The Possibilities of Alaska 



83 



who constructed the trans-Alaskan mili- 

 tar3' road, at rrty request seeded the past 

 summer small quantities of wheat, bar- 

 ley, and oats at Copper Center, in the 

 Copper River Valley, and he writes me 

 that they all matured. Ripe oats were 

 seen last September by Mr. Isaac Jones, 

 an emplo}'ee of the Department of Agri- 

 culture, on a tributary to the Forty-mile, 

 in about latitude 64. Two Wisconsin 

 men, Messrs. H. C. Nicolai and D. H. 

 Clark, started to farm at Skagway two 

 years ago. In September of last year 

 I saw considerable fields of oats, pota- 

 toes, and cabbage grown by them. On 

 Admiralty Island, near Killisnoo, a man 

 named Thomas Baker has been growing 

 vegetables and grains for years with 

 noted success. Small patches of grain 

 have been matured at Kadiak, at Afog- 

 nak, at the Moravian Mission on the 

 Kuskokwim River, and at many other 

 places. At Fort Selkirk an American 

 named Frank Bach, and at Dawson two 

 brothers named Morgan, also Ameri- 

 cans, have secured from the Canadian 

 Government tracts of upward of a hun- 

 dred acres of land each, which they are 

 farming successfully. 



STOCK-RAISING 



Cattle are kept at every considerable 

 settlement in Alaska, except perhaps at 

 Nome. They all do well. The treeless 

 region to the westward of Sitka is es- 

 pecially well suited to cattle and all 

 kinds of live stock. The Alaska Com- 

 mercial Company has kept cattle, sheep, 

 and Angora goats at Kodiak for many 

 years, and they required but little feed 

 and shelter, except in an occasional 

 storm during winter. The data on these 

 experiments were published in the re- 

 port to Congress on the Alaska Investi- 

 gations for 1899. The natives at Kenai 

 and Ninilchik, on Cook Inlet, have kept 

 cattle for half a century or more. • At 

 the latter place they have upward of 

 thirty head. But few breeding cattle 



have as yet found their way into the in- 

 terior, but horses are quite numerous 

 there. In this connection it is of interest 

 to note that in spite of the extremely 

 cold winters in the interior, there are 

 many instances on record in which 

 horses abandoned by prospectors in the 

 fall have survived the winters and come 

 out in the spring in fair condition. Mr. 

 Mark E. Bray, an American miner, told 

 me last summer that he used five mules 

 in his mining operations on one of the 

 tributaries of the Tanana. He aban- 

 doned them when he went out in the 

 fall, it being too expensive to buy feed 

 for them in Dawson, where he wintered. 

 When he returned to the diggings the 

 following April he found four of them 

 alive and well ; the fifth had been killed 

 by the Indians. In the fall of 1899 Mr. 

 Jack Dal ton turned loose forty-five head 

 of pack horses he had used in carrying 

 provisions over the Dalton trail, and in 

 the spring of 1900 he found forty-three 

 of them alive and well and in fair con- 

 dition. 



AGRICULTURAL LANDS 



There are extensive areas of grass 

 land in many parts of the interior. Mr. 

 Isaac Jones, already referred to, made a 

 reconnaissance last summer between 

 Eagle, on the Yukon, and Valdes, on 

 Prince William Sound. The distance 

 between these two points as the trail 

 runs is about 435 miles. He examined 

 some fifteen miles on either side of the 

 trail, thus covering an area of thirty 

 miles wide by 435 miles long. Within 

 the boundaries of this strip he estimates 

 that he saw two million acres of pasture 

 and farming land. In the region oc- 

 cupied by the Kechumstuk Indians, 

 north of the Tanana, and especially 

 along the south fork of the Forty-mile, 

 he reports that he crossed a meadow 

 with the grass waist high for a distance 

 of eight miles. He also learned of 

 horses which had run at large for two 



