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waterfowl. (Unfortunately, there were even more mosquitoes that swarmed up out of the marshlands.) Charles Sheldon—considered by both Grinnell of the Boone and Crockett Club and Merriam of the Biological Survey as the best young American naturalist-hunter—ended up inventorying the birdlife around the north base of snowcapped Mount McKinley with scientific exactitude. He published his findings in the January 1909 edition of the Auk. More than 400 bird species inhabited or migrated through Alaska, including many Asian species. Sandhill cranes and golden eagles were found throughout the territory, feeding along mirror-still lakes. The Aleutian chain was full of colonies of raucous seabirds, which Sheldon never got to inventory.25

One bird that Sheldon admired during his Alaskan wanderings was the trumpeter swan (Cygnus buccinator). With its bright white plumage, long periscope-like neck, and black bill, the trumpeter swan—the largest waterfowl species on earth—was magnificent. Besides being the unfortunate victims of fashion—women wanted their feathers for bonnets—these swans were sensitive to contaminants. A small colony of trumpeters lived in the lower Copper River system and the Kenai Peninsula. They bred in northwestern British Columbia and in the Saint Elias Range backcountry; those populations, however, were not faring well.26 Determined to help the trumpeter swans survive in their core range in Alaska, Sheldon worked with the Boone and Crockett Club, the New York Conservation Society, and the Camp Fire Club of America to help protect the swans. In 1968 the nonprofit Trumpeter Swan Society assumed the full-time duty of advocating the protection of these regal birds. E. B. White’s The Trumpet of the Swan, published in 1970, memorably introduced these beautiful birds (which can stand on one leg for more than half an hour) to many children.27

Market hunters were the bane of Sheldon’s days in Alaska. One afternoon while Sheldon and Karstens were tracking Dall sheep, they came upon a couple of hunters with sixteen dogs around a campfire. They were gorging themselves. They had slaughtered a herd of Dall sheep, including the ewes and lambs—the whole family—which Sheldon had been inventorying. “Naturally,” he wrote, “I was deeply disappointed to hear that my sheep, which I had been so carefully observing, were to be disturbed by vigorous market hunting, but could do nothing to prevent it.”28 He vowed to fight for laws to protect Alaskan game against “slob hunters” who didn’t even know what conservation meant. And he mistakenly warned Natives not to trust Hudson Stuck, a Presbyterian minister whose Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled, filled with tales of cold winter journeys on behalf of Christ, became a best seller.29 Before long, however, Stuck became Sheldon’s ally. In 1913, Stuck led an expedition up the summit of McKinley. His memoir of the climb was titled The Ascent of Denali.30 With almost evangelical vigor, Stuck insisted that the name of Mount McKinley was an affront to the mountain and Native people and should be changed back to Denali. “There is, to the author’s mind,” Stuck wrote, “a certain ruthless arrogance that grows more offensive to him as years pass by, in the temper that comes to a ‘new’ land and contemptuously ignores the Native names of conspicuous natural objects.”31

III

The 1907–1908 year on the upper Toklat River (in an area that became part of Mount McKinley National Park) was brilliantly described in Sheldon’s memoir The Wilderness of Denali. Nowhere in the world, Sheldon proclaimed, were there mountains as majestic in winter as the Alaska Range. He felt privileged to have walked among such towering manifestations of the ice age. The Alaska Range, filled with swollen rivers in springtime, divided the Alaska territory not only into districts but also into distinctive climates. For an experienced mountaineer like Sheldon, tramping around the crags, clefts, waterfalls, and marshlands of interior Alaska was far better than climbing the comparatively dull Matterhorn in Switzerland. Besides the Alaska