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Chapter Sixteen - Pribilof Seals, Walt Disney, and the Arctic Wolves of Lois Crisler

I

Walt Disney, a veteran of World War I, wanted to help the United States strike back against the Japanese following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Patriotically, he put his film company at the disposal of the U.S. War Department. Working with the director Frank Capra, he made films for the Army Signal Corps’s series “Why We Fight,” which explained America’s rationale for going to war.1 When a patrol–torpedo boat squadron asked for a cartoon insignia, Disney gladly obliged without remuneration and quickly produced an image of a mosquito carrying a torpedo on its back. That morale-boosting, comical mosquito became very popular in Alaska, where the actual insect was a menace.

Other outfits in the armed forces soon wanted their own insignia, and Disney’s studio was inundated with requests. Stationed on Kodiak Island in December 1941, for example, was a forlorn naval base with only seventeen minutes’ worth of ammunition. The base was run by the Western Defense Command in San Francisco under the leadership of General Simon Buckner, tasked with protecting the Aleutians from a Japanese attack. When, in June 1942, the Japanese landed 8,600 troops on Kiska and Attu islands, Buckner’s mission to thwart them became a national security priority. This was the first occupation of U.S. soil by a foreign country since the War of 1812. Over the coming months Allied aircraft dropped more than 7.5 million pounds of bombs on these two Alaskan islands, forcing the Japanese to retreat westward. Alaska was becoming an important theater of war, though that is now widely forgotten. The Western Defense Command, however, didn’t have a logo for its Alaska Defense Command (ADC) as 1943 began.

Disney—a lifelong lover of the northern fur seals that congregated on the Pribilofs—now entered the picture. During World War II, the humans on the Pribilofs had been evacuated, but, to Disney’s consternation, the seal harvesting continued unabated.2 Disney drew a cute, frisky-looking seal, balancing the letters ADC on its nose, for the soldiers and sailors to enjoy. In the background was a bright orange-yellow midnight sun. As of late 1943, the patch became the symbol for ADC (although it was never officially approved).3

Throughout the 1950s, Walt Disney pioneered in making nature films about Alaska. What most interested the general public was distinguished naturalists who hand-reared the wild animals they were observing. The thrill for audiences, particularly children, was watching a fierce animal like a wolf or bear become a family friend. Disney had struck gold with Jiminy Cricket and Mickey Mouse in cartoon format and would also make money with the True-Life Adventure documentary series, offering wildlife up-close. Serious conservationists of the 1950s weren’t particularly fond of Disney’s domestication of wildlife as a way of attracting converts to ecology. It smacked of “nature faking.” But wolves were being exterminated in Alaska (sometimes by airborne hunters), so the Muries decided to collaborate with the husband-and-wife team of Herb and Lois Crisler, who they knew were defenders of wildlife.4 And before the Crislers, Alfred and Elma Milotte—also a married couple—had moved to the Bering Sea to document the rituals of Alaskan fur seals on the Pribilof Islands for a pioneering Disney documentary.

Ever since the young Walt Disney left Kansas City for Hollywood in the 1920s, his urge to make movies about Alaska was intense. Once Disney reinvented animation as an art form with Snow White, Pinocchio, Fantasia, and Dumbo, he produced the True-Life Adventure nature documentary series, which brought in many young recruits to the modern environmental movement. Disney’s contribution to conservation was that he helped sensitize the general public to the beauty of fragile ecosystems (such as deserts, swamps, and tundra) and of animals (such as bears, cougars, and seals). A