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the Great War). Besides a few Euroamericans, the main populations around Lake Clark were the Dena’ina Athabascans (on Iliamna) and the Yupik Aleuts (at the mouth of the Newhalen River and the southwest portion of Iliamna Lake). These tribes were good stewards of the land. But as industrialization increased—with overpopulation becoming a new plague—Lake Clark was bound to attract the extraction industries.

There was about Vreeland a touch of the naturalist Muir. Vreeland had written a number of excellent articles in Field and Stream about the preservation of nature in New England. His “Passing of the Maine Wilderness,” in the April 1912 issue, was credited with saving Mount Katahdin (the favorite peak of Thoreau and, later, Roosevelt) from clear-cutting. Although Vreeland failed to get the North Woods of Maine designated as a national park, his indefatigable advocacy led to the creation of Baxter State Park (the fourth largest in America).62 The sacred Appalachian wilderness where Thoreau had written The Maine Woods, published posthumously in 1909, was secured.

A few years later, in May 1916, Vreeland testified before the House Subcommittee on Public Lands for the establishment of Mount McKinley National Park. An excellent skier and a leader in the Boy Scout movement, Vreeland lectured about the need for American wildlife and for gorgeous wilderness landscapes like Denali to be handed down to future generations to enjoy. Along with Stephen Mather (National Park Service) and Robert Marshall (U.S. Forest Service), Vreeland was the most effective conservationist to testify that afternoon on Capitol Hill. Passionately defending Sheldon’s field research on the Denali wilderness, Vreeland helped convince U.S. congressmen that Mount McKinley was irreplaceable.63

Vreeland—in his forties, always meticulously dressed with not a wrinkle in his clothes—considered himself more of a “camera naturalist” than a hunter or an angler. Growing up, he had hunted in Maine and Quebec. Like Hornaday, however, he recoiled from trophy hunting as he matured. One of his closest friends was Daniel Beard, a founder of the Boy Scouts of America; they frequently challenged each other in learning all the birds and trees of the Adirondacks. After graduating from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1895 and Columbia University in 1909, Vreeland made a fortune inventing and patenting dozens of electrical devices, including the sine-wave oscillator, a radio band selector, and the Vreeland spectroscope. He earned further renown for photographing the grizzlies of Yellowstone in their lairs. Roosevelt considered him the best wildlife photographer around, the best landscape and portrait photographer being Edward Curtis. An expert cartographer, Vreeland also mapped the mountains between the Peace and Fraser rivers in British Columbia and Alberta. In 1915 Vreeland Glacier was named in his honor by the Canadian government.64

Macnab and Vreeland shared at least two ideas: the CFCA’s belief that wilderness defined the American character; and the certainty that market hunting, overfishing, and poaching were reprehensible acts of debauched scoundrels. Committed to the outdoors life, they saw the Lake Clark region along Cook Inlet as a first-rate locale where hardy sportsmen of the CFCA could go in the summer to camp, hike, run rivers, fish, and maybe shoot a few ducks for dinner. The real Alaskan fishermen—both Euro-American and Native Alaskans—were good marine stewards of nearby places like Bristol Bay, Kachemak Bay, and the Shelikof Strait. The CFCA thought the resident fisherman should have a self-imposed limit of two to five halibut a day. And any fish over 100 pounds, unless they were trying to win a contest, had to be released; it was obviously a female full of eggs. So the fishermen of Homer, reels down, would bring the halibut and salmon to the dock, clean up, and go home. Fair fishing made sense to most of them. But the CFCA rejected the Seattle and San Francisco fishing companies that depleted the salmon waters around Bristol Bay for a single season’s profits.