The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [213]
North of the Brooks Range, there were signs within the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service that Alaska’s territorial game wardens thought Bob Marshall had exaggerated the allure of the Arctic. An example was Clarence Rhode, the half-knowing, half-uncaring director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. Rhode mistakenly invited Sumner on a friendly trip to survey the Arctic. Sumner saw it as a fine opportunity to count caribou on the springtime tundra, but he soon found himself shocked and disgusted. Members of the service’s delegation shot at wolves from airplanes whenever they were lucky enough to spot four or six trotting across the permafrost. Because the Arctic was flat and sparsely wooded, shooting the wolves was relatively easy. And these biologists were killing simply for sport, and later, in camp, bragging about their kills. Sumner developed a deep enmity toward Rhode: Where was the fair chase ethos? How could men of science be so ignorant?
Sumner returned to Fairbanks and thereafter cast a cold, skeptical eye on the directives of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. His own view of the Arctic, he now realized, was more in line with that of the Inupiat Eskimos and Athabascan Indians than with that of the Truman administration. Clarence Rhode’s employees, he now knew, had outdated ideas about controlling predators. And Rhode himself, only marginally interested in wolf ecology, was especially proud that the stockmen’s associations, market hunters, and oil, coal, and ore developers of the Alaska territory considered him an ally in subordinating nature. That was a hard-won honor for a federal employee in Alaska. Sumner began a campaign against Rhode and in favor of creating a huge Arctic Range reserve—something that would far exceed Mount McKinley National Park in protected acreage. As a start, Sumner collaborated with Olaus Murie, the director of The Wilderness Society, about saving Arctic Alaska, saying he felt strongly that it was “one of the most spacious and beautiful wilderness areas in North America.”24 Throughout the early 1950s Sumner, who did not flinch from being a maverick, went after Rhode relentlessly. His journal is peppered with sharp, condescending remarks about Rhode’s ignorance of the biological sciences. Sumner was convinced that Rhode wanted wolves exterminated to placate the politicians in Juneau. “My impression is that F & W’s policies are those of game farming of all wildlife,” Sumner wrote. “It seems to me that at the hands of our Government the Arctic is a very perishable place.”25
So Sumner made his dissent and made it forcibly. And if he wasn’t changing bureaucrats’ minds, he was certainly galvanizing conservationists: he was admired by many wardens for courageously slapping Washington, D.C., awake. But this was clearly a rearguard action. Rhode boasted that in 1951 his service killed 287 Alaska wolves, and he promised that the number would rise. Furthermore, a future governor of Alaska, Jay Hammond, boasted that he had shot 300 wolves from his plane in a single month.26 An aggressive new effort to poison wolves was under way in the Brooks Range. Rhode had approved dropping strychnine-laced bait in the Arctic, and he saw no reason why cyanide charges—mines—shouldn’t be buried in springs near wolf birthing areas in the Brooks Range. Native Americans complained, but to little avail, that strychnine “bombs,” tossed from planes, were also devastating wildflowers, caribou, and so on. “The wolf is universally hated in Alaska,” Larry Meyers explained in the magazine Alaskan Sportsman. “It is hated with an intensity which seems to be handed down from our primordial ancestors—an instinctive hatred tinged with fear.”27
IV
Although they weren’t consulted about it in any meaningful way by the U.S. government, the Gwich’in Nation of Northeast Alaska and Northwest Canada wanted the coastal