The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [283]
Olson wasn’t alone in gently pushing Seaton to do the right thing regarding the Arctic NWR in November–December 1960. Although Douglas didn’t write a letter to Seaton about the Arctic NWR, two of his former wives—Mercedes Eicholz and Cathy Stone—both thought it was “highly likely” that he had lobbied the secretary of the interior. Everybody in Washington officialdom had heard Douglas hold forth on the Brooks Range, insisting that U.S. Fish and Wildlife had to protect the Serengeti of America, including its profusion of wildflowers. “The vast, open spaces of the Arctic are special risks to grizzlies, moose, caribou and wolves,” Douglas would tell anybody who would listen. “Men with field glasses and high-powered rifles, hunting from planes, can well-nigh wipe them out. In this land of tundra, big game has few places to hide. That is another reason why this last American living wilderness must remain sacrosanct.”22
One legitimate concern Seaton had was the fact that Alaska’s leading Democrats—Senator Bartlett and Senator Gruening, in particular—weren’t enthusiastic about the Arctic NWR. What if the Kennedy administration overturned it? Why should Eisenhower establish it with an executive order only to have the Democrats reverse him? That was a paralyzing thought for Seaton, but this is where Douglas reentered the drama. Extremely close to the Kennedys, Douglas hoped he might be chosen as Kennedy’s secretary of state. Nobody knew whether Douglas would step down from the Supreme Court to take over the State Department, but it was a persistent rumor circulating around Washington that December. When Robert Kennedy asked Douglas whom his brother should nominate as secretary of the interior in November 1960, the justice had an immediate answer: Stewart Udall. “Douglas was one of my biggest promoters,” Udall recalled. “We didn’t see each other much, but we were clearly on the same conservationist team.”23
Douglas was wise to recommend Udall. Raised on an Arizona ranch, a Mormon, Udall was a civil rights activist with a deep love for wild America. Udall was elected to Congress from Arizona’s second district in November 1956. A gifted raconteur and a true outdoors enthusiast, soon to be an indispensable member of Kennedy’s cabinet, Udall was both poet and politician. One of his closest friends was Robert Frost. The Alaskan wilderness movement was lucky to get him involved to start off the new decade of the 1960s. During his years as secretary of the interior, from 1961 to 1969, Udall would lead the heroic effort to get four national parks, six national monuments, seventeen seashores and lakeshores, and scores of new recreation areas established. His book The Quiet Crisis (1962) galvanized opposition against the desultory stewardship of land, sea, and air by irresponsible corporations and uncaring consumers.
III
Olaus Murie was not well in early December 1960; he was still recovering from a recent lymph gland operation that he had undergone in Denver. Sometimes it seemed that his urgent work for The Wilderness Society was keeping him alive. Mardy had prayed that Olaus would live long enough for them to experience the Sheenjek River together one last time; and in 1961, just before he died, they did. Olaus, however, didn’t live long enough to see his dream of a Wilderness Act—born out of Bob Marshall’s Gates of the Arctic explorations of the 1920s—come to fruition in 1964. That December 1960, however, Olaus was proud that the Murie Ranch—which became part of Grand Teton National Park in 1960—had become the “heart” of the wilderness movement. It was a salon where many conservation ideas had been developed. The mimeograph machine at Dogpatch and the Muries’ P.O. box in Wyoming were the cables charging the battery of the Arctic NWR movement at the decade’s end. Mardy Murie would take on the role of watchdog of the Arctic NWR until her death in 2003 at the age of 101.
Nobody in the Alaskan wilderness movement