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for the protection of the nesting habitat for the largest aggregation of seabirds in Cook Inlet. Pelagic birds that congregated on the gravel beaches in these reservations included black-legged kittiwakes, common murres, horned puffins, glaucous-winged gulls, double-crested cormorants, the common eider, tufted puffins, and black oystercatchers. A fair number of passerine birds and raptors also thrived on the islands. This executive order actually exceeded bird-lovers’ hopes.51 Roosevelt, like a trickster raven, was brazenly confronting the “malefactors of great wealth,” claiming that a smew (Mergellus albellus)—the smallest Arctic sawbill—had more intrinsic value than a pulp mill.52

Roosevelt had first learned about the birdlife on Chisik Island from Dall, who was tasked with mapping Cook Inlet for the Coast and Geodetic Survey in 1895. Dall had published detailed field notes about Tuxedni Island for the Bulletin of the American Geographical Society (these notes were complemented with numerous maps). Roosevelt was enthralled by the scientific exactitude of Dall’s prose pertaining to volcanoes, talus slopes, Mesozoic fossils, and glacial plains. But it was Dall’s vivid description of birdlife that got Roosevelt’s juices flowing. “Near the beaches the rocks are worn into cave arches and pillars,” Dall wrote, “about which circle innumerable multitudes of sea birds.”53 But still, there was a dearth of reliable ornithological information, owing to a lack of local records, about the birds of Alaska until the late 1950s.

Perhaps the most enduringly fascinating of the Alaskan places that Roosevelt saved as a federal bird reservation was Saint Lazaria, a sixty-five-acre islet in the middle of the Alexander Archipelago. It supported an astonishing 500,000 seabirds. Why did Saint Lazaria attract these birds when other nearby islets didn’t? Roosevelt wanted an answer from the ornithological community. He got one. First, Saint Lazaria was a good incubator because of an absence of ground predators: there were no foxes, raccoons, or wolves. Second, the soft soil was ideal for seabird burrows. A third factor was that the birds on Saint Lazaria had an endless supply of fish in the surrounding waters. Saving Saint Lazaria had been recommended to Roosevelt by Edward A. McIlhenny—founder of the company that makes Tabasco, a Louisiana hot sauce—who had donated Arctic birds (representing sixty-nine species) to be studied at the Philadelphia Academy of Natural Sciences.54

V

What has often been overlooked when environmental scholars list Roosevelt’s conservationist accomplishments in Alaska is that they were often accompanied by a preservationist ethic. This point didn’t escape the notice of the ecologist, environmentalist, and writer Aldo Leopold, a former employee of the U.S. Forest Service, whose Game Management (1933) is still a classic book on methods of maintaining wildlife. Leopold dutifully noted that “conservation” was a “lowly word” until Roosevelt made wildlife and forest protection his “cause.” Suddenly, the game hogs, market hunters, and salmon depleters were on the run. Fire lookouts were created on top of mountains and men were trained as smoke chasers. To be selected by Roosevelt’s U.S. Department of Agriculture for forest duty—as William A. Langille was in Alaska—was a high honor. “Wild life, forests, ranges, and waterpower were conceived by him to be renewable organic resources, which might last forever if they were harvested scientifically, and not faster than they reproduced.”55 According to Leopold, Roosevelt’s doctrine of conservation had three primary tenets regarding game and forests, and these tenets were essential to preserving Alaska’s wilderness:

1. It recognized all these “outdoor” resources as one integral whole.

2. It recognized their “conservation through wise use” as a public responsibility, and their private ownership as a public trust.

3. It recognized science as a tool for discharging that responsibility.56

In his classic work A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously in 1949, Leopold