Under such conditions the pack horse adds little to the solution of the problem. He cannot both work and forage. Men "packers" were at one time paid as high as 60 cents a pound for packing over the Chilcoot Pass, but the rate had been 10 cents. Over the White Pass, where horses could be used, the rates were never lower than 10 cents, and often 20 cents. Horse trains were maintained only by a constant fresh supply of horses from the south, few animals surviving more than two or three trips. Of 3,800 horses taken north in 1897, all but 30 died on the trail. To cheapen transportation a wagon road was hastily built in 1898 and a toll levied of 2 cents a pound. In 1899 this was succeeded by a railroad, and freight rates have fallen from the original maximum of 60 cents a pound for 40 miles, from water to water, to $3.75 to $5.50 per hundred pounds for the 2,500 miles from San Francisco or Puget Sound to Dawson. It is 112 miles by rail from tide water over the 2,800-foot pass to White Horse, below the dangerous rapids of the upper river, and to Dawson by the river it is 451 miles further. The fare from Skagway is $70, and the fastest time made, 32 hours.

In the year 1901 the White Pass Railroad carried 33,471 tons of freight and 16,472 passengers, receiving from passenger traffic $252,932.71, and from freight, express, mail, and telegrams, $1,505,132.64, an average for freight of $43 a ton for 112 miles. Operating expenses, naturally heavy, were 42.42 per cent of the receipts. The first cost of this road, including many expensive franchises and the buying up of possible rivals, was $4,250,000, and in the first season its gross receipts were officially reported to exceed $4,000,000, with operating expenses of about $1,000,000. The actual facts as to this highway into Alaska and the Yukon Valley are given to show the great difficulties and expense of transportation in opening up a

new country, where in spite of a rapid fall in rates after the first season, a successful transportation enterprise will usually pay for itself with one year's earnings.

It causes regret to Americans that this brilliant undertaking, conceived and executed by American engineers, could find no American backers-that London, unhampered by the timidity which afflicts New York in presence of a new region, boldly and promptly investigated, financed, and carried it through. The headquarters of the road have been moved from the United States to Vancouver, and the great bulk of the freight is no longer from the United States, but almost wholly from Canada.

Besides having enjoyed thus far the monopoly of the shortest entrance to the Yukon Valley, the White Pass will remain the only approach to the rich Atlin country, a lake region just beyond the coast range, which is slowly but surely developing, producing this last season nearly $1,000,000 in gold. Atlin and the Upper Yukon country will always be exclusively tributary to this road. As there is no other pass through which a road can be built, for an indefinite period the revenues of the White Pass route may be counted on to increase, but of the rich Klondike region with Dawson as its center it is likely very soon to be dispossessed. From the Stewart River 72 miles above Dawson to Nulato below the Koyukuk River, a distance of just a thousand miles, there are nearer and better seaports than Skagway. The best of these is the bay of Valdes, 10 miles long and 3 wide, as protected and beautiful as a Swiss lake, and nearest of all salt-water harbors to Dawson.

In 1900 and 1901 Major Abercrombie built a government trans-Alaskan military trail from Valdes into the Copper River Valley. Last winter over this road the freight rate to Copper Center, 103 miles, was 48 cents by dog team; during the summer by pack horse it rose to

$1.50 per pound, as mud is much more difficult traveling than snow and ice. In October, 1900, the mail schedule from Valdes to the American Yukon was reduced to twenty days, and in April, 1901, the trip was made by the mail carriers in thirteen days. Beginning the first of January, 1903, the mail contractors put on a weekly stage, four trips each way monthly between Valdes and Dawson. This winter, for the first time, it will be possible for American mails and Ameri

start bonanza wheat farms, but because the proximity of the great mining camps will give them a very high return for all they can raise. Fresh milk and butter, eggs, and poultry, fresh beef and mutton, hay and oats for animals, fresh vegetables for men, command fancy prices. John F. Rice, quartermaster's clerk, in his official report to Major Abercrombie, states that the city of Eagle is second only to Dawson in importance; that the route from Eagle

can passengers to go to the American Yukon as quickly and as cheaply as over the Canadian route.

Five large ocean steamers, besides many sailing vessels, run each month between Puget Sound and Valdes, which is also connected by telegraph line with Eagle, Dawson, and the outside world. The increase of travel by this route is due to the discovery that the Copper River valley promises to be a great agricultural region, capable of affording homes to thousands of settlers, who will go there not because they can

to Valdes presents no such obstacles as routes through the Rocky Mountains or Cascades; that there is an abundance of grass from May until October; that the natural food resources of central Alaska are caribou, moose, brown and black bear, mountain goat, geese, duck, grouse, salmon, pickerel, perch, bass, whitefish, trout, pike, and grayling.

It is, however, not the agricultural resources that will immediately attract the largest influx of population and capital. About 140 miles from Valdes, in the Chitina Valley, are very great

Copyright, 1898, E. A. Hegg

copper deposits, which during the last season have been visited by many experts. Some of the ores run 85 per cent copper, and there are many thousand tons in sight assaying 16 per cent. A great mountain slide has occurred in this region, revealing, it is claimed, as much as 40,000,000 tons of high-grade copper ores. Valdes Bay and the lower pass north of it are the American gateways to the Yukon Valley, and already a railroad has been surveyed and partially graded to the interior, for the copper, which, though it can be quarried like the iron ores of Lake Superior, without a railroad will remain worthless. The railroad itself is assured an unlimited tonnage. It is the shortest line to Dawson and the Yukon Valley, and, what is of more importance, it can carry supplies delivered at Valdes from sailing vessels or deep-draft ocean steamers in all the months of the year, with only one break of bulk at Valdes, and also reach the deep navigable Yukon and the Koyukuk a month earlier than

by the Yukon mouth, which is closed by Bering Sea ice until July 1. As shown in the history of the White Pass Railroad, the ingoing traffic would be in itself sufficient to warrant a railroad, but from Dawson the only export is gold, about 70 tons a year, while this road will not only carry all the United States Government troops and supplies, for which many hundred thousand dollars are spent, but it will have the unlimited outbound tonnage of high-grade copper ores, which, with a freight rate of $2 a ton from Valdes to the smelters of Puget Sound, will scarcely be treated in the interior.

It is not too much to expect that improvement in transportation facilities alone will convert central Alaska into as densely a populated and prosperous a region as Colorado, as the Black Hills of South Dakota, as the rich mining region of British Columbia.

There is another part of Alaska waiting for transportation facilities. It is not so dazzling as the Klondike nor as

Far to the northwest lies the Seward Peninsula, suggesting on the map an animal's head snarling across Bering Strait at the nearby Siberia. By rivers and sea it is almost wholly separated from the mainland, and though comprising but 3 per cent of the area of Alaska, or 20,000 square miles in 600,000, it has yielded for the last three years nearly 75 per cent of the gold output, in spite of the increasing yield of the great quartz mines of the southeast, near Juneau.

Although the most distant region of North America, 2,700 statute miles from Puget Sound, it owes the rapid exploration and development of its coast to the fact that an all-water route was open to its shores, and that freight still costing a minimum of $70 a ton into Dawson is being landed on the Nome beach for $10 a ton. Passenger rates, higher in the first rush, have fallen to $40 and $50 first class and $20 or $25 steerage.

as well as the low coast and shortness of time required, impelled by stories that were indeed true of rich golden beaches, about 25,000 people and their chattels landed on the low sandy spit at Nome and were left to the mercy of surf and storm. The Eskimo, very numerous along this coast, who have none of the aloofness of the Indian, came in their umiaks, big skin boats that can carry fifty people and all their belongings, and made camp with the whites; but the Eskimo, needing no barometer, intuitively flee several days before a storm. Not so the whites, who every year have been caught. In September, 1900, when there were more than 12,000 campers along the beach, the surf rolled in, wrecked much of the shipping in the offing, and destroyed about $1,500,000 of miscellaneous property on the beach, and every year since, similar if not so severe disasters have occurred. Driftwood, piled high landwards from Nome,

shows that on occasion the sea sweeps the whole site of the present city.

This is not the only danger. Another is fire. The streets are narrow, and the houses-flimsy wooden structures—stand in serried rows. Because of the cold, there are hot fires everywhere. There are few brick chimneys, and in winter there is no water supply. If a serious fire should occur in midwinter, destroying shelter, food, and fuel, no relief could reach the stricken people. The nearest open port on the Pacific is 500 miles to the southeast. is 1,711 miles from Dawson, with no roads to either place. Bering Sea is in the same latitude as the Baltic, and, like the Baltic, is shallow and brackish, owing to the many rivers which empty fresh water and silt into it. In winter surface ice readily forms, extending 300 to 400 miles south of Nome, effectually isolating the city from November I until June 1.

It

This is unendurable, and three projects are under consideration to effect communication throughout the whole year. The simplest is to maintain in Bering Sea an ice-breaker of the Admiral Ermak type, an easy task, as the ice is not as thick and solid in Bering Sea as in the northern Russian ports. The second project is to build a railroad from Cook Inlet or Prince William Sound on open Pacific waters to Nome by way of St Michael. The third plan is to connect Nome by railroad with the lower Yukon River, and ultimately effect a junction with the railroad from Valdes to Eagle. To complete this project would require about 900 miles of track.

The gold yield of the Nome region has hitherto come from the sea beaches and from gulches and beaches at most 10 miles from water transportation. Even 10 miles has proved almost prohibitive. In winter the placers are not worked and the camps are closed. advantage can therefore be taken of the smooth snow and ice roads. In summer

No

the tundra is two or three feet of mud, with a bottom of frozen ground. The services of teams are worth from $20 to $40 a day, and it takes a whole day to haul 1,500 pounds 10 miles. The lowest rate is three times as much as the minimum from Puget Sound to Nome, 2,700 miles, and twice as much as the rate from San Francisco or Puget Sound to Dawson. So prohibitive were the natural conditions that Mr Chas. D. Lane, of the Wild Goose Company, considered it wise economy to devote 90 per cent of the output of certain placer claims to a transportation system, thus reducing cost of exploitation for all future output to 10 per cent, rather than indefinitely to spend 90 per cent of the yield for transportation alone.

The Wild Goose Railroad, 7 miles long from Nome to Anvil Creek, earned its total first cost within thirty days of its opening and shows increasing earnings each year. From Council City, on the Niukluk River about 90 miles from Nome, Mr Lane has built a second road, also 7 miles long, connecting Council with Ophir Creek, and this road has also paid for itself in one season. Council is 55 miles from the nearest seaport, up a shallow, winding river. That part of the Seward Peninsula on which Nome is located, a part about 5,000 miles in area, was, geologically speaking, very recently an island. A deep indentation of the ocean runs 50 miles inland from Port Clarence, northwest of Nome, and Golofnin Bay, about 70 miles east of Nome, also extends many miles inland. These two bays are joined by a deep valley, so that 60 miles north and inland from Nome it is possible with one short portage to go from sea to sea. Council City lies in this depression, Ophir Creek and innumerable other rich creeks emptying into it from both sides. Gold has been found in paying quantities on nearly all of them, but it is impossible yet to de