00:00:01
Speaker 1: A trip through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the crown jewel of America’s wildlife preserves, reveals a stunning, prime evil world under constant threat of becoming a national sacrifice. I’m Dan Flores, and this is the American West, where the prime evil West abides. What wakes me is a sound I’ve never heard, or to be truer to the actual experience. Two sounds to which my memory banks cannot assign. Cause one is a soft, gentle sort of chuffing, coming awake to the slanting light out the tent door. I register this one first, an auditory accompaniment to the angled light, which lands in my foggy consciousness as a kind of language I cannot translate. The other sound is almost as delicate, but more percussive. It appears to reach from the faraway to the nearby, a tinkling with a thousand source points. It’s June the twenty second, the day after summer Solstice, twenty nineteen, and with my wife Sarah, and eight of our friends, we’re waking in what could well be primeval America. We’re in Alaska, above the Arctic Circle, at nearly seventy degrees in north latitude, and on summer solstice that far up the curve of planet Earth, we’re experiencing a new cosmic reality. There’s a powerful sense of being slightly off the apex of a gigantic sphere, a sphere that’s spinning underneath a light source that never switches off. No matter how late you go to bed or how early you wake up, the light source is there, throwing the same fingers of dawn, sunlight and shadowing throughout the day and night.
00:02:19
Speaker 2: To be geographically specific.
00:02:22
Speaker 1: From our put in high up in the Brooks Range, we’ve now spent nine days descending.
00:02:29
Speaker 2: The Hula Hula River.
00:02:31
Speaker 1: The Hula Hula is named by or four and Awaiian islander who is either on a whaling ship or a ship pursuing wealth and firs here two centuries ago. Nine days from this smallish stream’s headwaters, we’re now out of the mountains and in the vast coastal plain of America’s Wildlife Crown Jewel, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And we’ve been living with these oblique life light angles the whole trip. But this far away, nearby tinkling sound and its chuff chuff accompaniment are new Both those sounds, it turns out, are emanating from thousands upon thousands of Cariboo who have been migrating out of mountains filled with dinning wolves to gather in the relative safety of the Arctic plane, where they’re coming to drop their calves. Heard after herd is passing by within one hundred feet of our camp this morning, conversing in a murmur that audibly rises above the flow of the nearby Hula Hula. That’s the chuffing I’m hearing, its quiet Cariboo road trip conversation, pulling the tent fabric aside to hear better. My first guess is that the tinkling is the clicking of Cariboo hoofs passing through the stiff eight inch high willows blanketing the riverside tundra. But the more acutely I listen, well, what it actually sounds like is an almost deliberate popping in their leg joints as they walk past.
00:04:11
Speaker 2: The truth is we’ve.
00:04:13
Speaker 1: Been paddling down river among Caribou herds for days now, but not in these numbers.
00:04:19
Speaker 2: Now.
00:04:19
Speaker 1: Everywhere we look, they’re the only upright things in an otherwise horizontal world. Tan and white bodies rocking along in a kind of slow motion parade. They seem aim towards an indistinct assortment of white blocks miles out that we’ve been seeing for the past couple of days. And I’m now starting to suspect our icebergs in the Arctic ocean, elevated by mirage above the flatness of the plane. But the caribou pulled me away from that thought. On the opposite river bank, only yards away, herd males with antlers and faces black at squid ink.
00:04:58
Speaker 2: Clack over the rocks.
00:05:00
Speaker 1: There are pregnant cows, also with antlers and posses of adolescence. We’ve already seen wolves, most of them black, along with grizzly bears and doll sheep. But the real wildlife miracle here is in the vast numbers of cariboo. I noticed that some herds with brand new calves, the little guys jetting and poegoing across the tundra, have finally abandoned their relentless march northward from the mountains. They’ve arrived ten days earlier in Arctic Village on the other side of the Brooks Range, gwitchin tribal Elder Sarah James had told us that the Porcupine Cariboo herd is three hundred thousand strong these days. Seventy five year old Sarah, with her long, silver streaked hair, was funny and eloquent and committed. She travels the world fighting to keep oil drilling out of the refuge, a looming threat in twenty nineteen and an even more frightening possibility in twenty twenty six. Sarah’s got the bona fides for that kind of activism. That tribal name means people of the Cariboo. Sarah and her people are the modern American equivalent of the Bison Indians of the nineteenth century and earlier. The Cariboo are in our hearts and we are in theirs, she told us. Now standing by my tent, surrounded by thousands of Cariboo moving slowly through a vast grassy landscape, in a scene reminiscent of the nineteenth century Great Plains or maybe East Africa, I’m as gobsmack as I’ve ever been in my life. For the first time, I’m experiencing a version of original America. The continent Humaniyed first marveled over more than twenty thousand years ago. This must be what it was like to experience bison herds to the horizon, her passenger pigeons streaming overhead, and day long flights that blocked out the sun. Now a quarter of the way through the twenty first century, what’s required for a primal experience of the natural planet is being in one of Africa’s grand game parks, and parts of the Amazon are in some wildly remote piece of North America, like this Arctic plane up at the roof of the world in the United States of our present century. This wild coastal plane in sight of Arctic waters is one of the last continental places to preserve a tantalizing echo of wild America as it waded across the millennia for its destiny to play out. Here are my first ten experiences of this place, as kept in my daily Journal. June fifteenth, twenty nineteen, Arctic Village, Alaska. Sarah James, who travels the world advocating for the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and the Native of Life, rides up on her Honda four wheeler to meet us on the airport tarmac where our group is just deplaned. There are ten of us lower forty eight ers. Our two guides who do this float trip repeatedly when brooks range snowmelt raises waters in the river’s high enough to do it, are from Arizona and Colorado, with one exception. The remaining eight of us are from Santa Fe, New Mexico, most of us longtime friends, several of us writers. Sarah, who is addressing us from the seat of her Honda, looks to be fifteen years younger than her actual age, and she is naturally easy going and personable. As she starts to talk, I noticed with some curiosity that of her fellow villagers. I can see everyone is also moving about the airstrip and the village streets on four wheelers. As we blink in the bright high latitude sunlight and swat at the occasional mosquito. Sarah is telling us about her people’s situation. I jot down a few notes. Minus seventy degrees fahrenheit used to be our normal winters here, she’s telling us, but this last winter minus forty was the coldest.
00:09:16
Speaker 2: It got, although the snow was really deep.
00:09:20
Speaker 1: Their village, whose name in their language translates to village with high banks, was founded on this spot because of the nearby tree line and the Caribou migrations.
00:09:31
Speaker 2: She says.
00:09:32
Speaker 1: They follow the caribou migrations from towers they’ve built around their country, which stretches from the highest place in the Brooks Range to as far as we can see. She adds, the caribou migrations are changing, but they still come to this valley and to old crow flats, places with lots of lakes and food sources. We call our herd the Porcupine Cariboo, and we’ve always hunted them. We cease to hunt in June when the new embryos form in them, and wait until the training of the calves is finished before we resume, she tells us. At one point the Porcupine herd dropped to as low as one hundred and twenty thousand, but now it’s almost back to its normal size of three hundred thousand. There are plenty of predators other than us, she says, a great many wolves, and also plenty of grizzlies, and there are lynks and wolverines too, everything living to some extent on the Cariboo presence. While Native people have hunted the refuge long before its official designation, the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge are Anwar dates to nineteen sixty, when the Eisenhower administration set aside eight point nine million acres of the Brooks Range and the Coastal Plain as the Arctic National Wildlife Range. When the epic Alaska Lands Bill passed in nineteen eighty, the Carter administration upgraded the range to a full refuge, expanded to a whopping nineteen point six million acres, four times the size of Yellowstone National Park. It overnight became the crown jeweled wildlife preserve of the entire seventy five year old system, a true Yellowstone of America’s wildlife refuges. Ecologist Olos Murray and his wife Marty were famous early advocates for anwar’s creation and for wilderness designation of nearly forty percent of it, But the Alaska Lands Bill left the one and a half million acre coastal Plane, the so called ten oh two, open to potential oil and gas exploration. That opening, and the threat its posed to wildlife, to the caribou, and to the Gwitchin way of life, is what motivated Sarah’s activism. I think of my elf as an educator protecting my way of life, not as an activist, she insists, to us, recycle, reuse, and refuse is my motto. I first went to the Plains Indian people because of their history with Buffalo, to get resolutions to support us in stopping oil and gas in anwar.
00:12:20
Speaker 2: She tells us.
00:12:22
Speaker 1: The National Congress of American Indians has supported the protection of anwar with a standing resolution, but other Native people surrounding the refuge, the coy yukon the Crees and the people of Cactovic Village in the Beaufort Sea have supported drilling and development. Coastal Plain people are in tougher conditions, she says. Still, we all breathe the same air. We need to help one another. The Republican Congress and Trump administration is really hard, but if we keep working on our goal for seven generations, we’ll finally win and educate the world in a good way and they’ll get it. June sixteenth, twenty nineteen, It’s a stunning morning at our first camp on the Hulahula. We arrived here by Bush Plain around noon yesterday after what well may be the grandest Plain ride of my life from Arctic Village north through the Serrated peaks and defiles of the Brooks Range, flying through valleys with knife edged peaks looming far above us on a perfect blue sky day. No wonder olass and Marty Murray, Sigurd Olson and William O. Douglas were so bewitched by this country. As for me, it’s entirely revising my conception of wild America. The view of our river, the hula hula from the air, a silver thread dissecting an immense mountain valley carpeted in tundra, was as alluring a scene as I’ve ever witness Yes, looking down on it, the thought repeatedly formed in my mind, Holy shit, we get to travel down that through this.
00:14:08
Speaker 2: A cold wind.
00:14:09
Speaker 1: Blowing from the north off Arctic Sea ice last night belied the bright, welcoming sunshine of our arrival in the afternoon, But today is both sunny and quiet. Basically, it’s a perfect day for a river trip into the wild unknown. This is our first day of travel on the river, so we got the bear talk from our guides last night, with accounts of blonde grizzlies that know nothing of humans, and especially of polar bears that see you and come knocking on the door. Polar bears mean business, and these days they come inland. We’re just a couple of days away from where other anwar travelers have had exciting experiences with polar bears. From this put in camp, near the Bush Plain landing Strip, which is little more than a level couple of one hundred yards of river cobbles clear of willows, we’ve so far seen a red fox trotting along the opposite cutbank from us, and eight nine doll sheep on the green tundra slopes of the surrounding mountains from our guides Arizona and christa saddler with whom I’ve rafted the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and Kevin Thursty McDermott, a burly and likable fifty something West Slope Colorado. We’re hearing accounts of Caribou herds, herds in the thousands, the many thousands downriver. Later, on June sixteenth, in Evening Camp, the river float commenced today not just with doll sheep, but also a wolfback on the slopes above camp. As we were preparing to set off, the sheep had been in bunches of ten to fifteen. One of the flocks was above us as we launched our rafts. Another was near us at noon. A group of backpackers who were also dropped off yesterday and camp nearby, though, came to our tents before we shoved off this morning with a one word announcement wolf.
00:16:07
Speaker 2: It pulled up everyone in camp.
00:16:10
Speaker 1: I got about ten seconds of glass time of a black wolf maybe half a mile away through my binoculars, then nothing, but following a lapse of twenty minutes, again came the cry wolf, and this time we picked up four. This pack included a black wolf that traveled second in line behind a lead brown animal. A silver gray wolf, hard to pick out against the gray talus slopes, moved in and out of the line, occupying various positions, but sometimes going its own way. Another brown wolf trotted at the rear, usually some distance behind. The group, appeared to be moving stalking, would not accurately express their actions, closer and closer to a grazing flock of white doll sheep, always one hundred yards or so below them, prompting the sheep to move up mountain, always maintaining the same distance.
00:17:07
Speaker 2: From the wolves.
00:17:09
Speaker 1: This pack howled several times a faint peeling of canine expressiveness. While it was not my situation, having lived in Montana during and after wolf recovery there, several of our group had never in their lives seen wolves nor heard real wolves howl in the wild. Sadly, that’s the case for most modern Americans on a continent where wolves were once the commonest of Keystone predators present here for more than five million years. That’s how anomalous the last one hundred years of wolf absence has been. This is a paddle trip down the Hula Hula. We’re traveling the country in two rafts, a guide manning the rudders of each, with four of us providing the paddle power for each raft. The river’s shallow, rarely deeper than three feet, and fast with snowmelt, with numerous braided channels. Looking down at the cobbles in its bed as we slip through its waters, the sight is of a shimmering transparency. But seen from the banks, the Hula Hulas waters take on a mesmerizing green turquoise hue from water’s edge to the crests of the Brooks Range peaks surrounding us. We’re above timberline. The country that rolls up the slopes is pure tundra. This evening, we’re in a fine camp among low willows along the west bank. Cariboo tracks in the mud are in some profusion only feet from Sarah’s in my tent. But we’ve not actually seen a Cariboo, at least not yet. I should add that evening is pretty much an artificial construction. Here above the Arctic Circle a week from summer solstice. The sun circumnavigates our sky at a kind of inclined angle, highest at noon when the sun is due south, lowest at midnight when it’s due north.
00:19:09
Speaker 2: But it never sets.
00:19:10
Speaker 1: So this is a trip that’s actually taking place over a nearly three hundred hour long single day. At least we can tell whether it’s morning or afternoon by which side of this mountain valley the sun is. In mornings, it skims the peaks on the east side of the valley. Afternoons, it dodges in and out of the mountains that confine the Hula Hula to our west. June seventeenth, twenty nineteen, we’re about to leave this Cariboo camp, which we’ve named such because as we slept, Cariboo herds began to migrate past us. It didn’t take long to get among the Cariboo, and just now a single black wolf is on the slope above the path the herds have been taken. There was considerable rain in the night, and this morning clouds top all the mountains around us. The days so far I’ve been in the seventies, but without the sun it’s cold enough to put on our healey hansome wetsuits today over four or five layers of smart wool, and our everyday footwear mid calf rubber boots. Thirsty tells us this morning that the wolves den in these mountains, which is why the Caribou migrate out to the coastal plain to drop their calves. Wolf dens are commonly on high overlooks, so the wolves can spot cariboo below. He says he’s seen a pack stampede of herd over a cutbank in a move very similar to a bison jump. He also told us that in summer, musk ox descend to the edges of the rivers to sleep and cool off in the shade of the big chunks of permafrost. We see everywhere slewing off the cutbanks in the summer warmth. Today is a cold, gray day with a north wind blowing steadily up the river and in our faces. This feels like Alaska in the Brooks Range up near the Continental Divide. Nothing for it but to paddle and look forward to camp and warm sleeping bags. June eighteenth, It’s after seven pm of an absolutely gorgeous day in the foothills of the Brooks Range, and we’re just down from seven hours of hiking up to a ridgeline high above the green Valley of the Hula Hula. Since we’ve been making good time, this was a layover day and we got to watch caribou herds heading north through the valley during much of the morning. We made this camp late yesterday after many miles descending the river, and are now in sight of the final canyon and the only cataract rapids on the Hulahula, which we’ll run tomorrow. A successful run through those rapids will take us out of the mountains and onto the coastal plain. Yesterday was a big descent of many hours of paddling under overcast skies and a cold wind erin our only California, and at twenty five, the youngest member of our party got tossed from our raft in a boulder garden rapid late in the day. It required nearly two hours after that mishap to find a suitable camp for the evening, but Erin was an absolute trooper about staying wet for so long.
00:22:34
Speaker 2: Yesterday was also.
00:22:36
Speaker 1: A two wolf day, both wolves black and solitary.
00:22:40
Speaker 2: The second a strapping big.
00:22:42
Speaker 1: Animal that ran effortlessly across the hummocky tundra before spotting us and squaring up three to four times to look directly at us from only a couple of one hundred yards away. We’ve not seen a bear yet, but watching caribou herds crossed his open country produces an emotion that’s difficult to put into words. Timeless keeps coming to mind, but you shudder a little bit at that one. As gray and cold as yesterday was, today has been a sunny, blank, blue sky delight.
00:23:16
Speaker 2: The clouds still wrapped.
00:23:18
Speaker 1: The peaks as we rose and had coffee, but by the time breakfast was done, the mist had lifted and Arctic sunlight flooded the mountains. June twentieth, It’s ten in the evening in the Arctic wilderness, and Sarah and I are celebrating our fifth anniversary with tequila and uncontrolled substances, and now Earl Gray tea too hot to drink.
00:23:44
Speaker 2: Almost the past.
00:23:46
Speaker 1: Two days have unspooled in a country of such unblemish natural qualities that I’m realizing I’ve lived a kind of emasculated existence for much.
00:23:56
Speaker 2: Of my life.
00:23:58
Speaker 1: Primeval America is what this is. We’ve so far seen one native hunting camp, three or four bush planes arking overhead, and the occasional jet flying from JFK to Tokyo. Otherwise, we’re traveling through the world of our hominin origins, or at least one hell of an approximation of it. Today’s our third straight day of gorgeous sunshine, which means we ran the canyon and its rapids in.
00:24:30
Speaker 2: Beautiful, bright light. Yesterday, the rapids.
00:24:33
Speaker 1: Including the Hula Hoop rapid, we slipped through in good morning high water. Other than sticking our raft on a boulder, we had no incidents and took a long lunch on a sunny, flowery hilltop where the Brooks Range opened suddenly into low green foothills speckled with.
00:24:51
Speaker 2: Caribou antler sheds. That setting.
00:24:55
Speaker 1: Once we were underway after lunch was the scene of our most exciting wildlife experience yet. I was in the front of our lead raft so got the first glimpse of a bulky, furred form rolling along up the right bank of the river. It was a familiar hump shape a grizzly, which, with a couple of bounds, was out of sight. As we paddled a riverband towards where he had disappeared. The sound of our voices must have bounced off the low cutbank.
00:25:25
Speaker 2: Where the bear had headed.
00:25:27
Speaker 1: The result was that our raft was in the direct line of fire. When the grizzly came galloping through the willows to water’s edge, straight for us. It looked for all the world like a charge, except I could tell the bear had not really seen us. Just as bear paus hit the river’s edge, Thirsty muttered something about not wanting to share a river with a bear and loosed a piercing whistle. The small black eyes in the grizzly’s lovely symmetrical face suddenly lost us. There was a split second what the fuck on his face? Then a studied, almost slow turned to his right like a nonchalant damn it, I think I may have left the burner on back home.
00:26:15
Speaker 2: Then, like a corner horse.
00:26:16
Speaker 1: Under quirt, he was boundering through the willows at escape velocity, directly away from us. It was a supreme sensory moment. We had been privileged to see a gorgeous grizzly bear at a distance of maybe thirty five feet. We camped yesterday and still are today, at a spot below k Gat Hill, which we climbed today through increasingly larger caribou herds, all steadily pulled northward, as if by some throbbing magnet. From here you could see the next river valley to the west, the valley of the Saddle Roach at mountains, and behind us the Hula Hulas at it through its canyon out of the Brooks Range. This afternoon, another grizzly graves past our camp, barely one hundred yards away. Wolf tracks are on the beach behind me. As I scribble this June twenty, first summer solstice in the High Arctic, we’re now in sight of the Arctic Ocean from a camp where the Hula Hulas banks have begun to ice up, far out on the coastal plain of anwar far into the famous ten to two the part of the refuge that’s long been a target of drill baby drill politicians and to be fair of some of the local natives and Alaskans who see money as an ultimate value. Looking across this vast tundra, a plane that’s bursting with the life of primeval America. The middle picture of drill baby drill Here is a kin to a man the Lamar Valley of Yellowstone Park, festooned with oil derricks, tank batteries, pumping units, and litter line two tracks. Try to hold that image in your mind. See if it doesn’t fly to escape screaming. We made big miles last foothills to pass the ice. Today we’re way ahead of schedule thanks to great weather that’s warm enough to keep snowmelt surging in the river and glory b Despite temperatures in the sixties and seventies, the Mosquito Hatch has not yet developed. Two big moments today. The first was pulling over for lunch and mounting the cutbank to find the biggest single caribou herd yet on the opposite bank, something around six hundred of them. We are also in Muskoks and Polar Bear country now, although we’ve seen neither. There’s something very powerful though about watching big herds of ungulates in open country. If our genes preserve memories, this has to be a visual trigger to that this is the kind of world we human beings evolved in and where we blinked into consciousness then live surrounded by big animals and big herds for forty thousand generations of our existence. No wonder it’s so moving on such a grandly sensuous level. The other wild piece of the day was rafting through the ice a section of the river where ice as thick as ten feet makes up at least one bank for a mile or more. We stopped and goofed around on blue, dripping ice packs for half an hour in sunny, t shirt temperatures. June twenty second, only three days of river and ocean traveler left to take us to the island airstrip that will be our takeout, and much of that will involve portaging to an adjacent river to get a straight shot at the island that will then wade to a mile or so out across the Beaufort Sea. Weather continues near perfect sixty one degrees on the high tundra just now several of us stayed up till midnight last night to watch the sun circle the horizon and to dance its progress on summer solstice. Caribou herds are now in sight constantly, with a vast herd migrating past camp this morning, an entirely Africa kind of scene. The Brooks Range, where we started this journey, is still in view, although.
00:30:43
Speaker 2: A little smoke shrouded. For the past three days.
00:30:46
Speaker 1: We’ve now been eight days without seeing any humans except ourselves. June twenty third, within sight of the ocean. This morning, we finally made it to the Cariboo’s final destination, their calving grounds, and now there are little ones scampering wildly and joyously across the tundra and nearby snowbanks. Cariboo herds presently occupy in ninety degrees of our views south of the river.
00:31:18
Speaker 2: June twenty fourth.
00:31:20
Speaker 1: This afternoon, we’re in a camp amongst sand dunes a mile from the ocean, having left the Hula Hula after portaging our rafts and gear across about a quarter mile of tundra to this camp. It was a day of paddling a last stretch of a widely braided cobble filled Hulahula with cariboo perpetually in sight. On a midnight hike last night, some of us saw what we estimated was ten thousand cariboo from one overlook. Now we’ll do two nights here while we portage all our gear and rafts over to the Oak Pillock River just east of us for a straight shot at the island and its bush plane landing strip. We saw our third grizzly yesterday evening. A bear that was probably three quarters of a mile away but in the open plain was clearly visible to the naked eye as a dark lump nosing through the tundra. Through our glasses, this bear was a glossy blond behemoth, turning sideways in the low sun. Its fur rolled and glistened with shades of chestnut and a silvery yellow. It was hard to stop watching with a weather front hitting. It’s now down to forty five degrees inside the tent, which is rattling in the wind like laundry on a clothesline. June twenty fifth, twenty nineteen. Tonight, our final camp is situated on the shore of the Beaufort Sea. Walls and chunks of white ice inhabited by harbor seals or in view. It’s a thing you never.
00:33:05
Speaker 2: Think you’ll see.
00:33:07
Speaker 1: The day was another form of adventurous ordeal. We’d been captured in the tents for twenty four hours while a frieze held up water from flowing down the oak pillock. Its final two miles became a wide mud maze that required portaging our raft while a barefoot Christa dragged the other raft through the mud with a ropeline. It was a cold, hard working day. But tomorrow we exit the river and wade across to the island, a long strip of sand and ice out in front of us. We saw no caribou today, but there were long tailed jaggers and huge and noisy trumpeter swans constantly overhead. This was the final camp of our twelve day passage through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and on this our last night, our guide, Thirsty, stood and made an unexpected, impassioned speech. Thirsty’s granddad was a hard rock miner in Colorado. He’s married to Darla, his high school sweetheart. His education ended with high school, but simply and directly he begged us to do whatever was in our powers to save this place from despoilation. Long before we arrived on the scene, the ages had been at work on it. He said, nothing we could do here would improve it a present day coda. In October twenty twenty five, as part of his American Energy Dominance agenda, President Trump proclaimed that he would reinstate seven oil leases owned by the state of Alaska in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and was now taking bids for future drilling contracts in the refugees coastal plane. Because of fear of public backlash, oil companies have so far been uneasy about bidding on leases in Antwar, but Trump’s Secretary of Interior, Doug Bergham, has proclaimed that with this announcement, Alaska is open for business. Petroleum geologists estimated that total reserves beneath an War might satisfy America’s thirst for oil for perhaps one and a half to two years.
00:35:47
Speaker 3: Sedan in this script, you’re tracking this float trip through since the North Slope Anwar, And it brought to my question that I wanted.
00:36:00
Speaker 2: To ask you sort of about your scholarship.
00:36:04
Speaker 3: More generally. You made your you really made your name with the Buffalo Article and the Journal of American History, and I was thinking about it, that’s probably one of the few pieces I’ve read from you where you don’t have you don’t mix your historical analysis with some story from your own life about being on the landscape yourself. Yeah, and clearly it’s it’s that shapes your thinking as a historian. So I wonder if you can talk for a little bit about the relationship between your research and writing and your adventures for lack of a better term, across the West.
00:36:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I think.
00:36:51
Speaker 1: One of the reasons that I’ve done a good bit of writing where I appear, usually fairly briefly, but at least some as a character in some of these stories, probably harkens back to the fact that I got my start as a magazine writer, and I did that. I wrote for magazines for six or seven years before I ever got a PhD, and ended up getting professorships and began writing for academic journals like the Journal of American History or writing books for university presses. And so, I mean, one of the things that I think probably has made a podcast like this and scripts like this possible is the fact that when I retired from the University of Montana ten years ago, I kind of reverted back to that sort of writing, and the books I’ve written since American Serengeti, Coyotie America, Wild New World, things like that that have all been sort of, uh, moving more back to the sort of writing that I did before I became an academic. I mean, I think with something like that Buffalo piece in the Journal of American History, you know, I mean, historians don’t do that kind of writing very much. They tend to do more the social science kind of the author stands back as a disinterested observer.
00:38:30
Speaker 3: Yeah you’re not a you don’t really take a clinical approach to your subject.
00:38:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah, So it’s that kind of So.
00:38:39
Speaker 1: I mean, I think probably what I’ve done is for a venue like that and for the sort of audience that I knew that the Journal of American History had, you know, I wrote a piece that I was not involved in at all other than as a sort of standback and let the let the evidence show what.
00:38:55
Speaker 2: This story was.
00:38:57
Speaker 1: But I think it’s probably for a different kind of audience, For a more general audience. It’s maybe useful to do this kind of writing where the author at least appears some because it provides kind of eyes and feet for the reader to be able to see the world. I mean, I try not to do this too much, but I generally try to get at least a story or two into any given piece where I’m actually trying to translate the points I want to make into being on the ground and seeing this play out in the world.
00:39:37
Speaker 3: But it’s clear that that sort of deep experiential process shapes how you think about these places.
00:39:45
Speaker 1: Yeah, it does, I mean, And so that still goes into whether I tell a story of my own presence walking through bad lands or are floating down the Hula Hula River through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, whether I tell that story through my own eyes or not, there’s no question. Because I’m sort of one of these people who has always like to be out on the ground and out in the world, not just in a library. Those experiences very definitely have played a role. And what I’ve written, one of the key.
00:40:24
Speaker 3: Threads throughout this piece is sort of this looming threat of energy extraction on the North Slope. And I think one of the things that you point out several times is that it’s not simply a story of outside interests coming in and extracting oil and gas. But there are people, there’s disagreement among Native people, and you highlight that a couple times that it’s not just Native people are the guardians of this place, and outside interests are trying to, you know, take advantage essentially.
00:41:05
Speaker 2: Of their resources.
00:41:06
Speaker 3: But there’s disagreements between different communities over how this landscape should be managed, which I think highlights a thread we see again and again in Western history that Native people aren’t some monolithic block And that’s true, you know, as true as it was two hundred and three hundred years ago as it is today when we’re talking about anwar.
00:41:27
Speaker 1: Yeah, and that’s just the reality of the world we live in.
00:41:31
Speaker 2: I mean, some.
00:41:32
Speaker 1: People have a take on how the world should be used, where the idea is we need to exploit it and help our own communities raise their standard of living, participate more in the sort of global economic world. And there are plenty of native peopleround and War who expressed that particular sentiment. I mean, as I described in the account of this, when we arrived at Arctic Village, which was the spot where we were taking our bush planes into the headwaters of the Hula Hula and the Brooks Range, one of the people who we had already decided we wanted to hear from was Sarah James, this woman who is a spokesperson for the Gwitchen people, the people of the Caribou, who have for thousands of years hunted caribou and sort of feel about themselves and I think I feel about them this way too. They’re the modern analogs of the Buffalo people of the nineteenth century, and so we wanted to hear what she had to say, and she met us on the tarmac when we flew into Arctic Village and talked to us for about half an hour or so about the concerns that she had. But she was also quick to point out that this was not the universal position on the part of Native people in this part of the world, and it’s not and so that’s something I think, as you pointed out, Randall, and you’re exactly right about this, this is true in the past as well, And you can’t think of Native people as just sort of everyone uniformly has this particular kind of idea about about how things should play out. So Arctic, the National Arctic, I mean, the an war is kind of a perfect modern day example of something that’s been going on in the West for a long time.
00:43:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:43:45
Speaker 3: You point out several times that this is sort of primordial. It’s a primordial landscape, and it feels like sort of the most ancient landscape that you’ve been on in North America. And it occurs to me that this is the first you know, it’s one of those places where if I’m lucky, I’ll get to see that place as an American, But this is the first America that anyone saw, really. Yeah, So I wonder if you can talk a little bit about how Alaska fits into the environmental story, the environmental history of the United States. We sort of see it at the beginning of our narrative of the West when we talk about peopling this continent, and then it sort of seems like it bubbles up again with Russian colonization instraction, and then we kind of lose it until Jimmy Carter and the Lands Bill, Right, So, can you tell me a little bit about how you think of Alaska as part of the Western story.
00:44:50
Speaker 1: Well, there’s no question that Alaska is central to the Western story, because, as you point out, this is the first part of the world in North America that humans got to so it’s the first place on the continent that human eyes are going to see. And because of its location as far north as it is, it’s ended up kind of doing a disappearing act from time to time. And I think one of the reasons I wanted to tell this particular story is I wanted to remind people interested in the West that Alaska still probably preserves more of the Frontier Old West character than any other part of America. I mean, Montana makes a good stab at it, Wyoming makes a stab at it. There’s some other parts of the Lower forty eight, to be sure, that begin to look something like what you imagine the Frontier did. But Alaska, there’s no question, I mean, the last Frontier is. It’s Alaska, and it’s the place that I think in the mind of Alaskans, they believe this, and they think of the place that way. But with something like the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I mean, you really do have an opportunity, if you. I mean, and to be sure, this is a rare thing to get to do. Not many Americans are going to get to go to the to ann War and see this kind of world. I mean, we floated for twelve days down the Hula Hula River. We never saw another party. We saw one native hunting camp just as we emerged out of the Brooks Range, but other than a group of backpackers who flew in the same time we did and headed off in a different direction, we never saw anybody else. And that was the first day we were there. So it’s a thing that is not an easy venture to have. But on the other hand, when you do it, you can’t help but come away with this kind of feeling that you’ve been privileged to see something of original America, that this is what the continent looked like, and that I think when you see it, instills in you a kind of a horror that something like what happened to the Southern high Plains might happen to this particular part of the West. I mean, and war is four times the size of Yellowstone National Park. It’s almost twenty million acres. It is a gigantic landscape, and you just don’t have the opportunity to be in places like that in the modern age very often. I mean, it was the wildest place I’ve ever been, and it’s probably an experience in my life that is right up there in the top one or two or three of the things that I’ve ever gotten to do was to see that particular, that particular part of America.
00:48:16
Speaker 3: In this piece, you you mentioned the Mauris and their work in Alaska, and I feel like the Mauris are sort of overlooked as a first family of American conservation.
00:48:28
Speaker 2: I wonder if you can.
00:48:31
Speaker 3: Give the audience a little bit more context around, you know, oh else and Adolph and trying to remember the his wife’s name, Marty Maria Arti Mury, Arti Mury.
00:48:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
00:48:45
Speaker 1: Uh. So, Olas and Adolph were were the brothers both trained as as biologists. Uh. And I mean I’ve talked about them, uh in some of the recent episodes, particularly the the one on wolves, a couple of episodes back where these two guys in the nineteen thirties were, I mean, one of them was working for the Park Service, Adolph and Olas Murray was working for the Bureau of Biological Survey and they both got sent to do the first scientific studies anyone had done about coyotes and then in Adolph’s case, about wolves. And so Adolph is the first of the two brothers to get the visit Alaska. He goes to Mount McKinley National Park in nineteen thirty nine and spends about three years there studying wolves, and of course writes that great book, The Wolves of Mount McKinley. And so these two guys, I mean, they really were, along with Aldo Leopold, I think, the premier ecologist and conservation minded ecologists of the middle of the twentieth century. Both of them ended up leaving the services that they worked for and primarily worked for the Wilderness Society for most of their lives, and Olas and Marty of course became figures who were I mean, they’re all over the West. They’re in Jackson Hole, They’re in Yellowstone. They obviously play a huge role in getting this particular place set aside, the Archte National Wildlife Refuge, which is designated by the Eisenhower administration, And they also played a role in getting much of it about forty percent of it designated as wilderness. I mean, Olos Murray is the primary mover behind the Charles Russell Wildlife Refuge in Montana on.
00:50:44
Speaker 2: The Missouri River.
00:50:46
Speaker 1: So yeah, these are people, and I keep looking for somebody to write a major sort of book, kind of like Doug Brinkley did about Teddy Roosevelt a few years ago, Wilderness Warrior. Someone needs to do a book out the Murys and the role they’ve played in the American West.
00:51:03
Speaker 3: Yeah. I feel the same way. I feel like whenever I read about wildlife and wild places in the twentieth century, their names are going to mix in somehow. And the Craighead brothers as well, these sort of undersung heroes of twentieth century conservation that that are behind the scenes oftentimes, that don’t maybe get their time in the in the spotlight.
00:51:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, and they should.
00:51:28
Speaker 3: Yeah. Well, Dan appreciate it.
00:51:30
Speaker 2: Thank you, Ran, Thank you.
Read the full article here