Vol. XIV, No. 4 



WASHINGTON 



April, 1903 



D 



T 



'ATHOMAIL 

 MPHIKD 

 E 



fr=H 



O 



REINDEER IN ALASKA 



By Gilbert H. Grosvenor 



TWE1/VE years ago Dr Sheldon 

 Jackson brought his first herd 

 of 16 reindeer across Bering 

 Strait from Siberia and started his rein- 

 deer colony at Unalaska, off the bleak 

 coast of Alaska. Many then smiled at 

 the experiment and declared his plan for 

 stocking the great barrens of northwest- 

 ern Alaska with thousands of the ani- 

 mals which for centuries had been indis- 

 pensable to the natives of Lapland and 

 Siberia was impracticable and wasteful 

 of time and good money. But the ex- 

 periment prospered from the very first. 

 Other reindeer, numbering nearly i ,000 

 in all, during the succeeding years were 

 brought over from Siberia. Today there 

 are nearly 6,000 head in the various 

 herds distributed along the Alaskan 

 coast from Point Barrow to Bethel. The 

 existence of the 20,000 natives of north- 

 western Alaska, as well as the success of 

 the miners who are beginning to throng 

 into the interior of the territory in the 

 far north, are dependent upon these 

 domestic reindeer; their clothing, their 

 food, their transportation, their utensils, 

 and their shelter are all furnished them 

 by the reindeer. 



The reindeer enterprise is no longer 

 an experiment although still in its in- 



fancy. There are 400,000 square miles 

 of barren tundra in Alaska where no 

 horse, cow, sheep, or goat can find pas- 

 ture; but everywhere on this vast ex- 

 panse of frozen land the reindeer can 

 find the long, fibrous, white moss which 

 is his food. There is plenty of room for 

 10,000,000 of these hardy animals. The 

 time is coming when Alaska will have 

 great reindeer ranches like the great 

 cattle ranches of the southwest, and 

 they will be no less profitable. 



The story of the inception and growth 

 of the reindeer enterprise in Alaska is 

 very interesting and is not generally 

 known. During an extended trip of in- 

 spection of the missionary stations and 

 government schools in Alaska in the 

 summer of 1890*, Dr Sheldon Jackson 

 was impressed with the fact that the 

 natives in arctic and subarctic Alaska 

 were rapidly losing the sources of their 

 food supply. Each year the whales 

 were going farther and farther north, 

 beyond the reach of the natives who had 



* Dr Sheldon Jackson first visited Alaska in 

 1S77, in the interest of schools and missions. 

 He made a second trip in 1879. Other visits 

 followed, and since his appointment as Gen- 

 eral Agent of Education in Alaska in 18S5 he 

 has made annual visits to the territory. 



