The Land of Tomorrow Part 6

Now, however, Alaska has her reward. The Secretary of the Interior has re-opened the coal fields for entry. But permission is given only to _lease_ the coal tracts. Before this book appears the first Alaskan coal will be helping to fill the bunkers, not only of Alaska herself but of the Pacific coast as well.

There is one noticeable thing about the conditions imposed upon the lessees of the coal fields by Secretary Lane and it is a point upon which both the prospective lessee and employee should be informed.

These conditions provide for the safeguarding of the lives and welfare of the miners. No operator may mine coal at minimum cost without regard for the safety of his men. The rules are explicit. The lease requires him to "leave ample support for the roof of the drifts and stopes, to provide adequate ventilation, special exits, to guard against explosion, flooding, 'squeezes' and fire." The protection of the workman goes even further than this. No firm, or individual, operating in government land, may work the miners longer than eight hours a day. They must agree to pay them twice a month in cash. The forced buying at stores owned by the company is strictly prohibited.

The operators, at the request of a majority of the miners, must grant one of their number, chosen by vote, permission to check and weigh the coal in cases where the miners' pay is based upon their output.

Wise provisions these! The stormy and b.l.o.o.d.y history of the Colorado fields is to have no repet.i.tion here if the foresight and the good judgment of the Department of the Interior can prevent it. All these things lend to the desirability of employment in Alaska. There are only two spots in the country where the coal lands are in possession of individuals or of private companies. Every other inch of it belongs to the government. And it will keep on belonging to it! The Secretary of the Interior, Mr. Franklin K. Lane, is the largest operating landlord in the world. While you may not buy coal land in Alaska you may lease it--for not more than fifty years. For each ton mined you pay a royalty to the government. You may then s.h.i.+p your coal in a government coal-car! One can see how easy it will be for a lessee to make money in coal in Alaska. All he has to do is to dig! No speculating in coal lands! No s.h.i.+fting and juggling of stocks and bonds of coal-carrying railroads! So far as the coal fields and mining in Alaska are concerned neither money, politics nor influence will avail to change the situation one jot or one t.i.ttle! Amen! Hallelujah!! Waltz me around again, Willie!!!

With farm and mineral lands, however, it is different. These may pa.s.s into the hands of private companies or individuals just as soon as the latter can qualify to meet the conditions. We who know the country can realize as outsiders can not what the railroad will mean to Alaska. One may take a boat at the mouth of the Yukon, traveling westward to southward, thence up the Tanana until he reaches Fairbanks which is within a hundred miles of the Arctic Circle. Here the new railroad will have its northern terminus. One may then take the train back to Seward, riding through the great gold country--a section the wealth of which is uncomputed--then on through the enormous coal fields, past farms laden with crops, finding himself, when the end of the journey is reached, at Seward, the terminus on the Peninsula, after a journey (not including the water voyage) of four hundred and fifty miles.

In proportion as commerce and industry grow opportunities for labor will increase. The omnipresent automobile will bring with it the necessity for the garage, the repair shop, the chauffeur, the mechanician. The railroad terminals mean new towns and new towns mean business houses. Wherever there is a road in process of construction there is always a chance for women. The workmen must be fed and provided with sleeping quarters. Boarding houses, laundries, etc., are indispensable. But----. I should not be honest either with myself or with my readers if I did not here utter one word of warning. No woman need be afraid to go to Alaska, but both men and women should go wisely and in full understanding of conditions there. Both _must_ be equipped to meet those conditions. The first is the promise, oral or written, of a job before going! The other is the means to return home at any time.

No one should go to Alaska without having first provided for one or both of these conditions.

CHAPTER XII

THE HAUNT OF THE SALMON

The greatest industry in Alaska is unquestionably the salmon fis.h.i.+ng.

More than two hundred and fifty kinds of edible fish abound in Alaskan waters and this does not include trout and grayling in the streams where only the latter are to be found. Most of the halibut eaten in the United States comes from Alaska. These fish often weigh as high as two hundred pounds. Large numbers of whales are caught and prepared for market annually. The fish products of the country have already netted more than two hundred million dollars.

Nothing in the history of all Nature is more wonderful (or more tragic) than the story of the salmon. So wonderful is it that it is almost beyond the power of the human brain to comprehend it. Until the advent of the motion picture--one of the greatest educators of our day and generation--few knew that the salmon returns to the very spot where it was sp.a.w.ned to die. After thirty months at sea, during which time nothing is known of them, they are drawn by some mysterious instinct back to the very spot of their birth. Sometimes the return necessitates a journey of fifteen hundred miles and during that journey nothing is eaten. Fishermen, both white and native, have told me repeatedly that they have never yet found anything in the stomach of a salmon. They leave the ocean and enter the rivers early in the spring. As soon as they enter fresh water they cease eating. Their stomachs shrink as their appet.i.tes fail and they have therefore no desire to return to the salt-water feeding-grounds. When they reach their destination they reproduce, which is the object of the long journey. Shortly afterward they die. Life, seemingly, is complete for them when they have reached the waters which gave them birth and have transmitted life to others.

This done, they drop down the river with the current and are seen no more. From three to four hundred eggs to each pound of the parent fish is the average sp.a.w.n. And yet----. The artificial propagation of the salmon goes on ceaselessly. It is compared to the sowing of seed by the farmer. The culture of the eggs in a hatchery and the distribution of fingerlings lay the foundation for an increased harvest year by year.

To me the return of the salmon to the sp.a.w.ning grounds is the most marvelous thing in the world. From its source in the snow-capped mountains of the interior to the spot where it flows, bell-toned and majestic, into the sea, the Yukon with its various tributaries is more than twenty-five hundred miles long! And the water is muddy. The fish wheels, useless in clear water, are in constant motion. How, then, does the salmon determine the exact spot at which to leave the river and enter the particular tributary from which, originally, it came? Only once has it been in it before,--the time when as a fingerling of two or three inches it made its first swift journey out to sea! What man, even if he had all manner of landmarks to guide him, would undertake to return to the spot he left in childhood if in order to do so he had to leave the broad ocean and follow twenty-five hundred miles of water which is first river, then tributary, then creek, then brook and finally a lake? It is not worth while to try to reduce the thing to intelligible terms. It is incomprehensible. No human intelligence can explain the sp.a.w.ning migration of the salmon. Yet long-continued and careful investigation and observation in every stream of the Pacific coast have established these facts beyond question.

He who has never seen a "run" of salmon has something yet to live for!

I know of no other event which equals it. The heaviest runs are in May, June, and July, the catch being largest in the latter month. The largest fish are caught in May. The "royal family" of salmon is the King. These are best in June. Often they weigh from fifty to eighty pounds. The king salmon never rises to the fly. The canneries take them by the wheel.

I shall never forget my first view of a fish wheel and a cannery. I thought the wheel the nearest approach to an infernal machine that I had ever seen--until I got into the cannery! The wheels are fas.h.i.+oned of wire-gauze compartments and are built in places near high-water mark where salmon are known to run in greatest numbers, usually at the head of natural or artificial channels in the river bed. "Like a cradle endless rocking" the wheel revolves, scooping up the unsuspecting and beautiful creatures literally by thousands. It is the blackest and bloodiest of murder. Nothing else! But----. In the "Outside" they insist on eating salmon and the canneries can not supply the demand without the wheel.

Kipling, in his _American Notes_, says that he saw a ton of salmon taken on the Columbia River as one night's catch from the revolving cups of a giant wheel. My own first sight of a fish wheel in operation beats the story of this renowned writer all to pieces. The proprietor announced that the catch of this night was _five tons_, an amount which taxes the credulity of any man in his right mind. With a fascination which no words can describe I watched those fish being unloaded. Huge fifty-pounders, hardly dead, scores weighing from twenty to thirty pounds and myriads of smaller ones! The warehouse, built on piles in the bend of the river, was not far away, and as I was there for the purpose of seeing the process from first to last, I went aboard the barge onto which the salmon had been tossed. Presently we drew up alongside the warehouse and unloaded the fish. Like a man hypnotized I followed my guide up the scale-strewn, fishy incline which led into the cannery.

None but natives worked in this particular cannery. The building shook and s.h.i.+vered with every chug of the machinery. I watched them cross and re-cross the slippery floor and I could think of nothing but the Devil and a blood-bespattered Devil at that!

My experience up to this moment, however, was not a circ.u.mstance to what happened next! When the boxes containing the fish were thrown down under a jet of water they broke of their own accord and the salmon burst into a stream of silver. A native jerked one up, a twenty-pounder, deftly beheaded and detailed it in two swift strokes of a knife. With equal deftness he relieved it of its internal arrangements by a third stroke. Then he tossed it into a b.l.o.o.d.y-dyed tank. The headless, tailless, _inside_less fish fairly leaped from his hands--just as though it were once more taking the rapids. But not so.

The next man caught him up short. What the first man had left undone the second one polished off to a fine degree. He proceeded to commit additional murder of the most d.a.m.nable sort. He thrust the fish under a machine resembling a chaff-cutter which hewed and hacked it into unseemly red pieces ready for the can and the poor mutilated remains were ready for the third man.

With long, bony, crooked fingers he jammed the pieces into cans which, sliding down a marvelous machine, forthwith proceeded to solder their own tops as they pa.s.sed! The fourth man tested the can for flaws and then it was sunk (with hundreds of others) into a vat of boiling water to be cooked for a few minutes. The cans bulged slightly after this operation and were slidden along on trolleys to the fifth man who with a needle and soldering iron vented them and then soldered the little aperture. The process was finished--all except the label. This attached, the "finest salmon on the market" was ready for s.h.i.+pment.

In Alaska we get used to almost everything in time, but I confess that it took me some time to pull myself together after this experience.

Never had I been so conscious of the grim contrasts of life as when I stepped outside that cannery! In that rude factory, the floor of which was but forty by ninety feet, I had seen the most civilized and the most murderous machinery! Outside, only a few feet away, before my eyes lay the most beautiful of G.o.d's country,--the immense solitude of the hills! I fairly fled down to the launch by which I was to journey back down the river, trying to get as far away as possible from the slippery, scale-spangled, oily floors and the blood-bespattered Eskimos. But it was like a doctor's first surgical operation. I got over it, and after several years' residence in the country became so accustomed to the sights of a cannery that they now make little or no impression. The canneries are Alaska's greatest a.s.set.

To state how many cans of salmon go out yearly would be an impossible task. All we know is that the value of the Alaskan salmon fisheries can not be computed. It is true that Alaska derives much of her wealth from the copper, gold and silver mines and her practically untouched coal deposits. But her fisheries are the most important of her industries. Mines have a way of giving out suddenly, for no apparent reason. But the fish reproduce themselves each year. The fisheries of Alaska can not fail.

Next to the fisheries the fur business is perhaps the most important industry. Here again is a business opening for him who seeks it. As very warm clothing is necessary, tanners ought to find the land full of opportunities. The fur business is perhaps the _easiest_ way to affluence which presents itself in Alaska. Native hunters and trappers follow the old rule and hunt their prey from Nature's supply. But many have already gone into the raising of fur-bearing animals as a business, just as the farmer raises sheep for the wool.

Fox farming is the most popular and a great industry is being developed. Many who began this business in Alaska have since transported it to the States. In the west are some twelve or fifteen such inst.i.tutions and the eastern States also contain a few. The value of the fox fur is known to all and, as has been said, from four to seven hundred dollars is not an unusual price for the black and silver fox skins.

Judge Martin F. Moran, of the Kobuk district, is experimenting in angora goat-raising in which he thinks there is a great future. Judge Moran lives twenty miles north of the Arctic Circle. Since the breaking out of the war angora ranchers in the west have netted large fortunes by supplying mohair, and conditions for raising the goats are less favorable there than in Alaska. Judge Moran is planning (and has perhaps already carried out his plan) to import a herd of angoras which shall graze upon the rich reindeer moss which grows so abundantly in the tundra of western and northern Alaska.

The sea-otter, the most valuable fur-bearing animal, may not now be hunted, according to a law enacted by Congress, until November first, 1920. These were formerly numerous, but they are now threatened with extinction and are to be found only on some of the Aleutian Islands. It has been estimated that during the Russian occupation two hundred and sixty thousand sea-otter skins were taken, valued at twenty-six million dollars. Since the United States took over the country in 1867 about ninety thousand have been marketed. Now, however, the output is only about twenty skins a year. A good otter skin is very valuable, ranging in price from eight hundred to eighteen hundred dollars.

The seal-fur industry, although developed by the Russians, reached its height after the territory was acquired by the United States. From 1867 to 1902 seal skins to the value of thirty-five million dollars were exported. The fur seal, although widely distributed throughout the country, has but one breeding place,--the Pribilof Islands. Here most of the skins are taken. The seals were slaughtered in the most ruthless fas.h.i.+on and the government at last awoke to the knowledge that the seal was in a fair way to follow the sea-otter unless protected. In 1870 the capture of seals on these islands was prohibited by law. The United States took charge of the islands and the fisheries. Natives may kill annually only enough seals to provide themselves with food and clothing. The destruction of the herds was thus halted by the government and in 1912 the census revealed two hundred and fifteen thousand, nine hundred and forty seals.

From the sale of fox furs and seal skins the government has derived during the last twenty-five years a direct revenue almost covering the total purchase price of Alaska. There are approximately twenty thousand white people in the territory. In China there are four hundred million. Yet in 1915 the United States trade with Alaska was five million dollars in excess of the total United States trade with China!

CHAPTER XIII

THE EIGHTH WONDER OF THE WORLD

Alaska is a land of scenic splendor. She has scenery as beautiful as that of Switzerland or New Zealand. From my own cottage doorway I have seen sunsets which equaled those of Mont Blanc, famed in song and story, and I have traveled through valleys which in summer rivaled the celebrated Vale of Chamounix. Whoever it was who selected the Seven Wonders of the World of which we learned in our school days would have had to add to the list if he had ever dwelt for any length of time "north of fifty-three."

The country boasts some of the greatest wonders of Nature. The Calico Bluffs on the Yukon are as high as the Was.h.i.+ngton monument and their strata look much like agate formations. She has five thousand glaciers which are giants in comparison with those of the Alps. The Childs Glacier is as tall as the dome of the capital at Was.h.i.+ngton. Of the hundreds of others there are many that are known as "first cla.s.s"

glaciers. By this is meant that they discharge their contents into the sea direct. Among them are the LeConte, Dawes, Brown, Sawyer and Taku.

It is the latter which furnishes the bergs that surround the s.h.i.+ps which carry travelers northward through the "Inside" route. From the deck of the vessel, near Taku Inlet, forty-five glaciers may be counted. Of these, as you face Taku, Norris glacier stands to the left.

It is unique in that it sends out two seemingly full-grown rivers, one flowing to north and one to south. Flowers may be seen growing in the forest glades nearby, and remnants of tree stumps two feet in diameter reveal that the glacier must once have withdrawn long enough at least to permit them to grow. Then a change of climate or other natural action must have pushed the ice forward again to cut them off and grind them into fragments,--making them a part of the glacial debris.

Mendenhall Glacier is near Juneau. It is easily reached by automobile and a delightful experience it is to ride along the highway leading to it. The road is fringed with ma.s.ses of wild flowers. Imagine, if you can, sitting in the shade of a gigantic cottonwood, or spruce, and eating ice cream made from the milk of cows which now pasture upon the gra.s.s where once the ice stood a thousand feet deep! Mendenhall, according to the best authorities, is at least twenty-five miles long,--almost twice the length of the largest glacier the Alps affords.

The highest mountain peak in Alaska was known to the Russians as _Bulshaia_ and to the natives of Cook Inlet as _Traleyka_. Both words signify the "great" or the "high" mountain. The natives of the interior called it _Denali_, but in 1895 it was named Mt. McKinley. It is twenty thousand three hundred feet high, exceeded in height only by Aconcogua of South America and Mt. Everest in Indo-China. It was named by W. A.

d.i.c.key, who saw it from the Susitna River. Later its position and alt.i.tude were determined. Many have attempted to ascend it. In 1912 Prof. Herschel Parker of Columbia University and Mr. Belmore Browne of Tacoma, Was.h.i.+ngton, got within three hundred feet of the summit, and in 1913, Rev. Hudson Stuck, Archdeacon of the Yukon and author of _Ten Thousand Miles with a Dog Sled_ and _Voyages on the Yukon_, together with three companions, reached the top.

Above the recently-created National Park Mt. McKinley towers in majestic sublimity, the everlasting sentinel, the guardian, as it were, of the last and loveliest spot on earth which remains as Nature fas.h.i.+oned it, still untouched by human hands.

Mt. St. Elias is better known and has been much written about. Its height is eighteen thousand and twenty-four feet. Mt. Logan is nineteen thousand five hundred and forty feet. Of the two now-celebrated pa.s.ses in the mountains of the Yukon, the Chilkoot and White Pa.s.s, the former is at a height of three thousand one hundred feet and the latter at a height of twenty-eight hundred feet. It was over these pa.s.ses that the gold-seekers of 1898 stampeded into Klondike.

But the mountains of Alaska, glorious, majestic and awe-inspiring as they are, are the losers when compared with the greatest of Alaskan wonders, the volcanoes. Of these, Mt. Katmai, opposite the Island of Kodiak, the terrific eruption of which in June, 1912, is well remembered, is most celebrated. At that time a ma.s.s of ash and pummice, the volume of which is estimated at _five cubic miles_, was thrown into the air. It buried an area about the size of the State of Connecticut to a depth varying from ten inches to ten feet and smaller amounts of the ash fell as far as nine hundred miles away. Unquestionably, the notoriously cold, wet summer which followed the eruption was due to the fine dust which was thrown into the higher regions of the atmosphere to such an extent as to have a profound effect upon the weather. At the time of the eruption I was at sea, on my way from St. Michael to the States. It was not long until the ash began falling over us, filling the air and seemingly trying to cover the face of the waters. It got into our lungs and made them ache. It was not until some time later that I heard that it was Mt. Katmai which had exploded and that the eruption was one which would go down in history. There was not, of course, the enormous loss of life which followed the eruptions of Vesuvius, Stromboli and Mt. Pelee. But in other respects the explosion of Mt. Katmai was unique. Kodiak, the town which was buried, was a hundred miles away. Ash fell as far away as Juneau, Ketchikan and the Yukon valley, distant respectively six hundred, seven hundred and fifty and nine hundred miles.

In the report of the leader of the National Geographic Society's Mt.

Katmai Expedition of 1915-'16, Robert F. Griggs, of the Ohio State University, is the following paragraph which gives concisely a good idea of the magnitude of the explosion:

"Such an eruption of Vesuvius would bury Naples under fifteen feet of ash. Rome would be covered a foot deep. The sound would be heard at Paris. Dust from the crater would fall in Brussels and Berlin and the fumes would be noticeable far beyond Christiana, Norway."

Yet it was only a little over a year after this eruption that I myself saw those ash-laden hills covered again with green verdure! The native blue-top hay was growing right through the ash which had been washed off the hills and was then covering the land a foot and a half deep. I was deeply interested in the native method of harvesting this hay. In the pursuit of agriculture as I understood it I had never encountered this practice elsewhere. The hay was cut high up on the mountain. It was done into bundles in fish nets and was then sent tumbling down the mountain-side to the bottom. There it was picked up and carried off homeward or else loaded on boats to be s.h.i.+pped elsewhere.

At the time of the eruption the natives, fortunately for them, were all away fis.h.i.+ng. They were never permitted to return to their mountain.

The government built them a new town and conveyed them thither in a body, thus establis.h.i.+ng them in it. The village was not near the crater. It was about twenty-five miles away. This is five times as far distant from the volcano as Pompeii was from Vesuvius or St. Pierre from Mt. Pelee.

As has been said, the verdure has returned. Around Kodiak it is vividly, beautifully green. But the Katmai Valley, once fertile and now a barren waste, contains what the writer firmly believes to be the most wonderful and awe-inspiring sight in the whole world. On the second visit of the Expedition of the National Geographic Society, the following year, Prof. Griggs explored and named it. He called it "The Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes"--than which there could be no better name!

There are no words in the language capable of giving any definite impression of the scene. Stretching away as far as the eye can see, until the valley is lost in the far-distant mountains, lie literally thousands of small volcanos, replicas in miniature of Katmai, the Great! From almost every one of them shoots a slender column of steam which rises steadily and gracefully, sometimes to a height of a thousand feet before it breaks or even wavers! Words become futile. One could not exaggerate it if he tried. There would not be an adjective left in the language when he finished!