The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [69]
Americans were spellbound by the unfolding drama. Was Roosevelt still on the march? Or was his campaign now over? No matter how many scholars insist that Davy Crockett died of disease at the Alamo or that Abraham Lincoln was really a bigot, the general public refuses to abandon the orthodox view of these heroes. The larger public view—whether accurate or not—is that Crockett fought for the independence of Texas, and Lincoln emancipated the slaves. After Milwaukee it no longer mattered whether Roosevelt won or lost the 1912 presidential election. By the time he arrived at Madison Square Garden on October 24, and received a forty-five-minute standing ovation, the bullet still lodged in his rib cage, he had become an enduring American icon.82
On November 5, however, Wilson swept the election with 435 electoral votes to Roosevelt’s disappointing 88. “I won’t pretend,” Ickes later recalled in Autobiography of a Curmudgeon, “that we didn’t awake the day after the election with a bad headache.”83 Roosevelt consoled himself with the fact that Taft had won only eight electoral votes and Debs—who, surprisingly, won 6 percent of the popular vote, the most ever by a socialist candidate—nevertheless failed to receive a single electoral vote. The Bull Moose Party succeeded in winning 27.4 percent of the vote and electing thirteen new members to Congress. Even more impressively, the Bull Moose Party brought more than 230 state legislators into office. To offset his own loss, Roosevelt boasted that he had fulfilled his pledge to make Taft a one-term president. But no genuine whoop of victory was conveyed by the Colonel’s reasoning. “Well,” he had written to Kermit on election night, “we have gone down in a smashing defeat; whether it is a Waterloo or a Bull Run, only time will tell.”84
Chapter Five - Charles Sheldon’s Fierce Fight
I
All of Alaska brought a bounce to Charles Sheldon’s gait. Like a protagonist in a novel by James Oliver Curwood, he decided that every inch of the territory was Edenic, though with a lethal component. But it was 20,320-foot Mount McKinley, its peak blanketed in deep perpetual snow, that left Sheldon in awe. Just looking at McKinley—which he first saw in mid-July 1906 from a hilltop near Wonder Lake—seemed to lower Sheldon’s blood pressure and heart rate. Time stood still within a fifty-mile circumference around the base. Even in summer, the temperature on the mountain, wrapped with storm clouds and mist, frequently dropped below zero Fahrenheit. Gold prospectors had named the towering peak in 1896 to honor President William McKinley. The name stuck. To the Athabascan Indians, however, the peak was Denali (“The Great One”). Sheldon used the Indian name (although he sometimes simply said “The Mountain”). The south peak was the highest point in North America. To Sheldon the whole area around Mount McKinley—the huge glaciers, the trough-like gorges, the miles of tundra stretching out to meet other mountains on the blue horizon—was his beloved “Denali wilderness.” The Alaska Range made the Colorado Rockies seem like foothills. Furthermore, in terms of its sheer rise from base to summit Denali was the tallest mountain in the world.
Traveling around Mount McKinley, Sheldon was like a cowboy riding through a well-stocked cattle ranch in Texas and eyeing his herd, except that Sheldon’s cattle were migratory caribou. From halfway up the mountain the caribou looked like ants. In his field journals he waxed eloquent about caribou herds and told of risking his life to study grizzlies. Unlike the slopes in the Lower Forty-Eight, the Alaska Range—home to 161 species of birds and thirty-seven of mammals—was not heavily forested; it was primarily