10 INTRODUCTION OF DOMESTIC REINDEER INTO ALASKA. 



In the past the natives, with tireless industry, caught and cured, for 

 use in their long- winters, great quantities of fish, but American can- 

 neries have already come to some of their streams, and will soon be 

 found on all of them, both carrying the food out of the country and, by 

 their wasteful methods, destroying the future suj)ply. Five million 

 cans of salmon annually shipped away from Alaska — and the business 

 still in its infancy — means starvation to the native races in the near 

 future. 



With the advent of improved breech-loading firearms the wild rein- 

 deer are both being killed off and frightened away to the remote and 

 more inaccessible regions of the interior, and another source of food 

 supply is diminishing. Thus t]^e support of the people is largely gone, 

 and the process of slow starvation and extermination has commenced 

 along the whole arctic coast of Alaska. 



To establish schools among a starving people would be of little serv- 

 ice; hence education, civilization, and humanity alike called for relief. 

 The sea could not be restocked with whale as a stream can be restocked 

 with fish. To feed the population at Government expense would pau- 

 perize and in the end as certainly destroy them. Some other method 

 had to be devised. This was suggested by the wild nomad tribes on 

 the Siberian side of Bering Straits. They had an unfailing food sup- 

 ply in their large herds of domestic reindeer. Why not introduce the 

 domestic reindeer on the American side and thus provide a new and 

 adequate food supply? 



To do this will give the Eskimo as permanent a food supply as the 

 cattle of the Western plains and sheep of New Mexico and Arizona do 

 the inhabitants of those sections. It will do more than preserve life — it 

 will preserve the self-respect of the people and advance them in the 

 scale of civilization. It will change them from hunters to herders. It 

 will also utilize the hundreds of thousands of square miles of moss- 

 covered tundra of arctic and subarctic Alaska and make those now 

 useless and barren wastes conducive to the wealth and prosperity of 

 the United States. 



A moderate computation, based upon the statistics of Lapland, where 

 similar climatic and other conditions exist, shows northern and central 

 Alaska capable of supporting over 9,000,000 head of reindeer. 



To reclaim and make valuable vast areas of land otherwise worthless; 

 to introduce large, permanent, and wealth-producing industries where 

 none previously existed ; to take a barbarian people on the verge of 

 starvation and lift them uj) to a comfortable self-support and civiliza- 

 tion is certainly a work of national importance. 



Eeturning to Washington on J«[ovember 12, 1890, I addressed to the 

 Commissioner of Education a preliminary report of the season's work, 

 emphasizing the destitute condition of the Alaskan Eskimo and rec- 

 ommending the introduction of the domestic reindeer of Siberia. 



On the 5th of December following, this report was transmitted by you 

 to the Secretary of the Interior for his information, and on the 15th 



