When President Woodrow Wilson signed the 1917 legislation creating Mount McKinley National Park and handed the pen to Charles Sheldon, it signaled much more than the creation of Alaska’s second national park. The act was a major milestone along a long path littered with conflicting views about how to manage Alaska’s resources that dated back to the days of the Russian promyshlenniki and that would continue well into the next century.
The key impetus that got the Mount McKinley legislation passed was the impending doom facing big-game animals, but the legislative debate raised much broader issues. Shortly before Congress passed the Mount McKinley legislation, geologist Stephen R. Capps, who spent almost three decades in Alaska for the U.S. Geological Survey, wrote of the immediacy of the threat to wildlife in an article intended as an integral part of a final lobbying volley fired by park proponents. “How necessary is it that this park should be reserved immediately, rather than at some indefinite date in the future?” Capps asked. “Is there any danger that the park will not keep, even if not reserved? The answer is plain and admits of no argument. The scenery will keep indefinitely, but the game will not, and it must be protected soon or it will have been destroyed.”
Capps had already alluded to the much broader concept of wilderness preservation on a much grander scale than that of merely saving Sheldon’s sheep and bears. His premise was that “the Mount McKinley region now offers a last chance for the people of the United States to preserve, untouched by civilization, a great primeval park in its natural beauty.”
Capps went on to describe the geography and concomitant resources of the ubiquitous river valleys and surrounding hills along this part of the Alaska Range, and then—to counter those who had long railed against the economic impact of such federal withdrawals—he posed the question, “Will it pay?” Capps had no doubt about the answer: “Considered as a purely business measure, without taking account of the esthetic value of such a permanent national reserve in its influence on the development of the American people, the Mount McKinley National Park will be a tremendous financial asset to the territory of Alaska and to the United States as a whole.”6 The immediacy of the threat, the preservation of an entire wilderness ecosystem, and the positive or negative economic impact—presciently or unwittingly, Capps had enunciated the three themes that would be central to all future national-park debates in Alaska.
Things move more slowly in Alaska, however, than in most places. Although Mount McKinley National Park was created in 1917, it was 1921 before the fledgling park had its first superintendent, Harry P. Karstens, a man well acquainted with both the mountain and its animals. Karstens was Alaskan to the core—the sourdough’s sourdough. He had been a Klondike stampeder, Seventymile River miner, sled driver for the Kantishna mining camps, and hunting pal of Charles Sheldon’s. When Archdeacon Hudson Stuck asked Karstens to join the 1913 attempt on Mount McKinley, Karstens had already explored its lower slopes and mused with Charles Sheldon that they should be the ones to climb it together.
On April 12, 1921, National Park Service director Stephen Mather sent Karstens a ten-page letter of instructions for the new park. By all accounts, Karstens had his work cut out for him. The first priority was to protect the wildlife. Keeping outside market hunters at bay was one thing, but his fellow Alaskans were accustomed to using the whole spread of the public domain at their pleasure. Now someone—albeit one of their own—was telling them to cease and desist hunting there, and arresting them if they didn’t. It was a major change of both habit and mental attitude that Alaskans would have to suffer through with each national park reservation.
During his seven years as park superintendent at Mount McKinley, Karstens excelled at the pioneering aspects of the wild and undeveloped park, but frequently found his no-nonsense, direct-action approach at odds with his Washington superiors. Among his achievements were the establishment of ranger patrols, including with dog teams during winter, to reduce poaching; supervision of the construction of the Riley Creek operations base and park headquarters; construction of a wagon road west to the Savage River; and welcoming the first tourists. No doubt inspired by his association with Charles Sheldon, Karstens also supported the first detailed natural history research in the park, including Olaus Murie’s caribou studies.
It was the bureaucratic battles that finally wore down Karstens. He resigned his position in October 1928 and went back to Fairbanks to resume his transportation business. But Karstens was definitely sold on the national park concept. Once in Anchorage, he had addressed the Women’s Club on the park’s progress and concluded: “A natural park is being preserved in its naturalness for you and for me and for our children—unspoiled, unmarred. To enjoy this pleasuring ground for the benefit and enjoyment of the people, its sublimity of beauty and grandeur, one must be in tune with these things. There is little to offer visitors who need attendants to make them comfortable,…but there is much to offer those who understand the language of the great silent places.”7
The majority of 535 members of Congress acting to establish a national park was bad enough for some Alaskans, but when the president undertook to establish a national monument under the 1906 Antiquities Act by executive order alone, that really caused a stir. Such action was one time that things could move fast in Alaska! President Woodrow Wilson did just that in creating Katmai National Monument in 1918 at the urging of those who had seen the Valley of the Ten Thousand Smokes. Exuberant National Geographic articles aside, not everyone agreed.
Thomas Riggs, Jr., late of his work on the Alaska Railroad and now governor of the territory, reacted vehemently to Wilson’s action—despite the fact that he was a Wilson appointee. Riggs wrote in his 1918 report to the secretary of the interior: “For the sake of the future of Alaska, let there at least be no more reservations without a thorough investigation on the ground by practical men and not simply on the recommendation of men whose interest in the Territory is merely academic or sentimental.” Two years later, Riggs was even more succinct, declaring that Katmai Monument served no purpose and should be abolished.8
Meanwhile on the other side of Alaska similar battles were raging over the area around Glacier Bay. Central to the story here was a man whom Governor Riggs no doubt included in the category of “merely academic or sentimental.” But William S. Cooper was no armchair advocate. During three summers in the Colorado Rockies—beginning in 1904 when he was only twenty—Cooper covered a wide range of territory and made first ascents of a number of peaks, including Pigeon, Vestal, and Arrow, three jagged San Juan summits. Upon his return to Detroit after his 1908 Colorado trip, Cooper complained of chest pains and dizziness. A specialist told him that he had strained his heart on his climbs and should avoid such exertion in the future. The diagnosis was probably wrong, but Cooper never climbed seriously again. Instead, he threw himself into the next best thing: traveling among the mountains as a botanist and ecologist.9
In 1916, as a professor at the University of Minnesota, Cooper made the first of four scientific expeditions to Glacier Bay. Out of these trips eventually came nine publications, but in the beginning he was looking for an area where he could study a full ecological cycle. Given the rapid retreat of its glaciers, the Glacier Bay area was the perfect laboratory in which to compress time.
Cooper began on the glacial moraine beneath the faces of the receding glaciers and investigated the black crust of mostly algae that formed there. As he moved farther from the glacier—down the bay but backward in plant development time—Cooper documented what became the classic stages of plant succession, more recently called terrestrial succession. These led from the black crust, to moss, to species that add nitrogen, to willows and cottonwoods, and finally to the spruce and hemlock forests around Bartlett Cove that were several hundred years old. Subsequent research would show this succession process to be more complicated than Cooper’s model, but his pioneering work at Glacier Bay over two decades laid the groundwork for more advanced botanical and ecological research.
On Cooper’s first trip, he established nine permanent research quadrates that he would visit and monitor on succeeding visits. On all of Cooper’s expeditions, Captain Tom Smith shuttled him around the bay in first the Lue and later the Yakobi. Smith got a good dose of “glacier sense” on their first trip. He anchored the Lue at what he thought was a safe distance from the face of the Rendu Glacier after putting Cooper and his party ashore. A sizable chunk of the glacier’s face calved off in due course, and the resulting surge sent the Lue heaving and pitching violently. According to Cooper, Smith was always reluctant to venture very close to a face again despite Cooper’s urgings.
World War I postponed Cooper’s second visit until 1921. By all accounts, including their own, he and Tom Smith became and remained good friends, but they also came to disagree strongly on the future of the area. Cooper wanted it preserved. Smith thought it was ripe for mining.
At the Ecological Society of America’s 1922 annual meeting in Boston, a suggestion was made that the organization should investigate preserving the entire Glacier Bay area. William Cooper agreed to chair the committee, which included that apostle of Katmai, Robert F. Griggs. When the committee presented its conclusions at the society’s 1923 annual meeting, it was no surprise that it enumerated five key reasons why the Glacier Bay area should be afforded some level of protection: its tidewater glaciers, its old-growth coastal forests, the opportunities to study plant succession, the historical association with Vancouver, and the area’s relative accessibility. Whether its accessibility was seen as an asset that would encourage tourist visitation, or as a detriment that might destroy the resource without such protection, is debatable. In any event, that point was left out when the society incorporated the other four reasons into a resolution urging the president to withdraw the region.10
Next came a demonstration of the power of the presidency. Scarcely five months after the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting, President Calvin Coolidge by executive order in April 1924 temporarily withdrew more than 2.5 million acres (about 4,000 square miles) around Glacier Bay from any kind of activity—mining, homesteading, timbering, or otherwise. Essentially, this covered everything from the Pacific coast eastward across the Fairweather Range all the way to Lynn Canal, including the homesteads around Gustavus.
Most Alaskans went ballistic. The Juneau Daily Empire labeled the proposal to establish a national monument there “A Monstrous Proposition.” There were more than 30,000 acres of surveyed agricultural lands and three or four times more than that capable of agricultural development, the paper argued. What about the canneries, operating mines, patented mineral claims, and settlers on homesteads within the area, not to mention the vast opportunities for mineral prospectors, water power developments, lumbering, and more?
But the Daily Empire was just getting warmed up. “It is said the proposed National Monument is intended to protect Muir Glacier,” the paper noted, “and to permit of the study of plant and insect life in its neighborhood. It tempts patience to try to discuss such nonsensical performances. The suggestion that a reserve be established to protect a glacier that none could disturb if he wanted and none would want to disturb if he could or to permit the study of plant and insect life is the quintessence of silliness…. It leads one to wonder if Washington has gone crazy through catering to conservation faddists!”11
Barbs continued to fly from both sides. When Coolidge’s temporary withdrawal was made permanent the following year, however, the new Glacier Bay National Monument had been pared down to less than half of its original size. Most of the spruce forests of the lower bay and the agricultural lands, including those around Gustavus, had been excluded from the new monument, and the eastern boundary stopped at the crest of the Chilkat Range rather than extending all the way to Lynn Canal.
William Cooper returned to Glacier Bay for a third time in 1929, again in the company of Tom Smith. On this trip, they made their first visit to Johns Hopkins Inlet. The glaciers there were in rapid retreat during this period, and Cooper and Smith ventured into Johns Hopkins Inlet again in 1935. Smith was more excited than ever about the area’s mining potential, and on this visit—in the middle of the depression—there were plenty of people who shared his views. With glimmers of the gold rush not too far removed from recent memory, many folks thought that the way out of the depression was a resurgence of mining just about anywhere that it looked the slightest bit promising.
While Tom Smith sailed Glacier Bay’s inlets with William Cooper looking at glaciers, he was also a partner in a mining venture within the boundaries of the new monument. Whether or not the claim was legal depended on who was telling the story. Smith’s partner and the real impetus in the venture was Joe Ibach, a likable enough sort who was also somewhat of a character. The home that Joe shared for more than thirty years with his wife, Muz, at Willoughby Cove on Lemesurier Island was a welcome port to many a traveler. And if anyone truly loved the Glacier Bay country, it was Joe Ibach.
In the summer of 1924, after Coolidge’s temporary withdrawal, but before the final order establishing the monument, Ibach went ashore just northwest of the Reid Glacier, found what he took to be gold-bearing ore, and staked three claims. When the monument was declared, the land office warned Ibach not to work the claims, but he proceeded to do so surreptitiously nonetheless. With Muz’s help, he sorted the ore and hauled the best stuff out a couple of sacks at a time, frequently on board Tom Smith’s boat. One year, the Ibachs and Smith actually owed the Juneau smelter money for freight after the run, while another year they split the smelter proceeds and got a grand total of thirteen dollars each. It was hardly enough to start a rush, but Ibach was as optimistic as any who had ever tramped the trails of ’98.
Enter novelist Rex Beach. Ibach and Beach went way back, having been on hunting trips together decades before. Beach showed up on Lemesurier Island in 1935 and quickly convinced himself—undoubtedly with a little encouragement from Joe—that opening Glacier Bay National Monument to mining was exactly what was needed to lift Alaska out of the Great Depression. Beach soon wrote a magazine article and letters to President Franklin Roosevelt and others asserting that the monument was “absolutely barren and the only timber, such as there is, lies along the southern edge. It is not a good game refuge, nor are there any fishing streams or lakes in which salmon spawn. Presumably there are some sheep and goats in the St. Elias Range but it is the last place anybody would go for bear, moose or caribou. In fact the whole area is like a haunted house and I doubt if ten white men have visited it in the last ten years.”12
Not much of that was true, but Beach, whose reputation rests on fictionalized accounts of some of Alaska’s more colorful history, was never one to let facts stand in the way of the particular story he was telling. Beach found an ally in Alaska’s territorial delegate, Anthony Dimond, and together they exchanged a flurry of letters with both FDR and Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes. Over the course of the spring, Roosevelt changed his view of the situation at least twice, going from being inclined toward permitting mining, to against it, and then once again supportive of it.
Somehow in June 1936, in scarcely more than a week before Congress adjourned for the political conventions, a bill that opened Glacier Bay National Monument to mining was rushed through both houses of Congress and signed by the president. William Cooper summed up the feeling of those who had worked so hard to preserve the region when he wrote: “The entire procedure was thus carried through in one week. No one likely to attempt opposition knew of the affair until it was a fait accompli.” Beach only grinned. “It is absurd to assert, as those scientists did,” he himself later wrote, “that in helping Tony Dimond establish a precedent for which Alaskans have long fought, we threatened the integrity of the national park system.”13
As soon as the legislation opening the monument to mining passed, Beach wired Ibach a coded message that he should go out and stake more claims. Joe did so, but results were much the same as his earlier efforts. There was no Eldorado to be found in Glacier Bay. Interestingly enough, however, the following year, Roosevelt transferred more than 1 million acres from the Tongass National Forest to the monument. The action angered Ernest Gruening, soon to be Alaska’s territorial governor, because it put several dairy farmers out of business and in Gruening’s view was another example of the federal government locking up the land. Other battles would soon be fought on Alaska’s soil, and skirmishes in the Glacier Bay land-use war would continue until the area was finally designated a national park in 1980.
From the conservationists’ standpoint, they had been lucky. Glacier Bay apparently held no great gold riches, but on a larger scale, the action of a publicist who obviously had the presidential ear set a dangerous precedent when the gates to what had once been thought safe from development were suddenly thrown open. In the big picture, that is the significance of the activities at Glacier Bay in the 1930s. On the smaller, more personal side, there are two footnotes to the story.
Joe and Muz Ibach lived on Lemesurier Island until 1956. Devoted to each other, they had a long-standing pact that if something happened to one of them, the other would not be far behind. In 1959, Muz died in a Juneau hospital. Joe was beside himself, and he took her body back to Lemesurier Island for burial. The following spring, he made plans to return to the mines at Reid Inlet, but the morning he was to depart he left a handwritten will on some brown wrapping paper and then shot himself. At the bottom of the paper he had written, “There’s a time to live and a time to die. This is the time.”14
William Cooper returned to Glacier Bay in 1956 and again in 1966, the fiftieth anniversary of his first visit. He was hailed as the “Father of Glacier Bay National Monument” but seemed to delight most in crawling around on his hands and knees at Blue Mouse Cove pointing out plant species. William S. Cooper, the would-be mountaineer who was told to take it easy in 1908, died in 1979 at the age of ninety-five.