Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 12, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 January 1914 — MIGHTY RIVER IS THE YUKON [ARTICLE]

MIGHTY RIVER IS THE YUKON

Body of Water, at Places Sixty Miles Wide, is the Hope'of the Territory of Alaska.

Dismiss from your mind any notion that the Yukon river is a puny stream fed by eternal glaciers and trickling away to the sea. It Is a river, so mighty that it can spread out over a width of 'SO miles on the Yukon flats and still have depth enough in the main channel to float heavily laden ' '•w* ' .A; *•

freight steamers. From its mouth (near St. Michael) at the Behring sea it is navigable ail the way to White Horse, in the Yukon territory of Can* ada, an unbroken stretch of over 2,100 miles —two-thirds of the distance from New York to San Francisco. Add to this the navigable water' of its tributaries —370 miles on the Innoko river, 320 on the Iditarod, 620 on the Koyukuk. and 302 on the Tanana —and you will begin to have a fair idea of what a Mg river we have in our great empire beneath th® northern lights.

The valley drained by this wonderful river system of the north is the hope of Alaska. The wealth of the past and of today has come from mines atnd fisheries; and the lifetime of all mining regions is briefer even than human life. It has been only a few years, you remember, since the Klondike was the most active mining camp in the world; today it is a valley long since deserted by the iadb vidual miner and turned over to two big dredging companies, which work the low-grade tailings.—Leslie’s.