The daily morning journal and courier., 1903-09-04
L. L. SAWYER ON NOME.
The Colonel Has Had Enough of Pierc-
 ing Cold Weather.

The Colonel Has Had Enough of Pierc-
 ing Cold Weather.
 The Meriden Journal of September 2 has the following in reference to L. l.. Sawyer, who is pleasantly remembered by quite number of old friends in New Haven: } r~
 Colonel Ludovic L. Sawyer, whose re- election last spring as a a.member of the school board in Nome, Alaska, was duly chronicled in the Journal at the time the news first reached here, has written to a Meriden friend and the letter just received is highly characteristic of the old warhorse of democracy in his palm jest days as a resident of the Silver City. That the colonel has had about enough of the hardships of the 'hyper- borean land' of Nome is quite evident from the tone of his epistle.
 T don't know. he says, Eff will be able to go out this next fall or not. Three winters are quite enough at my age up here, and no change. My seri- ous sickness last spring admonished us to make change.
 ''There are times in winter-the bliz- gard times when the thermometer tells a story of intense cold. But, if shelter ed, with supplies and fuel, and not obliged to be out in the intense cold and caught in a blizzard we have to stand it and make the best of it. was caught out and badly frozen last winter. Mrs. Sawyer got her face and nose skinned just going out for a few minutes.
 s'But the isolation, is less bearable than the weather-to be shut out from the world and imprisoned in ice and snow, to have to wat for more than two months for the mail to come, and then get no letters. Why by the time mail reaches us in winter a man might make two trips around the earth. He might have taken the Lunar Limited express, travelling at the rate of thirty miles an hour and completed trip to the moon.
 Yet there is a big store of gold lock- ed up in these frozen hills. This gener- If I could get the hands of the clock back ten years would be assured of a 'pile'-a big poke of gold.
 ,"We up here-where there is not tree-alI barren-long to be in the land that Is fairer than this When after being imprisoned = ice bound eight months, we see the ice go out from the beach to the Behring sea, we breathe a sigh of relief. For eight months we . have looked out over the sea and real ized that the expanse of ice, stretching as far as vision reached, was the bar rier that closed us in and shut us out from the balance of the world; and to see the ice go makes on feel like a prisoner whose jail door has been un- barred to admit him to lige and liberty"
 The colonel sent along set of election tickets, such as used in Nome, and on this subject he had the following inter- esting comments:
 s'Voting is by secret ballot. There are no party political organizations. We do not know what our neighbors' national politics is and care less. There are no primaries-no nominations. Candidates by petition filed run for office. The sev- en getting the highest votes are elected to the common council and the three for the school directors.
 E 'sMy friend, John c. Byxbee, the most : shrewd politician ever in Connecticut and my tutor. couldn't hold candle to me un here in the way we run an election. Every man is for himself and the al take the hindmost."
 The election is described as the live Hest ever seen in Nome. A large vote was boiled. 1,1s5, out of a registration of 1866 and the Nome Nugget, in giving the result of the election, said: "All the candidates had teams on the streets to carry the free and independent voters to and from the polling places in the city jail"