The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [53]
Although London has been considered the “Kipling of the Arctic” for his stories of American expansionist fortune-seeking in Alaska and the Yukon, the novelist James Oliver Curwood brought an environmentalist perspective to his brutal tales of the far north. Curwood, a die-hard Rooseveltian conservationist, was the lead lobbyist promoting legislation to create Superior National Forest in Michigan. During the early twentieth century, more than 4 million hardcover copies of his books were sold in the United States. His novels, such as The Alaskan and Son of the Forests, were translated into twelve languages. Curwood wrote about reindeer farms, Eskimo culture, and grizzly bears.84 In The Alaskan his heroine, Mary Standish, bursts out with patriotic rhetoric about the wonders of Mount McKinley, the Pribilofs, and the Tongass: “I am an American. I love America! I think I love it more than anything else in the world—more than my religion even. . . . I love to think that I first came ashore in the Mayflower. That is why my name is Standish. And I just want to remind you that Alaska is America.”85
Curwood did a fine job of injecting conservation into his novels. Worried that Alaskan waters were overfished, Curwood lamented that the “destruction of the salmon shows what will happen to us if the bars are let down all at once to the financial bandit.” More of a weekend recreationist than a wilderness cultist like Muir, Curwood championed proper game and land management ethics in Alaska. The Alaskan Native Brotherhood was founded in 1912 and promoted the same conservationist principles. “Roosevelt’s far-sightedness had kept the body-snatchers at bay, and because he had foreseen what money-power and greed would do, Alaska was not entirely stripped today, but lay ready to serve with all her mighty resources the mother who had neglected her for a generation,” Curwood wrote. “But it was going to be a struggle, this opening up a great land. It must be done resourcefully and with intelligence.”86
Although Rooseveltian conservationists of the progressive era such as Garland and Curwood were often perceived as a united front, always promoting forestry and wildlife science, there was at least one fault line among them. This was as menacing as the San Andreas Fault, and it had to do with whether to dam the Tuolumne River in Yosemite National Park. Following the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, when widespread fire had caused catastrophic damage downtown, the city applied to the Department of the Interior for a water rights lease to Hetch Hetchy, a breathtakingly beautiful valley in Yosemite National Park. A vicious fight ensued between those who wanted the O’Shaughnessy Dam built and those who wanted the glacial valley protected. Ironically, Pinchot, who was working against big mining interests in Alaska, sided with San Franciscans in the controversy over Hetch Hetchy because the dam, in his mind, represented “the greatest good for the greatest number of people.”87 Pinchot objected to the views of his naturalist friends—Muir, in particular—in California, who were always ready to cut a rancher’s fence or torch a sheepherder’s wagon to protect the Sierras from development. “When I became Forester and denied the right to exclude sheep and cows from the Sierras, Mr. Muir thought I made a great mistake, because I allowed the use by an acquired right of a large number of people to interfere with what would have been the utmost beauty of the forest,” Pinchot testified before the U.S. Congress Committee on Public Lands. “In this case I think he has unduly given way to beauty as against use.”88
From 1910 to 1913 the fight over Hetch Hetchy, which many