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By Root 3180 0

Court Justice William O. Douglas, who was busy writing up his stories about the Brooks Range for a memoir to be titled My Wilderness). Douglas, decidedly skeptical about technology, became a promoter of the Arctic NWR in the corridors of power in Washington, D.C. “Here were pools never touched by man,” he wrote of the Arctic, “except perhaps by the awful fall-out from the atomic bombs that slowly disseminate [over] the whole earth.”48

As a clever strategy, a group of fifty-five Alaskan leaders—forty-nine men and six women—assembled at Constitution Hall on the campus of the University of Alaska near Fairbanks to draft a constitution. The event was modeled on the 1787 convention in Philadelphia where the Constitution of the United States was written. Tired of waiting for statehood, Alaskans were taking matters into their own hands. The constitution drafted at these sessions demonstrated that Alaskans were more than ready to become the forty-ninth state.49

But problems were brewing for Arctic Alaska. In the spirit of a quid pro quo, Seaton announced that Public Land Order (PLO) 82 of 1943 (FDR’s executive withdrawal of 48 million acres north of the Brooks Range from civilian exploitation or development) would be modified. The land withdrawn by this order had included Harding’s 23 million-acre Naval Petroleum Reserve plus about 26 million acres more. Seaton was in effect saying: allow the Arctic NWR to be saved for conservation and we’ll open other federal Arctic lands up for mining or drilling. The Fairbanks Daily News-Miner applauded this, and on November 20, 1957, 20 million acres of PLO 82 land were opened for Alaskans to develop. Snedden, who was allied with Seaton, ran a 144-page edition of his Fairbanks Daily News-Miner extolling the decision: “Seaton Opens Arctic Gas Oil.” The 8.9 million-acre Arctic NWR was buried deep in the story as a secondary event.

Olaus and Mardy Murie were worried about PLO 82. They now understood that when the Department of the Interior endorsed the Arctic NWR, this was merely the first step along a tortuous road toward making it permanent. The whole effort could still be obstructed. They warned Osborn and Zahniser to be realistic and keep the champagne corked: premature celebration was a curse of political novices. Charles Sheldon, for example, thought he had saved Mount McKinley in 1906, but it took him until 1916 to get the job done in Congress—a full decade of nonstop lobbying. Alaska’s Territorial Department of Mines wasn’t going to allow the Arctic NWR without a hellacious fight. Vague language about allowing mining in the Arctic NWR wouldn’t placate developers and speculators. Once the Arctic NWR became America’s largest national wildlife refuge, they understood, drilling, trenching, and dynamiting wouldn’t ever be allowed. The miner Douglas Colp spoke for many when he described the Arctic NWR as a “preposterous fantasy” of New Dealers and wilderness fanatics of the 1930s, now suddenly being embraced by the Eisenhower administration in the 1950s. The Alaska Miners Association flatly rejected the idea of giving caribou herds and seagulls priority over people’s jobs.

Sensing that public opinion in Alaska was turning against the Arctic NWR, Snedden once again rallied to the side of the Department of the Interior. On January 29, 1958, his Fairbanks Daily News-Miner published another editorial in favor of the Arctic NWR. The newspaper said that the Arctic Range was “one of the most magnificent wildlife and wilderness areas in North America . . . undisturbed as God made it,” and that in coming decades tourists from all over the world would come to see the caribou herds, polar bears, and snow-white owls: “Thousands of tourists with cameras and fishing gear will leave many millions of dollars in Alaska, on trips to visit the Arctic Wildlife Range, the only one of its kind in the world.”50

While the Arctic NWR was hotly debated in Fairbanks, the big story in Alaska was statehood. President Eisenhower, it seemed, was lukewarm about admitting Alaska into the union as the forty-ninth state.