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By Root 3200 0

knew exactly when President Eisenhower would formally issue a public land order designating the Arctic NWR. All the proper paperwork had been filed. Seaton, with renewed force around Thanksgiving, had signaled to the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner that it would happen soon. Still, it came as something of a surprise when on December 7, bright and early, Mardy Murie walked to the Moose post office and was handed a telegram by the postmaster. It was a press release from the previous day, issued by Seaton. The Muries had been testifying in Idaho against the damming of the Snake River and missed the historic moment; their home had no telephone service, and so they had not received the news about the Arctic NWR the night before. “I floated back that half mile through the woods on a cloud, burst through the front door,” she recalled in her memoir Two in the Far North. “Oh darling, there’s wonderful news today!”24

Beaming like the Cheshire cat, her eyes flashing with the excitement of a glorious achievement, Mardy waved proof that their steady, protracted effort to save the Arctic had succeeded. The press release by the Department of the Interior read: “Secretary Seaton Establishes New Arctic National Wildlife Range.”25 To Mardy it was a dream come true. Also, both Izembek and Kuskokwim (later renamed for Clarence Rhode) were designated national wildlife ranges. “Olaus was at his table at the back of the room, writing,” Mardy wrote. “I held out the telegram to him; he read it and stood and took me in his arms and we both wept. The day before, December 6, Secretary Seaton had by Executive Order established the Arctic National Wildlife Range!”26*

Why did President Eisenhower approve it? This can only be conjectured, since the paper trail is so thin; but for one reason, Eisenhower trusted Seaton’s instinct on Alaskan land issues. And since Eisenhower had worked so gallantly to demilitarize Antarctica, his doing something for conservation in the Arctic made sense. It’s impossible, however, to measure the degree of sympathy Eisenhower felt for the Arctic NWR. There is virtually no paper trail of his views. The only public mentions that Eisenhower ever made about the Arctic NWR—his administration’s crowning conservationist legacy—were minor, a notice in his “Public Papers of the President,” and a bureaucratic line in his 1961 budget address.27 Yet Eisenhower, though his rationale is unrecorded, approved the establishment of what became America’s largest national wildlife refuge. Saving those 8.9 million acres was perfectly consistent with his signing of the Antarctic treaty. Few individuals had done more to preserve polar environments than Eisenhower. “Seaton told me that he didn’t want to make a big deal about the Arctic Refuge because it would create a backlash with the incoming Kennedy Democrats,” the incoming secretary of the interior, Stewart Udall, later recalled. “Governor Eagan was squawking about it being unconstitutional. Somehow because I was from the west, Eagan thought I’d side with him and turn what became known as ANWR over to the state.”28

When Udall was asked if he had ever considered buckling under Eagan’s pressure, he said, “The thought never crossed my mind. All the Arctic Refuge meant to me when I became secretary of the interior was that our [Kennedy’s] administration could do big things. If Eisenhower and Seaton could create an Arctic Refuge, then we could do similar preservationist deals in California’s redwoods country and the Ozarks and Utah. All those places were of real excitement to me. They hadn’t yet been completely ruined.”29

The circumstances of Eisenhower’s approval of Public Land Order 2214, during his last days in the White House, officially designating the Arctic NWR, weren’t entirely unusual for an outgoing president. (It should be noted that Eisenhower did not sign PLO 2214; Seaton did.) Theodore Roosevelt, for example, had saved the Olympics just forty-eight hours before leaving the White House in 1909. Such public lands acts offered an opportunity for a timely gesture. What was odd, however, was