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blanketed by snow and ice.1 Besides protecting wildlife, Sheldon also wanted to ensure that the large quantities of hemlock, birch, poplar, alder, and willow surrounding McKinley didn’t become cordwood. Alaska had more than 450 types of plants that botanists believed might be potential medicines. He feared that the Alaska Railroad line connecting Fairbanks to Seward—completed in 1914—would forever ruin the Denali wilderness. Yet he recognized that because McKinley was between the two cities, the railroad would make the national park a convenient stopover. “To America’s fledgling conservationists, railroads were synonymous with wildfire, destruction,” the historian Tom Walker wrote in McKinley Station. “Enter the railroad—gone the wildlife; gone the frontier.”2

In the aftermath of the Harriman Expedition, it was the search for a Roosevelt elk (Cervus roosevelti), in 1904 on Victoria Island in Canada, that first injected Charles Sheldon into the drama of saving Alaska’s wilderness.3 The Biological Survey was looking for this subspecies of wapiti—which had survived in small herds on the Olympic Peninsula (in Washington state) and Vancouver Island (in British Columbia)—to analyze in Washington, D.C., and Sheldon volunteered to bring back mounts.4 (There were no native elk species in Alaska.*) Although he was essentially a big-game hunter, Sheldon had become a legend in old Mexico for climbing sheer cliffs to spy on bighorn sheep. Financially comfortable and politically astute, he was a well-rounded sportsman who was difficult to ignore. His sharp features conveyed willpower, an impression confirmed by his deep, almost gruff voice. Looking like a Canadian Mountie, the pinched-lipped, muscular Sheldon stood at about five feet ten inches. Demure, respectful, and bookish, he was a clean-shaven embodiment of roughing it like Jim Bridger, an old-time mountain man of days past, easily able to backpack 100 pounds or so across rugged terrain. As a big-game hunter for the Biological Survey, Sheldon was always ready with rifle, field glasses, and camera. To Sheldon wildlife conservation wasn’t an optional policy; it was a life force, the necessary corrective to manifest destiny and to the industrial revolution.

Reading Sheldon’s faithfully kept faunal journals isn’t for everybody. Much of his prose smacks of Forest and Field and the old-style campfire yarns of the nineteenth century (a genre in which “half-breed” Indians were backwoods scouts and educated white men made historic “discoveries” in bioregions where Native American tribes had lived for thousands of years). Sometimes, however, when he describes blunders he made on the trail, the reader can almost hear silent laughter. Anecdotes of deer carcasses hanging from clotheslines, endless winter nights, and salmon impelled to swim upstream because of “tooth and claw” mandates reveal Sheldon as a Darwinian naturalist—Theodore Roosevelt without TR’s elegant, dramatic turn of phrase. When Sheldon vividly described the flora and fauna of Admiralty Island (then part of the Tongass National Forest and since 1978 a national monument) and Montague Island (at the entrance to Prince William Sound)—both around 300 square miles with sheer-sided and thickly wooded coastlines—he was superb.

Throughout the first decades of the twentieth century, Sheldon set up U.S. Biological Survey camps on sheltered beaches on Alaskan islands. Unusually for a hunter-explorer in the early twentieth century, Sheldon brought Louisa Walker Gulliver—his wife—with him as a partner on his expeditions. Sheldon, a proud family man, also regularly brought his four children on his remarkable outdoor educational adventures. Together they would study brown bears, which were thick on Admiralty and Montague islands. These enormous bears weighed from 600 to 1,700 pounds when they were fat from feeding on the spawning salmon found throughout coastal Alaska. Bears that ate a steady diet of these weighty Alaskan fish tended to put on pounds themselves. On three other Alaskan islands—Kodiak, Afognak, and Shuyak—the largest subspecies