

as chief geologist of the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) from 1903 to 1924—to study the northern timberline. Independently wealthy, he was ready to leave academia and make a career as an iconoclast for wilderness preservation. He had been spending his downtime at Johns Hopkins poring over topographical maps of Alaska printed by the USGS. More than 100 million acres had not yet been mapped. The Arctic tundra held an immediate—and lifelong—fascination for Marshall. Wanting to work north of Fairbanks, Marshall set his sights on the central Brooks Range, which stretches west to east across northern Alaska and into Canada’s Yukon Territory. Any stream north of this range flowed into the Arctic Ocean. The meandering Yukon north of Denali and south of the Brooks Range flowed into the Bering Sea (technically an extension of the North Pacific). Marshall, the forester, was interested in how black spruce flourished even in subzero weather. He hoped to plant spruce seeds, wanting to prove exactly where the North American tree line ended.

II

In 1929 Marshall made his first trip to Alaska. Prior to this he had looked at a blank spot on a USGS map around the Koyukuk River and had wanted to fill in the vast white space. At long last, he got to see the northern lights. When he arrived in Fairbanks, wearing thick flannel shirts, insulated pants with suspenders, and a rainproof jacket, the bearded Marshall looked like an Amish model for an Abercrombie and Fitch catalog. Eager to get to work, he bought a ride on a plane to Wiseman, a mining hamlet located along the middle fork of the Koyukuk River in the central Brooks Range. What an adventure! Marshall’s eyes popped in wonderment as he peered out the plane’s window at the awesome scenery. The Brooks Range had no central feature like Denali or Saint Elias, but it was nevertheless breathtakingly magnificent. Its beauty, however, was subtle. The size and remoteness of the Brooks Range—all those peaks without names and never climbed—made it the wildest roadless area in North America. Marshall was surprised that there was so much sedimentary rock, and so little metamorphic rock. Clearly, these peaks had once been under a sea. If you climbed any peak you’d be almost certain to find marine fossils. It astounded Marshall to think that the Brooks Range was the northernmost part of the Rocky Mountains.

Only 127 people lived in Wiseman when Marshall arrived. Dusty, ramshackle, and without modern conveniences, the place was lost to the world, with not even a railway connection or a decent road to somewhere else. The centerpiece of the town was Pioneer Hall, where trappers, Eskimos, and prospectors congregated to sing old Canadian folk songs or dance the Hesitation Waltz (a two-step-count, forward-and-back waltz with a prolonged pause) late into the night. Isolation wasn’t merely a part of living near the snow-blanketed Brooks Range; it was the all-encompassing reality. Nature was the reigning king in Wiseman, so remote from the daily rhythms of even Fairbanks that it might as well have been Tierra del Fuego. It was hard to make even a brief call out on a shortwave radio. But even though there was not a single railroad depot, not a single room wired for electricity, and not a single tin lizzie within 200 miles along a dogsled trail, and the closest accredited doctor was more than two hours away, with only a grudging concession made to modern medicine (pills), Wiseman was, in Marshall’s estimate, “the happiest civilization on earth,” a magical place where alcohol flowed freely to help people cope with the long dark winters.18

Wiseman had the appeal of a hillbilly moonshine hollow in Tennessee. The house joints were caulked with mud. The best one-room homes were made of hewn pine with rusty corrugated tin roofs. Everything looked haphazard and hurriedly constructed. West of town were the austere Endicott Mountains, an ideal wilderness. Hiking the range, Marshall felt elevated to previously unimagined spiritual and moral heights. In the wind-torn rawness, the desolate bleakness, he shed New York, Massachusetts,