The Alaska prospector., 1908-04-30
BUILDING RAILROAD
 BY SLOW STAGES
Ballaine-Frost Row Marks Another Era in Career
 of Alaska Central.

outside papers bring an entertain ing account of a war of words be- tween John E. Ballaine and A. C.. Frost of the Alaska Central railroad i'll Frost's Chicago office, which near ly ended in scrap. The names of the belligerents are familiar to Alas ka. Ballaine is the original promoter of the Alaska Central railroad and Frost is now and has been for three years it's president.
 Concerning the merits of the busi- ness difficulty between these men probably nobody in Alaska is fully informed but two facts are well known to everybody in Seward and to many outside. John E. Ballaine is the man who started the Alaska Central in a fair way to make it a success and A. c. Frost is the man who ran it into the ground through gross mismanagement and incompe- tence.
 Never did big enterprise ill Alaska fizzle out through preposterous incom- petence like the Alaska Central. The work of construction was a kinder garten exhibition from the day Frost became it's head, and today he has about $1 in railroad for every S2 ex- pended. He has been a frost on the enterprise, as he seems to have been on his Chicago Milwaukee electric line, which is in the hands of a re- ceiver.
 The Reynolds railroad fizzled be- cause Reynolds had no resources be- yond hot air and mendacity, but the Alaska Central in Frost's hands burned money in bales.
 Some day magazine story will be written about the Alaska Central and simple recital of facts will be as funny as anything Mark Twain ever wrote. Even now men in Seward amuse each other by relating incl dents of it's career under the kinder garten management, and the truth is so much stranger than ordinary fic- tion that it would stagger belief were not the testimony positive.
 Frost himself has never seen the railroad upon which he has invested $4, ,OO0, ,000 of his own and other pco- ple's money. He has been too busy at the task of qualifying his Lake Mich igan electric line for receivership. At the outset he placed a man in ab- solute charge of construction and operation who became the contempt of every competent engineer and every experienced straw boss on the line within six months and the butt of perpetual jokes in Seward almost as soon.
 This man would neglect the business of general manager and chief engineer to act as private de- tective in trying to run down the theft of can of baking powder. With tens of thousands of dollars go- ing to waste every month in the com missary and as much more on useless names on the payroll he would quib- ble over a dollar or two on printers bill.
 At one time when about 700 men were working on the road twenty seven clerks were employed in the commissary, nearly all incompetent. Five capable men would have done the work better. The commissary was one of the wonders of this part of the world. When an inventory was taken last year the department was $150,0 ,000 shy. The methods that per mitted this result may be partially explained by the statement that an entire car load of valuable goods once disappeared at the end of the track and never was heard of afterward.
 A Valdez merchant who went to Seward once to see If he could make use of some of the surplus came away without buying anything and men, toned with interest that among the junk he saw gross or two of banana knives for the use of the laborers.
 A speciality of the system was doing work anywhere except at the end of the track and in furtherance thereof forty eight 4-horae sleds were kept busy through the winter of 19O5- 1906 hauling tens of thousands of dollars worth of goods more than twenty miles to Turnagain arm, where all the perishables routed the next summer.
 All this was told to Frost but he refused to come and sec 1t or take anybody's word for it until nearly all the competent men on the road re- signed and went outside because they would not risk their regulations by further connection with the work. Thnn his pet was allowed to resign.
 This is why the Alaska Central has so far failed when 1t might and should