The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [40]
With boyish enthusiasm Roosevelt read everything published about the musk ox herds found in the Arctic. The last known one perished in 1909. It sickened him that the musk ox had disappeared from Alaska by the late 1800s, overhunted and weakened by blue winter cold. These hardy, stocky, oxlike bovids had roamed the permafrost valleys from Alaska to Siberia. Roosevelt had high hopes that a new subspecies of musk ox would be discovered in the north pole or Greenland. With zoological dispatches about exploration at the north pole sent to him in Africa by the Smithsonian Institution, Roosevelt started studying everything published about these weird-looking, 800-pound, curly-horned beasts that plodded Arctic Alaska’s tundra. And he planned to have the musk ox (and wood bison) reintroduced in Alaska. Standing about four feet tall at the shoulder, the musk ox had a noble lineage not unlike that of the American bison. Throughout France and Germany, in fact, ivory and stone carvings 250,000 years old depicted the musk ox accurately. Musk oxen, nervous and suspicious by disposition, were coveted for their straggling quviut (an underfur), which was combed out and used for caps and coats.
Roosevelt’s Yukon Delta Federal Bird Reservation indeed proved to be the ideal place to breed stock to help restore musk oxen to their former ranges in Alaska. By the late 1930s a small herd from Greenland was indeed shipped to Alaska and released on the sweeping tundra of Nunivak Island Refuge.10
As an ex-president, Roosevelt regularly wrote zoological articles for the Outlook (where he was on the masthead as “contributing editor”), Scribner’s, and the American Journal (although these treatises seldom received much public notice). The musk ox became one of Roosevelt’s favorite species to analyze from an evolutionary perspective. With meticulous precision he learned every biological fact he could about the species the Inupiat called omingmak (“the animal with skin like a beard”). Calling the musk ox the “last survivor of the ice age,” Roosevelt marveled at how the beast used its long skirtlike guard hair—much bushier than that of bison—to stay warm.11
“These musk-oxen,” Roosevelt wrote in the magazine Outlook, “which once lived in what is now Ohio and Kansas, just as they once lived in England and France, have followed the retreating glacial ice belt toward the Pole; and there, in the immense desolation of the North, they still dwell side by side with men, the Eskimos, whose culture is at the same stage of development as that of those inconceivably remote ancestors of ours who hunted the musk-ox when it was still a beast of the chase in mid-England.”12
Roosevelt would later personally interview Peary for detailed information about the chain of life around the north pole, everything from the behavior of orcas to the patterns of wind currents. He was riveted to learn how wolves were “hangers-on” around musk ox herds, preferring ox meat to caribou. Yet the migrating musk ox had evolved to survive bitter subzero weather. To Roosevelt, the musk ox brought a certain majesty to the Arctic ecosystem. He fixed his attention on these shaggy ambassadors from ancient times, ice age relics who had once shared vast stretches of Arctic tundra with woolly mammoths and short-faced bears. “The musk-oxen [are] helpless in the presence of human hunters, much more helpless than Caribou, and can exist only in the appalling solitudes where even arctic man cannot live,” Roosevelt wrote in A Book-Lover’s Holidays in the Open, “but against wolves, its only other foes, its habits of gregarious and truculent self-defense enable it to hold its own as the Caribou cannot.”13
II
When Roosevelt left the White House in March 1909, he was proud of his conservation accomplishments in Alaska. Having left Gifford Pinchot ensconced as chief of the U.S. Forest Service,