The Alaska prospector., 1904-02-25
AS Others See Us.

The following is from a write-up of Valdez by Arthur c. Johnson. |. recently published in the Dawson NEWS:
 Valdez, Alaska, a little city of 1900 souls, built on moraine at the head of Prince William sound. and fairly under the huge bodies of ice and snow which have Melted backward and left the soil for it to stand on, waits expectantly to be shunted into greatness by the same agent that seems to make and undo all towns that become important spots on the map-a railroad.
 In the meantime Valdez goes on being town where mushers land when they come from the outside, Seattle or San Francisco,) and where they put up and get supplies when they come from the diggings. many of them POO miles back over the high mountains clad in perpet- nal snow. In this Copper river country as in nearly every part of Alaska, the winter time is reserved for travelling and putting in sup plies, and the summer time for throwing the pay dirt into the sluice and washing out it's gold. Hard packed snow on the trail makes good travelling for the dogs, and the horses can pull quantities of grub on sleds instead of taking it in driblets on their, backs. So Valdez is lively in the winter, when the musher is coming and going, never neglecting to literally spend his dust on each arrival. In the summer there are not so many mushers and the people have more time to speculate on the building of railroads.
 As in the case of Seattle, all they had at Valdez when they commence ed to build it was wood and water. Dozens of picturesque little log cabins stand as monuments of the days before the enterprising Yam kee came along and unloaded his sawmill from the ship. He evident ly was not long in getting into operation for they say business be- gan to boom just as soon as the miners found that there was a good way to get into the Copper river country back of Valdez, and mer- chants had at least to have flat boards on which to spread out their wares From the little mill which nowadays whines away all day long behind its pile of sawdust, near. the beach, came the broad walks on which we travel about the we'll laid out little town, the two or three squares of neat little clap boarded stores, many neat resi- dences, and the vast wooden struct- ure where the reckless go to feed their nickels into the slot machine and onto the numbers of the roul- cite table, where you can see four games of ten pins going on at once in the series of bowling alleys, and where you can shoot at little white painted birds and rabbits with a 22-calibre rifle. The sawmill is also responsible for the two-story hotel-the telephone partition kind where you are kept awake nights by the snorings of your neighbOr m the room on one side and the coughing of the man on the other. There are only partitions of inch boards and wall paper. There are no plastered houses in yaldez-or in Alaska. The builder is lucky if he gets bricks and mortar enough to build chimney.
 They have two wooden newspa- per offices in Valdez, where ye edi- tor does his own type setting on the copy he has himself written, and once week turns to with the office devil to get out the regular edition of his journal on the old reliable Washington hand press. They have wooden blacksmith shops, wooden jewelry stores and wooden