The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [24]
One Presbyterian missionary hoping to Christianize the Chilkat Tlingit was John Brady (who served as governor of the district of Alaska from 1897 to 1906).7 Brady, living amid mile-long glaciers and shimmering coastal waters, would do anything for Roosevelt—literally anything—because he owed his life to Theodore Roosevelt Sr. (the president’s father). Brady was based in Sitka (on Baranof Island) with the Pacific Ocean serving as his backyard, and he was properly concerned that thirty-seven salmon canneries were operating at capacity around the Inside Passage, the glorious waterways that Muir had extolled in the San Francisco Daily Evening Bulletin. In 1894, for the first time, packers in the Alexander Archipelago had exceeded the million-case mark by late fall. Overfishing was becoming a menace. Grinnell had likewise complained in his report for the Harriman Expedition that Alaskan Natives were being swindled by the rapacious salmon industry. “For hundreds of years,” he wrote, “the Indians and Aleuts had held those fisheries with an actual ownership which was acknowledged by all and was never encroached upon. . . . No Indian would fish in a stream not his own.”8
Perhaps in repayment for having been born with a silver spoon in his mouth, Theodore Roosevelt Sr. regularly found foster parents for homeless children in New York during the late nineteenth century. John Hay, a family friend, claimed that TR Senior had a “maniacal benevolence” to help slum children. He was a founder of the Children’s Aid Society; he paid support stipends for dozens of waifs through that society; and he spent every Sunday at the Newsboys Lodging House, offering counsel as a sort of father figure. One afternoon in 1854 TR Senior saw little John Brady, in ragged clothes and with disheveled hair, begging with a tin can around Chatham Square. Within a few weeks TR Senior had gotten the ragamuffin Brady, whose father was a drunken longshoreman, placed with a foster family in Indiana. He took personal pride in Brady’s graduation from Yale University in 1874. Next for Brady was a scholarship to Union Seminary; he excelled at ecclesiastical scholarship and was eventually ordained as a Presbyterian minister. Then Brady studied law, with a plan to help Native Americans get ahead in society. In 1878 he moved to Sitka, Alaska, and founded the Presbyterian mission school there. (This school, which later became the Sitka Indian Industrial Training School and still later Sheldon Jackson College, was an industrial vocational institution for Native Alaskans.) The words of Jesus had arrived on the panhandle.
When Muir was touring Glacier Bay in 1879 and 1880, Brady, the only serious rose horticulturist in Alaska, had been teaching Tlingit and Haida children how to speak English, and introducing them to the scriptures. The huge glacier where Muir and the dog Stickeen had almost died would be named after Brady. On July 15, 1897, after McKinley’s election as president, Brady became governor of Alaska. Brady was a protégé of Sheldon Jackson, a Presbyterian minister who had been trained at Princeton University and who was pro-temperance, pro–Native American rights, and pro-conservation. Jackson, in fact, imported reindeer from Siberia on the cutter Bear and released them at Amaknak Island in the Aleutian chain. Reindeer—domesticated caribou—were then introduced near Port Clarence in Northwest Alaska, and Jackson hired Laplanders to teach Native peoples how to become reindeer herders.9 Much of Brady’s work, like Jackson’s, involved trying to properly educate