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Although Arctic Village sold only 3,000 copies, many people interested in Alaskan conservation read it, including the twenty-nine-year-old Mardy Murie. Olaus Murie, the husband of the buoyant, clear-minded Mardy, was considered the world’s leading biological expert on Arctic caribou, and she had been assisting him to better understand the 11,000-year relationship between people and caribou in northern Alaska. A careful, college-educated note-taker, Mardy eventually wrote an elegant memoir, Two in the Far North, as a tribute to Arctic Alaska and the frontier spirit of its people. Marshall, while staying at a hotel in Chicago, received a warmhearted fan letter from her. “Of course I heard of you often and your fame still lingers in the Koyukuk as the most beautiful woman who ever came to that region,” Marshall replied. “Jack Hood, Cone Frank, Pass Postlethwaite and Verne Watts each told me so, and they’ve seen them all come and go from Dirty Maude to Clara Carpenter. . . . Mr. Murie’s fame also lingers in the Koyukuk.”45

This exchange of letters was the beginning of a united front to preserve what would become the Gates of the Arctic National Park and the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. As part of the New Deal conservationist program, Marshall soon held highly significant meetings with the Muries in Washington, D.C., and Moose, Wyoming. Following the death of Charles Sheldon, Olaus Murie—taking some time from the caribou—had also become the Biological Survey’s leading expert on the Jackson Hole elk herd. Mardy Murie continued assisting her husband with his study of the caribou herds of Alaska and the Yukon. The three conservationists believed in one crucial point: that in the aftermath of Hetch Hetchy, wild Alaska was now the environmental battleground.

Pleased with the success of Arctic Village, Marshall began working on a follow-up, The People’s Forest. Published in 1933, it was crammed with scientific data, and it charged that the reckless clear-cutting strategy of “big timber” was destroying American landscapes. The U.S. government’s halfway policies were failing to arrest this destruction. No longer, Marshall argued, should Americans tolerate tracts of tree stumps in their communities. Private companies, he feared, were bent on ruining landscapes for quick profit and were unconcerned about the environmental devastation they casually left behind. From Marshall’s perspective, it behooved the Roosevelt administration to acquire about 200 million additional acres of land. That would bring America’s public forestlands to well over 500 million acres. According to Marshall it was time to “discard the unsocial view” that our woods belonged to lumbermen. “Every acre of woodland in the country,” he insisted, “is rightly a part of the people’s forest.”46

As the historian James M. Glover noted, the publication of The People’s Forest had the unfortunate effect of leaving Marshall somewhat marginalized as a utopian socialist.47 There was a strain in the book that could be read as hostile to the whole capitalistic notion of land acquisition. Owners of large ranches in Wyoming and Texas considered Marshall as communistic as Leon Trotsky and as eccentric as Rockwell Kent. Bureaucrats didn’t respect his clarion calls or his pejorative language. Franklin Reed, editor of the Journal of Forestry, said The People’s Forest was “dangerous,” an irresponsible plea for huge U.S. government reserves with virtually no concern about how such a preservationist policy would affect jobs in depressed areas.48 Marshall then started a well-organized campaign to have Reed fired. In any case, by 1935 FDR started speaking in extremely eco-friendly terms. “It is an error to say we have ‘conquered Nature,’ ” Roosevelt told Congress. “We must, rather, start to shape our lives in a more harmonious relationship with Nature.”49 In Vermont’s Winoski River valley alone, more than 3,000 CCC workers were encamped for a “green” reforestation campaign.

Marshall proved to be a good bureaucrat,