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20 REPORT ON THE INTRODUCTION OF 



that there should be a Congressional act protecting reindeer for a t^rm 

 of years, and placing them under the control of the Secretary of the 

 Treasury. 



EXPERIMENT STATION. 



As bills are before Congress for the extension to Alaska of the pro- 

 visions of the agricultural college and experiment station acts of 

 1862, 1887, and 1890, I would call attention to the necessities of northern 

 and Arctic Alaska. In the ordinary experiment station investigations 

 are pursued with regard to the best methods of rearing and caring for 

 horses, cattle, hogs, and sheep ; but in Arctic Alaska there are hundreds 

 of thousands of square miles of area that can never be utilized for the 

 raising of cattle, horses, or sheep; but this large area is especially 

 adapted for the support of the reindeer. I would, therefore, respectfully 

 urge that provision be made in the experiment act of 1890 for the estab- 

 lishment of an experiment station at Port Clarence, Alaska, where the 

 principal industry shall be the propagation, management, and care of 

 the reindeer. In southeastern Alaska the natives that are being 

 advanced to civilization and citizenship are taught, for a living, to 

 be carpenters, boot and shoemakers, coopers, blacksmiths, etc., but as 

 none of these are needed in Arctic Alaska, the only pursuit to which 

 the young men of that region can look in their progress towards civili- 

 zation is the care of reindeer. To stock Alaska with reindeer, to 

 reclaim and make valuable millions of acres of moss-covered tundra, to 

 introduce a large, permanent, and wealth- jnoducing industry where 

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

 starvation, and lift them up to comfortable self-support and civiliza- 

 tion, is certainly a work of national importance. 



As a number of Eskimo young men should be turned out from the 

 proposed experiment station from year to year fully prepared to take 

 charge of and manage herds of reindeer, the industry will naturally 

 increase and the herds become more and more distributed throughout 

 the country until that whole northern region shall be covered with them, 

 as similar regions of Siberia and Lapland are now covered. 



The question having been raised with regard to the introduction of 

 skilled labor into the United States, the Superintendent of Immigra- 

 tion for the Treasury Department was conferred with, and it was 

 found that the laws and regulations covering immigration did not stand 

 in the way of introduction of the Laps for the j)urpose of taking charge 

 of the reindeer station for the Government. 



It is hoped that the present colony of Lapps may find such advantages 

 in Alaska lor going into the reindeer business on their own account 

 that they will become permanent citizensof the United States, and will 

 eventually attract to Alaska an emigration from Lapland, where the 

 restrictions thrown around the reindeer industry in some localities are 

 such as to have created great dissatisfaction, and caused the business 

 to be unprofitable. 1 



1 See letters of N. Width, p. 162, and of W. Bergstrom, p. 163. 



