Iditarod pioneer., 1917-06-02
TRIED MINING AND FARMING
 AND SUCCEEDED AT LATTER

Johnson. He packed his belongings in a gunnvsack and joined the endless streams of tenderfoot "mushers" headed for the land of promise.
 He returned last week after twenty years of "necking it" through the wilderness of the far North prospecting in the mountains and valleys, and enduring all the hardships the life entails He was young man when he left Today his face is scanned with the lines that spell exposure and hard work. His hair is gray.
 He has put at his back twenty years of experience that savor of a Jack London story He has found gold. He has tramped out of the hintcrlsnds with fortune in dust on his back He has lost those for tunes in vain attempts to repeat his sue cess He has run the gamut of good for tune and bad always with face set on the golden rainbow just ahead.
 He found fortune at last. But 1t was not wrested from the yellow-streaked rock.
 was from the land of the Matanuska valley in Alaska
 He made his money raising potatoes. It makes him laugh when he thinks about it.
 For nearly two decades he prospected from Dawson to Fairbanks, from Copper river to Valdez and Cook inlet, finding gold and los ing it. And then he took up a 320-acre homestead of government land near the new railroad and discovered that 3 cents a pound profit on potatoes on land that will raise twelve tons of them an acre, was the way to a permanent bank account
 q mushed into the gold country with my pack on my back" said Johnson. "l worked in the Dawson mines, learning to know gold when l saw it, and to know where to find it. With my partner l worked a claim on Hunker creek.
 That one claim paid up S46,0O0 in few months. We took that money and went into the Dominion creek region in the Yukon. Bedrock was deep there. We sunk expensive machinery and went into it big The next spring found us broke, down and out
 q went to Fairbanks and got a good stake furnishing wood for the old mines And then back on the trail way up to the Slate Creek district, and into the head of the Copper river, to Valdez and Seward worked every creek and range on the way out, always 'muShing' it on foot
 Finally found myself in the Cook inlet, and took up a government claim for the fun of it. 1 discovered that few acres of potatoes paid more in the end than any claim I ever connected up with. Funny isn't it?"
 It was suggested that while raising the succulent tuber ght afford more sub stantial honorariun than chasing the golden "wll!-o -the-wisp it was a decided "come-down' as far as adventure and TO- nance were concerned.
 The prospector-farmer sniffed
 ''l can get along right we'll with mighty little of this romance stuff" he exclaimed If you call working a drift with the ther- mometer around 20 degrees below zero, all the while hoping that the spring run will show you have hit something during the
 
 winter-if you call that romance, some. body else is welcome to it. Ii living on sour dough and frozen beans is adventure, you can have my share"
 "Why did you stick it out so long, then?" he was asked.
 Mir Johnson looked rather sheepish as he answered
 You never found gold, l guess" he said. There isn't any sensation like it in the world, You got to work like seven niggers to get it, and then maybe it isn't there. And maybe it is Always that Maybe it IS. And when you see it there in your pan and you figure out all you got to do to make S100 is to shovel little well, there isn't any feeling I know about like 1t. There it is, yellow and pretty And it will buy you anything in anything you want. That is what keeps you there
 The suggestion was natural that perhaps he would some day desert the potato farm and hit the trail
 Not if l know myself" he said. q like the land And they are building the gov ernment railroad right through it. From Seward to Anchorage it is wonderful land. You can raise anything there that you can here. And to the north about fifty miles are the coal fields Some day there are going to be sawmills and pulp mills up there. It won't take many years before the whole district is settled. I am there to stay. Raising potatoes is something like mining gold, anyway You work all season