The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [222]
Certainly political conversation was in the air that summer of 1956, but none of the seven on the Sheenjek expedition gave many details. The journey had an unexpectedly spiritual feel. In Athabascan-Inuit cosmology, animal species like the bear and the caribou were once humans. To cut down a white spruce or to shoot a trumpeter swan for no essential reason was considered a crime against the creator.25 Perhaps Olaus Murie—who considered exploration the most profound intellectual activity known to man—summed up the Sheenjek River experience best when he simply wrote, “Here we found nature’s freedom.”26 The short summer intensified the awareness that warmth in the Arctic was only a brief respite from the cold, that light was always followed by a deep, long darkness. This mood, Murie knew, dominated the land and everything living in it.
All the members of the expedition did publish articles in various periodicals, including Alaska Sportsman and National Parks. Mardy Murie would use her Sheenjek diaries quite extensively in her memoir, Two in the Far North, published in 1962. Olaus had taken fine photographs of the Sheenjek Valley over the summer and was prepared to give public slide presentations throughout the Lower Forty-Eight. Olaus had collected cutting-edge biological information about Arctic Alaska to share with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.27 The Muries, in fact, had so much fun that they considered the expedition their second Arctic honeymoon.
Living Wilderness published a detailed account of the Sheenjek expedition of 1956 under the heading “Alaska with O. J. Murie.” Murie began by praising Dr. Brina Kessel of the University of Alaska for documenting eighty-five birds, but it was the spirit of William O. Douglas that pervaded this account. Clearly, having a man of Douglas’s eminence on the Sheenjek River was extremely encouraging. “I was impressed with the sincere motivation of this author of books such as Of Men and Mountains and Almanac of Liberty,” Murie wrote. “And I feel fortunate in having on our Supreme Court a man of his honest outlook, and one who so loves the mountains and virile outdoor living.”28
Clearly, Douglas had been enraptured by the snowcapped Brooks Range and the virgin Sheenjek River. His upbeat report on the Arctic Range as a wilderness area had a dramatic effect on the entire conservationist community. “This is—and must forever remain—a roadless, primitive area,” Douglas said, back in Washington, D.C., about what became the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, “where all food chains are unbroken, where the ancient ecological balance provided by nature is maintained.”29 George L. Collins expressed the prevailing opinion in conservation circles when he observed that Douglas’s participation in the Sheenjek expedition was crucial, because that “goofy bird” from the Supreme Court had a name that was “sterling” and “magic” in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C.30
Douglas had left the Sheenjek Valley convinced that it should be preserved as a primitive park. It was an Arctic Eden where whales blew, grizzlies stalked, and caribou roamed freely. If President Harding could make a National Petroleum Reserve for the navy in 1923, Douglas didn’t see why President Eisenhower couldn’t declare an Arctic Range by 1960. Back in Georgetown, Douglas, who always