ORCA
Scientific explorers are not easily managed, and in large mixed lots are rather inflammable and explosive,” John Muir would write upon the death of E. H. Harriman, in 1909. After a month together, as the Elder neared the top of the arch formed by Alaska’s panhandle and southern coast, the members of the Harriman Expedition had, according to Burroughs, “assumed the features of a large and happy family on a summer holiday cruise.” Expeditions are often like military campaigns, long stretches of marching and boredom broken up by brief moments of excitement. At the point when other adventurers might be entertaining themselves by counting digits lost to frostbite or drawing straws to determine whom the cannibals would eat first, the scientists aboard the Elder were in the steamship’s salon listening to forestry professor Bernhard Fernow play Beethoven and Schubert on the piano, posting bits of humorous doggerel on the notice board, or challenging Harriman to a round of his favorite game, crokinole. Much of the credit for high spirits belonged to Harriman, whose energetic, hyper-organized personality helped maintain the peace. “The ship was equally at the service of men who wanted to catch mice or collect a new bird, as those who wanted to survey a glacier or inlet or shoot a bear,” wrote Burroughs, who by the time the Elder left the Inside Passage was showing less interest in any of those activities than he did in returning to his New York cottage.
Much of the good cheer was surely relief from the day-to-day drudgery of exploration. Men like Muir, Grinnell, and Dall were accustomed to living on hardtack and wild game and sleeping on the ground. Harriman not only furnished hot meals and warm beds, but had established a Committee on Lectures that provided regular postprandial entertainment. Each evening at 8:00 P.M., one of the Elder’s experts gave a talk. “One night it was Dall on the history or geography of Alaska,” Burroughs wrote, “then Gilbert upon the agency of glaciers in shaping the valleys and mountains, or upon the glaciers we had recently visited.” Daniel Elliott, who had launched the expedition by whetting Harriman’s appetite for bear, spoke on the fauna of Somaliland, in East Africa. Muir, who was an even better talker than he was a writer, took his turn with a story he had been polishing for almost twenty years but had only recently published, the tale of the little dog Stickeen.
Following his trip to Glacier Bay with Hall Young and the four Tlingit guides, Muir didn’t return to San Francisco until January of 1880. He had corresponded dutifully with his fiancée, Louie Strentzel, throughout his journeys yet had somehow neglected to mention the date of his return to California. Louie learned of her future husband’s arrival by reading the shipping news. The two were married in April at the Strentzel family estate, in Martinez. Muir spent the next three months working tirelessly to learn the fundamentals of growing and selling fruit. Louie became pregnant. In late July, Muir departed once again for Alaska, promising to return in plenty of time for the birth of their first child.
Shortly thereafter, Hall Young was awaiting the incoming mail boat in Wrangell when, to his astonishment, he spotted a familiar bearded form on the deck. Muir, who had given Young no advance warning of his return, hopped ashore and asked his friend, “When can you be ready?”
The matter was not as simple as reassembling their crew from the previous year. A disagreement between Wrangell’s Stikine Tlingit tribe and their rivals the Taku had been inflamed by the northern neighbor’s heavy consumption of home-brewed hoochinoo. (The Tlingit word has been passed down in a shortened form, hooch.) The Taku invaded the Stikine village at Wrangell. Hoping to broker peace, Toyatte and Young stood between the two sides, armed only with the chief’s ceremonial spear. When gunfire commenced, the chief was shot through the forehead and fell dead in front of the missionary. “Thus died for his people the noblest Roman of them all,” Muir wrote.
A new crew of three Tlingits was recruited, and a sixth member of the party joined at the last minute. Over the objections of Muir and Young’s wife, Young’s dog, Stickeen, invited himself on the trip when he “deliberately walked down the gang-plank to the canoe, picked his steps carefully to the bow, and curled himself down on my coat,” Young remembered. Within a week, the small white, black, and brown mongrel was Muir’s inseparable companion, joining him on his rambles and sleeping at his feet.
The party paddled north to Glacier Bay and made a quick reconnaissance of the previous year’s discoveries. They devoted a full week to Muir Glacier, mapping its face and driving stakes into the ice to measure the rate of its flow. In some spots, the ice river was moving fifty or sixty feet per day, with the leading edge calving off in bergs as it reached the water’s edge. After paddling across the bay in a fierce storm, they pulled into a cove. At its head was Taylor Glacier (since renamed Brady Glacier for the future governor who greeted the Harriman Expedition in Sitka). To Muir’s great delight, the ice was growing rather than receding. Its main branch alone was three miles wide. The glacier was advancing so rapidly that a Huna chief who had lost a salmon stream to the encroaching ice shocked Young with the news that he’d attempted to appease the ice mountain by sacrificing two of his best slaves, a husband and wife. “They were my slaves,” the chief replied when Young gasped. “The man suggested it himself.”
Young knew that the miserable weather would not lessen Muir’s enthusiasm to explore an expanding glacier. When the minister awoke early the next morning, hoping to fix a hot breakfast for his friend, Muir had already departed. He’d taken along only an ice ax, a hunk of bread, and Stickeen.
Muir ascended the east side of the ice field, using trees that stood along its edge as a shield against the blast of the storm, which was so powerful that he had difficulty breathing while facing into the wind. Newly sheared stumps and trees crushed to pulp by the advancing ice littered the ground; the rain had swollen a stream of glacial runoff into a cascading torrent. Realizing that a coat was useless in such conditions, Muir stripped his off and surrendered to a complete drenching. Having ascended several miles with Stickeen along the glacier’s edge, he scanned across its body as he neared the top. “As far as the eye could reach, the nearly level glacier stretched indefinitely away in the gray cloudy sky, a prairie of ice.”
Using just the ax and a compass, Muir and Stickeen traversed the relatively smooth seven miles across in three hours. At 5:00 P.M., he estimated that three hours of daylight remained for their return to camp. As man and dog started back across, they found themselves disoriented amid a “bewildering labyrinth” of deep crevasses. Some of these could be leaped. Others could be crossed only on knife-edge ridges, which Muir flattened with his ice ax and scooted across “like a boy riding a rail fence” so that Stickeen could follow. As the sky grew darker, the hungry and exhausted pair started to run whenever possible to make up time. Already soaked to the bone, Muir knew that to survive the night on the ice, he would have to jump up and down until daylight just to stay warm.
Muir halted at a forty-foot-wide crevasse that appeared impassible. Retracing his steps wasn’t an option. He had barely managed to leap across an eight-foot gap from a higher spot to reach his current position. The only possible crossing point was a frozen sliver attached to the sides of the chasm, “at a depth of about eight to ten feet below the surface of the glacier.” (Muir later told Young that the edge curved down “like the cable of a suspension bridge.”) Stickeen looked down over Muir’s shoulder into the hole and began to whine, voicing his doubts.
Muir carefully cut a series of steps down to the narrow bridge, then began scooting slowly across with his knees pinned to its sides. As he went, he leveled a four-inch-wide balance beam for his friend. At the far end, Muir cut handholds and more steps and ascended carefully from the crevasse. Stickeen continued to howl. Muir knelt at the edge and coaxed the dog into slowly walking across the bridge.
Young kept watch from camp throughout the day but could see little through the sideways rain. At sunset he told the men to build a bonfire as a homing beacon. Not until after ten did the wet and weary adventurers stagger out of the forest. Without a word, Young and one of the Tlingit guides stripped Muir naked and dressed him in dry long underwear. Stickeen, who usually bounded into camp, crawled cold and wet to an edge of blanket and curled up by the fire. Only when Muir had eaten a hot meal could he speak of the day’s events. His recounting of crossing what he called “that dreadful ice bridge in the shadow of death” moved Young to tears. Muir looked over at Stickeen on his blanket. “Yon’s a brave doggie,” he said.
Muir, who found the process of composition excruciating, said that the short book he published in 1909 about the adventure, Stickeen, was the most difficult writing he’d ever done. The narrative itself is straightforward, but the parable hidden inside must have given him fits. Stickeen was the vehicle through which he conveyed an idea that he’d been building and revising since childhood: that animals had God-given rights just as humans had. He seemed to have absorbed the influence of his Tlingit guides, whose pantheism incorporated a belief “that animals have souls, and that it was wrong to speak disrespectfully of the fishes or any of the animals that supplied them with food,” Muir wrote in Travels in Alaska.
Nearly twenty years after his harrowing journey with Stickeen through the crevasses, the Elder passed near Taylor Glacier during the final leg of its journey home. After the evening’s scholarly lecture in the salon gave way to a raucous celebration with college cheers and songs, Muir quietly stepped outside to stand alone at the ship’s rail in silent vigil for his canine friend.
The passengers aboard the Elder could smell their next stop before they could see it. As they approached the tiny fishing town of Orca, the shoreline of Prince William Sound was coated for several miles by a slick of grease “dotted with salmon heads and bodies,” according to Hart Merriam. In the journals of the various team members, the subject on which all agreed most, aside from the beauty of Glacier Bay, was Orca’s overwhelming stench. John Muir was repelled by not only the odors of the cannery but the “unutterably dirty, frowsy” workers within. “Men in the business are themselves canned,” he wrote in his diary.
After a brief stop, the Elder spent a few days exploring the glaciers of Prince William Sound, then returned to Orca for repairs on a busted propeller. A hundred dolphins provided an escort much of the way. As the ship docked near the cannery in the evening, its graphophone played at full volume, attracting the attention of idle gold miners lurking near the pier. More than three thousand men from down south had departed up the Copper River the prior year “on the wildest, vaguest rumor of gold,” Burroughs wrote. “Alaska is full of such adventurers ransacking the land.” Scores had died from scurvy, and survivors were trickling back into Orca penniless, waiting by the waterfront and hoping that a pitying steamboat captain would front them passage back south. Orca had no need for a dry dock, due to its extreme tidal range. The propeller repair crew waited for low tide, waded out into the shoals, constructed a scaffold around the steamship’s broken blade, and slipped a new one into place before high tide returned.
The hiatus for repairs gave the expedition members a chance to take a closer look at the activity inside the cannery. Burroughs watched in wonder as Chinese laborers from San Francisco wielded blades like jugglers—slicing off unwanted bits and disemboweling innards before passing a fish on to be washed, scaled, and canned. “Every second all day long a pound can, snugly packed, drops from the ingenious invention,” he wrote. Burroughs lost his appetite for salmon after seeing so much of it in one place. “It is kicked about under foot; it lies in great smelling heaps; . . . the air is redolent of an odor far different from that of roses or new-mown hay.”
To George Bird Grinnell, the carnage looked all too familiar. He was so moved by what he saw at Orca that he devoted an entire chapter to the state of its salmon fisheries in the second volume of the Harriman Alaska Series. “If one inquires of an individual connected with the salmon industry in Alaska something about their numbers, he is at once told of the millions found there, and informed that the supply is inexhaustible.” It was the same language, Grinnell noted with alarm, that he was accustomed to hearing about the abundance of fur seals, buffalo, and passenger pigeons—all species whose astounding numbers had plummeted to almost zero in less than fifty years due to hunting. Once fishermen and packers dropped their bravado, however, their private concerns showed “very clearly that the supply of Alaska salmon is diminishing, and diminishing at a rapid rate.”
For untold centuries, Orca had been fished by Eyak and Sugpiaq natives. Ownership rights to certain streams were hereditary and inviolable, which encouraged caretaking. The canneries that ignored these traditions were owned by corporations in California, so profits were shipped out of the territory along with product. They relied on nets that could stretch up to a mile long across the mouth of a river and barricades that blocked fish attempting to swim upstream to spawn. In both cases, salmon were prevented from breeding. A deliberate salmon-eradication program could hardly have been more effective.
“Their greed is so great that each strives to catch all the fish there are, and all at one time, in order that its rivals may secure as few as possible,” Grinnell wrote. Any unwanted bycatch was discarded, as was any surplus salmon that spoiled before it could be processed—better the fish go to waste than to allow a competitor to have it. “All these people recognize very well that they are destroying the fishing; and before very long a time must come when there will be no more salmon to be canned at a profit. But this very knowledge makes them more and more eager to capture the fish and capture all the fish.” Laws restricting overfishing had been passed but were virtually unenforceable in a territory as large as Alaska. Government agents lacked boats and depended on the canneries for transportation, thus eliminating surprise visits. On those rare occasions when an inspector found violations too flagrant to ignore, Grinnell wrote, the canners would admit guilt and say, “We do not wish to do as we are doing, but so long as others act in this way we must continue to do so for our own protection.” They would be happy to stop as long as their competitors did so first. “Nothing is done and the bad work goes on.”
The buffalo would survive, in large part due to Grinnell’s political efforts. The passenger pigeon would not fare so well. In 1831, John James Audubon had estimated that two billion of the birds lived in North America. Grinnell remembered being called from the breakfast table as a boy in Manhattan’s Audubon Park to look at a dogwood tree outside the window in which “there were so many birds that all could not alight in it.” In the months between the Elder’s visits to Orca and the publication of Grinnell’s salmon essay, the last wild passenger pigeon was shot by a boy in Ohio. The species Ectopistes migratorius went extinct when its only surviving member, a female named Martha, died in captivity in 1914.