The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [20]
But as Beach made clear in The Winds of Change, first published in 1918, the Russian, Canadian, and Japanese pelagic hunters continued slaughtering Alaska’s northern fur seals indiscriminately. Seal fur brought money. And law enforcement, as represented by federal agents in Washington, D.C., was far, far away. To these market hunters, the Pribilofs—rocks with only clusters of creeping willows and a few shrubs bearing black currants and red salmonberries—were Fort Knox; actually, truly fine pelts were worth more than gold. Disdainful of federal seal protection laws, vessels from these countries would anchor just outside the three-mile U.S. limit and slaughter the great herds. Rudyard Kipling included in his second Jungle Book the short story “The White Seal,” a saga of the Bering Sea about nations slaughtering Pribilof fur seals and otters. Using high-powered rifles, hunters in the Aleutian Islands shot at the heads of seals and otters, hoping their bodies would wash ashore, where skinning could commence.
III
By the time Roosevelt graduated from Harvard in 1880 he had become envious of naturalists like Dall—a latter-day American version of Steller—who roamed the strange and forbidding Alaskan tundra with mush dogs, sledding past grizzly bears. The ribbon seal (Phoco fascita) in the Bering Sea, the giant tusked walrus, ice cascades, fierce gales, alpine tundra, root-digging grizzlies, unspoiled conifer forests, ripping tidal currents to match those of New Brunswick’s Bay of Fundy—all of Alaska’s extraordinary ensemble of natural wonders tugged on his psyche. Such wild grandeur was incomprehensible on the East Coast. Excitedly, Roosevelt devoured everything published about the Alaskan frontier. But the real excitement in Alaska from 1870 to 1914 was gold. From the early prospectors of the 1870s to the crazed strikes of the late 1890s in the Klondike and the stampedes in Nome to the El Dorado gold fever triggered by discoveries in Tanana, Ruby, Iditarod, and Livengood, gold ruled Alaska. Only the discoveries of oil fields in Alaska, first up the Cook Inlet and then along the Arctic Ocean coastal plains in the middle to late twentieth century, equaled the wild-eyed hunger for gold.34
The part of the permafrost Arctic expanse owned by the United States—northern Alaska above the Arctic Circle—was home to millions of birds from all over the world. In the air—arriving in swirls from Antarctica, Australia, Asia, South America, northern Canada, and the Lower Forty-Eight—were migratory birds that had flown thousands of miles. Every spring geese, ducks, swans, and sandhill cranes were the first to arrive, even before the ice melted and the rivers were free. Native Alaskan tribes, Roosevelt learned, had flourished for thousands of years, living hand-to-mouth off the frozen land and rough sea. According to the U.S. Geographical Survey in 1877, most of Alaska was an open book for any faunal naturalist willing to collect quantitative data. After reading Henry Wood Elliot’s A Report upon the Condition of Affairs in the Territory of Alaska, Roosevelt craved the rock, snow, and ice of the territory even more. Russia had made one of the worst blunders of the nineteenth century in selling more than 586,000 square miles so cheaply. Alaska sprawled over 21 degrees of latitude and 43 degrees of longitude. As the explorer Alfred Hulse Brooks—who gave his name to the Brooks Range—noted, Alaska was truly a place of “continental magnitude.”35
Alaska was one-fifth the size of the continental United States, larger than California, Texas, and Montana combined. If superimposed onto a U.S. map, the state would stretch all the way from