derness.

The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may happen agriculturally
in Alaska or the rest of the arctic regions when the world outside is
filled up and all unfrozen lands are under cultivation. Still less is he
one who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract in
any way from its due claims to the attention of mankind. There is in the
territory a false newspaper sentiment that every one who lives in the
land should be continually singing extravagant praises of it and
continually making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska
because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities,"
because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed into
"waving fields of golden grain." But a man may also love it who regards
all such visions as delusions.

[Sidenote: FOOD AND FURS]

The game and the fish of Alaska, the natural subsistence of the Indian,
are virtually undiminished. Vast herds of caribou still wander on the
hills, and far more are killed every year by wolves than by men. Great
numbers of moose still roam the lowlands. The rivers still teem with
salmon and grayling and the lakes with whitefish, ling, and lush. Unless
the outrage of canneries should be permitted at the mouths of the
Yukon--and that would threaten the chief subsistence of all the Indians
of the interior--there seems no danger of permanent failure of the
salmon run, though, of course, it varies greatly from year to year.
Furs, though they diminish in number, continually rise in price. There
are localities, it is true, where the game has been largely killed off
and the furs trapped out; the Koyukuk country is one of them, though
perhaps that region never was a very good game country. In this region,
when a few years ago there was a partial failure of the salmon, there
was distress amongst the Indians. But the country on the whole is almost
as good an Indian country as ever it was, and there are few signs that
it tends otherwise, though things happen so quickly and changes come
with so little warning in Alaska that one does not like to be too
confident.

The Indian is the only settled inhabitant of interior Alaska to-day; for
the prospectors and miners, who constitute the bulk of the white
population, are not often very long in one place. Many of them might
rightly be classed as permanent, but very few as settled inhabitants. It
is the commonest thing to meet men a thousand miles away from the place