282 REPORT OF OFFICE OF EXPERIMENT STATIONS. 



of an undeveloped industry in an undeveloped country to be taken up and com- 

 mented upon as a measure of that country's capabilities and a statement of its limita- 

 tions in that especial direction. Yet that is just what has happened. 



The same dogmatism of ignorance that once condemned the central spaces of this 

 continent, now the home of millions of thriving people, to desolation, tells us that 

 farming can not be carried on in Alaska. 



We have taken occasion several times to correct the ludicrous but injurious con- 

 ception of Alaska's future thus set before the people by agencies to which they are 

 accustomed to trust for facts. We have, in particular, pointed out the conditions of 

 climate along the already well-known coast region of Alaska, the modifications pro- 

 duced by the warm Japan current, and the certainty of profitable returns on agricul- 

 tural industry there wherever there are reaches of lowlands suitable for cultivation. 

 But it will be novel to most of our own readers to hear that the agricultural possibil- 

 ities of interior Alaska, especially of the valley of the Yukon and its tributaries, are 

 even greater than those of other sections. For here we have the splendid alluvial soil 

 that characterizes the river bottoms of our own mountain regions, while the climate 

 is such that almost all the products of the north temperate zone may be raised there 

 with certainty and in abundance. 



This fact is set forth in an extremely interesting and valuable article by Mr. Eras- 

 tus Brainerd, which appears elsewhere in this issue. Mr. Brainerd is not talking 

 theory, but fact. He is a man who sees things as they are and understands what he 

 sees. He writes of a country with which he is personally familiar. He tells what 

 has actually been done as well as what is possible. And his statements are reen- 

 forced by a series of photographs, taken on the spot, which may convey a few new 

 conceptions to those in the East who have formed their ideas of Alaska from a view 

 of the Muir glacier. 



Mr. Brainerd says: " Wheat, oats, rye, and barley have ripened and produced 

 mature seed at different points during several years under the most adverse circum- 

 stances on the Yukon." He says that most crops, and nearly all the vegetables, 

 with small fruits, grow in the greatest profusion with but little care, while there is 

 no question of the value of the section as a stock- producing country. This is sub- 

 stantiated by the facts of past experience, and is to be considered in connection with 

 the estimate of an expert of the Agricultural Department, that there are at least 

 100,000 square miles of tillable and pasture land in Alaska, chiefly in the interior. 



The analogy of other countries lying as far north as the Yukon, or farther, referred 

 to by Mr. Brainerd, makes the estimate of Alaska's future agriculture primarily 

 reasonable. Its possibilities rest mainly on two conditions which are entirely over- 

 looked by those who have never lived beyond the lower latitudes. One of these is 

 the high summer temperature, the other the length of the summer day. The atten- 

 tion of the outsider is directed wholly to the excessive cold of the Alaskan winter. 

 He hears of 70° and 80° below zero, and forthwith assumes that the thermometer 

 barely rises above the freezing point in summer. The fact is that a temperature of 

 over 100 is not uncommon, while the average for the short summer is high. 



We say "short summer," but that needs qualification. It is short in months and 

 days, but long in hours. When the sun is farthest north, there is, in those lati- 

 tudes, a period of but from two or three to five or six hours of twilight. Plant life, 

 looking for light and heat, gets as much of them in two months of these lengthened 

 days as it does in four months of the days farther from the Arctic Circle. The work- 

 ing of the law is perfectly familiar to the farmers of Minnesota and the Dakotas, 

 where cereals mature in much less time than farther south. The Alaskan valley, 

 during the brief warm term, is a veritable hothouse, where vegetable growth pro- 

 ceeds by a forcing process to results impossible elsewhere in the same length of time. 



All the circumstances, all the experience of men elsewhere, as well as in the few 

 spots of Alaska which the hunt for gold has permitted to be devoted to agricultural 



