The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [22]
An accomplished naturalist and adventurer, Roosevelt had eagerly read the scientific reports written by the faunal naturalists on the Harriman Expedition as they were periodically issued. He was especially impressed with the work of George Bird Grinnell (editor of Forest and Stream), Dr. C. Hart Merriam (chief of the U.S. Biological Survey), and William H. Dall (paleontologist of the U.S. Geological Survey and honorary curator of mollusks at the U.S. National Museum). Sometimes Roosevelt was envious of Dall, who had three species—the Dall porpoise, Dall sheep, and Dall limpet—named after him. By 1899 only the Olympic Range elk (Cervus roosevelti) had been named—by Merriam—in Roosevelt’s honor. The Harriman Expedition was Dall’s unprecedented fourteenth trip to wild Alaska; his first visit had been in 1865, to study the possibility of an intercontinental telegraph line. Dall had encyclopedic knowledge of all things Alaskan and was teasingly nicknamed “Inuit Dall.” His book Alaska and Its Resources (1870) was a bible to U.S. government agents traveling in the district after Seward’s purchase.1
Once Roosevelt started reading Dall on Alaska, he began thinking about ways to protect Alaska’s species (and their habitat) in perpetuity. Now, in 1899, as New York’s conservationist governor, he was setting the tone for the rest of America, including Alaska. The big-game hunter Dall DeWeese had also gone to Alaska in 1897 to shoot a trophy bull moose (Alces alces) on the Kenai Peninsula. He bagged an antler rack that set a record at the Boone and Crockett Club. Antlers of an adult moose in Alaska weighed around seventy-five pounds and had a seventy-two-inch spread. Most adult caribou (Rangifer tarandus) and moose shed their antlers by January, after the rut. Female caribou shed theirs in the springtime after calving (often not until June). Female moose have no antlers.
But when DeWeese went back the following summer, the moose population on the Kenai Peninsula had been severely diminished by market hunters working in the lowlands. Roosevelt was livid over DeWeese’s report—the Alaskan moose might soon go the way of the Great Plains bison. Roosevelt, working with the New York Conservation Society and the Boone and Crockett Club (which he had cofounded), started planning to create a moose refuge in Alaska, on Fire Island (the first in the world). To Roosevelt’s chagrin, the reports of the Harriman Alaska Expedition, of which he started getting advance copies in 1900, were short on moose biology. (That wouldn’t have happened if he had been a mammalogist on the Elder, along with Merriam and Grinnell.)
Roosevelt believed that, like bison on the Great Plains, moose added an alluring charm to the Alaskan landscape. He wanted a tough law that Alaskans had to get special permits to hunt moose only in season, when the antlers were biggest. His views weren’t far removed from those of the Koyukon people of Alaska, who claimed that wild animals weren’t property. “Wild beasts and birds are by right not the property merely of those who are alive today,” Roosevelt said, “but the property of unknown generations whose belongings we have no right to squander.”2
Paradoxically, stories of the Harriman Expedition mooring off Kodiak Island to hunt bears fascinated Roosevelt no end. Back in the 1880s in the Bighorns of Wyoming, he had shot grizzly bears. It was an ambition of his to bag a Kodiak bear as E. H. Harriman had done in Alaska. (Harriman, in turn, had partially modeled his thirteen-volume report of the expedition on Roosevelt’s three outdoors memoirs about the Dakota Territory.) There was, however, a dissenter: Muir thought that Harriman, Merriam, and others stomping around Kodiak Island to bag bear trophies in the name of “science” were a childish and pathetic spectacle. To Muir, his cruise compatriots were cruel fools, idiotically abandoning the glories of Prince William