ALASKA EXPERIMENT STATIONS. 281 



even now to learn that the careful estimate of Professor Georgeson, the Agricultural 

 Department's expert, who has personally been over the ground, is that Alaska con- 

 tains 100,000 square miles of tillable and pasture land and that "it is chiefly the vast 

 region in the interior" which will furnish the agricultural land. In this estimate I 

 believe he is correct. I have spent much more time than he .has in the country, 

 have traveled the river from source to mouth, and have made it a point to question 

 the majority of the miners and explorers whom I have met, certainly at least a 

 thousand and probably more during four years, men who have been on nearly every 

 creek and river of the Yukon watershed, the Porcupine, Koyukuk, Tanana, White, 

 Shageluk, Melozi, Novi, Dall, Chandeleure, Chena, Nenana, Ozanna, and others, 

 some not yet mapped, and while neither their testimony nor mine is expert, and 

 while some were skeptical, by far the greater number believe that some day the 

 Yukon valleys will be settled by small farmers, particularly by the sturdy Norsemen, 

 men who as Professor Georgeson suggests, " possess the courage to face and sufficient 

 energy and strength to endure the hardships incident to pioneer life in a northern 

 climate, who can clear and till the land with their own hands." Such men, who do 

 not look for a market, but for a home where they can support themselves in inde- 

 pendence, will eventually find it in the Yukon Valley, where by a little farming, 

 some fishing and hunting, and some mining they may be happier and more comforta- 

 ble than they are now. In fact, there are a very few such persons there now. I 

 know personally an Englishman and his wife who have located a farm on which they 

 are already self-supporting and where they expect to end their days. 



I have mentioned fishing as incidental to farming, for the wealth of fish in the 

 streams is almost incredible even to a resident of Puget Sound, w r here the salmon 

 canning industry is so vast. As an indication of what it is I give a photograph of 

 salmon drying at one Indian village, Nulato, where the fish are caught by the most 

 primitive methods. I have mentioned none of the drawbacks, for they are only those 

 incidental to pioneering. Isolation, cold, and insect pests, mosquitoes, and gnats. 

 These are bad, but I believe they are no worse than the Pilgrim Fathers found when 

 they first landed on the "stern and rock-bound coasts " of New England. There the 

 cold w r as more intense because it was damp, the mosquito plague at first as bad, and 

 the isolation greater, because the Pilgrims were months from civilization w r here the 

 Yukon pioneers will be weeks, while with the Government telegraph line now build- 

 ing completed they will not be days from touch with the rest of the world. 



EDITORIAL COMMENTS. 



The same issue of the Post-Intelligencer which contained the fore- 

 going article by Mr. Brainerd, namely, that of September 29, 1901, 

 contained also an editorial on the general subject of agriculture in 

 Alaska, which I submit because it shows that the leavening forces of 

 investigation and education are at work and because it aims at the 

 correction of misleading conclusions, drawn from fault}^ premises, but 

 which have been widely disseminated throughout the country. The 

 fact that but few men make their living in Alaska by agriculture at 

 present should not be taken as proof that the country has no agricul- 

 tural possibilities. The editorial is as follows: 



The publication of a little bulletin by the Census Bureau, dealing with agriculture 

 in Alaska, has led to an amazing amount of uninformed comment by newspapers of 

 the country. One would have supposed that even the most careless newspaper 

 writer would know that census investigations deal with facts as they are and not 

 with facts that may or may not exist hereafter. One would not expect the statistics 



