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IV

What haunted Sheldon, making him seethe with anger, was the gradual diminution of the larger mammals such as Dall sheep, moose, and deer as a result of market hunting across the tundra-covered valley. Sometimes, even when he was hungry and miserable, Sheldon nevertheless counted and collected for the Biological Survey. Only the thick swarms of biting flies and insomnia during the summer solstice really hindered him. Driven by his love of the outdoors, Sheldon, when the creeks were down and the trails melted out, kept biological diaries of his pioneering wildlife observational research on the northern slopes of the Alaska Range. “Complete enjoyment of the wilderness,” Sheldon wrote, “needs periods of solitude.”38 Being alone at a high altitude gives a person plenty of free time to think. Sheldon began dreaming of the Denali wilderness as a national park—the largest in the system, millions of protected acres. Karstens’s journal entry of January 12, 1908, recorded Sheldon’s first hope that the U.S. government would maintain Denali National Park as a quasi-wilderness area (i.e., roadless).39

The McKinley River was the longest and widest of hundreds of glacier-fed rivers, streams, and creeks. Everywhere a visitor looked, there were braided brooks gurgling across the wet tundra. More than twenty ridges were involved in the drainage of the McKinley River. With his loyal packer Harry Karstens (nicknamed “the Seventy-Mile Kid” because he had once mined a claim on Seventy Miles Creek outside Dawson City), Sheldon built a weatherproof cabin along the Toklat River, located opposite the mouth of present-day Sheldon Creek (named in his honor). From the start, they split plenty of firewood to prepare for the subzero winter. At a trading post they acquired roof shakes and a small keg of nails. Using their lean-to shack as a base camp, Sheldon began wandering around the Denali wilderness. Head down, he struck out into the high-velocity wind, with gun, pad, and pencil. He was a man in his element. It sickened Sheldon that residents of the Kantishna region north of McKinley were mass-butchering game while building the Alaska Railroad.40 It also sickened him to see market hunters butchering Dall sheep to put meat in the pots of mining camps in the Savage, Teklanika, Toklat, and Sanctuary river valleys. Much of this meat was fed to the sled dogs. Much like annual tree rings, the indented lines on a ram’s horns, some spreading as much as three feet across, indicated the Dall sheep’s age. Sheldon feared the species was headed toward extinction. Even the U.S. Army infantrymen stationed in Alaska at Fort Gibbon at Tanana and Fort Liscum near Valdez considered the sheep butchery repugnant.

Throughout 1907–1908 Sheldon, like a new John Muir, had shared campouts with the Chilkat (in southeastern Alaska). His journals also indicate encounters with the Minchumina, Nenana, and Tanana.41 The Ivy Leaguer looked as if he had been born and raised amid Alaska’s varied habitats—glaciers, mountains, tundra, grasslands, wetlands, lakes, woodlands, and rivers. He wore rawhide moose snowshoes and traveled in forty-foot-long bark canoes. In his log cabin, whose roof was scarcely higher than his head, he scribbled furiously about the great round moon, silvery waterfalls, icy fjords, and torrential rains. Despite all the precipitation, Sheldon worried constantly about brushfires. Ever since the U.S. Forest Service was created in 1905, men had been paid decent wages as fire lookouts. Sheldon hoped to raise funds in New York for hiring more lookouts for Alaska. “Alone in an unknown wilderness hundreds of miles from civilization and high on one of the world’s most imposing mountains, I was deeply moved by the stupendous mass of the great upheaval, the vast exterior of the wild areas below,” Sheldon wrote, “the chaos of the unfinished surfaces still in process of molding, and by the crash and roar of the mighty avalanches.”42

As reflected in Karstens