OFFICIAL GIVES
OUTLINE OF
OURJUTURE
W. A. Ryan, who is connected with
the office of Secretary of the Interior
Dane, is on an official visit to Alaska,
analyzing conditions along the route
of the government railway and is look
ing into the resources and possibili
ties of the country. Mr. Ryan spent
several days in Cordova, while en
route to Fairbanks and Nenana, and is
now in Anchorage. In a recent issue
of the Alaska Railroad Record he
speaks optimistically of this territory
as follows:
"Alaska can pay the Nation’s War
Debt!”
There is a fine flavor of magnifi
cence in this slogan originatel by the
Alaska Citizen, of Fairbanks.
In seven words Mr. J. H. Caskey,
the editor of the Citizen, has summed
up the limitless resources and ambi
tions of Alaska. The phrase conveys
to the war-ridden world the hope, nay,
the promise that Alaska can and will
create sufficient wealth during the
next two or three generations to mini
mize, if not to neutralize, the burden
of debt placed upon the people of the
United States through the great war.
To anyone at all conversant with
the potential wealth of Alaska the
claim will not seem at all extravagant.
The Nenana News and the Anchor
age Times have declared their con
fident belief in the possibility that the
potential wealth of this great terri
tory is sufficient to accomplish this
result. There will be those, of
course, who will challenge the possi
bility, but they will be men of small
vision.
Twenty years ago the world looked
upon the old Indian Nation as a cattle
range of little value for agriculture
and of none for mineral production.
Yet Oklahoma’s coal lands, oil lands
and zinc mines have added untold
wealth to the nation. The western
half of the United States was regard
ed as a desert by the majority of the
people of the United States. The
school books in my school days re
ferred to the “Great American Des
ert,” just as Alaska is now referred
to as a land of ice and snow. The
Llano Estacado was never dreamed of
as a region of boundless riches, yet
that Great American Desert is dotted
with cities and towns and the oil pro
duction of the staked plains is enorm
ous. Besides those regions once so
inhospitable, so bleak and barren,
Alaska is a fruitful field. It was to
the wise and provident policies of the
national government, which through
its liberal laws, made the develop
ment of the latent wealth of the great
west possible that the burdens laid
upon the people by the Civil War
were made easy to bear and easy to
pay. The west paid that debt many
times over.
Alaska’s Great Area.
In area Alaska equals that part of
the United States west of the Missis
sippi. It has as many square miles
as twenty-eight of the forty-eight
states of the Union. It has as great
a variety of resources as the northern
tier of states possesses. At Fairbanks
recently a banquet was given by the
Agricultural Society at which every
article of food, Including the sugar,
was of local production. Cattle and
horses, wintered in the open in some
of the interior valleys, come out in the
spring butter-fat and as sleek as if
cared for in box stalls. The enormous
herds of mountain sheep and caribou
are demonstrations of the value of
the ranges for meat production. The
grain production of the Fairbanks and
Rampart farmers prove that cereal
crops are not confined to the valleys
of the coastal Blope.
But the basic industry, of course,
is and must be mineral production.
There are literally millions of acres
of alluvial gold, silver, tin and copper
deposits that would be held of bo
nanza richness in California that are
now unproductive because of the ex
cessive costs of recovery. With the
completion of the government railroad
and connecting wagon roads to points
of production, with adequate water
lines on interior rivers and sufficient
coastwise shipping facilities, the de
velopment of Alaska’s mineral re
sources must be rapid and remuner
ative. Central power plants eligibly
located for the distribution of electric
power to the various mining camps
would revolutionize mining methods
and production costs. Electric cur
rent may be transmitted to distant
and Inaccessible regions where the
cost of fuel transportation would be
prohibitive. Mills for the reduction
and concentration of ores operated
electrically will in turn reduce the
cost of transportation to the railroad.
It is even possible that systems of
trolley lines for the operation of elec
trically-driven trucks over mountain
roads may be found practical and eco
nomical. Looking twenty years ahead
none of these foreshadowed possibili
ties will seem stranger or more won
derful than the developments of the
twenty years just passed.
Wonders of Recent Years.
w no ispeaamg twenty years ago as
I am today of the next twenty years)
had predicted that in metallurgy a
method of floating the mineral con
tent of ores on soap bubbles would
increase production and reduce costs
would have been regarded otherwise
than as a dreamer? Who, then pre
dicting the aeroplane as the winning
factor in a world war, the submarine
as an instrument that would nearly
annihilate trans-oceanic commerce, or
would have foretold the completion of
the Panama Canal by the United
Stats, or would have pictured our gov
ernment as owner and operator of
great systems of hydro-electric gener
ation and distribution, as reclaiming
vast areas of arid lands by irrigation
—who, I say, predicting these things
twenty years ago, would have been
classed other than as a visionary?
Perhaps the United States govern^
ment may never construct a system
of wagon roads in Alaska; it may
never erect immense electric power
plants adjacent to its coal fields and'
distribute the power throughout the
mining districts; it may never elec
trify the Alaskan railroad; it may
never encourage and stimulate the
search for gold and other mineral'
riches of Alaska by directly aiding
prospectors, as Canada does; it may
never appropriate money to assist in
the development of Alaskan re
sources; it may never establish a sys
tem of farm loans and' state aid for
agriculture, but if it does not it will
be because Alaskans fail to impress
upon the nation the importance and
profitableness of such' policies. River
and harbor improvements, railroad
land grants, liberal land laws, liberal
forestry laws, generous mineral and
homestead rights, prodigal expen
ditures for public works fostered, en
couraged and made possible for a
single generation of Americans to ac
complish more in the development
of natural resources in the western
states than was ever accomplished
before in the history of mankind in
twenty generations. With the ex
ample of the prodigious increase of
national wealth due to these policies
so that the United States is the rich
est of all nations, how can any one be
lieve that Alaska will be left, like
Topsy, to “just grow”?
Those who know anything at all
about Alaska know that her coal, her
oil, her precious and semi-precious
mineral deposits are greater than
those of any other known like area
on this continent. Five well-defined
coal seams on Lignite Creek in the
Nenana field have a total thickness
of over 300 feet. One field in the Chu
litna district is reputed to have one
bed 200 feet thick. As these deposits
exceed the largest elsewhere known
so do most of Alaska’s mineral de
posits exceed those elsewhere known.
Alaska could readily support a pop
ulation of from twenty to thirty to the
square mile, or over 11,000,000. She
has less than 30,000. Sweden has a
population of thirty-one to the square
mile and Norway eighteen to the
square mile. Russia has ten prov
inces lying farther north than Anch
orage, and these ten provinces have a
population of over 5,000,000. The basic
industries of these far northern coun
tries, like that of Alaska, is mineral
production, but agriculture is by no
means neglected. The farms of these
countries, having about the same cli
matic conditions as Alaska, produce a
larger average per acre of grain crops
than southern European countries.
SCENES OF CONFUSION
IN PARIS STATIONS
PARIS, Jan. 14 (Correspondence of
the Associated Press).—The railway
stations of Paris are piled high with
American baggage these days. Moun
tains of bedding, rolls, locker trunks
and the customary belonging# of the
officer, block every spare space, for
these men are in exodus home They
represent very largely the officer
personnel not now attached to units,
traveling separately and trying to
reach ports of embarkation. Because
of this they have to use the* regular
trains and other Of travel
and transfer across the city.
Porters are few in Paris railway
stations. Those that exist are old
men or wounded men, so it is: not un
usual to see a colonel or two wrest
ling with his own: baggage side by
side with a whole* squad' of soldiers..
Then comes the hunt for a taxicab,
which is even more rare than the
porter and, usually, lacking- any
French, these Americans have-no easy
time getting out of one station to an
other.
But they manage it after a fashion
with the help of the American mili
tary police; whose red' hats-, and1 bras
sards are numerous in all the depots;.
-+_
The Daily Times Job plant is
well equipped for all classe of comi
mercial printing;
-*
Advertise in H»e Daily Times>
Mr. Business
Man
*
By the recent addition of many new
type faces and other equipment we have
made of our JOB DEPARTMENT one
of the finest in Alaska. We are now in
a position to handle your orders with
even more neatness and dispatch than
before. How about that order for sta
tionery you were wanting right away?
Just step to the phone and call us—
we will do the rest.
Prices? Well—, you will find them
always RIGHT.
There’s a Reason Why
Peepte- Os to the i
TRISCO CAFE
DAD’S THERE!
FOR SALE
New Boat Hulls
Pish ami Clam Power Boat
Hulls now ready at shop on Sec
ond street, next to Jail building.
E. D. LACY
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I MINING MACHINERY MARINE HARDWARE CANNERY SUPPLIES 0
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Wk E :
■ IN CORDOVA STOCK g
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The World’s Recognized Fishermen’s Engines, Medium and Heavy Duty, Four-Cycle, Extended Bases
NOTICE.—We are making new additions to our Machine Shop in Cordova, which before April the first will be complete, and comprise the fol
lowing new equipment: One 18-inch Monarch Lathe, 16-foot bed; one 13-inch South Bend Gap Bed Lathe; one Wilmarth & Morman Universal
Grinding Machine; a Vulcan 60-ton Hydraulic Press; one Buffalo Boiler Plate Slitting Shear; a Buffalo 4-inch Furnace; one Oster Pipe and Bolt
Threading Machine; a Becker-Brainard Milling Machine, 20x80-inch table; one Baker Key Seater; two Buffalo Upright - Geared Drilling and
Reaming Machines; a Universal Wood-Working Machine,*and many other electric and universal hand machines, including an Ox-Weld Acety
8 lene Welder and Detroit Electric Hardening Furnace.
HARMON MACHINERY COMPANY, INC.
* CORDOVA. ALASKA
.