DOMESTICATED REINDEER INTO ALASKA. 121 



on our return Lome when, by some means, I allowed my team to be attacked by 

 dogs. Subsequent experience showed that I was wholly to blame for the accident, 

 but I find some little satisfaction in realizing that no permanent injury resulted to 

 the deer. 



I need not speak of the great need of some means by which the natives can secure 

 proper clothing to enable them to withstand the severe winter of this latitude, in 

 place of the light squirrel and rotten rabbit skins now used almost entirely by them 

 all through this section, for you are fully apprised of that fact. 



Neither is it necessary to discuss the importance of some other food supply than 

 that had now only by patient and continual labor in all sorts of weather by the 

 natives, for you have had experience enough with your own people to know what 

 trials and dangers they undergo to get sufficient to preserve life. But if the propa- 

 gation of reindeer throughout this region is hastened, it will place these people in a 

 position that will make their lives worth living, and raise them from an existence 

 where toil is accompanied with the ever-present shadow of starvation. 



My hopes that you would bring the reindeer through the balance of the winter after 

 I left the station, all right, 1 am happy to learn are realized, and I also learn that 

 you have a large number of young deer. 



The native I took with me to your place has set the natives here wild on the rein- 

 deer question, and he wants me to ask you to give him a place on the herd. I know 

 you have many applications for such positions, but I can recommend him as a good 

 man, and believe it would be a good idea to let these people have one of their men 

 represent them at the station. If this can not be done, I wish you would urge the 

 authorities to either start a station here or send a small herd somewhere in this sec- 

 tion of the country. 



The most exaggerated accounts of the number of deer at the station are in circu- 

 lation among the natives, many of them thinking you have several thousand. As 

 you prophesied, I am unable to find a single native now who predicted last summer 

 that the deer would all die. It is like everything else in this world. Nothing suc- 

 ceeds like success, and the natives who knew the venture would prove a failure are 

 now the first ones to say that they knew the deer w-ould come through all right. 



I outlined the character of the country down this way to you while at the station, 

 and I have seen no reason since my return to change my opinion that it is as well 

 adapted to raising deer as in your section. Moss is everywhere abundant, and 

 there are large tracts of grass that afford an unlimited supply of summer f<c<l. 

 You will remember I told you of the quantity cut and put up for our mules, both 

 last year and this. 



I hope you have fully recovered your health, and that your experience with the 

 reindeer will prove as successful at the end of the coming winter as the last. 

 I am, with respect, 



John A. Dextkr. 



Mr. Miner W. Bruce, 



Superintendent Teller Reindeer Station, Port Clarence, Alaska. 



