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By Root 3128 0

Roosevelt also established the Kenai National Moose Range in Alaska with Executive Order No. 8979 (just a few days after Pearl Harbor was attacked on December 7, 1941).41 An editorial in Seward Gateway had called for a moose reserve on the Kenai Peninsula a decade earlier. And, in 1932, thirty-seven conservation-minded citizens from the village of Ninilchik petitioned Secretary of Agriculture Arthur M. Hyde to create a new refuge like the one on Fire Island. In addition to lobbying to create a Kenai National Moose Range, the Alaska Game Commission had issued a number of new hunting regulations throughout the territory. But boomers in mining towns like Hope and Sunrise objected strongly to the federal government’s protection of moose. Moose was Alaska’s regional meat, prepared marinated, used in casseroles or stews, and eaten in burger buns.

From 1932 to 1941 boomers fought against the Biological Survey, opposing an executive order to save Alaska’s moose population. But when the Biological Survey was transferred from the Department of Agriculture to the Department of the Interior on July 1, 1939, the idea of a moose refuge gathered momentum. Under President Franklin Roosevelt’s executive order the U.S. government started constructing military installations on Kodiak Island and at Dutch Harbor. As a trade-off, Ira N. Gabrielson, the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, was able to persuade FDR to establish Kenai National Moose Range, encompassing 2 million acres. Furthermore, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service agreed to allow limited hunting and land leasing in the refuge—leading important “hook and bullet” nonprofits to support the moose sanctuary. With World War II dominating all aspects of American life, the Kenai National Moose Range seemed like a fine way to protect wildlife. But life isn’t that simple. Richfield discovered oil on the Kenai Moose Range in the early 1950s and began demanding immediate exploitation of the field to obtain petroleum. A showdown over Alaskan moose was looming.42

Marshall continued to worry that the New Deal wasn’t socialist. He was opposed, for example, to the federal government’s building dams in wilderness areas of immense value as natural resources. But he cheered the Department of the Interior for saving such treasured landscapes as the Sonora Desert of Arizona, Cape Hatteras in North Carolina, and Big Bend in Texas. Other national monuments—Zion, Death Valley, Joshua Tree, and Capitol Reef—were either expanded or upgraded to national park status later.43 Besides the CCC, Marshall approved heartily of the Soil Conservation Service, whose aim was to stop erosion. Feeling that “big timber” was waning in the Pacific Northwest, Marshall tried to persuade his publisher to change the title of Arctic Village to Those Bastards, the Lumbermen (possibly he was joking). But his dedication never changed, from the first draft to the final proof. It read: “To the people of the Koyukuk who have made for themselves the happiest civilization of which I have knowledge.”

Arctic Village greatly enhanced Marshall’s career. Appointed by President Roosevelt as director of the Indian Forest Service, Marshall would travel around the country for about six months a year inspecting forests from Minnesota’s Lake Superior to Arizona’s Gila National Forest. Visiting reservations where pent-up frustration was increasing, he also helped Native American tribes reacquire forests stolen from them in the nineteenth century when treaties were broken. When presented with discrepancies in land title cases, he usually sided with the Indians. But he wasn’t helping all the Native tribes. Marshall confronted the Navajo over their overgrazing of stock on the Arizona range. Wearing an old cotton workshirt, faded dungarees, and a straw hat, he didn’t seem like a USDA Forest Service officer. Returning to his old hobby of collecting unique American place-names, the ever-studious Marshall learned fascinating words from various tribes. He marveled that the Chippewa in Minnesota, for example, had a particularly long word for cranberry