05/27/2026
Every muskox in Alaska descends from thirty-four animals that were roped in Greenland, shipped to Norway, sailed under the Statue of Liberty, quarantined in New Jersey, trained across the continent to Seattle, shipped to Alaska, held behind bear-proof fencing at a college in Fairbanks, and then loaded onto a leaking barge in the Bering Sea that had to be hand-pumped to keep it from sinking.
All thirty-four survived the journey.
In 1900, there were no muskoxen in Alaska. The species had survived in the Arctic since the last ice age, outlasting the woolly mammoth, the steppe bison, and the cave bear, but it could not outlast commercial hunting and the hide trade. The last reliable report of a wild muskox in Alaska came from 1895, when a man named Henry Rapelle visited a Yukon River villager who had a muskox skull on his wall. The man told Rapelle he had thought it was a bear with horns when he shot it. That was likely the last one.
In May 1930, the U.S. Congress allocated $40,000 to the U.S.
Biological Survey to acquire a herd of muskoxen for introduction into Alaska with a view to their domestication and utilization in the Territory. That single sentence launched an 8,000-mile animal-moving operation that lasted six months and crossed two oceans, a continent, and a bureaucracy.
Norwegian sailors were hired to capture the animals in East Greenland. They targeted calves and yearlings because adults were too dangerous to handle. The expedition leader kept a journal. To reach the young animals, his crew had to get past the adults, which meant shooting the bulls that charged the capture teams. There is much violence in a flock of muskoxen, he wrote. They roped and crated nineteen females and fifteen males. By the end of August 1930, the muskoxen were in Norway.
From Norway, handlers loaded the crated animals onto a steamship and crossed the Atlantic. On September 15, 1930, the ship passed beneath the Statue of Liberty carrying thirty-four Arctic ungulates in wooden boxes on the deck. The muskoxen were offloaded into a quarantine facility in New Jersey, where they spent thirty-three days. The heat was described as unbearable for Arctic animals. The temperature was roughly sixty degrees Fahrenheit.
All thirty-four survived quarantine. They were loaded onto a train and shipped 2,500 miles across the United States to Seattle. From Seattle, they went by steamship to Seward, Alaska, a seven-day voyage. From Seward, the Alaska Railroad carried them to Fairbanks in four days. On November 5, 1930, all thirty-four muskoxen were released from their crates at the Alaska Agricultural College and School of Mines, now the University of Alaska Fairbanks. They had been in transit for six months. Not a single animal had died.
The Fairbanks experiment worked at first. A few calves were born. The muskoxen roamed a forty-acre clearing surrounded by boreal forest. But the operation proved expensive. The animals needed fencing to keep them contained and separate fencing to keep black bears from killing the calves. The cost of maintaining the facility exceeded the budget. L.J. Palmer, the biologist running the project, decided to move the herd to a place where fencing would not be necessary.
He chose Nunivak Island, a seventy-by-forty-mile piece of tundra in the Bering Sea off the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. No bears. No wolves. No predators large enough to threaten an adult muskox. The island was essentially a predator-free open-air enclosure surrounded by ocean.
Getting the muskoxen there was the final and worst leg of the journey. In 1935 and 1936, thirty-one animals were crated and transported from Fairbanks to Nenana by truck. At Nenana, they were loaded onto a steamship and taken down the Tanana and Yukon Rivers to the coast. From there, they were loaded onto an old barge and towed roughly three hundred miles across open ocean by a motorboat.
The barge started leaking.
Biologist Charles Rouse, who was traveling with the muskoxen, described what happened next. The men aboard the barge operated hand pumps continuously to keep the vessel afloat while thirty-one crated muskoxen stood in rising water. The barge did not sink. The motorboat did not lose the tow. The animals did not drown. They reached Nunivak Island, the crates were opened, and the muskoxen walked onto the tundra.
They thrived. The Nunivak herd grew from thirty-one animals to over six hundred. Starting in the late 1960s, biologists began using Nunivak as source stock for transplants across Alaska. Twenty-three muskoxen went to the mainland east of Nunivak in 1967 and 1968. Sixty-four went to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in 1969 and 1970. Seventy-two went to the Seward Peninsula in 1970 and 1981. Seventy went to northwestern Alaska in 1970 and 1977. Every one of those transplant populations established itself and grew.
Today, more than 3,500 muskoxen live in Alaska. Every single one of them traces its lineage back to the thirty-four animals that Norwegian sailors roped in Greenland in the summer of 1930. The entire Alaskan muskox population passed through a wooden crate, a steamship, the New Jersey heat, a transcontinental train, another steamship, a railroad, and a leaking barge with hand pumps before it became a functioning wild population again.
The muskox survived the Pleistocene. It survived the ice ages that killed the mammoth. It could not survive the hide trade, but it survived everything the U.S. government did to bring it back, which in 1930 included nearly sinking it in the Bering Sea on a barge held together by men with hand pumps and the reasonable expectation that the whole thing was about to go under.
Source: University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, Ned Rozell / Alaska Department of Fish and Game / Peter Lent, "Muskoxen and Their Hunters: A History."
Image is for illustration purposes only
