KODIAK
After a roundabout four-hundred-mile trip southwest from Orca to Kodiak Island, the passengers of the Elder “swarmed out of the ship, like boys out of school, longing for a taste of grass,” John Burroughs wrote. Compared with the cold monochrome austerity of Harriman Fjord, disembarking at a place covered in green fields and rolling, flowering slopes was like emerging from a fever. Even John Muir, for whom glaciers were the entire point of the voyage, had to admit that “no green mountains and hills of any country I have seen, not even those of the Emerald Isle, can surpass these.”
The island’s main village, St. Paul (known today as Kodiak), was in 1899 a melting pot of cultures. Russians had subjugated the island’s Alutiiq population during the initial fur frenzy and had since intermarried with them. A scattering of Americans had moved in since the handover. Burroughs found the village nearly as enchanting as the surrounding countryside: frame cottages with small gardens, grassy lanes instead of streets (the island had neither horses nor wheeled transport of any kind), and a shop with a large sign reading CHICAGO STORE, where he purchased some fresh eggs.
The Elder had arrived in Kodiak ahead of schedule because Harriman had learned that the island was prime bear country. After five weeks in Alaska, he was growing impatient with his failure to land his trophy. Hart Merriam, who was engaged in a decades-long project at the U.S. Biological Survey to classify the varieties of brown bear, surely knew that once the ship departed Kodiak and made its way into the Aleutians and beyond, the chances of finding a bear to shoot were slim. Merriam sought out an old Kodiak hunter named Fischer, who’d sent him some skulls in Washington, DC. Fischer told the scientist that the largest sample he’d forwarded had belonged to a bear shot by his wife not far from town. Merriam rushed back to share the promising news. By that evening, Harriman was speeding in a steam launch to a campsite eight miles away.
Muir was cranky as ever about all the hunting, grumbling to his journal, “Everybody going shooting, sauntering as if it were the best day for the ruthless business.” But he, too, succumbed to Kodiak’s verdant charms, joining a party that wandered the wildflower-covered foothills outside of town. Poet Charles Keeler and John Burroughs sneaked away with a picnic of beer and sandwiches to lounge beneath a giant spruce tree on Wood Island. Keeler counted the robins and warblers he recognized from their winter visits to Berkeley as Burroughs took a snooze on the grass. At the request of Mrs. Harriman, the young mineralogist Charles Palache helped supervise the Big Four girls on “their first taste of outdoor life,” which included rowing a boat upriver and cooking their own pancakes and bacon. When Palache spotted a bald eagle’s nest in a cottonwood, he impressed the ladies by shinnying up and snatching a young bird with feathers as soft as beaver fur.
While the rest of the Elder passengers savored Kodiak’s rustic pleasures, Merriam waited alone anxiously for the expedition patron’s return. At around 8:45 P.M. on July 3, Harriman roared into camp and announced—to Merriam’s “immense delight”—that he had bagged “a real big genuine Kodiak bear.” Even in the scientist’s scant notebook jottings from the day, one can sense his relief.
It is perhaps for the best that George Bird Grinnell had gone off hunting elsewhere on Kodiak Island, for the tale of Harriman’s feat didn’t exactly rise to the Boone and Crockett Club’s standards of fair play. Harriman had come across a mother brown bear with her cub, munching grass “like a cow,” he said. The team of hunters drove the two bears into a narrow gorge, where Harriman was waiting with his Winchester. The odds were heavily stacked in the railroad man’s favor, since he was encircled by men “with enough firepower to tear the bear to pieces,” should his nerve fail him, one participant recalled. Harriman dropped the sow with a single shot. Guide Yellowstone Kelly completed the ambush by dispatching the cub.
The specimen was not quite as impressive as originally believed. She was a little undersize for a Kodiak bear and, judging from Edward Curtis’s photo of the kill, rather mangy. Nonetheless, a taxidermist was immediately dispatched to prepare Harriman’s trophy. The skulls of both animals wound up in the archives of the Smithsonian, deep in whose bowels they may still reside today.
The next day, the Fourth of July, dawned warm and clear. “The celebration began by the firing of the ship’s little brass cannon,” Burroughs wrote, which the crew stuffed with rags and blasted repeatedly for an hour. “The Stars and Stripes Forever” blared from the graphophone. Botanist William Brewer delivered a rousing speech praising the United States’ entry into the Spanish-American War as evidence of its dedication to freedom. Charles Keeler rebutted with a poem condemning the intervention.* Someone picked up a fiddle, and a pair of middle-aged scientists danced a jig to an old Christian hymn. The afternoon concluded with “a boat race and general merriment,” Burroughs wrote. A final cheer went up when the team that had been dispatched to collect the dead bears returned with the trophies.
John Muir took a dissenting view of the gaiety, recording Harriman’s sporting feat in his journal as the killing of a “mother and child.” It was aboard the Elder in Kodiak, however, that Muir’s resistance to Harriman’s magnetism finally crumbled. While some other members of the party were assembled on the front deck awaiting another fine meal, several praised the “blessed ministry of wealth” that had made the expedition possible. Ever the gadfly, Muir interrupted the laudations, saying, “I don’t think Mr. Harriman is very rich. He has not as much money as I have. I have all I want and Mr. Harriman has not.”
Word filtered back to Harriman, who took a seat next to Muir after dinner. “I never cared for money except as power for work,” he told Muir. “What I most enjoy is the power of creation, getting into partnership with nature in doing good, helping to feed man and beast, and making everybody and everything a little better and happier.” A most unusual friendship was born, one that would last until the end of Harriman’s life.
The accord between conservationist and capitalist did not prevent Muir from getting the last word, as he almost always did. In a long letter he wrote to the Harriman children upon returning to his farm in Martinez, he concluded, “Remember your penitential promises. Kill as few of your fellow beings as possible and pursue some branch of natural history at least far enough to see Nature’s harmony. Don’t forget me. God bless you.”