WASHINGTON, DC
The return of the Harriman Expedition to Seattle on July 30 was national news. The New York Times ran a front-page story, surrounded by dispatches about a deadly yellow fever outbreak in Virginia, rioting in Paris over the Dreyfus affair, and a daylong race in which two automobiles averaged the blistering speed of almost thirty miles an hour. The San Francisco Chronicle called the Elder a “curiosity shop” that was “stocked with everything Alaskan from a totem pole five feet through and sixty feet high to the minutest insect.”
Totem poles were last-minute additions to the ship’s cargo. At Kodiak, an old gold miner had given Frederick Dellenbaugh a crude hand-drawn map showing the location of an abandoned Indian village near what is now Ketchikan. As the homebound Elder approached the Alaska–Canada border, Harriman compared the miner’s map against Captain Doran’s charts and ordered a stop at a settlement called Cape Fox Village. When the Elder’s launches landed on shore the next morning, the expeditioners encountered a ghost town. Just behind the beach stood a row of traditional Tlingit houses. In front of the houses stood nineteen totem poles.
The scientists were ecstatic. Clothing, blankets, masks, carvings, and other artifacts were so plentiful that the Elder docked off Cape Fox Village for two days to allow each expert to maximize his haul. As they rummaged, the expeditioners speculated on the fate of the missing residents. “It was a question with us as to why the village had been so completely deserted and apparently all at once,” Dellenbaugh wrote.
The top prizes were the massive poles, several of which the crew and scientists alike labored, in unusually warm weather, to dig out and float to the ship. Celebratory beers were opened, and a program of songs performed in Harriman’s honor. The patron gathered his entire party on the beach for a final all-star-team photograph in front of the remaining totems. Long into the night, the quiet Inside Passage echoed with the Harriman Alaska Expedition cheer: “Who are we? Who are we? We are, we are, the H.A.E.!”
Two members were absent from the photograph: Edward Curtis, who was standing behind the camera, and John Muir, who had wandered off in a huff. Muir was infuriated by the theft of the totems, and also displeased that a family of squirrels living atop one pole had been preserved as specimens. On his 1879 visit to Alaska, some of the Presbyterian missionaries with whom he was traveling had cut down a pole belonging to the family of Kadachan, the Tlingit chief who was among those who guided him to Glacier Bay. (“I heard a chopping going on at the north end of the village, followed by a heavy thud, as if a tree had fallen,” Muir writes in Travels in Alaska.) In spite of having recently converted to Christianity and presumably forsaking pagan idols, Kadachan looked the missionary party’s leader squarely in the face and asked, “How would you like to have an Indian go to a graveyard and break down and carry away a monument belonging to your family?”
If Muir feared that his fellow Harriman expeditioners were making a mistake, he was correct. Cape Fox Village hadn’t been abandoned. Its occupants had moved a few miles away, probably to avoid a smallpox epidemic and almost certainly so that their children could attend a new school.
A month after the Elder arrived in Seattle, a consortium of local business leaders sailed to the village of Tongass and chopped down another Tlingit totem pole, which they carried back to be erected in Pioneer Square. This time, the Natives appealed to Governor Brady and a grand jury indicted eight of the businessmen. They were fined a total of five hundred dollars. Seattle kept the pole. After an arsonist vandalized the original in 1938, Tlingit craftsmen carved a replacement, the same pole beneath which I first learned about the Harriman Expedition from a national park ranger in a Smokey Bear hat.
After stepping off the Elder in Seattle, the Harriman Expedition’s luminaries gave newspaper interviews, lingered for a few days, and dispersed. Harriman, pleased with his burst of positive press, departed immediately to deal with a brewing railroad crisis. John Burroughs and others returned east on another Harriman special train. William Dall, having wrapped up his fourteenth and final trip to Alaska, sailed for a new chapter in Hawaii. Hart Merriam spent three months in the Bay Area, tracking mammals and fretting about the work ahead editing the Harriman Alaska Series, which would consume more than a decade of his life.
George Bird Grinnell returned to Forest and Stream and published a series of reports on the expedition, highlighting the problems Alaska’s wildlife faced and the need for government intervention. The fur seals of the Pribilofs would eventually be saved by the first international treaty to protect wildlife, 1911’s North Pacific Fur Seal Convention. Aboard the Elder, Grinnell had invited photographer Edward Curtis to join him the following summer in Montana to observe a Blackfeet Indian ceremony. That journey would launch a project that became Curtis’s twenty-volume opus, The North American Indian, one of the twentieth century’s masterworks of photography and ethnology. Like his photographs of the melting giants of Glacier Bay, Curtis’s images of Native Americans and their rituals are in some cases all that remains of a vanished world.
John Muir returned to his fruit farm in Martinez, where over the coming months he hosted a swarm of visitors from the expedition, everyone from Merriam to Captain Doran. His two months at sea had solidified alliances with some wilderness defenders and created new ones with others. In a letter to Harriman’s daughters written upon returning home, he described his time aboard the Elder as “a floating university in which I enjoyed the instruction and companionship of a lot of the best fellows imaginable, culled and arranged like a well-balanced bouquet.”
The nascent environmental movement was itself evolving, and hardening into two general groups. The utilitarians believed that America’s natural spaces should be managed for their potential resources, chiefly logging. The preservationists, led by men such as Muir and Grinnell, wanted wilderness to be maintained in its original state for its own sake, and for the sake of future generations. Muir’s lyrical nature writing took on a sharper edge. The famous introduction to 1901’s Our National Parks shows a touch of manifesto seeping into the pastoral sweetness and natural light: “Thousands of tired, nerve-shaken, over-civilized people are beginning to find out that going to the mountains is going home; that wildness is a necessity; and that mountain parks and reservations are useful not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.”
The American conservation movement, like the First World War, built slowly over decades and then seemed to burst forth suddenly with an anarchist’s bullet. By the spring of 1901, Boone and Crockett cofounder Theodore Roosevelt was in Washington, DC, serving as the new vice president to William McKinley and eagerly reading early drafts of reports from the Harriman Expedition that his friend Merriam had sent over. Under other circumstances, the peripatetic Roosevelt would have been an ideal member of the HAE. He had known Grinnell and Merriam for years, wrote authoritatively on the outdoors, and dined frequently with his literary hero, John Burroughs. He envied their adventures aboard the Elder. Upon reviewing Merriam’s writings on bears, “Roosevelt hatched a plan to take a steamer to Alaska and then hunt with an Aleut guide along the salmon streams of Kodiak,” writes historian Douglas Brinkley. “He even ordered rubber boots and rainproof slickers in anticipation of the journey.”
Roosevelt was returning from a hike in the Adirondacks on September 13, 1901, when he received word that McKinley, who had been shot in Buffalo, was near death. McKinley died the following day and Roosevelt was sworn in as president. The new president’s status as both unelected to the highest office in the land and the youngest chief executive in American history, at forty-two, did nothing to diminish his legendary confidence. Suddenly the defenders of America’s wilderness had an ally in the White House. Just six weeks after Roosevelt took the oath of office, Hart Merriam wrote to John Muir, in California, that the new president “wants to know the facts and is particularly anxious to learn them from men like yourself who are not connected with the Government service and at the same time are known and esteemed by the people.”
Roosevelt knew well from Grinnell’s lobbying efforts to preserve Yellowstone that getting Congress to support progressive conservationist projects over the interests of wealthy businessmen was no easy task. As president, he instead chose to save wilderness largely by executive fiat. In August 1902, he issued a proclamation setting aside the Alexander Archipelago as a forest reserve. The same year, influenced by Grinnell and other fellow members of the Boone and Crockett, he pushed for the first comprehensive law protecting game animals in Alaska. Moose and brown bears now fell under the jurisdiction of the Division of Biological Survey, where Merriam was chief. In 1907, Roosevelt enlarged the Alexander Archipelago reserve to create the seventeen-million-acre Tongass National Forest reserve, the largest in U.S. history. A few weeks later he set aside 5.4 million acres, including College Fjord and other areas he’d read about in the Harriman Alaska Series, as the Chugach National Forest. Almost all the glaciers seen by the passengers of the Elder were now federally protected.
By 1903, the enormously popular Roosevelt was planning his Grand Loop tour, a two-month working vacation that would take him through most of the states west of the Mississippi. Mutual acquaintances inquired if Muir might be open to guiding the president in the California Sierras. Though the two men had never met, Roosevelt had been deeply influenced by Our National Parks. “I do not want anyone with me but you,” Roosevelt wrote to Muir in March 1903. “I want to drop politics absolutely for four days and just be out in the open with you.”
Muir had his own agenda for the president’s visit. The Yosemite National Park, established in 1890, was still a quadrilateral doughnut, with the state of California retaining its control over the spectacular Yosemite Valley, at the park’s center. Lumbermen and sheepherders continued to exploit the state’s lax supervision. Muir and the Sierra Club repeatedly asked the state legislature to consider ceding the valley back to the United States government, without success.
Roosevelt’s Yosemite visit went even better than hoped. The president largely ignored the slate of formal events organized by California politicians, slipping away to pass four days camping with Muir. The two men slept beneath the sequoias and rode horses to Glacier Point, where snow fell onto the valley and Half Dome. Muir felt comfortable enough with the president that he chided him for his love of hunting.
“Mr. Roosevelt, when are you going to get beyond the boyishness of killing things?” he asked.
“Muir, I guess you are right,” he replied.*
Roosevelt readily agreed that Yosemite Valley needed to be saved, but the California legislature would not vote to return control to the federal government without the approval of the Southern Pacific Railroad, the most powerful lobbying force in Sacramento. Fortuitously, the Southern Pacific had been acquired by a reinvigorated Edward Harriman after his return from Alaska. Muir’s unusual friendship with Harriman had continued to flower, and he somewhat reluctantly asked for the mogul’s help. Overnight, the Southern Pacific switched its position on Yosemite from opposition to support. In Washington, DC, the budget-conscious speaker of the House was slow to ratify the move. Harriman had a word with him, too. President Roosevelt gladly signed the legislation into law.
Perhaps the most powerful weapon in Roosevelt’s preservationist arsenal was the Antiquities Act of 1906, which gave him the power to protect “historical landmarks, historic preservation structures, and other objects of scientific interest.”* Over the next two and a half years, he designated Devils Tower, the Petrified Forest, the Grand Canyon, and other western wonders as national monuments. In 1908, a wealthy businessman donated a tract of nearly three hundred acres of Northern California redwoods to the government; Roosevelt, honoring the donor’s request, named the monument Muir Woods. In 1925, President Calvin Coolidge would use the Antiquities Act to set aside Glacier Bay.
For a hundred years following the 1867 purchase of Alaska, the question of Native land rights remained in legal limbo. The 1968 discovery of massive oil fields lurking beneath Prudhoe Bay changed everything. The state of Alaska quickly sold nine hundred million dollars in drilling leases. Various tribes laid claim to the land through which the major petroleum companies planned their eight-hundred-mile pipeline. It was soon apparent that no oil would flow until the land rights issue was settled. The solution was the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), which divided forty-four million acres and 962 million dollars among twelve regional corporations and more than two hundred village corporations.
In 1978, facing a deadline to determine the fate of the U.S. government’s remaining Alaska land holdings following the ANCSA settlement, President Jimmy Carter used the Antiquities Act to designate fifty-six million Alaska acres as national monuments. During his final weeks in office, Carter signed into law the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act of 1980, widely considered to be the most important environmental legislation passed since Theodore Roosevelt’s administration. The move vastly expanded the dimensions of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, doubled the size of National Park Service lands, and elevated several monuments to national park status. Among them were Glacier Bay National Park and Katmai National Park.