The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [257]
To promote the forthcoming Disney documentary White Wilderness—a groundbreaking precursor of today’s Deadliest Catch and Man vs. Wild, Alaskan adventures on the Discovery Channel—photographs were circulated of Herb and Lois Crisler eating roast frog in Oregon and hand-feeding wolves in Alaska. At a time when the cold war pervaded American life and newspapers were filled with grim reports about Khrushchev, Mao, and the hydrogen bomb, the back-to-nature movement found a place in pop culture and was a huge success at the box office. When Disney released White Wilderness, about the Crislers, in 1958, the critics praised the wildlife photography. Never before had the migration of caribou, the howls of wolf packs, and the antics of grizzly bears been experienced by so many people. Disney’s nine cameramen caught all the inherent drama of Alaska’s spring thaw and winter freeze. Moviegoers’ hearts raced as lemmings “committed suicide” by jumping off cliffs, a wolverine attacked a fleeing rabbit, and polar bears swam in the Arctic Ocean in search of seals. For use in schools Disney had White Wilderness cut into fifteen-minute capsule specialty films such as “Large Animals of the Arctic” and “The Lemmings and Arctic Birdlife.”
In the 1980s the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation newsmagazine The Fifth Estate (a counterpart of CBS’s 60 Minutes) attacked White Wilderness as nature faking and as having involved cruelty to animals. Disney’s cameramen were accused of forcing lemmings off a cliff into the Arctic Sea. And the cute scene of a polar bear cub tumbling down a snowy embankment had been shot, allegedly, in a film studio in Calgary.5 These were serious charges, but in 1958, when White Wilderness won an Academy Award for best documentary, they didn’t seem to matter to the “Save Arctic Alaska” movement.
The Crislers had done an impressive job of promoting the enduring beauty of Alaska in both Arctic Wild and White Wilderness, and, building on the status established with their cult work A True-Life Adventure: The Olympic Elk in 1952, they became television celebrities and were sought for speaking engagements from Los Angeles to New York. Somehow, in the era of the cold war and containment, Disney’s Arctic was therapeutic, a reminder that parts of America were still wild. Retreating to Crag Cabin, their home near Lake George, Colorado (forty miles from Colorado Springs), the Crislers started raising wolves and dog-wolves in their fenced-in backyard. Nature appeared to have been domesticated, with Disney’s help. After having brought public attention to the Olympic Mountains, they now made Americans aware that the United States owned part of the Arctic. The Naval Petroleum Reserve had been claimed for oil in 1923; now some adjacent acres were up for grabs. The Crislers’ love of wolves far outdistanced Gary Snyder’s humorous affection for coyotes or Peter Matthiessen’s calm appreciation of musk oxen. “Sometimes [the female] ululated, drawing her tongue up and down her mouth like a trombone slide,” Lois Crisler wrote. “Sometimes in a long note she held the tip of her tongue curled against the roof of her mouth. She shaped her notes with her cheeks, retracing them for plangency, or holding the sound within them for horn notes. She must have had pleasure and sensitiveness about her song for if I entered on her note she instantly shifted by a note or two: wolves avoid unison singing; they like chords.”6
The New York Times extolled Lois Crisler for contributing to our “knowledge of animal behavior.” While the untamable Ginsberg was reading “Howl” at the Six Gallery, Lois Crisler