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By Root 2905 0

mapped Arctic Alaska. Who knew what riches lay under the permafrost? Oil seeps had been spotted between Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay along the Beaufort Sea. Ore deposits were considered probable on the tundra. In fact, the Alaskan mineral extraction industries—both local and national—abounded with rumors that zinc, copper, nickel, and platinum were to be found in the Muries’ proposed Arctic Refuge. Naturalists like Olaus and Mardy were opposed to coal mining, oil drilling, and wolf hunting—activities that many TVSA members thought made Alaska great. “He was a mild-mannered fella,” Charles Gray, an unrepentant aerial wolf hunter, recalled of Murie’s attempts in the fall of 1956 to lobby the TVSA. “He was sincere and had facts.”7

A few days after lobbying the TVSA, Murie wrote to Howard Zahniser of The Wilderness Society explaining his firm conviction that to persuade fiercely antigovernment Alaskan residents to protect the Arctic for recreational and aesthetic reasons took patience: “a lot of psychological progress will have to be made before enough Alaskans favor further federal reserves, that is a phobia in Alaska.” Zahniser, operating from Washington, D.C., frustrated by the five-hour time difference with Fairbanks, didn’t have much patience for the hand-holding style of Olaus Murie. He didn’t believe in Snyder’s “hunting magic.” To Zahniser, who had suffered a heart attack in 1951 and understood the meaning of borrowed time, most Alaskans were shoot-em-up types, uneducated in modern principles of conservation and ecology, reckless stewards of the land whose own front yards resembled town dumps with rusted Chevrolets and broken bottles littering the unmowed lawns. Left to their own devices these north country fools, ready to do anything for a fast dollar, would foul the Arctic. Extolling the virtues of the Alaskan tundra, Zahniser, who had started drafting a wilderness bill, wanted the Arctic Refuge rammed down the territory’s throat while statehood was a pending issue. The time for the federal government to strike, Zahniser believed, was now. “Will the wilderness disappear,” Zahniser, who had never visited Alaska, asked Murie, “while we are waiting to be good psychologists?”8

Such exchanges between Murie and Zahniser were commonplace in the late 1950s. As a member of The Wilderness Society’s governing council, Murie worried that Zahniser’s in-your-face style was alienating congressmen and threatening the society’s tax-exempt status.9 Unlike Zahniser, Olaus and Mardy Murie were beloved in Alaska. Powerful friendships had been built up by the couple over the decades. Even though the Muries’ primary home was Moose, Wyoming—which had grown into a campus of seventeen ranch structures—they were embraced by the Fairbanks community, and Mardy had many childhood friends in town. Olaus had proudly received an honorary membership in the Pioneers of Alaska—the venerable sourdough club. “Some years ago I received in Alaska one of my most valuable treasures,” Olaus Murie wrote, “It was not a gold nugget. It was an honorary membership in the Pioneers of Alaska.”10

Deeply respectful of outback types who made a living in the far north, Olaus and Mardy were friendly toward Alaskan miners, hunters, and homesteaders; and this attitude made environmentalist fund-raisers in the Lower Forty-Eight uneasy. Olaus and Mardy Murie’s consensus-building style with Alaska’s NRA types took up a lot of precious time. But the Muries insisted that the Arctic movement needed Alaskan sportsmen as partners. Furthermore, they also wanted the Gwich’in who lived just outside the proposed Arctic Refuge to become allies. “While we were camped on the Sheenjeck River, a group of Indians came up and camped across the river on a hunting expedition,” Olaus Murie wrote in Living Wilderness. “We had some good visits with them. These represented the first human settlers of Alaska; they fit in with wilderness living, and our system of wilderness areas does not intend to interfere with hunting and trapping by such people.”

Searching for influential allies, Olaus turned