The Saint Paul globe. (St. Paul, Minn.) 1896-1905, 1903-10-15
THURSDAY, OCTOBER IS, 1903.
THE VISITING STATESMAN.

Senator Dietrich, it appears, has
come back from Alaska with the usual
volume of exhaustive Instrumentation
] that the not too modest visiting states
man usually gathers. We are accus-
toned to the visitor who gives his i'm
preston of America to the reporter
who has gone down New York harbor
in a tug to meet his steamship. We
have heard some of the volumes Of
criticisms upon peoples and institu
tons made by writer's who had whirled
through their cities in express trains
and gathered their information of life
and customs from car windows. Sim
ilarly valuable are the laws laid down
by Senator Dietrich for Alaska's fu-
ture.
He has no great confidence, it ap-
pears, in Alaska's agricultural posi-
bilities. Now it happens that there
are many people living in Alaska who
have lived there summer and winter
for the last ten or fifteen years. They
have made trial of these very posi-
bilities, and have come to conclusions
widely different from those reached
by Senator Dietrich. He made a sum-
mer junketing trip along the customary
routes of travel in our great territory.
Doubtless he did his best to obtain in
formation, and doubtless meant to get
just such information as the politician
abroad gets of those who meet him.
1t is the men who have made Alaska
their home, not the prospectors or pro-
motors or place-hunters, who have as
certained what its resources and it's
possibilities are.
There ought not to be any manner of
question about this. They are written
in the records of common experience
and of scientific research. Along the
mighty coast line of Alaska there pre-
walls a climate which, between the first
mountain ranges and the ocean, is far
milder the year around than that of
the northern ATTITUDES of the United
States. There are found stretches of
immensely fertile land, capable of pro-.
ducing all vegetables and all cereals
raised in the states, with the possible
exception Of wheat and Indian corn.
Back in the interior, where the winters
are severe there is different climate.
but one still favorable to agriculture.
There the surface of the earth is
rich vegetable mold, formed by the
deposits of millions of wears of de-
caying organic matter. There is a sub
stratum of frozen soil and. ice that
never melts, summer or winter. from
which the growing plants in their sea-
son draw an unfailing supply of moist
ure. There come the wonderful sum.
mer days with their twenty hours or
so of forcing sunshine, combining with
the moisture to produce practically a
greenhouse temperature. There the
Mills are covered with plants like the
wild parsley, that grows to height Of
six feet or more. Every knoll is decked
with flowers more brilliantly perfect
and larger in growth than any known
to our climate, and every meadow is
clothed with thick standing grasses
that exceed in height the stature of the
tallest man.
Talk about country like this hav-
Ing no agricultural possibility! You
can grow anything there that does not
require longer season to mature than
the late and early frosts permit. There
was time when just these things
We're said of Minnesota. There was
a time when we had tc hammer