William "Bill" Brown

Born in Seattle in 1930, Bill Brown was a long-time employee of the National Park Service, working in park planning, publication writing and editing, park management, and as regional historian. He came to Alaska in 1975 and was a member of the Park Service's Alaska Task Force that conducted research and worked with local people around Alaska to better understand the areas that were to become new national parks. He played an important role in planning for Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve, worked in the National Petroleum Reserve Alaska, and completed key historic resource studies for Gates of the Arctic and Denali National Parks. In the 1980s, he was Park Historian for Gates of the Arctic National Park and produced the book The History of the Central Brooks Range: Gaunt Beauty, Tenuous Life, which is a historical narrative of human occupation of the area and a survey of historic sites. This richly detailed history of the region goes a long way toward demonstrating just how long and varied human occupation and use of the Brooks Range and surrounding areas have been. The book makes extensive use of primary sources, including the travel diaries of explorers, prospectors, trappers, and missionaries. It strongly relies upon first-person accounts and oral history accounts from Native elders. Bill Brown retired from the Park Service in the early 1990s and lived in Gustavus, Alaska. He passed away on May 1, 2016.

Interviews with Bill appear in the Gates of the Arctic National Park Project Jukebox and the Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve Project Jukebox (Oral History H91-22-01/02), and he was the interviewer for many of the interviews in the Denali Mountaineering Project Jukebox.

Date of Death:

May 1, 2016

William "Bill" Brown appears in the following new Jukebox projects:

Gates of the Arctic National Park

Interview Title	Abstract	Archive #: Oral History	Project	Date of Interview
William Brown, Part 1	Bill Brown was interviewed on October 22, 1992 by David Krupa at Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. Bill was visiting Fairbanks from his home in Gustavus, Alaska to finish work on Denali Mountaineering Project Jukebox where, instead of being the interviewee, he did the interviewing. In this interview, Bill gives a brief summary of his career in the National Park Service, then goes on to detail the process of defining and protecting historic sites as part of the National Park Service's mission along the Koyukuk River and in the Central Brooks Range. Bill shares the perspective of a historian as he discusses the long history of Native presence in the area and the successive waves of European interest and occupation based primarily on mining, and more recently, oil development on the North Slope. He discusses how the relative isolation of the Brooks Range and the fragility of the environment affected its frontier development. He goes on to chronicle Native involvement and reaction to Western encroachment, and concludes with a brief overview of Alaska's land and resource history and its impact on national parks in Alaska.	93-15-01	Gates of the Arctic National Park	Oct 22, 1992
William Brown, Part 2	This is a continuation of an interview with Bill Brown on October 22, 1992 by David Krupa at Elmer E. Rasmuson Library at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. This is a continuation of tape number Oral History 93-15-01. In this part of the interview, Bill talks about the formation of Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, and some of the land management issues that the new park had to deal with.	93-15-02	Gates of the Arctic National Park	Oct 22, 1992