As armies of gold seekers and others sought to take from the land, there were also stirrings that parts of it should be preserved inviolate at all costs. The first decade of the twentieth century saw the establishment of Alaska’s two national forests and its first national park, initial lobbying for a second national park, and the first major confrontation over the development of its natural resources. While most Alaskans bristled at what they considered federal government attempts to impede the territory’s growth, others cheered the reservation of these enormous tracts of lands.
In 1891, Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act, authorizing the president to place federally owned public domain lands into “forest reserves,” the equivalent of what would soon be called national forests. Within a decade, three presidents transferred some 50 million acres nationwide into these reserves. These included Afognak Island north of Kodiak that was set aside by Benjamin Harrison in 1892 to protect its salmon-spawning streams, timber, and animals. The Afognak Island Forest Reserve, which later became part of Chugach National Forest, was the first federal conservation designation in Alaska.
After 1901, Theodore Roosevelt enlarged the system of forest reserves with a passion nurtured by his early days in the Dakotas, as well as his close association with the Boone and Crockett Club. Roosevelt named Gifford Pinchot, a well-connected advocate of scientific forest management, as chief of the Bureau of Forestry. Then, with Pinchot’s wholehearted support, Rossevelt proceeded to set aside another 150 million acres of reserves over the next seven years. When development interests finally lobbied Congress to pass a revision to the 1891 law limiting such widespread presidential discretion, Roosevelt quickly huddled with Pinchot and reserved another 16 million acres of the best of the remaining parcels before the law took effect. In 1907, at Roosevelt’s urging, this system of forest reserves became national forests under the administration of the U.S. Forest Service, and Pinchot was appointed its first chief forester.68
For his first Alaskan act, Roosevelt designated 4.5 million acres scattered among the islands of southeast Alaska as the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve on August 20, 1902. Five years later, he signed an executive order creating Tongass National Forest with another 2.25-million acres. This first Tongass National Forest encompassed the mainland from Portland Canal north to the Unuk River on Behm Canal, essentially the area now designated as Misty Fiords National Monument. In February 1909, during Roosevelt’s last full month in office, he combined the Alexander Archipelago Forest Reserve with these Tongass lands to make one national forest with almost 7 million acres. Over the ensuing years, more additions were made, and today the 17-million-acre Tongass National Forest is the largest in the United States.
Meanwhile in southcentral Alaska, Roosevelt created Chugach National Forest on July 23, 1907. Its name (CHEW-gatch) evolved from the Russian understanding of what the Natives around Prince William Sound called themselves, Chugatz or Tchougatskio. Originally, the Chugach encompassed about 5 million acres stretching across the Kenai Peninsula and Prince William Sound, but six major boundary adjustments, including adding and then deleting Afognak Island and later transferring areas to national-wildlife-refuge and national-park status, were made by 1980.
The purpose of both the Tongass and Chugach National Forests—indeed the initial purpose of all national forests—was to prevent the selective clear-cutting of the best and most accessible timber while leaving behind denuded and quickly eroded landscapes. The forest service’s charge was the prudent management of renewable resources to ensure their longevity. But as was to be the case many times in Alaska during the next century, the creation of these first national forests left unsatisfied parties at both ends of the spectrum.
A majority of Alaskans were dismayed and some more than a little confused by the reservations. Their response was, “Hey, wait a minute, for a generation the federal government has been stifling growth up here through benign neglect, and now that it’s finally paying some attention, it’s telling us that we can’t use or develop much of the best land.” At the other end of the spectrum there were the diehard, “preserve the wilderness at any cost” advocates. One of them was John Muir, who crossed swords early on with Gifford Pinchot over the concept of multiple-use management, a dilemma—or reality, depending on one’s viewpoint—that continues to confront land managers to the present day.
In southeast Alaska, where much of the territory’s population then lived, the combined Tongass National Forest encompassed a high percentage of the land most suitable for homesteading and agricultural development. But at least there were trees in the southeast. Much of the land set aside for the Chugach was not tree-covered, and many thought that it was “at the very best too marginal an area to be reserved as a national forest.”69 But southcentral Alaska had coal, and there Theodore Roosevelt really threw the fat into the fire.
As the gold rush waned, many Alaskans were banking on coal to be the economic savior for the territory. As part of his Progressive thinking, however, Roosevelt issued an executive order in 1906 prohibiting additional coal mining on the public domain in Alaska. Coal reserves were further locked up by the initial creation of Chugach National Forest and its subsequent expansions to include the bulk of the Bering River coal fields around Katalla. Through a strawman named Clarence Cunningham, the Morgan-Guggenheim syndicate held many unpatented claims in this area. Pinchot encouraged Roosevelt to make the withdrawals to counter what Pinchot thought was the syndicate’s plot to corner the market on Alaska’s coal. For his part, Roosevelt believed that such withdrawals would encourage Congress to create a coal-leasing system that would both be open to competition and also provide a source of revenue.
After Roosevelt left office, his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, continued these policies, but Congress failed to create a leasing system and the coal remained untouchable. Finally, Pinchot and Taft’s pro-development secretary of the interior, Richard Ballinger, who at one point had represented Cunningham in his attempts to patent the claims, had a severe falling-out. The whole story is long and complicated, but the gist of this first Alaskan battle of conservation versus development is that it led directly to Pinchot’s firing by Ballinger and Ballinger’s subsequent resignation. At least indirectly, it fueled the political schism that saw Roosevelt and the Progressives challenge Taft as a third party in 1912.
For Alaska, the coal reservations had the effect of not only impeding mining operations but also discouraging railroad development. No one was very interested in financing a railroad that had to operate on imported coal. The result was a double whammy. First, railroads, steamships, and locals were paying $11.00 to $12.00 per ton for imported coal when high-grade coal was readily available from the Bering fields for $2.50 to $3.50 per ton. Second, coal tonnage that was historically a ready and reliable source of freight revenue for the West’s railroads was nonexistent.70
Nowhere was the resentment higher than in Cordova, where the completion of the Copper River and Northwestern Railway to Kennecott was supposed to be just the first step in ensuring the town’s economic future. Kennecott, after all, was initially only to be a branch line on a route that led all the way to Fairbanks. On May 4, 1911, with visions of tea being dumped into Boston Harbor, 300 Cordova businessmen and citizens armed themselves with shovels and marched to the wharf of the Alaska Steamship Company and proceeded to shovel several hundred tons of imported British Columbia coal into Orca Bay. When Richard J. Barry, the company’s general agent, demanded that this Cordova Coal Party cease, he was met with continued shoveling and shouts of “Give us Alaska coal.”
If there were indeed parallels to be drawn with the Boston Tea Party, some, including the Seattle Times, were quick to point out the decidedly Alaskan character of the Cordova affair. The Bostonians of 1773 had gone “in dead of night…and disguised as Indians,” the paper noted, whereas the Alaskans marched unabashedly in broad daylight. Even the far-off Philadelphia Bulletin called the event “a demonstraton of a not unreasonable impatience with the dilatory federal policy relating to the development of Alaskan resources.”71
Meanwhile in nearby Katalla, which was still hoping to become the gateway to the Bering coal fields, Gifford Pinchot was burned in effigy amid a flurry of posters plastered around town that proclaimed:
PINCHOT, MY POLICY
No patents to coal lands!
All timber in forest reserves!
Bottle up Alaska!
Save Alaska for all time to come!72
Those words turned out to be mild (and representative) compared to what journalist George E. Baldwin later wrote about Pinchot after the forester had visited Alaska: “When the high priest of conservation, the prince of shadow dancers, recently visited Alaska to gloat over his handiwork of empty houses, deserted villages, dying towns, arrested development, bankrupt pioneers, and the blasted hopes of sturdy, self-reliant American citizens, it is a striking comment on the law-abiding character of our people that he came back at all.”73 It’s probably safe to say that Baldwin was not on John Muir’s mailing list. Congress finally passed an Alaska coal-leasing bill in 1914.
The U.S. Forest Service was just one aspect of the federal government’s presence in Alaska. Another was the still-neophyte national park system. The National Park Service was not created as a separate agency until 1916, but Congress began the national park tradition by setting aside Yellowstone as early as 1872. In addition to such acclaimed treasures as Yosemite, Glacier, Mount Rainier, and Sequoia National Parks, Congress created a number of Civil War–era military historical parks in the late 1800s before designating a national park to commemorate the Battle of Sitka. Established in 1910, Sitka National Historical Park was the first national park in Alaska. Over the years, its mission has expanded to tell the larger story of Tlingit and Russian cultural influences in southeast Alaska.
Interest in the cultural heritage of Sitka and all of Alaska had been growing thanks in part to the efforts of Governor John Brady and Sheldon Jackson’s museum. In 1903, Brady collected about twenty totem poles from the Tlingit villages of Tuxekan and Klawock and a number of Haida villages on Prince of Wales Island. These totem poles were shipped to St. Louis and assembled as part of the Alaska Exhibit at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Centennial Exposition. While bands played “Meet Me in St. Louis,” hundreds of thousands of fairgoers got their first look at totem poles, other Alaska Native artifacts and crafts, and mounted Dall sheep and brown bears. To many, Alaska became much more than just exaggerated tales of the gold rush.
After the exposition, some of the totem poles were in such poor condition that they were sold, but others were displayed at the Lewis and Clark Exposition in Portland the following year before being shipped to Sitka. While hindsight might cast Governor Brady’s collecting in much the same light as the Harriman Alaska Expedition’s visit to Cape Fox, the end result was that the remnants of these poles form the basis for the totem park that still lines Sitka Sound adjacent to the 1804 battleground site. Because of decay and weathering over the years, only a few of the poles along the park trail still contain fragments of the original poles that Brady shipped to St. Louis, but his efforts were a critical step toward recognizing and preserving the multicultural heritage of southeast Alaska.
The creation of the new national park at Sitka was relatively noncontroversial because it involved a small area of land around a specific site. Those who dreamed of national-park status for vast sections of Alaska would face tougher challenges. No one dreamed a bigger dream—nor worked so hard to see it come true—than railroader, hunter, and naturalist Charles Sheldon. Born in Rutland, Vermont, in 1867, Sheldon was a graduate of Yale and a product of the eastern elite. Over the years, however, his Alaskan associates came to admire him as a man to be trusted on the trail no matter whether it led across frozen tundra or through the halls of Congress. After a law degree, Sheldon went to work in railroading and served as general manager of a railroad in Mexico from 1898 to 1902. During that time, his investments in Mexican mining operations allowed him to retire from active business at the early age of thirty-five.
A member of the Boone and Crockett Club, Sheldon counted C. Hart Merriam and Theodore Roosevelt among his many friends, and he was on a first-name basis with many of the participants of the Harriman Alaska Expedition. Bolstered by these connections, Sheldon became a tireless champion of the cause to preserve North American game animals, particularly mountain sheep.
Sheldon first acquired his interest in mountain sheep while working in Mexico. He hunted both desert and mountain bighorns. Then in the summer of 1906, Sheldon heard the call of Alaska. He hired Harry Karstens as a guide and packer and headed for the north side of Denali in search of Dall sheep. The pair began their quest along the moraine of the Peters Glacier, but finding no sheep there, they moved progressively eastward until they reached the headwaters of the Toklat River. “Sheep at last! I thought,” wrote Sheldon, “but the field glasses revealed a grizzly bear walking along smelling the ground for squirrels or pawing a moment for a mouse. Under the bright sun its body color appeared to be pure white, its legs brown.” 74
But the sheep were close, and before Sheldon left that summer to the honking of sandhill cranes winging south, he observed hundreds of sheep in the rocky crags between the Toklat and Teklanika Rivers, including seven rams that he shot as specimens. Sheldon quickly determined, however, that his study of Dall sheep would not be complete unless he observed them for an entire year. “With this in view I planned to revisit the region, build a substantial cabin just by an old camp on the Toklat, and remain there through the winter, summer, and early fall.”75
Sheldon did just that, returning to the shadow of Denali the following summer, again in the company of Harry Karstens. Sheldon’s year in residence on the Toklat, from about August 1, 1907, to June 11, 1908, allowed a systematic, season-by-season observation of the Dall sheep, and his meticulous field notes and keen powers of observation set a high standard for all of the naturalists who followed him to Denali. Somewhat surprisingly, when Sheldon left Denali and Alaska in the summer of 1908, he was never to return. Perhaps he knew in his heart that what he had experienced would never be the same again and that he could not bear to see the change. But the passion he took with him from that year on the Toklat fanned the spark that slowly built into the creation of Alaska’s second national park.
Using the bully pulpit of the Boone and Crockett Club, and enlisting the aid of a host of fellow conservationists, including Theodore Roosevelt himself, Charles Sheldon became a tireless advocate for the creation of a national park around Denali. It was the only way, he believed, to preserve the complete ecosystem of Denali and protect its sheep, bears, moose, and wolves from market hunters. Sheldon first put the park idea into words in his journal entry of January 12, 1908, penned during the winter that he spent in his little cabin on the banks of the Toklat. In that entry, he called it Denali National Park, just as he had always called the mountain by that name.
After years of lobbying, the authorization bill for the park finally passed. Sheldon’s pleas for the name Denali, however, fell on political ears, and Congress chose the political, not the historical, name in creating Mount McKinley National Park. But it has remained Sheldon’s Denali in spirit. In recognition of his efforts to bring it to fruition, Charles Sheldon was delegated to deliver the bill personally to President Woodrow Wilson, who signed it on February 26, 1917, and gave the pen to Sheldon.76
The establishment of Mount McKinley National Park was to exemplify the frequent gulf between congressional designation and funding. Congress did not appropriate funds for the park in 1917. Nor did it do so in 1918, when the report of the secretary of the interior noted that “the failure of Congress to provide funds for the administration of Mount McKinley National Park has again prevented the National Park Service from taking possession of that area.”77
Finally in 1921, again at the urging of Charles Sheldon, the first appropriation of $8,000 was made, and a superintendent was appointed to organize a small ranger force to monitor poaching. Thanks to Charles Sheldon’s unqualified recommendation, National Park Service director Stephen Mather was able to write, “There is no question in my mind about [Harry] Karstens being the man for the place.”78
Years later, while studying the wilderness that Charles Sheldon labored so long to save, naturalist Adolph Murie wrote in his journal: “During various trips down the Toklat in the course of my field work, I usually stopped at [Sheldon’s] cabin, lingered to examine the walls, the shelves, the wooden pegs used for nails. I would stand before the cabin and look across the gravel bars to the mountains, a scene Sheldon must have enjoyed. Although the cabin is deteriorating, and a swing of the river may destroy it suddenly, I have a feeling it should be left alone. I think that Sheldon, with his love for wild places, would like to have his cabin crumble to earth with age.”79 So it has.