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plain along the Beaufort Range permanently protected. They called the area Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit (“The Sacred Place Where Life Begins”). Boldly the Gwich’in Nation started standing up to oil companies, protesting against strychnine, and opposing the mining of the Arctic Range. The coastal plain they knew was the birthplace of the Porcupine caribou herd (where 40,000 to 50,000 calves were born annually). Journeying across the range, maps in hand, Collins sought the best borders for his envisioned international park. Quietly he observed with field glasses a huge herd. The Gwich’in villages were located along the migratory route, and to the Gwich’in people the caribou represented life itself. They drew on the herds for clothing, tools, medicines, and food. These 8,000 Native people started demanding equal rights for Arctic residents in the 1950s.

What to do about the Gwich’in? That concerned both Collins and Sumner. There was a saying that if “Gwich’in retained a part of the caribou heart, then the caribou would, in turn, retain a part of the Gwich’in heart.”28 In other words, the people and the caribou had a symbiotic relationship: the fate of the Porcupine herd would determine whether the people’s distinctive culture survived. Creating a national or international park didn’t make sense to Collins. Glacier Bay National Monument had struggled with how to handle issues of hunting and fishing in a preservationist site. Collins knew he had to honor traditional Gwich’in subsistence living in whatever designation was chosen for the Arctic Range. “We had a tradition of hunting and prospecting,” Collins explained. “We had international interests to consider. . . . It was felt in the service and in the department, I think, that national park status wasn’t quite the thing for this one.”29

Environmental activists seldom have enough political power or money to make changes—but they often know how to write. And there is no question in reading the reports of Collins and Sumner about the Arctic—unofficial documents not cleared through the Department of the Interior—that the campaign for Arctic preservation was promoted in mid-1951. Collins and Sumner would seize every advantage, work both sides of the aisle, and be essentially shameless in pursuing the goal of saving the northernmost third of Alaska. All this effort, however, could take them only so far. In the end, the American people would have to demand that Arctic Alaska be saved. A coalition of the Sierra Club, the Audubon Society, the National Park Association, and The Wilderness Society (among other nonprofits) would have to work for the Arctic Range. Operating in their favor was the fact that Alaska was still a territory. Around Anchorage, however, the movement for statehood was gaining momentum. Both Collins and Sumner now believed that conservationists could start lobbying Capitol Hill with a quid pro quo in mind: statehood for Alaska only if a sizable part of the Arctic became a nature reserve where the new wilderness philosophy would be honored.

Toward the end of his life even Theodore Roosevelt—the great hunter himself—wrote four or five essays on the advantages of wildlife photography over rifles. Ansel Adams wandered around Denali in 1948 taking amazing photos of Mount McKinley. Very few photographers, however, trekked up to the Arctic, because special equipment was needed in such cold country. On the North Slope the sun never set from May 10 to August 2. And from November 18 to January 23 the sun never rose. For visual artists, this meant that the sun didn’t get high over the horizon; so they got low-angle light with distinct shadows. Add to the situation nameless valleys, stark mountains, and needle-sharp rocks, and very few people volunteered for Arctic duty. Only a few hardy photographers, such as Richard Harrington and Bates Littlehales, have made art from the Arctic. But Walt Disney Productions had discovered Lois Crisler—the author of Arctic Wild, for whom the “wolf’s call” was so powerful that “nothing else would do but to look deeply into its eyes on