THE DEVELOPMENT OF ALASKA.
The United States becomes increasingly conscious of the excellence of the bargain which it made when it bought Alaska for the nominal sum of $7,200,000. Several official reports have called attention to the subject recently with glowing accounts of the vast resources of the territory, the progress made in development, and the increasing prosperity of the people. More and more American tourists are visiting the country each year, to return with enthusiastic accounts of its possibilities, and one prominent industrialist predicts that a new pioneering slogan, "Go North, young man 1 " will earn deserved popularity before long. Alaska's two major industries at present are fishing and mining Both have shown consistent growth since the War, the combined value of their products, as an instance, being for last year 25 per cent, above that for 1927. Since America bought the territory, minerals worth about six hundred million dollars have been produced in the Alaskan mines. From the fisheries, the revenue last year alone was about fifty-five million dollars. And the resources of the country have scarcely begun to be touched. We learned recently, for instance, of huge untouched deposits of coal, estimated at some five hundred million tons. Substantial contracts for Alaskan timber for newsprint have recently been entered into and are confidently stated to presage immense industrial developments to come with, incidentally, a shrewd challenge to the Canadian paper companies.
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