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so, too. All three of the major refuges—Arctic (14,000 square miles), Kuskokwim (2,924 square miles), and Izembek (680 square miles)—made sense to the News-Miner. Unlike those on the Kenai Peninsula, none of these proposed lands were thought to be rich in timber, oil, or coal. As Eisenhower reluctantly moved toward admitting Alaska as the forty-ninth state, it made sense for the Department of the Interior to have these national wildlife refuge proposals drawn up, detailed, ironed out, perhaps ready for Congress to debate, and—it was hoped—signed into law.

With most Alaskans wanting statehood, arguments about letting U.S. Fish and Wildlife save 8.9 million acres of the Arctic had a low priority. If Alaska had already been a state in the spring of 1957, the opposition to the Arctic NWR would probably have carried far greater weight. Now, even the Fairbanks Chamber of Commerce supported the Arctic NWR. The assistant secretary of the interior for fish and wildlife, Ross Leffler, toured the proposed Arctic Range site in July 1957. Rhode piloted Leffler all around the Brooks Range, exploring the immense world of extremes, contrasts, enlightenment, and wonder as best he could. Leffler was awed by the presentation. The Department of the Interior issued a press release announcing its hope of establishing the Arctic National Wildlife Range. On July 13 the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner ran the headline “Arctic Wildlife Area Is Proposed.”*

For the Muries, Leffler’s announcement was a godsend (as was the Times’ story). The federal government was now fighting on their side to protect hallowed ground. In the dispute over the dam at Dinosaur National Monument, some 175 organizations had worked against a U.S. government project that threatened to destroy the environment. By contrast, the Arctic NWR had the Department of the Interior on its side.45 Still, the department wanted Alaskans to see the project. And the terms of engagement were now clear: congressional authority instead of executive order. The Muries didn’t get a pure wilderness: there was a provision that allowed “limited mineral entry” at the “secretary’s discretion,”46 and this clause worried Olaus and Mardy. But a deal had to be made. By approving the Arctic NWR, Eisenhower had suddenly become a friend of The Wilderness Society (at least for the duration of this particular fight). Having Fred Seaton as secretary of the interior was proving to be a boon to conservationists, as Sigurd Olson had promised. The Muries were acutely aware that there could be many more plot twists, but victory was in sight.

Working for Seaton at the time was Ted Stevens, a former Fairbanks district attorney and legal consultant to the News-Miner. Stevens, in his mid-thirties, had earned the Distinguished Flying Cross during World War II with the Army Air Corps, for heroism in the China-Burma-India theater. There was no limit to his enterprise. He was known as Mr. Alaska. Now, in 1957, wanting to rise quickly in the bureaucracy, Stevens was responsible for tweaking the legal intricacies of the Arctic NWR agreement. Ironically, Stevens, when he was a U.S. senator from 1968 to 2009 (at forty-one years, the longest Senate stint by a Republican in U.S. history), fought hard to open the Arctic NWR for drilling. But in 1957 nobody knew that there might be a lot of oil in the northeastern part of Arctic Alaska. And Stevens, an up-and-coming Republican, was glad to be working closely with President Eisenhower, creating alliances aimed at withdrawing lands for the Arctic NWR.

The U.S. government paper “Establishment of Arctic Wildlife Range” (released in November 1957) included the language of Olaus Murie, Zahniser, Collins, and Sumner, and also a lot of paraphrasing. The most significant statement was that the Arctic NWR offered the “ideal opportunity” for the United States to save an “undisturbed portion of the Arctic large enough to be biologically self-sufficient.”47 For the holiday season, Murie returned to Washington, D.C., with slides from his Sheenjek River Expedition of 1956 (including photos of Supreme