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By Root 2901 0

Biological Survey in early 1904, offering his services collecting wildlife. They were immediately taken with his handsome appearance, his gentlemanly ways, and his abiding interest in the Yukon and Alaska. His whole demeanor was that of the young TR, a sophisticate who could associate easily with packers, wranglers, and backcountry iconoclasts. So the U.S. Biological Survey tapped Sheldon to collect mammal skins on Vancouver Island, in the Yukon, and in Alaska from July to October 1904. That’s when he went looking for biological data on the Roosevelt elk.

At the Biological Survey headquarters on Thirteenth and B Street (later renamed Independence Avenue) in Washington, D.C., Dr. Nelson was known as “Mr. Alaska,” and for good reason. During the 1870s, decades before the Klondike gold rush, Nelson, with old-time WASP ingenuity, had traveled all over Alaska for four years, serving as a weatherman for the U.S. Army Signal Corps in the Bering Sea. Besides monitoring blizzards and wind velocity from primitive weather stations, Nelson collected wildlife specimens and Eskimo artifacts for the Smithsonian Institution (known then as the U.S. National Museum). His most astounding biological discovery was collecting field data about the all-white Dall sheep with gorgeous curled horns that populated Alaska and northern Canada. He actually purchased a couple of these sheep from backcountry hunters to conduct scientific experiments on. The sheep were carefully studied by the Smithsonian biologists, intrigued by theories about animal coloration. Dutifully Nelson wrote a zoological treatise on rams in 1884, based largely on Sheldon’s taxonomic principles. Nelson even named a new species of sheep: Ovis dalli (an homage to William Dall, the great Alaskan naturalist-explorer).10

Merriam, Nelson, and Roosevelt welcomed Sheldon into their small clique of biological-minded outdoorsmen. In Mexico’s Sierra Madre and the Yukon’s subarctic mountains, Sheldon had studied sheep’s maneuvers on high cliffs, seeing their fancy footwork as poetry in motion. Roosevelt had written biologically accurate essays about bighorns in The Wilderness Hunter (1893), and Sheldon would do the same for Dall sheep and Stone sheep (Ovis dalli stonei) in his own book, based on his 1904 and 1905 northern Canada–Alaska expeditions. The journals from these high-altitude outings were eventually published in 1911 as The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon. In New York’s zoological circles, Sheldon was anointed the great pathfinder of the early twentieth century, a new Deerslayer or Natty Bumppo. Bursting with enthusiasm for everything Alaskan, Sheldon wanted to make national parks, wildlife refuges, and wilderness zones out of his favorite campsites in the Alaska Range and north Pacific coast islands.11

Sheldon’s backwoods style enthralled Roosevelt, who saw him as a spiritual heir. Roosevelt, in fact, reviewed The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon in the Outlook, declaring his young protégé the new TR. “Mr. Charles Sheldon is a . . . wilderness wanderer, who to the hardihood and prowess of the old-time hunter adds the capacity of a first-class field naturalist, and, also, what is just as important, the power of literary expression,” Roosevelt wrote. “Such a man can do for the lives of the wild creatures of the wooded and mountainous wilderness what John Muir had done for the physical features of the wilderness. . . . His experiences of Alaska, and indeed the entire Northwest, are such as no other man has had; and no other writer on the subject has ever possessed both his power of observation and his power of recording vividly and accurately what he has seen.”12

Imbued with a visionary streak, Sheldon wasn’t trying to present the wilderness in Alaska as a souvenir of the closed frontier. His importance to the history of conservation lay in his belief that the days of Kit Carson had passed, but that if the primitive arts were learned, a vibrant wilderness adventure could still be had. Much like the Camp Fire Club of America, which was created in 1897, Sheldon recognized that wildlife