USA > Alaska > Trailing and camping in Alaska > Part 21
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Young California would scorn to lasso a horse by any but a forefoot. How he would look down on an inferior ! These " cabelleros " prided them- selves in that and their gauntlet gloves, high-topped boots, red flaming scarfs and their ability to speak the Spanish language. They became tame citizens by settling down on farms and in cities. A few did enter the penitentiaries and others even entered politics, and all because the demand for their ro- mantic and preferable calling was limited.
This narrative is about ended. The places on Prince William Sound, Alaska, where was heard not long since only the noise of the wild fowl, are now teeming with boats on the water and with miners and mechanics hammering on land. The laughter of the loon and the quacking of ducks are seldom heard, as they have flown to less fre- quented localities. Railroad companies are now competing for right of way to the interior by way of the Copper River and its valley, and when the prod- uct of the world's greatest copper mines are being
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smelted by fuel from the immense coal deposits there, then will be established enormous commerce with the Orient.
This narrative describes and treats of about one- sixth part of Alaska. There are other rich districts known up there, and doubtless many that are yet unknown.
When Captain Abercrombie, Sam Lynch and I camped and ate porcupine on the Tanana slope of the Alaskan Range, we were then in an unknown country. At that time a prospector who had been on the Tanana was a curiosity. To-day the prin- cipal city in Alaska is on the Tanana River. Nine million dollars of gold were produced from the Tanana River Valley in the year of 1906. More than 30,000 acres of land have been homesteaded in that valley. Vegetable gardening there has been very profitable.
ALASKA'S OUTPUT IN GOLD
The year of 1909 announces to the world that Alaska thus far has produced $300,000,000. The Seattle assay office alone, during the five years pre- vious to June, 1905, melted $100,000,000 of gold. The Alaska trade with the United States during the year of 1905 amounted to $3,000,000 per month. Alaska annually ships $10,000,000 worth of valu- able ores into the United States, and the product is rapidly increasing.
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COAL
Alaska coal must be reckoned among the future products of the north. That country possesess all grades of coal from lignite to anthracite. Great deposits of coal are yet unknown to all but a few prospectors, trappers and Indians. The Indians call coal " fire-rock." The reported analysis of Con- troller Bay coal was : moisture, 2.18 per cent .; vol. comb. matter, 12.76; fixed carbon, 74.33; and ash, 10.73 per cent. Coal exists on both sides of the Alaskan Range, but the greatest known deposits are on the Tanana side.
TIN
Alaskans believe the world's supply of tin will soon be produced from the Seward Peninsula. It is more than probable that English capital will se- cure control of it and not allow the development to be inimical to the advantage of their already de- veloped mines in England, as they practically con- trol the price of the product. It is now necessary to send Alaska tin ore to Europe to have it reduced. The ore of Alaska is said to assay higher than that of the Eastern Hemisphere, and it is claimed that the deposits are far more extensive. In addition to the tin ore in place there are extensive placer tin deposits in gravel.
SEALS
The North American Commercial Company has
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the sealing rights leased from the government. Under the conditions, they are allowed to slaughter 15,000 fur seals annually. These fur seals are rapidly becoming extinct. Japanese poachers have been intruding on the breeding grounds, and in 1906 several of them were caught, and a few were shot, by the government guards while attempting their capture.
SALMON
One season's catch of salmon has amounted to more than 26,000,000 fish. This means that if those salmon were placed in a row, touching nose and tail, the string of fish would be more than 10,000 miles long, and would continuously extend three times across the continent, easterly and west- erly.
REINDEER
At this time, 1280 reindeer have been imported from Siberia into Alaska at a cost to the United States of about $140 per head. They have increased to more than 10,000 and are destined to be one of Alaska's future valuable assets.
A FEW FACTS
We paid about two cents an acre for Alaska, where, if the beaver alone within its borders were protected for twenty years the value of their pelts would amount to more. That much was paid for a country that proudly claims more beautiful and im-
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pressive scenery than Switzerland, the Austrian Tyrol, Venice, Vesuvius, Pompeii and the bay of Naples; and which has locked in her bosom more coal than Pennsylvania, more tin than Wales, more iron than Sweden, more silver than Colorado, more copper than Montana and more gold than Cali- fornia.
There are 59 domestic and 181 foreign corpora- tions operating in Alaska; also there are 26 news- papers; 50 Dept. U. S. mineral surveyors; more than 100 lawyers and nearly 300 notaries public.
While the reader has been taken through the most mountainous, most picturesque and most difficult sec- tion to traverse in all Alaska, yet the scenes depicted of trail life may, in considerable degree, be accepted as characteristic of the trails in other localities. In summer the same long days light the way of the adventurous prospector, whether he be with an equally adventurous companion, or as part of a stam- pede to a new Eldorado, following untrodden courses into the mysterious north; the same battle with the pestiferous mosquitoes and gnats whose legions seem to guard the almost invisible kingdom of gold; the same examples of heroism and imprudence, of grit and hair-breadth escapes; and in the face of almost insurmountable difficulties.
In the Copper River country the copper and precious metals are generally locked in the grasp
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of rock-ribbed and snow-mantled mountains. In the Yukon and its tributaries, Nature still protects its measureless riches in great beds of gravel and silt, and at Nome the old ocean beach seems a memorial of the scorn of the sea for the world's standard of value, as if to say: "All the gold of the world does not possess the intrinsic value of the moisture- laden clouds that I send to thirsty fields."
Alaska has been maligned because it has been mis- understood. We must shamefully confess that the Hon. William H. Seward was subjected to scathing criticisms on the floor of Congress for recommend- ing its purchase. Now the true worth of the coun- try is rapidly becoming known to the white race, while "Lo, the poor Indian," indifferent to the pos- sibilities of his environment, will as quietly disappear as do the foggy mists of those valleys before the al- most continuous rays of Alaska's summer sun. The pioneers who labored, struggled and died will be forgotten, although they blazed the way and opened opportunities for their fellowmen, for it will be with them as with other pioneers throughout the world.
There are many noted and worthy pioneers whose names are not mentioned in this narrative, as it was intended to describe the country and its conditions, rather than individuals. Most of those who re- mained were men of good principles. There have been heroes in Alaska, as noble as any in history. The lone prospector, ragged and destitute, clinging
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to the hope that he might find a sufficiency for the loved ones at home, was there; and if he failed, and returned home penniless, he was a hero for trying. There are other heroes who could be mentioned, among them the noble seafaring men who walked the bridges of their ships in the many wintry storms.
There are a few self-important but uninformed critics, who stand on an eminence of self-assumption and condemn all of the pioneers as an undeserving lot, but such are not worthy of consideration. They knew nothing of their hardships, privations and struggles, nor have they the fellow-feeling for their brother-man that pulsates in the breast of heroes, and actuates them to do noble things and accomplish great results.
The frontiersman knows no superior and is sub- servient to none. He is his own physician, breathes pure ozone and lives a long life. He values you according to your honor and integrity, and not on your possessions or social position. The frontiers- men have been the greatest soldiers of all ages, and General Scott could tell them when to charge, but no one could tell them when to retreat. It is probable that his " dead shots," dressed in buckskin, composed the most formidable army of its size that the world has ever known.
One thousand frontiersmen, who have been raised in the wild, if properly equipped with small arms and telescope rifles, could successfully defend a
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mountainous district against one hundred thousand invaders. True, they would employ Indian tactics, and every man would be a general, but he would be a successful one, against one hundred of the machine- like drilled soldiers of modern times.
The American frontiersmen, who are now among the mountains of the Pacific, have descended from the pioneers who conquered America for a more contented race, and they now long for other worlds to explore. Many Alaskans can trace their ancestry back to the banks of the Missouri, Tennessee and the Wabash rivers, where settled the pioneers who followed Boone's trace from Virginia. My sym- pathies are with them, and my ancestors mingled with and fought beside theirs. Indeed it is because of that inherited love for adventure that I spent ten years in Alaska.
In these pages I have prospected over ten years of experiences, and many incidents have been lost in the panning, but I hope the reader's life-trail has been made no rougher by our having traveled this distance together. It is with reluctance that the wilds are temporarily exchanged for the cook-stoves and dyspepsia of civilization, and I regretfully leave the old campfire, with the pack-saddles scattered around it, and launch this literary raft to prospect other sands, farther down the river of life.
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DEC _ 1909.
ICOPY NOT TO CAT DIV. DEC, 4 1909
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 0 017 297 335 8
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