WESTBOUND ON THE HARRIMAN SPECIAL
Harriman and most of his invited specialists left Grand Central Station by train on the twenty-third of May 1899, in several private carriages that included a dining car, two sleepers, and a plush smoker stocked with fine cigars and a five-hundred-volume library on all topics related to Alaska. Harriman kept a private car for his own use. His guests, accustomed to the shoestring budgets of government-funded expeditions, luxuriated in the hospitality made possible by capitalism. The painter Frederick Dellenbaugh, who had run the uncharted Colorado River with explorer John Wesley Powell in large rowboats, marveled at the hot and cold running water in his stateroom and the choices of entrée with dinner—baked bluefish, prime roast beef, roasted Philadelphia capon. As Harriman’s guests settled in for their weeklong cross-country journey, the host passed through his train cars to get acquainted.
Like Merriam, several of the men on the train had never heard of their small, mustached host prior to receiving his invitation. He did not exude warmth. “Every feature of his countenance manifested power, especially his wonderful eyes, deep and frank yet piercing, though likely at first sight to keep people at a distance,” observed John Muir. In addition to being an innovative thinker, a genius with numbers, and a fierce competitor, Harriman was something of a late bloomer, whose name would not become synonymous with business until the coming decade. He had dropped out of school at fourteen to take a job as an office boy on Wall Street. By age twenty-two he had worked his way up to a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1881, he was part of a syndicate that purchased a small, decrepit railroad in upstate New York, which Harriman arranged to resell for a profit. Not until 1898 did he acquire his first major railroad, the Union Pacific.
Harriman was known for his ability to digest huge amounts of information quickly, which allowed him to impose order and efficiency on situations that might easily spin into chaos, such as corralling a shipload of scientists whose individual worlds revolved around mollusks or birds or rocks and expecting them to spend two months harmoniously in close quarters. Once Harriman had taken the measure of a subordinate and found him adequate, however, he was an eager delegator of authority. As the special train chugged toward Chicago, Harriman “announced that it was not his desire to dictate the route to be followed, or to control the details of the work,” Merriam wrote. Instead, he appointed his guests to serve on a variety of committees of the sort one might have in a business organization. These he deputized to make decisions about the expedition’s specific itinerary.
After crossing the Mississippi, the passengers aboard the special train observed mounting evidence of the taming of the West: fenced farms, coal mines, networks of train tracks. “In places the country looks as if all the railroad forces of the world might have been turned loose to delve and rend and pile in some mad, insane folly and debauch,” John Burroughs wrote. Settlements remembered as pinpricks on a map a few years prior had grown into full-fledged towns and cities. Omaha was hosting the Greater America Exposition, to which Harriman’s guests were escorted on a private trolley. In Boise, where the local paper declared Harriman “the man of the hour in railroad circles,” the team was met at sunrise with a parade sponsored by the chamber of commerce. Merriam suggested that Shoshone Falls, in Idaho’s Snake River Canyon, might make a nice day trip. Harriman wired ahead, “ordering horses, a stagecoach, and two buggies to be brought up by rail,” according to historians William Goetzmann and Kay Sloan. No expense needed to be spared, as Harriman was making money faster than he could spend it. For the fiscal year that ended June 30, 1899, the Union Pacific would earn a net profit of fourteen million dollars.
As the Harriman special train rolled through the Rockies, a smaller coterie of guests, including Muir, had embarked from California to meet the others in Portland, where a dinner was being held at the city’s finest hotel. The final leg of their rail journey was eased by Harriman’s sometime rival J. P. Morgan, who had ordered the tracks of his Northern Pacific Railroad cleared. In Seattle, photographer Edward Curtis and his assistant, D. G. Inverarity, completed the party. As the Harriman Alaska Expedition prepared to depart Seattle on the thirty-first, its detail-oriented patron stood in the gray Northwest drizzle keeping an eye on the tons of strange cargo being loaded onto the George W. Elder: the baggage and scientific equipment of all his guests, hunting rifles and ammunition, a complete photo dark room and slide projector, a piano, the five hundred books on Alaska, cigars, brandy, champagne, and, according to Burroughs, “eleven fat steers, a flock of sheep, chickens, and turkeys, a milch cow, and a span of horses.”
Harriman had assembled a company of men who would come to be known as some of the founders of American conservation, at the very moment when a movement to protect America’s natural beauty was forming. Paradoxically, Harriman states in the first paragraph of the first volume of the Harriman Alaska Series that his interest in Alaska had been piqued by the opportunity to kill a Kodiak bear. What may seem incongruous more than a century later was at the time entirely consistent. Though urban environmentalists tend to avoid the subject, the roots of their movement are inextricably intertwined with hunting.
Perhaps the leading example of this duality was George Bird Grinnell. Grinnell in 1899 was best known as the editor of Forest and Stream, a magazine for sportsmen that championed the preservation of habitat. His pedigree as an outdoorsman was extraordinary. When he was a boy, his family had lived on the bucolic north Manhattan estate of the late naturalist and bird artist John James Audubon, where he was tutored by Lucy Audubon, John’s widow. During the 1870s, Grinnell had made several trips west—assisting on some of the first dinosaur fossil hunts (guided by “Buffalo Bill” Cody) and serving as the naturalist on General Custer’s 1874 Black Hills Expedition. (He declined Custer’s invitation to join the doomed 1876 campaign that ended at Little Big Horn.) With each return trip west, Grinnell saw that populations of large animals were dwindling due to overhunting. Traveling through Nebraska in 1870, historian Michael Punke writes, “Grinnell’s train had twice been halted by herds of buffalo.” Two years later, he rode with the Pawnee on one of their last great buffalo hunts. By 1879, not a single bison was to be found in the state of Colorado.
In response to similar threats to wild bird populations, Grinnell founded the Audubon Society, which he briefly ran from the Forest and Stream offices. He also used the magazine to advocate for law enforcement against poaching in existing national parks and the formation of new ones. (Montana’s Glacier National Park, which was established in 1910 and recently welcomed its 100 millionth visitor, was largely Grinnell’s creation.) When Grinnell gave a lukewarm review to the book Hunting Trips of a Ranchman, the author, twenty-six-year-old New York State assemblyman Theodore Roosevelt, stormed into the editor’s office to rebut the criticisms. A friendship followed, and two years later, in December 1887, Grinnell and Roosevelt decided to form the Boone and Crockett Club. The club’s members, each of whom was required to have killed at least three kinds of trophy animals, would use their political influence to promote preservation of wild places, not least because that was where big game lived.*
The creeping panic felt by men like Grinnell and Roosevelt was due not only to the diminishing numbers of animals to shoot. In 1893, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner announced that, according to the latest census data, the American frontier had disappeared. For decades, hardy pioneers had gone west to conquer the wilderness. Nature, like the Native Americans, was treated as an enemy to be subdued. Turner argued that the frontier experience had shaped the American character, with its love of freedom and rugged individualism. Europe suffered willingly under kings and emperors. The United States demanded democracy. With the frontier gone, Turner and others wondered, what would become of America?
Except the American frontier hadn’t disappeared. It had simply moved north. The territory of Alaska was so distant and vast that, as the superintendent of the same 1890 census on which Turner had based his pessimistic hypothesis pointed out, it presented “difficulties in the way of enumeration scarcely conceivable in the older portion of the country.” Not only were the contents of this immense northern enigma unknown, but no one was even certain how to begin measuring them. The first glimmer of a new ecological awareness may have been dawning in response to the end of the Wild West, but that urge to save the wilderness had been sparked by the threat of scarcity. Alaska was so big and so wild that its natural resources were assumed to be inexhaustible and ripe for exploiting. As the Elder cruised northward, campaigns that would test the limits of those resources were well under way.