Jasper County Democrat, Volume 18, Number 68, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 24 November 1915 — DEVELOPING ALASKA. [ARTICLE]

DEVELOPING ALASKA.

All the Strikes Made There Were AJade by Men Who Were Broke. All the strikes made in Alaska were made by men who were out of a job. If all the men in Alaska had been profitably employed all the time the country would never have been developed even to the present extent. It was, indeed, once said wittily that a prospector in Alaska is a man out of a job. You will notice all the time that when a man has no employment he calls himself a miner. In doing so he is telling a lot of truth, because when a man has no employment in this northern territory he turns to the hills and creeks, and he may turn to them for more than one purpose. He may go out and prospect or he may go out and pretend to prospect, to make his credit good. In the Atlin country in the old days, when the pay w as very slim, the phrase “standing off the grocer’’ was a regular synonym for prospecting, or even mining. These are some of the little things which one has learned by long years in the territory. They are things which new arrivals cannot see, and no one could expect outsiders tose* them, so the result is that people who do not know Alaska are the people whp warp men to keep our. 11 might be respect fu Ily suggested to Secretary Lane that the best way iir which to develop the country around the railroad would be to send as many broke men Up here as possible. That is, men who, though broke, have a backbone that isn’t broke. That is an exaggerated way, perhaps, -of pointing out a lesson, but there is a lot of reason in it, as most thinking sourdoughs will tell you. A wealthy man never made a discovery in Alaska. It is pretty safe to say that-, and it is even safe to say that no man who ever had a job in Alaska ever discovered anything. . Dawson was discovered by a Squawman, Nome by herders, Fairbanks by a Jap, and so on almost down the line. To go back to a subject which is often dwelt upon: Do the mining men of the Kenai Peninsula and the other districts around it ever feel that some sort of an organization of themselves would aid in the development of the country? At a first glance, at least, it looks as if a wellorganized body of men who are engaged in mining could perform an immense lot of good for the district, and therefore for themselves individually. The first great difficulty in all mining camps is to get Gateway.