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A virtual fixture in Washington, D.C., society from 1890 to 1946, Pinchot could often be seen walking in the streets around Dupont Circle, noticeable in an instant by his broad-brimmed, floppy brown hat. A believer in the wise use of natural resources, Pinchot also devoted his life to preserving many of America’s pristine forestlands. Congress had passed legislation creating forest reserves in 1897, and this gave Pinchot his opening to make history. Working under Roosevelt, Pinchot helped save more than 150 million acres—mainly in the American West—as protected national forests between 1901 and 1909.

One problem Pinchot faced in Alaska was that surveys were scant. In 1902 he had dispatched William Langille—a Canadian-born Oregonian known in the Forest Service as Pinchot’s eyes and ears—to do reconnaissance in both the Chugach and the Tongass forests of Alaska. Using dogsleds and dugout canoes to get around, Langille immediately recognized that the Alexander Archipelago, Chugach, and Tongass were richer in trees than the entire Rockies of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana combined. “Special attention should be paid to species, age, and distribution of the forest bodies in different sections,” Pinchot had instructed Langille, “noting relative sizes, etc. in reference to geographical, physical, and altitudinal position.”22

According to people associated with Roosevelt and Pinchot, unless Forest Service rangers like Langille continually hiked or patrolled by canoe, timber trespassers around Puget Sound, backed by Wall Street capital, would swoop into Alaska, destroy forestlands, never replant, and leave the tiny timber communities to starve. Tree stumps, runaway unemployment, and silted rivers would be the legacy of “big timber.” Instead of sustainable communities built by pioneer families, ghost towns would spread from Homer to Seward to Ketchikan. Roosevelt had seen this trend all over the Wild West. Determined Rooseveltian conservationists like Langille envisioned the coastal forests of southeastern Alaska—an extension of the rain forests of Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia—remaining as national forests. There would be no huge cities, no steel mills like those in Pittsburgh, no Tacoma cable running from hill to hill, no seal-skinning slums on the disappearing glaciers. Instead, little Alaskan fishing and lumber towns would be settled by permanent populations like those found in British Columbia, unencumbered by the gospel of greed. Langille, who kept scrupulous record books, would soon be tasked with arresting timber thieves, issuing occupancy permits, enforcing game laws, and working closely with the Biological Survey, Fish Commissions, and Geological Society.

When it came to Jack London’s tales of prospecting in Alaska and the Yukon, Roosevelt was a scold. Although he admired London’s heartiness, he hated The Call of the Wild, deeming it tacky “nature-faking.” Roosevelt—a cheerleader for the Harriman Expedition—wanted Alaska studied for its caribou herds, its grizzly and polar bears, the giant walrus, its seabirds. He was not interested in phony wolf stories. The heroes of Alaska, to Roosevelt, were the U.S. Forest Service agents like Langille, the conservationist law enforcers who arrested the dirty, unkempt gold seekers who thought Alaska was a casino to gamble their lives in. Roosevelt disdained “cheechakos,” avaricious miners flooding into southeastern Alaska who had no family values, no fashion, no manners, no code of ethics. To Roosevelt these gold seekers were like ice worms, digging into the land without any sense of community-building. London described prospectors on the California iron trail feeding Native Americans liquor, but this sad notion sickened Roosevelt. As a former police commissioner in New York City, who admired explorers, army officers, foresters, and biologists, he had zero tolerance for boozers, rabble-rousers, and malcontents, many so dirty that they stank, who didn’t know a snow bunting