ourable seasons and in favourable spots of interior Alaska certain
early varieties of Siberian oats and rye have been matured, and it
stands to the credit of the Experiment Station at Rampart that a little
wheat was once ripened there, though it took thirteen months from the
sowing to the ripening. When the rest of the world fills up so that
economic pressure demands the utilisation of all earth that will produce
any sort of food, it may be that large tracts in Alaska will be put
under the plough; but it is hard to believe that nine tenths of all this
vast country will ever be other than wild waste land. At present the
farming population is strictly an appendage of the mining population,
and the mining population rather diminishes than increases.

Your health resort that no one will resort to is a dull place at best
and a poor dependence for merchandising, so that the little town of Hot
Springs is fortunate in having some mining country around it to fall
back upon for its trade. We lay an extra day there, waiting for the
stage from Fairbanks to break trail for us through the heavy, drifted
snow, having had enough of trail breaking for a while. At midnight the
stage came, two days late, and its coming caused me as keen a sorrow and
as great a loss as I have had since I came to Alaska.

[Sidenote: NANOOK'S DEATH]

We knew naught of it until the next morning, when, breakfast done and
the sled lashed, we were ready to hitch the dogs and depart. They had
been put in the horse stable for there was no dog house; the health
resorter, actual or prospective, is not likely to be a dog man one
supposes; but they were loose in the morning and came to the call, all
but one--Nanook. Him we sought high and low, and at last Arthur found
him, but in what pitiful case! He dragged himself slowly and painfully
along, his poor bowels hanging down in the outer hide of his belly,
fearfully injured internally, done for and killed already. It was not
difficult to account for it. When the horses came in at midnight, one of
them had kicked the dog and ruptured his whole abdomen.

There was no use in inquiring whose fault it was. The dogs should have
been chained; so much was our fault. But it was hard to resist some
bitter recollection that before this "exploitation" of the springs, when
there was a modest road-house instead of a mammoth hotel, there had been
kennels for dogs instead of nothing but stables for horses.

I doubt if all the veter