Denali Historic Resource Study

Wrapping up the first-stage development of the park occupied the last few years before World War II. Critical to McKinley Park's function as a partner in Alaska's economic development—via attraction of tourists to the territory—was construction of a first-class hotel at the McKinley Station entrance. Alaska Governor Ernest Gruening and Interior Secretary Harold Ickes worked together to get funding for the hotel through the Works Progress Administration, with $350,000 appropriated in 1937. [63]

Two principles framed Secretary Ickes' approach to this project: As a staunch New Dealer he believed that visitor facilities in the National Parks should be government-owned and -operated to avoid any deviation from the public purposes of such accommodations. On a broader scale, he felt that Alaska had flirted long enough with the gambling psychology of mining. If the territory were to advance to statehood, thus avoiding the fate of a vast, abandoned mining camp, it must ". . . build up a civilization based upon a more stable and widely prevailing economy." Because of its many charms and splendors Alaska should look to tourism as the long-term base for permanent development. [64]

As affirmed by an NPS-conducted Alaska recreation survey of 1937, the plans for McKinley Park visitor accommodations called for a hotel at McKinley Station and a lodge at Wonder Lake. Planning Chief Tom Vint's office drew up preliminary plans for the rustic-design buildings. Money problems cut out the lodge and forced a revised, spartan design for the hotel. [65]

Following Secretary Ickes' principle of public ownership and operation, the Alaska Railroad was directed to use the WPA funds for construction of the hotel, and was charged with its operation once built. The NPS acted as the railroad's agent for design and construction. [66]

When Secretary Ickes visited Alaska in August 1938 he met with NPS and Alaska Railroad officials at McKinley Park to inspect the hotel project. He expressed great disappointment in the hotel's design, saying it looked like a factory and he expected to hear a shift-change whistle blow. With Tom Vint and the railroad's Otto Ohlson in tow, Ickes strode through the site demanding modifications of the building—more rooms, enlargement of lobby and dining areas—and told them they were to see to it personally and directly. This story and that of the devolution of the hotel's design—caused by too little money and too many bosses—are told in Tom Vint's chagrined report to the Director on the Secretary's visit. [67]

Secretary of the Interior Harold L. Ickes, during his 1938 visit, near Camp Eielson. "Alaska Railroad Album, 1938," AMHA.

Colonel Ohlson had been loath to have the railroad take over the hotel's operation because the park's short season assured losses for the operator. But under the Secretary's orders, he complied.

The new hotel opened on June 1, 1939, with accommodations for a maximum of 200 guests. For the first time visitors to the park could enjoy the amenities typical of stateside railroad parks, including ranger-conducted interpretive programs at the hotel and on the tour buses into the park.

McKinley Park Hotel under construction, 1938. The hotel opened on June 1, 1939. J.C. Reed Collection, USGS.

Interior of McKinley Park Hotel, 1946. C.A. Hickock Collection, USGS.

To avoid competition with the railroad hotel, the Mt. McKinley Tourist and Transportation Company was ordered to shift its main operation from Savage Camp to Camp Eielson, 66 miles from McKinley Station. [68] (In 1953 the Alaska Railroad dumped the red-ink hotel; the NPS took over and contracted with a concessioner for its operation.)

Mt. McKinley from Camp Eielson (location of present-day Eielson Visitor Center). Eide Collection, AMHA.

With further assistance from Governor Gruening, always alert for Alaska's development, McKinley Park benefitted from another New Deal program, the Civilian Conservation Corps. Perhaps the most popular of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's relief programs, the CCC provided work, training, discipline, and moral environments for 2.5 million young men who otherwise would have passed the jobless years on Depression street corners. After recruitment of enrollees by the Labor Department, the U.S. Army operated and supervised the CCC camps, including transportation and basic training. The Forest Service and the Park Service provided the conservation projects, including forest-fire suppression, reforestation, road and trail building, landscaping, and construction of recreational structures. [69]

Civilian Conservation Corps camp (location of present-day seasonal employee complex), 1938. AMHA.

For two seasons in 1938 and 1939 the 200-man CCC crew at McKinley Park did all of these things. A summary of CCC accomplishments by Supt. Frank Been—who replaced Harry Liek in June 1939—listed scores of projects that helped complete the park's prewar development. With the impetus of relief-program funding, work was done in those two short seasons that would have taken many years under the regular appropriation route. At Park Headquarters the CCC's built employee housing, garages, the machine shop, a new 40-dog kennel and equipment house for sled dogs, and completed sewer, waterline, telephone, and powerline installations. The hotel grounds were landscaped and a deep waterline was laid to avert freezing problems. Fire hazards were removed along the park road by clean-up and burning of slash and other construction debris. And the much-needed Wonder Lake ranger station-residence was built by a special crew in 1939, providing a district headquarters for the park's deep interior.

Dog and food barn, in park headquarters complex, 1950. File 3-6, Denali National Park and Preserve historical archives.

Superintendent Been extolled the CCC program not only for its material accomplishments but also for the great opportunity it provided the young men of the Pacific Northwest to experience Alaska and carry their enthusiasms for the territory back home. Several of the camp supervisors, and later some of the CCC enrollees, became productive citizens of Alaska. [70]

The human story of the camps—from 6 a.m. reveille and calisthenics to after-hours sports and educational sessions—has been told by many of the enrollees, who in later years returned to the park to view the products of their labors, still very much in use. Adventures and companionship with campmates is a recurring theme of these reminiscences. Most of the CCC's lauded the Army-camp routines and the physical conditioning from outdoor work and solid food as valuable preparation for their service in the war.

With virtual completion of its first-stage physical development and with inauguration of formal interpretive programs—dog-team demonstrations at the kennels, lectures at the hotel and along the park road—McKinley Park at last was ready to entertain visitors in a manner approximating that already standardized in the stateside parks. Ground-patrol bases at the new Wonder Lake district headquarters and scattered boundary cabins, along with the 1940 start of air patrols over the park's remote sections, finally gave the superintendent and his rangers a handle on protection. But then threats of war and war itself came along to interrupt this new dawning with a rising sun of another sort.

The December 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor propelled Alaska from preparations for war into war itself. The feared Japanese assault on Alaska came in June 1942 with air attacks on Dutch Harbor at the east end of the Aleutian Islands and occupation of the far western islands. Immediately travel to Alaska came under military control and McKinley Park operations closed down to a basic maintenance schedule. Local people could visit the park, but all facilities were either mothballed or, as at Savage and Eielson camps, held open on a do-it-yourself basis. [71]

Military reinforcements and civilian construction crews flowed into Alaska by the scores of thousands, transported in ships whose passage up the coast was threatened by Japanese submarines. Completion of defensive bases that has been started before Pearl Harbor made possible an island-hopping offensive campaign across the stormy 1200-mile-long Aleutian chain. A triumph of logistics as much as of battle, this northern warfare finally evicted the invaders from the westernmost islands of Kiska and Attu. All across Alaska major and emergency airfields sprang up overnight, one of them at McKinley Station. Army and Navy bases, coastal defense installations, fuel lines, and supply depots proliferated. The Army engineers began building the Alaska-Canada Highway, the Alcan, to secure lines of supply from the risky sea passage.

Suddenly Alaska had several hundred thousand more people than ever before. Soldiers on leave or recuperating from the miseries of Aleutian campaigning needed some place to go. McKinley Park with its hotel, rustic camps, and healthy outdoor recreation opportunities offered such a place—happily removed from the boom-town temptations of Fairbanks and Anchorage.

After a flurry of correspondence and negotiations between Governor Gruening, Maj. Gen. Simon B. Buckner, Commanding General of the Alaska Defense Command, and Interior Department and NPS officials, McKinley Park's conversion as an Army recreation camp was consummated. [72]

A phase of the negotiations warrants further notice: General Buckner, a driving, take over commander, had been authorized by the President to declare Alaska a military area, subject to military control as a war zone. His plans for McKinley Park—once he became convinced of its advantages as an Army recreation camp—had the ring of battle orders. He wanted major construction of camp facilities, extension of roads, and other improvements that would have turned the park into a military reservation. NPS Director Drury, working through the Secretaries of War and Interior, quickly scotched these plans. He maintained that the National Parks would pitch in for the war effort in all ways compatible with their status as National parks, but not in ways that would jeopardize that status. The parks were symbols of our national greatness, civilized institutions that must be defended from ourselves as well as from our attackers during wartime. The National Parks would survive the war and exist unimpaired after the war. They would not be sacrificed to it. [73]

With this sparring over, the Service entered into McKinley's war effort with enthusiasm. The hotel and the camps were, in effect, loaned to the Army, which staffed and ran them for the soldiers' benefit. Hundreds of men piled off every train—6,000 to 8,000 per month during the peak year of 1943. Fishing, hiking, and horseback expeditions were favorite summer activities. A small ski-slope near headquarters, plus unexcelled cross- country expanses, skating rinks, and dog teams provided winter sport. The Army's special services branch, aided by volunteer hostesses and Red Cross women, presented dances, parties, and special events—including the usual World War II hilarity of brawny soldiers cavorting as hula dancers in slit-paper "grass" skirts. This was a place where fighting men could forget the Army and G.I. drill. Men and officers here fraternized as friends. All in all, McKinley was "heaven" after the sodden, fog bound Aleutians. [74]

The Army also held small-scale winter maneuvers at the park and conducted the previously noted cold-weather tests of food, clothes, and equipment high on the mountain. [75] But these exercises involved only small numbers of men. It was the thousands who came as recreationists that filled the park in numbers never before recorded. [76] With hardly an exception the visiting soldiers became missionaries of Alaska's splendors. Many of them converted themselves and settled in Alaska after the war. The Army's funding and administration of "visitor services," with a guaranteed clientele, made McKinley a park for all seasons, including winter, as never before or since. [77]

During the war park personnel, depleted by the war effort—several of the staff having volunteered for military service—maintained a sort of shadow presence in the park. They showed off the sights and clarified the park's regulations for the Army special services staff, including the ban on hunting. They and the ARC did what they could with pittance money and manpower to keep the road passable for the Army trucks and buses that took soldiers into the park. Patrol schedules suffered; but this was less a problem than it might have been given the wartime dearth of population surrounding the park. Custodial management—just holding the park together until after the war—occupied nearly all the energies of the skeletal staff. [78]

The Army's pumping in large numbers of visitors solved one problem that had bothered Supt. Frank Been since his transfer north from Sequoia, where he had been park naturalist. A critical congressman had added up total expenditures for the park road ($1.5 million), then divided that figure by the number of park visitors in 1940 (1,202), yielding a cost per visitor of more than $1,000. Been wrote to Washington that construction of a park approach road would solve this problem by encouraging low-income, local people to come to the park. [79] In 1943 Acting Director Hillory Tolson urged the park's acting superintendent, Grant Pearson (Been had left for military service), to get a release from the Army to use military-visitor numbers in NPS travel tabulations. These hefty transfusions would help justify the park's budget requests. Though these numbers were common knowledge in Alaska, the Army refused their publication because of war-zone security. [80]

Before Been left for Army duty in January 1943, his park-naturalist urge to do something more for visitors resulted in approved plans for three east-end trails still used today: Horseshoe Lake (built in 1943), and the Headquarters-to-Hotel, and Yanert (Triple) Lakes, trails completed in the late Forties. [81]

As acting superintendent in Been's place, Grant Pearson made a big hit. He was the old timer, the last of the pioneer rangers. His credentials as a bona fide Alaskan ranked as high as anyone's in or out of the Service. A field man par excellence, he had seen most of the park's far corners and he was a proven leader in tough places. In 1944 he had another chance to prove his mettle.

An Army transport plane crashed on September 18 some 16 miles east of Mount McKinley in the tangle of peaks at the head of Eldridge Glacier. Aerial reconnaissance indicated no survivors among the 19 on board. The Army asked Pearson to lead an expedition to the crash site to try to determine the cause and to recover the bodies. Pearson wanted a small team to reach the site quickly, before snow covered bodies and crash remains. But the insistence on body removal meant a large expedition, ponderous in organization and logistics. With the aid of Sgt. James Gale of Elmendorf Field's Search and Rescue Squadron (a still functioning outfit operating out of Anchorage) and Brad Washburn—called in from the Army's cold-weather test camp—Pearson took the 40-man party to and from the crash vicinity without loss or injury during a 43-day trek, 25 days of it above timber in arctic ice and snow in the teeth of winter. Twelve men of the party, led by Pearson, arrived at the crash site on October 10, roping down a precipitous ice slope after crossing the range from the park side. As best they could determine, the plane hit high on Mount Deception, then plunged 1,600 feet down the ice to its final resting place. An engine near the point of impact protruded from the ice nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. Deep snow, 10 feet fallen since the crash, frustrated all efforts to find bodies. Only a bloodstain on a piece of fuselage and the co-pilot's B-4 bag, dug out of a drift, connected the scattered plane to its vanished occupants.

A few months later, after a memorial service at Ladd Field in Fairbanks, a sister transport craft dropped three floral wreaths over the snow-covered mountain where the bodies lay buried beyond recovery. The Army awarded Pearson the Medal of Freedom for this extraordinary mountaineering exploit. Following Been's return after the war, and subsequent transfer in 1949, Pearson assumed the full superintendency of the park. He retired after 31 years of service in 1956 and became a leader in the Alaska Legislature. [82]

When the 90-mile-long park road and the ARC spur to Kantishna were completed in 1938, miners began hauling equipment and ore between that district and the railroad, as contemplated in the 1922 agreement between ARC President James Steese and NPS Director Stephen T. Mather. Opening of this direct transportation link coincided with and significantly promoted the expansion of lode mining that led to the Kantishna's most productive era.

At first this commercial use of the scenic park road caused perturbations in the Service's Washington Office. The quid-pro-quo terms of the ARC-NPS agreement had been lost in the shuffle of years. But eventually the dual-use concept of the road—as park road and commercial road—was rediscovered in park and Washington files. The park's jurisdiction over that part of the road within its boundaries, and the miners' use of it as an industrial link between mines and railroad, was accommodated by the park's issuance of nominal-fee permits. These documents stipulated load limits, size of equipment, and seasonal-and hours-of-use regulations that safeguarded the primary scenic-road purpose and the integrity of the roadbed. [83]

The government virtually banned gold mining as nonessential during World War II, but prospecting and production of strategic minerals was pushed hard. The U.S. Geological Survey and its sister Interior Department agency, the Bureau of Mines, conducted strategic-mineral surveys across the country and provided technical assistance and other subsidies to mines that could produce these critical war materials. One of these was the Stampede Mine, which ranked as Alaska's prime producer of antimony—an alloy of great importance in aircraft and other war production.

The Stampede Mine, 45 miles west of park headquarters, was just a few miles outside the park until the expansion of 1978-80. Discovered during the early Kantishna Hills prospecting, Stampede's isolated lode of stibnite—the ore of antimony—lay essentially fallow until Earl Pilgrim took over operations in 1936. He had acquired the claims and transferred them to a subsidiary of the National Lead Company, which provided financial muscle for mine development. By 1939 a used 40-ton mill and ancillary facilities were in operation. But technical difficulties and commodity-price fluctuations limited operations to "high grading" or hand-picking only the richest ore for shipment. By Spring 1941 transportation costs forced closure of the isolated mine, located many miles from the park road. The long ore haul by caterpillar tractor and double-enders over the Stampede winter trail to the railroad at Lignite—then on to stateside smelters—simply would not pay.

In 1942 Pilgrim rehabilitated the old mill with new equipment and machinery, operating until the fall of that year when the water supply froze. Meanwhile the USGS performed geological mapping and the Bureau of Mines did extensive testing and drifting to locate the most promising ores. With this boost Pilgrim continued mining and shipping high-grade ore, along with development of new ore bodies. [84]

Transportation costs continued to plague Pilgrim throughout the years of his Stampede Mine operations, which lasted into the early Seventies. [85] As an alternative to the winter-trail haul, he pioneered air transport of ore concentrates from the airstrip he built at the junction of Stampede Creek and the Clearwater Fork of Toklat River, 2 1/2 miles below the mine.

During the war Pilgrim proposed a constructed road paralleling Toklat River that would give him trucking access to the railroad via the park road. [86] After clarifying correspondence with Superintendent Been, Director Drury authorized this road as a war-emergency measure, for use only during that emergency, and to be routed on the river bars rather than cross-country. [87] Pilgrim abandoned this idea in 1944 for lack of funds, but renewed it in 1948, when it was again approved. Pilgrim let the project lapse when the ARC failed to subsidize it.

Pilgrim next revived the project in 1954 when he was operating the mine under contract with the Defense Minerals Exploration Agency. The Stampede end of the proposed route would be bulldozed across country, thus saving 6 or 8 miles over the riverbed route. [88] Supt. Grant Pearson saw advantages to the park in such a road: It would not mar scenery near the park road (where Pilgrim's route did follow the riverbed) and it would give the park vehicular access to its Toklat boundary cabin, which could be used as a supply point for patrols on the remote north boundary. Pearson recommended approval, [89] as did the Alaska Railroad, always alert for more freight-traffic revenue. [90] Approval from Washington followed, based on Pearson's foreseen advantages and permit stipulations that required landscape-architect approvals of route, culverts, and bridges. Again the ARC could not come up with subsidizing funds and the project lapsed. [91]

Earl Pilgrim's proposed road to Stampede Mine along the Toklat River, 1947. E.L. "Bob" Bartlett Papers, UAF Archives.

Three years later Pilgrim renewed the struggle. But by then NPS personnel had changed, including appointment of a new superintendent. The new men considered the road project inimical to park purposes and values. The NPS offered some solace to Pilgrim, citing new road plans of the Bureau of Public Roads (which had assumed ARC functions) that would intersect the Stampede winter trail. [92]

Meanwhile, Olaus Murie and other conservationists had publicly deplored the proposed mining road through the park. On the other hand, the interminable Pilgrim road case had made the old miner a martyr to bureaucratic caprice in the arena of public opinion. After all, the NPS had thrice approved the project in past years. The Service took this heat alone, for territorial highway people—who had opposed in the past and continued to oppose using their scant funds for a costly road to one faltering mine operation—did not have to expose that sentiment so long as the Service refused to grant Pilgrim a permit. [93]

Park Superintendent Duane Jacobs summed up all this crossfire in a memorandum of April 1958. He, too, strongly opposed the road, if that position would not expose the Service to undue criticism and opposition. His philosophical views were buttressed by a potent practical consideration: He feared that the 18 miles of road routed in the riverbed, which would be washed out with every flood, would inevitably be relocated to bordering terraces if the road were ever established; i.e., a dozed and constructed road throughout. [94] Regional Director Lawrence Merriam relayed Jacobs' analysis to the Director—emphasizing the superintendent's last point, and questioning the utility of such a road given the fluctuating market price of antimony. This letter implied the need for a once-and-for-all executive decision to refuse further consideration of the Toklat road permit. [95]

Evidently Washington did so decide, for by 1960 Pilgrim had given up on a road through the park. Now he fastened onto the new State of Alaska pioneer-road program, specifically designed to bring remote mines into production. [96] This program lived a brief and futile life. Its first and only accomplishment was the pioneer road to Stampede, built in 1965. According to former Alaska Highway Commissioner Bruce Campbell, this road traversed the same wet ground—fit only for winter trails—rejected by road engineer Hawley Sterling during his 1920 survey of routes to the Kantishna. Earl Pilgrim, who had advised the 1965 road builders to take a better route on the terraces, could not contain his rage. As Campbell relates the story, the project inspector traversed the new track by four-wheel-drive vehicle with great difficulty. When he got to Pilgrim's mine road at the Stampede airstrip, he found the aged and armed miner astride a blocking bulldozer, waving him away and cursing road engineers in general. The inspector's disappointing trip out to Stampede was, by all accounts, the only full traverse ever made by a wheeled vehicle. The "road" reverted to bog almost instantly over the greater part of its length. [97]

Bowed by age and frustration, but not beaten, Earl Pilgrim ran his mine and cat-trained his ore intermittently for another 7 years, depending on the price of antimony. With a forge, piles of salvaged parts, and a couple of cranky generators the venerable miner kept things going. He was a certified mining engineer and had been the first professor of mining at Alaska's A&M college in Fairbanks. Beyond that he had practiced mining of all kinds in Alaska's hinterlands. He was a genius at improvisation. One who knew him figured that he could fashion a moving part from a chunk of rock, if necessary. Machines, circuits, piping, and tools were interlocked with the personality of the man at the Stampede Mine site, as demonstrated by local anecdote: When Pilgrim finally divested himself of the mine in 1978, the new company sent in its by-the-book engineers; they simply could not make the place run. Without Earl Pilgrim's personal coaxing, all of these ingenious hookups and fabrications refused to mesh into the system that he had made. [98]

In December 1979, Stampede Mine, Ltd.—which had acquired the property from Earl Pilgrim—donated its real estate rights and interests to the National Park Service and its mineral rights and interests to the University of Alaska. Under the conditions of the quitclaim deeds the new owners were charged to cooperatively use the site as a mining study area for development of efficient and environmentally sound mining methods consonant with the Mining in the Parks Act of 1976.

In the process of surveying the mine and developing work proposals under the subsequent NPS-UAF agreement, hazardous materials were discovered. The Service agreed to rid the site of these materials, including explosives. In pursuit of this task, a major dump of explosives stored at the mill was targeted for demolition by an Army ordnance detachment. Miscalculation of the course and effects of this demolition on April 30, 1987, resulted in a major explosion that severely damaged the mill and nearby structures. Subsequent investigation showed procedural faults and miscommunication among the NPS and Army personnel involved. Revised demolition procedures and management controls put in force by the NPS since this explosion will prevent future episodes of this kind at the many abandoned mine sites on NPS lands in Alaska. But the integrity of Earl Pilgrim's legacy was sorely diminished. (Mercifully, Earl Pilgrim was living out his final days at the time and was beyond cognition of this event.) Pending development of historic preservation plans for Stampede, the park has stabilized and weather-sealed key structures and maintains custodial protection of the site. [99]