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equal to nearly 50 percent of the entire coastline of the Lower Forty-Eight). To look at it another way, the new national forest blanketed an area exceeding 61,000 square miles—about 80 percent of southeastern Alaska.42 Today it is one of the world’s largest surviving temperate rain forests, with a biomass comparable to tropical rain forests in Venezuela, Brazil, or Costa Rica.

While the Tongass was certainly a large landmass, it wasn’t all forestland; there were many glacial waterways as well as limestone rock and varied vegetation. What mattered was keeping all the elements of the Great North Forest ecosystem intact. Roosevelt knew that soon, with the statehood movement advancing, entrepreneurs would start imagining clear-cuts, smokestacks, and roads. He wanted only a few sawmills, locally run, to be licensed for timber. No huge outside companies would be allowed. “The history of the Alaska territory up to that time had been a history of exploitation,” Kathie Durbin wrote in Tongass: Pulp Politics and the Fight for the Alaska Rain Forest. “The exploiters had come in waves, seeking sea otter pelts, gold, salmon, and crabs from the Aleutians, and ivory from the Arctic coast. These raids had depleted Alaska’s bounty, producing brief booms and generating great wealth for a few.”43 Roosevelt believed that the U.S. Forest Service could protect the Tongass in perpetuity. An array of chartered fishing vessels—purse seiners, halibut boats, gill netters, and trawlers—were allowed, but there were highly regulated catch limits.44

With scores of high, tumbling waterfalls; five salmon species in the streams; and brown and black bears around every bend, the Tongass was a wilderness paradise, considered by many to be among America’s most beautiful national forests. There were eagles and ravens everywhere. Nearly one-third of the Earth’s old-growth temperate rain forest grew in the Tongass coastal ecosystem. The estuaries and coastal meadows in the Tongass have been called a “biological buffet” of marine life. Annually, anadromous wild salmon leave the ocean and return to their Tongass freshwater birth streams to perish. Every spring humpback whales (Megaptera novaeangliae) journey nearly 3,000 miles from Hawaii to the waters around the Tongass to breed and calve. “The Tongass is a place where people live with salmon in their streams and bears in their backyards,” the naturalist Amy Gulick, granddaughter of Sierra Club’s founder Edgar Wayburn, wrote. “It’s a land of remarkable contrasts.”45 Like Muir, Roosevelt wanted these lands and waters to be a cherished part of the American heritage forever. To desecrate such islands of the Alexander Archipelago as Admiralty, Baranof, and Chichagof was akin to rape and unbefitting of a conservation-minded citizenry working to benefit future generations. The Forest Service would hold the line in the Tongass and the Chugach, refusing to lease land tracts to huge corporate extraction businesses.

Unfortunately, many Alaskans loathed Roosevelt’s two national forests, the Tongass and the Chugach. The prevailing sentiment in Juneau-Sitka was: How dare Washington, D.C., tie up so much land to prevent strip-mining and clear-cutting? Before long, the Alaska boomers and sourdoughs complained, the maniacal public land conservationists would even try to save worthless muskeg bogs and thaw lakes. First- and second-generation Alaskans, particularly those in extraction and cannery businesses, turned livid at what they considered two blasphemous words: national forest. Mentioning Roosevelt’s name at a flapjack shack in Seward or a general store in Valdez guaranteed a negative reaction. Wisely, Roosevelt kept Langille—a forester, scholar, and artist to boot—as his first federal forest officer in Alaska. Locals couldn’t help liking Langille for his self-effacing, honest demeanor; he was always ready with a corny joke, though his hand was never far from his holster. Langille recommended to Roosevelt that Admiralty and Montague islands—offshore from Cordova in Prince William Sound—become protected wildlife reserves.