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will not harm moose habitat in any way and might even enhance it on the Kenai Moose Range,” Rhode wrote to Olaus Murie. “Some of the proposals call for a road network in a grid fashion every quarter mile. I cannot agree that would be helpful in maintenance of the type of moose habitat, which appeals to me, but it is difficult to convince the hungry promoters. It even appeals to some moose hunters who feel they would have no difficulty with such a network or killing a moose where they could back up the car to load them.”37

The political dispute over moose became fierce. A real-estate developer in Anchorage, Marvin R. “Muktuk” Marston, circulated the slogan “Make these moose move over and make room for people.” In 1955 McKay, who was then still secretary of the interior, had granted Richfield operational drilling leases in the moose refuge. (During his tenure as secretary of the interior he had, however, created nine new wildlife refuges and had refused to let the U.S. Army take control of the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, a buffalo range created by TR in 1905, from the Department of the Interior even though the refuge was adjacent to an ever-growing Fort Sill.) The National Wildlife Federation (NWF) defended the Kenai moose population, but the Alaskan zeitgeist in general was drill- drill-drill. The Alaskan politician Walter Hickel, later to become President Richard Nixon’s secretary of the interior, was furious that sentimentality regarding moose was slowing down economic development. Hickel reminded Alaskans that in 1910 the defiant Cordova “Coal Party” had organized citizens to dump crates of coal into Prince William Sound to protest against Gifford Pinchot’s federal policy of tying up resources.

After congressional hearings in December 1957, Seaton sided with the oil industry. In August 1958 he opened up 50 percent of the Kenai Moose Range for oil exploration. This action directly contradicted his claim in the New York Times that oil and wildlife refuges didn’t mix. To Seaton, in the end, it made little sense to allow every moose its own 500 acres of prime Kenai real estate to browse.

III

Why Rhode allied himself with the Muries so zealously with regard to the Arctic NWR is a mystery. Keep in mind, however, that in 1957 oil hadn’t yet been discovered there. (Richfield’s discovery was at Swanson River on Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula.) Also, despite his tough pose, Rhode knew that the migratory caribou of the Arctic (unlike Kenai moose) indeed did need thousands of miles of rangeland to survive: the conservationists weren’t making that up. In addition, Rhode, whose views on conservation were like those of the old-style homesteaders, believed that the Brooks Range, as it unfurled closest to the Beaufort Sea, was, along with Bristol Bay and Kachemak, perhaps the most beautiful part of Alaska.

The Muries, now working with Rhode, Snedden, and Seaton, set about the task at hand: the Arctic NWR. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner wrote a powerful endorsement of the refuge in the fall of 1957: “We favor the proposal for the Arctic Wildlife Range,” its editorial read. “We think the complaint of those opposing it is akin to that of a small boy who has just been given a pie much larger than he can eat but who cries anyway when someone tries to cut a small sliver out of it. We ask those who would raise strong protest over reserving this comparatively small sliver to stop and ponder the fact that the 20,000,000 acres now being made available for development by Secretary Seaton’s action comprises an area which exceeds the total land area of five New England states combined.”38

The attitude toward the Arctic NWR in Anchorage, however, was decidedly negative; this was considered just another federal lockup of Alaskan land. If the Arctic NWR drew tourists, Fairbanks would become the hub city. After victory in the Kenai, developers weren’t inclined to forget about Arctic real estate. Rhode candidly wrote to Olaus Murie that Alaskans opposed “everything” proposed by the U.S. government except “immediate statehood”; they felt almost