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developing the U.S. government’s wildlife protection ethos by way of the Boone and Crockett Club and the National Association of Audubon Societies. In Alaska alone, Roosevelt’s bird sanctuaries—Tuxedni (Chisik and Duck islands in Cook Inlet), Saint Lazaria Island, Bering Sea (Saint Matthew Island Group), Pribilof (Walrus and Otter islands), Bogoslof, and the vast marshlike Yukon Delta—would eventually become parts of two national wildlife refuges: the Alaska Maritime NWR and Yukon Delta NWR. “These reservations,” Hornaday wrote, “are of immense value to bird life, and their creation represents the highest possible wisdom in utilizing otherwise valueless portions of the national domain.”26

The Alaskan wilderness was, unquestionably, still an Eden-like paradise in 1913, what a future U.S. Fish and Wildlife director, Ira N. Gabrielson, would call a “living zoological museum.”27 But that positive assessment didn’t take account of the seal, otter, and walrus rookeries, which were under assault by market hunters. Using statistical graphs, Hornaday made vividly clear in Our Vanishing Wild Life the high percentages of walrus and seal populations in jeopardy. The prognosis for species survival was unfavorable. In Hornaday’s mind (as in the minds of Roosevelt, Sheldon, and other conservationists), there were “fatal defects” in Alaskan game laws circa 1913. For example, as part of a reparations strategy, First Nation tribes enjoyed an exemption from bag limits in Alaska. Tribes were legally allowed to shoot anything that moved. Hornaday recounted the experience of the conservationist and hunter Frank Kleinschmidt at Sand Point on the Kenai Peninsula: he saw eighty-two caribou tongues piled up in a Native Alaskan’s canoe, brought to market to sell for fifty cents apiece. He was aghast at this casual carnage. “The carcasses were left where they fell, to poison the air of Alaska,” Hornaday wrote of the market hunters. In contrast, he praised the outcome of regulated sports hunting: “Thanks to the game law, and five wardens, the number of big game animals killed last year in Alaska by sportsmen was reasonably small—just as it should have been.”28

Both Hornaday and Roosevelt were adamant that Sitka deer (Odocoileus hemonius sitkensis), which lived in southeastern Alaska, be allowed to roam thousands of miles on protected U.S. government land unmolested by market hunters. They were part of what Roosevelt called America’s “deer family.” The U.S. Department of the Interior had an obligation, they believed, to allow only a very limited hunting season for Sitka deer in the Tongass and Chugach national forests. Such a position was not viewed favorably by Alaska’s residents, many of whom believed the federal government had no right telling a citizen of the territory what he could or couldn’t shoot. Game management seemed to them like something conceived by Karl Marx. An ex-governor of Alaska, in fact, explicitly protested that Rooseveltian conservation with regard to Sitka deer and moose was socialistic. In a rugged territory like Alaska, the argument went, a man had a right, under the Second Amendment, to follow a buck and pull the trigger. “The preservation of the game of Alaska should be left to the people of Alaska,” a territorial ex-governor argued. “It is their game; and they will preserve it all right!”

In Our Vanishing Wild Life, Hornaday outlined the flaws he saw in that stance against the federal government:

1. The game of Alaska does not belong to the people who live in Alaska—with the intent to get out tomorrow!

2. The preservation of the Alaskan fauna on the public domain should not be left unreservedly to the people of Alaska because . . .

3. As sure as shooting, they will not preserve it!29

Hornaday wanted the sale of all game to be prohibited in Alaska: even an Arctic prairie billy (a Euroamerican subsistence settler) or an Eskimo should be allowed to shoot only what he or she would personally eat. This was a very extreme, uncompromising stance. Hornaday and Roosevelt believed that market hunters, such as those