“MUCH MALIGNED”

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 48, 20 November 1928, Page 8

“MUCH MALIGNED”

ALASKA AS IT REALLY IS POPULAR MISCONCEPTION Alaska is popularly regarded as a land of snow, ice, and blizzard. Mr. Robert Bell, of Christchurch, who returned vesterday from a six months’ visit to the north-west of Canada and California, told a “Dominion” representative that it was time the popular misconception of that fertile land was removed. “Alaska is a much-maligned country,” said Mr. Bell. “The popular misconception may be laid at the doors of those writers of fiction who have dealt for the most part with the, in many cases, tragic incidents of the Klondike gold rush of ’9B. But these novelists in their desire to harrow the souls of their readers forgot to paint the other and brighter side of the picture—the fact that for at least four solid months of the year the sun shines without intermission and the flowers bloom. Indeed, during those months the sun works overtime. In midsummer it does not set at all during the twenty-four hours of the day, and tapers off from that to twenty, eighteen, and sixteen hours, and so on, a day. It requires little imagination to envisage the amount of growth, not only of flowers but of crop and garden produce, generated by so much sunshine when the fertilising power of the snow and frost which have melted and sunk into the earth is also taken into account. “For instance, the yield of wheat at Government agricultural farms has been ns high as GO bushels to the acre; oats, 134 bushels; barley, G 6 bushels; peas, 21 bushels. I have seen vegetables —potatoes, cabbages, lettuce, etc.— growing in gardens in Dawson, which lies within two degrees of the Arctic circle, that would make the amateur gardeners of New Zealand envious. As for flowers, I have rarely seen larger or more gorgeously coloured blooms of dahlias, chrysanthemums, gladiola, and delphiniums than in the gardens of residents of Skagway and Dawson. As for wild flowers, I have never in my travels in many countries seen such a wealth of colour or variety of species. Sweet peas, forget-me-nots, lupins, roses, fireweed, asters, bluebells, larkspur, and many others clothe the hillsides and the valleys like multi-colour-ed carpets. Surely it is time the popular misconception of this fertile land was removed. When I speak of Alaska I mean not only that huge tract of country purchased by America from Russia in 1863, but that vast region extending from the Northern Pacific to the Arctic Ocean known as the Yukon territory of Canada.” “Apart from the teeming fertility of the soil, those countries are immensely rich in minerals, which so far have scarcely been tapped. Coal, gold, silver, and other minerals still await the pioneer. The Klondike Valley and its tributaries, which only thirty years ago attracted the alluvial miner and yielded such rich rewards, is now being ploughed to a depth of thirty and fifty feet by mammoth dredges in the quest for the yellow metal. The miles upon miles of huge mounds of tailings, after those monsters have passed along, appal the visitor, who cannot help deploring that such a fertile valley should be so ruthlessly devastated and turned into a wilderness of stones in the mad desire for a ‘quick return’ instead of being tilled and yielding every year its harvests of golden grain. “This great country, too, has unlimited supplies of timber, and its forests are the home of thousands of animals whose furs are in demand the world over at prices which are steadily moving up at fashion’s decree. If the day of the miner with his shovel and pan have gone, I should say temporily gone, the day of the trapper has surely succeeded, for he is receiving a larger and ever larger reward for his labour, his isolation, and his hardships.

“Transportation is one of the difficulties of this vast region. True, the Yukon is navigable for over 2000 miles, and many steamers ply on its broad bosom, but railways and roads have scarcely yet begun their civilising influence. In time these will come. Strange as it may appear, aviation is not unknown in this far-away ami little-known land, for at Dawson I saw the landing plateau for the air service which plies during several months of the year carrving passengers and mails to the isolated posts of this vast and as yet little-known region of the earth.”