• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

After filming White Wilderness for Disney in 1956, the Crislers took their four wolf pups home with them to Tarryall Peak in Colorado. They had no other choice. Because these wolves had been domesticated, they had never learned to hunt. Releasing them into the wild would have meant certain death. Killing them wasn’t an option. So the Crislers got government permits to keep them in Colorado as pets. Harper and Brothers advanced Crisler money to write a follow-up memoir—Captive Wild—about raising and breeding wolves at Crag Cabin, their ranch.32

Never known for holding his tongue, William O. Douglas lambasted Disney for the irresponsible nature-faking stunts in White Wilderness, though he was careful not to hold Lois and Herb Crisler responsible for the staged material: “In my time Walt Disney did more than anyone to distort and depreciate our wildlife,” Douglas wrote. “He had a wolverine fight a bear to death. Animals, other than men, do not follow that course. They have conflicts but soon withdraw. Disney got the wolverine to fight the bear by starving both animals for weeks in a Los Angeles zoo. The battle actually took place in a movie set in the city.”

In his memoir Go East, Young Man Douglas intensified his criticism: “Disney showed rams of the mountain-sheep family charging each other, their foreheads clashing to the tune of the ‘Anvil Chorus,’ ” he scoffed. “They charge, of course, but in between charges they rest, walk around, paw the earth, and the like. They do not follow the pattern of a Hollywood dancing troupe.”33

While the Crislers were raising wolves in Colorado, Frank Glaser, the wolf hunter, was still using his “coyote getter” from Seward to Nome. On most mornings he loaded cyanide into his “coyote getter” (which was set off by animals attracted to a bait station) and headed out into the wild. He was also given access to a plane, making it easier for him to slaughter wolves far and wide. But a change was occurring in Alaska. Glaser, once considered an Alaskan hero, was starting to be viewed by the general public as a menace. Glaser’s idea of success was discovering a wolf den and slaughtering the pups: this practice was now frowned upon by an increasing number of Americans. Still, Eisenhower’s secretary of the interior, Douglas McKay, presented Glaser with a Meritorious Service Award for controlling predatory animals. Glaser moved around Idaho, California, and Oregon for a while in the 1950s. But there weren’t enough wolves to slaughter in other states, so he moved back to Anchorage. One night Glaser heard wolf howls in the distance. He seethed with rage. “They don’t belong in town,” he fumed. “They’ll kill dogs, and a lot of kids are running around too. I’m worried about them. Those wolves have to be killed.” Upset by the fear that wolves were going to lay siege to Anchorage, Glaser telephoned Dr. Louis Mayer for psychological help. “Mayer made a house-call,” Jim Rearden recalled in Alaska’s Wolf Man, “talked with Frank, gave him a sedative.”34

III

By a happy coincidence, 1956 brought another milestone publication that to many Arctic conservationists transcended Lois Crisler’s writings. The brother of The Wilderness Society’s cofounder Bob Marshall brought out, with the University of California Press, a posthumous work by Marshall, Alaska Wilderness: Exploring the Central Brooks Range. Whereas Bob Marshall’s Arctic Village had dealt with the citizens of Wiseman, Alaska Wilderness offered meditations about the Upper Koyukuk drainage system to the Gates of the Arctic wilderness. Every page offered wisdom and enlightenment. Suddenly Marshall’s voice was alive again, nearly two decades after his death in 1939. He described battling Squaw Rapids below the mouth of the Glacier River and recounted “a furious blizzard” swooping down upon him and freezing his party’s “cheeks and necks.” It all made for riveting outdoors reading. Alaska Wilderness included scientific data and drainage maps, and it had a revivifying effect on Adolph, Olaus,