The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [71]
To Sheldon, brown bears—which ranged from Wyoming to Alaska—were the most awesome creatures in North America. All bear cubs, Sheldon noted, followed three rules of survival: obey mother, trail mother, and have fun.6 His field notes described variations in coloration from dark brown pelage to very pale or gray-brown. Whereas most hunters would either shoot a bear or climb a tree for safety, Sheldon tried to study their muscle humps to estimate size. All over Alaska bear rugs were a centerpiece of living rooms; the thick underfur and guard hairs were warmly comforting. What Sheldon found particularly fascinating about bears was that their front paws were easily twice the size of the back paws. Many a day while working in Alaska, Sheldon saw a brown bear click its teeth, froth at the mouth, put its ears back, and then just walk away. Long before Sheldon, naturalists had written about bears; but he pioneered in dispelling the myth that bears were prowling killers of humans.
There was a new environmental awareness shining forth in Sheldon’s Alaskan field journals. When he hunted in places like Admiralty Island, his big-gun mentality evaporated into a more modern ecological attitude. What interested Sheldon were topics like the range of grizzlies. On Admiralty Island, unlike vast Denali in the interior, the coastal rain forests produced large berry crops and salmon ran deep, so grizzlies seldom wandered beyond a forty-mile limit. Sheldon hoped to someday conduct quantitative research on the polar bear; he was tired of hearing only tall tales and yarns spread by the trophy seekers. Alaskans were still imbued with the wasteful frontier mentality, the idea that there were no limits to America’s wildlife resources. Temperamentally unsuited for city life, although New York City was his principal home, Sheldon believed that the American frontier was alive and well in the blueberry backcountry of Alaska. Some of Sheldon’s colorful journal entries had the descriptive power of paintings by Hartley or Marin.
And Sheldon, while lacking the evocative flair of Muir or Thoreau, developed a smooth, marvelously controlled prose style when describing how Alaskan mammals struggled to survive human intrusions. “It was the mystic hour of evening when our work was finished, and, the clouds having lifted, the rain suddenly stopped,” he wrote on September 20, 1909, after a couple of stormbound days on Admiralty Island. “It was calm, and a peaceful silence brooded over woods and waters. Mrs. Sheldon and I walked far out on a point of reefs. Everywhere ducks were lazily floating on the surface of the water, which reflected the large trees towering near the shores as well as the high, snow-crested mountains behind them. Huge reefs were scattered all about, snow-white with the thousands of gulls which flocked on them to pass the night. Little islands, covered by groves of lofty trees, were numerous, and on one of these, in the top of a gigantic dead spruce, a fine bald eagle and its mate now perched facing each other, each one calling at short intervals in a series of shrill screams which echoed about the irregular shores.”7
For Sheldon the best places in the western hemisphere were those where the wind velocity had rip-roaring power. The Denali valleys, he said, were like swells in the ocean, boundless and breathtaking. Those who heard his appeal were instantly ready to purchase a one-way ticket to Alaska. Private gentlemen’s clubs—the most elite in America, such as the Cosmos and the Century—wanted Sheldon as a lifetime member. Poised and always adaptable, comfortable both at the Metropolitan Opera and curing fish with Native Alaskans in the Kenai Peninsula, Sheldon added both hardiness and élan to any conversation, luncheon, or campfire. Alaska, he avidly declared, was the escapist tonic