Alaska Its Neglected Past Its Brilliant Future

Cover Alaska Its Neglected Past Its Brilliant Future

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER I. Alaska's Attractions. IN a geography of comparatively recent date I find : " Alaska is a cold country, and is valuable only for its furs and f1sheries. Most of its inhabitants are Indians." Such is the description of a land whose aggregate area is five thousand one hundred and seven square miles; whose ex

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treme width, from east to west, is two thousand two hundred miles, in an air line; whose breadth, from north to south, is one thousand four hundred miles; whose coast, if extended in a straight line, would belt the globe, and whose great river, the Yukon, running away into Canadian territory, is computed to be not less than three thousand miles long, two thousand of which is navigable, while its width ranges from one to five miles for fully one thousand miles of its course. Its five mouths and intervening deltas exceed seventy miles in extent. The size of this great river should be sufficient for national pride alone in its possession, but that is not all. Its shores, or at least the country traversed by it, is teeming with virgin mines of gold, silver and copper. The Indians find in its neighborhood beautiful furs which they carry many miles intheir canoes to the trading posts. The supply would naturally be much greater if there were less laborious modes of conveyance. Prospectors tell us that there are almost inexhaustible mines of coal of excellent quality, actually jutting out before those who have explored the islands and more inland places. The trip to Alaska is safe and comfortable by the inland passage. Fine passenger and safe freight steamers sail periodically along the sounds, straits and bays protected by the islands of the British Columbian and the Alaskan coasts, giving the excursionists the opportunity of gaining the full benefit of a sea water...

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