Under the caption, "Opening a New Gate to Our Northern Garden," a splendidly written, illustrated article appeared in the February issue of Pickwick Papers, a magazine of motor travel published at Los Angeles. The article was written by Ernest Walker Sawyer, special representative of the general manager of the Alaska railroad, and the pictures used were selected with a view to suggesting to motor travelers what they may expect to find in the northland in the way of scenic beauty when they motor to Alaska over the projected Pacific Yukon highway. The article follows:
Most American motor tourists believe that when they have crossed the Canadian border and traveled a hundred miles into British Columbia, they have reached the
northern boundaries of the earth, that beyond the southern edge of Canada there is nothing but a trackless waste of snow and ice through which a few shivering caribou mush with difficulty.
There are a number of adventurous souls who have thrown all caution to the winds and bravely started morth from Vancouver, although in their hearts was probably the certainty that this smooth highway would last only a few miles and then suddenly end up against a wall of ice. Daring as have these hardy motor travelers been, the rewards of the courage have been great.
Theirs has been the thrill of looking over a ledge to see, two thousand feet below, the mighty Fraser River struggling through the narrow pass of Hell's Gate. They have seen the white purity of Marble Canyon enclosing green Pavilion Lake, and have entered the game-filled hills of the Cariboo country. They have ridden through the streets of Quesnel, one ot the oldest towns in British Columbia, which still quaintly reflects its early days in the fur-trading business and later in the Cariboo gold boom of 1858.
But perhaps greater than these thrills of natural beauty and romance is the thrill of finding that the roads through this remote country are excellent and well traveled, that the settlement along the highwars are populous and prosperous, that the country around them is all green countryside, and not perpetually white. In short, that the North is neither frozen nor uninhabited and you don't have to be a hardy pioneer with
a pick on your back and golden visions in your mind to enjoy it.
Now the greatest thrilis of the north country are to be made accessible to motor travel. Plans for the Intemational Highway are taking very definite shape, and when the International Highway is finished it will reach from Seattle, Washington, far beyond the confines of British Columbia, beyond the Yukon Territory, to Fairbanks, in the heart of the Territory.
Now the movies have led us to believe that Alaska is the last word in coldness, that snow covers the country almost the whole year, that dogteams are the best means of transportation there, and that highway travel is at best possible only during a few weeks in the middle of the summer, and then with difficulty.
The real state of the weather is quite otherwise. Alaska has summers as mild and flower-laden as the best of her northern sister states, for during the six months
of Alaskan summer the days are warm and much longer than ours. In midsummer Alaska basks in 20 daily hours of warm sunlight, and plants and flowers flourish accordingly. So it is nothing unusual to see big crops of surprisingly large and robust-looking fruits and vegetables come out of Alaskan farms.
Ride through the streets of any Alaskan city and you will see ordered avenues lined with attractive bungalows that look as if they had just been moved up from Southern California. The gardens that surround these homes grow strawberries, tomatoes and a profusion of other fruits, flowers and vegetables. During the long winter nights the
plants are kept in hothouses, but once the summer begins, they are brought out into the open air and given the full benefit of those 20-hour days.
Wheat, oats, barley, lettuce, celery, beets, peas and all sorts of warm-weather crops are being grown on a commercial scale in Alaska. The crops are of excellent quality and production is increasing year by year, so that nowadays home-grown products are taking care of a large part of the Alaskan demand.
And Alaskn has developed her own original sort of cattle industry, too, although we are not used to thinking of Alaska as a cattle country. Reindeer meat is now selling in many of our markets at prices comparable to beef figures, and the reindeer business is growing by leaps and bounds. The animals were first brought into Alaska to
furnish sustenance for the native population, which had formerly subsisted mainly on fish. The meat became popular, the flocks grew to the present size of over 1,000,000 head, and an American demand grew up. Land in some of the little-known interior valleys that had
been considered valueless has been found to be fine grazing ground, and reindeer-raising is now one of the territory's most prosperous industries.
Of course, Alaska's mines are still an important source of prosperity to the country. Mining has now outgrown the placer-mining stage of gold rush days that demand high-grade ore, and has graduated to the status of a stable low-grade-ore industry that yields millions of dollars to miners who work with dredges and motor trucks instead of picks and frying pans. There are also vast forests awaiting development, and Alaska's salmon industry brings in $3,000,000 a year.
Hand in hand with the territory's progress in agriculture and industry has come the development of her highways and airways. Alaska has already 71 airports, and more coming. The territory is also looking forward to the development of airlines from America to Asia, which will doubtless pass through Fairbanks.
Alaska's chief motor route is the Richardson Highway, which runs from Fairbanks south to Chitina and to Valdez on the coast, and measures some four hundred miles in length. The Richardson highway passes through some of the most magnificent country in existence, and is served by a motor coach company which operates on regular schedule along its length.
There is also the Steese Highway, running north from Fairbanks to Circle, up on the Yukon river, a distance of 162 miles. Alaska's highways have saved the citizens
$2,000,000 a year in transport costs, besides encouraging increased production by this economy. Gone are the days when transports could only operate along flowing water courses in summer ane frozen ones in winter, and then only by packhorse or afoot. The government system of roads and trails is nowadays in use except for about three weeks during the spring and fall seasons.
Alaskans have been modest but untiring in telling the world about their country's development and about how wrong the world has been in its ideas of its climate. Their efforts are beginning to bear fruit, and travel into Alaska has increased by leaps and bounds even in competition against the floods of advertising that other parts of the country pour on the vacationing public every summer. In the late summer Alaska has had almost as many visitors as she could entertain, and a hotel-building movement has started in an effort to provide more and better accommodations for tourists.
Alaska is ripe and ready for highway communication with the United States, through Canada. As a matter of fact, more than half the International Highway is now finished. Of the 2000 miles from Seattle to Fairbanks, 1250 are completed and working. The problem that confronts Alaskans and Canadians is to link these fragments in to one continuous road.
From Seattle for 1000 miles to Hazelton, in northern British Columbia, the International Highway follows the route of the Cariboo Highway, which is already completed and in good condition, drawing more tourists over it every day. The highway follows the magnificent Fraser river to Lytton, then turns through Marble Canyon and continues northward thru quaint Quesnel to Prince George, principal town of northern British Columbia.
Prince George is not a large city as population goes - it numbers some 3000 inhabitants - but it is an important place. It is the distributing center for an immense territory, and it is a great touring center, for roads leading to various lake
and river resorts radiate from Prince George. Summit Lake, 32 miles north, marks the Continental Divide - not the one we are used to that divides the waters between the
Pacific and Atlantic, but the dividing-point for waters that flow south to the Pacific or north into the Arctic Ocean.
Hazelton, 70 miles west of Prince George and 1000 miles from Seattle, stands on the site of an old Indian Vilage, and the tribe's totem poles still remain as one of the chief sights of the place. Hazelton is actually farther north than the southern boundary of Alaska, for Alaska stretches a long thin Panhandle along the coast for some 500 miles south of the bulking shoulders of the Territory, where it sticks out of the northwestern corner of Canada. However, the International highway does not yet enter Alaska but continues inland, for the terrain there is comparatively smooth and much easier to traverse than the high, steep mountains of the coastal range.
At Hazelton today's motor tourist reaches the end of his trail and the road-builder reaches the beginning of his. For from Hazelton northward there is no road. Only a dim trail continues as far as Telegraph Creek, 200 miles from Hazelton, marking the course which the International Highway will probably follow northward.
This dim trail also marks the course of the old Telegraph Trail, which possesses a unique and romantic history. In the late sixties a daring band of pioneers started out on the bold project of building a telegraph line to Siberia and Europe, traversing this wilderness and Alaska, which in those days was a desert of ice. The successful laying of the transatlantic cable made their project useless, but had the cable failed the telegraph line might have succeeded and Alaska would today be the crossroads for communication between the old world and the new.
At the present time practically the entire stretch of the International Highway route between Telegraph Creek and Fairbanks is wild and uninhabited country. However, 150 miles north of Telegraph creek, the route strikes Atlin, on Lake Atlin, a beautiful vacation resort which is now accessibie by steamer. At Atlin there is a highway "island" - an isolated stretch of road of 25 miles - and this road will be linked in the
new highway.
Some threescore miles farther north is Whitehorse, where the new highway first strikes the Yukon river, and where the cruelly swift rapids took away the outfits and the lives of many a luckless prospector in the Yukon rush days. At Whitehorse the International highway will again pick up an existing road, this time a considerable
stretch that runs 100 miles to Kluane Lake and brings the highway within 150 miles of the Alaskan border. From Whitehorse, too, a railroad operates south to Skagway, on the Pacific coast, a popular summer resort among Americans.
Having left Kluane Lake, the roadbuilders will traverse virgin country until they have crossed the Alaska-Canade border and reach Tanana Crossing, only 200 miles from Fairbanks. A branch road, leaving the highway just on the Canadian side of the line will lead up to Dawson, Yukon Territory, the center of the gold stampede of '98. In perfect comfort tourists will be able to see and cross the river that brought fortune and misfortune to so many brave souls in the mad days of the Yukon rush.
From the Dawson junction, it will be a mere 200-mile jump across the Alaskan border, over Tanana Crossing, down the Tanana valley and on to the Richardson Highway, which the International Highway will join at a point only 70 miles away from
Fairbanks. In two hours more the traveler will be at his journey's end in the heart of Alaska.
Fairbanks is a town that holds the sightseer with a fascination all its own, for it is a modern, busy city much like our own American towns but set in a country that partakes of all the strangness of the far North. All around Fairbanks are the hills whose disintegration has given the area its rich placer deposits, and Fairbanks highways are marked with the tracks of heavy motor trucks and caterpillar tractors hauling mining machinery in and ore out.
The telephone poles near Fairbanks are not set in the ground, but set up on tripods, which cannot be unset by frost or snow, nor knocked down by stray caribou running against them. And speaking of caribou, the residents of Fairbanks are allowed five of them every year, and the animals can be shot right on the highway as they drive into Fairbanks by thousands.
A day's railway trip will take you from Fairbanks into the Mount McKinley National Park, surrounding Mt. McKinley, which is the highest peak on the North American continent. A highway will be built soon into the park. In Fairbanks, too, is the world's northern-most college. And from this city, airlines radiate to every inhabined part of Alaska, for the territory is one of the most air-minded regions in the world.
Now when we speak of this International highway that will connect remote, unknown Alaska with the familiar United States, by traversing 750 miies of virgin wilderness, we do not speak of a visionary. project, a fond dream of some far-seeing progressivist. In the first place, more than half of the highway is finished, as the reader knows. Of the unfinished portion, 290 miles lies in Alaska, 200 miles in the Yukon Territory (Canadian), and 350 in British Columbia.
British Columbia is said to have guaranteed $1,000,000 a year toward the project. As for the American end, Secretary of the Interior Wilbur has taken a stand favorable to the project, and is cooperating with Canadian authorities in compiling data relating to it. Bills have been introduced in Congress by Delegate Sutherland of Alaska and Senator McNary of Oregon for preliminary studies in cooperation with Canada and Alsska. At the present time, about $1,000,000 a year is going to Alaska highways.
Doubtless the new highway will prove a benefit to Alaskans. Doubtless too, it will open up territory in British Columbia and in the Yukon that will bring greater prosperity to Canada. But perhaps its greatest value will be to ourselves, to the
rank and file of Motor tourists. For we will have a new travel route opening up scenic beauties such as no part of the world but Alaska possesses. We will be able to see in
comfort these scenes of which we have heard so often, the Yukon country of '98. And we will soon learn to think of Alaska not as a frigid gateway to the Arctic Circle, but as a real sister state, a live, prosperous and important member of the American commonwealth.
