Laura Cross

Laura Cross was interviewed on August 28, 1991 by Dan O'Neill on the bluff above the Yukon River in Eagle, Alaska. Dan O'Neill was sitting in the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve's visitor's center when Laura came in to get tourist information. Dan overheard her say she had come to Alaska to "claim my national interest lands." She said she had worked hard back in the 1970s to get the various D-2 lands established as conservation units, and now she had come to see as much of them as she could. Thinking that it was fortuitous to meet an "outside conservationist," O'Neill asked if she might like to say on tape what motivated her to campaign for the park lands in distant Alaska, and what they meant to her. She agreed readily, and Dan and Laura talked while sitting on a picnic table near the bluff behind the National Park Service headquarters building. In this interview, Laura talks about her involvement with the effort to protect Alaska land as conservation units, what wilderness means to her, and her perceptions of subsistence and the local response to the creation of Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve.