ALASKA, THE POSSIBILITIES OF.-He would have been considered a rash prophet who five years ago had the temerity to predict that Alaska would one day become a great and powerful state.

Yet, today, such a prediction would not be ascribed to prophetic sight, but simply a common-sense view, a foregone conclusion, based on the resources and possibilities inherent in the territory. The change of opinion is due to the fact that it has been demonstrated that Alaska has agricultural possibilities of a high order. The development of agriculture will enhance the value of the other vast and varied resources of the territory a thousand fold. It will make it possible to work the extensive placer mines not rich enough in gold to pay at the present prices for foodstuffs, as well as the enormous deposits of low-grade quartz ores found nearly everywhere in the mountains.

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Alaska has been maligned, abused and totally misunderstood. It has been garded as a frozen, worthless waste, whose only value consisted in its seal fisheries, and totally incapable of furnishing homes for a civilized people. These ideas are still current even in quarters where one would naturally expect to find a knowledge of the facts. Through the instrumentality of Secretary Seward, Alaska was purchased from Russia in 1867 for the sum of $7,200,000. It has already paid for itself many times over, and still we have scarcely begun to realize how enormous the resources are. What the profits to the lessees of the sealing privilege have been will probably never be made known, but it is interesting to note that the rentals received or due the government for the lease of this privilege from 1870 to 1895 amounted to almost the original cost of the territory, namely, $7,192,540.41 (Senate Document No. 81, 54th Congress, 2d session); and as to the income from mines, it is commonly reported that more than

an equal sum has been taken from a single mine near Juneau, to say nothing of the millions taken out in other places.

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Alaska has an area of 591,000 square miles, in round numbers; that is to say, it is as large as all of the United States east of the Mississippi River, exclusive of the four states of Florida, Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi. It requires an effort of the mind to grasp the significance of such an expanse of territory. never could be a greater misconception in regard to a geographical fact than the popular idea that it is a snow-covered, inhospitable waste, and it is strange that this idea should be so persistently propagated and disseminated among the people. As a matter of fact, you can travel from one end of the Yukon to the other in summer time and never see snow. You see, on the contrary, a tangle of luxuriant vege tation, large forests, and such delicacies as wild raspberries, red currants, huckleberries, and cranberries in profusion. In places the grass grows as high as a man's shoulder. At Holy Cross Mission I desired to photograph some cattle, native born, reared by the fathers, and for that purpose asked that they be turned into a meadow reserved for hay. To my astonishment I found that the cattle were totally out of sight when they got into the grass, which reached above their backs.

Alaskan tourists are largely responsible for the false conception which is abroad in regard to the agricultural possibilities of the country. The high mountain range which skirts the sea coast is covered with snow and glaciers. It has a rugged, forbidding aspect. People who go as far north as Skagway and back again to Seattle in a two weeks' trip fondly imagine that they are studying Alaska, and that they are quite prepared to pass judgment on the whole territory, when, as a matter of fact, they have not been within 200 miles of the 141st meridian, where Alaska proper