The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [74]
Sheldon, having completed his apprenticeship in Mexico and Alaska, soon became a transformational leader in the conservationist movement of the progressive era. He was elected an officer in the Boone and Crockett Club, National Parks Association, and American Forestry Association, among numerous other preservationist-minded organizations. From the outset, Merriam respected Sheldon for treating the natural world with humility and restraint. Roosevelt, in fact, saw Sheldon, whom he deemed “a capital representative of the best hunter-naturalist type today,” as almost a member of his extended family.14 Roosevelt often turned to Sheldon to serve on various wildlife committees of the Boone and Crockett Club.15 Because Dr. Merriam had failed to finish his magnum opus North American Mammals, Roosevelt started hinting that perhaps Sheldon should step up and fill the void.16 While Sheldon never produced such a comprehensive study, he led the movement for America to adopt progressive game laws.17
Interior Alaska was an unforgiving land in 1904, when Sheldon first went to study Dall sheep in earnest. None of the territory’s 30,000 residents suffered from being too gentle. Sheldon felt like a voyageur, an intrepid explorer following animal tracks all over the Alaska Range. There was only one rule of dress: stay warm. Clothed in heavy wool garments, determined to survive, Sheldon proved his mettle as a true explorer. Every day his clothes got wet and his bedroll clammy. But he didn’t complain. His rifle of choice in 1906 was a Mannlicher .256 caliber. Unlike Andrew Berg—a Finnish immigrant who became the first licensed hunt guide in the Kenai Peninsula and moonlighted as a fur trapper—Sheldon carried field glasses as his favorite tool. Berg’s hunt notes, however, proved to be a monument to phonetic misspellings: “at home doctoring,” “no suckuss above freezing all day . . . weathre warm.”18
In The Wilderness of the Upper Yukon—published in 1911—Sheldon enthusiastically described the plans and goals of the U.S. Biological Survey’s Yukon-Alaska expedition: to study the golden-horned, all-white Dall sheep foraging on grasses, sedges, forbs, and dwarf willows. Drawing on his diaries to give the book a real-time structure, Sheldon analyzed all species of wild sheep of North America. He divided the family Bovidae into two species subgroups: thinhorn and bighorn. Dr. Nelson had previously accumulated valuable information about sheep’s hooves and horns, but it was based on conjecture and limited biological proof. Sheldon, filling the vacuum, provided authoritative Darwinian analysis of wild sheep’s range in the Yukon and Alaska. “Indeed, so little was known about the variation, habits, and distribution of the wild sheep of the far northern wilderness, that my imagination was impressed by the possibilities of the results of studying them in their native land,” he wrote. “There was, besides, the chance of penetrating new regions, of adding the exhilaration of exploration to that of hunting, and of bringing back information of value to zoologists, and geographers, and of interest to sportsmen and lovers of natural history.”19
Awed to be working with the great Dr. Nelson, Sheldon now made Alaskan mammals and birds his area of zoological expertise. For the next decade, he commuted between New York and Fairbanks, where all the roads abruptly ended. Trails in the Alaska Range during Roosevelt’s presidency had been built exclusively for the mining and timber companies. After outfitting himself in Dawson and hiring Jack Haydon as a guide, Sheldon developed the daily pace of a man on the march. Living out of a backpack and duffel bag, he was prepared for extreme camping at all times. Sheldon had clearly not come to Alaska for recreation. From dawn to dusk he worked, collecting wildlife data. No matter how grueling the outdoor experience became, he never let it affect his