134 COMMISSION OF CONSERVATION 
As a mineral industry continues to grow in Alaska the natives and 
graduate apprentices can earn high wages as teamsters, hauling supplies 
and furnishing fresh reindeer meat to mining camps in the interior, 
at points remote from railway and steamboat transportation. Well 
trained sled deer have been used to carry the mail 650 miles from Point 
Barrow, south to Kotzebue. This is the most Northern mail route in 
the United States, and likewise the most perilous and desolate mail 
trip in the world. Two trips are made a year and $750 is paid for each 
journey. The average speed is about 40 to 50 miles per day, keeping 
up a steady trot. 
One of the latest and quite remarkable feats showing the capacity 
of the reindeer for sledge driving was that accomplished by Mr. W. T. 
Lopp, the Superintendent of the Government Reindeer Service. Dur- 
ing the recent winter’s tour of inspection, Mr. Lopp travelled more 
than 2,500 miles with a reindeer sled over the frozen tundra and ice- 
bound rivers of the lower Bering Sea region from the middle Yukon to 
the coast of the North Pacific. Part of this route for several hundred 
miles lay through a country which had been so little traversed that not 
even native trails had been made. The Alaska Reindeer Service is un- 
der the direction of the United States Bureau of Education. 
