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accounting for every penny spent; but his memorandums were often filled with belittling sarcasm and ridicule. Allan Harper, head of the Indian Bureau’s Organization Division, warned Marshall that if he didn’t want to be fired, he’d better consult a censor who would have the power to omit some particularly brutal phrases. What saved Marshall was the fact that Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes admired his vision and boldness. Cantankerous, judgmental, and deeply devoted to conservation, Ickes was nicknamed Donald Duck by FDR because of his cartoonish temper tantrums. Horace Albright, head of the National Park Service, said that Ickes was “the meanest man who ever sat in a Cabinet office in Washington” but also “the best Secretary of Interior we ever had.”50 Ickes shared Marshall’s foresight when it came to increasing primitive areas within America’s national forests. “I think we ought to keep as much wilderness area in this country of ours as we can,” Ickes told CCC workers. “I do not happen to favor the scarring of a wonderful mountainside just so we can have a skyline drive. It sounds poetical, but it may be an atrocity.”51

In the summer of 1934 Marshall was appointed by Ickes to represent the Department of the Interior in creating an international wilderness sanctuary with Canada along the Minnesota-Ontario border. Marshall hoped for a roadless national park. Visitors would instead paddle canoes like the voyageurs of old to get around the “land of 10,000 lakes.” Deeply disturbed because the National Park Service had been building turnpikes inside wonders like the Shenandoah Valley, Marshall worked overtime to develop a new roadless policy. From his perspective, the skyline drives built through the scenic center of Shenandoah National Park were a betrayal of the law of 1916 saying that both wildlife and scenery should remain “unimpaired.” Plans for concrete thoroughfares through Great Smoky Mountains National Park also incensed Marshall. Roads would facilitate logging, mining, dam construction, and oil drilling. By focusing on roadlessness Marshall knew he could eventually win the battle to preserve wilderness.52

Ickes dispatched Marshall to Tennessee to recommend routes for a proposed new highway from Shenandoah to the Smokies. Cleverly, Marshall wrote an urgent missive asking Benton MacKaye, the father of the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail, to meet with him in Knoxville. Meanwhile, Mackaye had asked Harold C. Anderson, secretary of the Potomac Appalachian Trail, to come with him to Tennessee. Meeting at the Andrew Jackson Hotel in Knoxville, the three conservationists, recognizing that there was no lobbying group aimed at keeping public lands roadless, started an open-ended dialogue. They wanted to found a new nonprofit group like the Izaak Walton League or the Sierra Club. To these men the idea of a highway in the Smokies reeked of “bad planning.” Marshall’s vocal dissent, however, was construed by some members of the National Park Service as an “improper and ungracious attack.”53

A few months later, in 1935, Marshall met in Washington, D.C., with Robert Sterling Yard (a creator of the National Park Service) and Mackaye to officially announce the founding of The Wilderness Society.

The nature photographer Ansel Adams once wrote that certain “noble areas” of the world should be left in as “close-to-primal condition” as possible.54 That was what Marshall wanted to happen in America. “All we desire to save from invasion,” he declared, “is that extremely minor fraction of outdoor America which yet remains free from mechanical sights and sounds and smell.”55 Aldo Leopold, the most eminent wildlife biologist of the twentieth century, was brought in to become a cofounder of The Wilderness Society.56 “It will be no longer a case of a few individuals fighting,” Marshall declared, “but a well organized and thoroughly earnest mass of wilderness lovers.”57

The Wilderness Society was officially created at the Cosmos Club in Washington, D.C., on January 20, 1935. Professional, self-assured, and devoted to nature, these high