The Nonpartisan Leader Newspaper, September 2, 1918, Page 9

i B e it - ments, the shoes, and even . speed or power, as well as for | ~ single mail route in Alaska— . Reindeer \fawn taking its first meal. No beef trust has a claim on him. The surplus of the herds is being packed and sold in the United States for the benefit of the actual herders. Washington Bureau, Nonpartisan Leader SHIPMENT of 70,000 pounds of arrived at Seattle to be sold in the open market. Alaska has begun to ‘export the surplus from her herds, which feed upon the moss that covers more than 200,000 square miles of the pub- lic lands within the territory. No packing trust is responsible for the starting of this industry in thefar north. A public school teacher, aided by congress in his plan to save the natives of his settlement from famine, brought the first lot of deer from Siberia to the American con- tinent. They have multiplied under the careful attention of the school authorities. Today there are more than 1,000,000 of them in Alaska and- still nobody thanks the packers or the big business interests. The big business interests have had nothing to do with the industry. It has grown up as a mutual obligation between the government and the natives. The deer belong to the govern- ment and the natives today. It was July 4, 1892, that Dr. Sheldon Jackson, superintendent of n.atlve and white schools in Alaska under the federal bureau of education, brought intoe the harbor at Port Clarence, on Bering strait, a shipload of domesticated reindeer from Siberia. The revenue cutter Bear, still in service, was the carrier. Congress had yielded to his ap- peals for- the starving natives, a few months be- fore, and had given him $5,000 and the use of the vessel to buy and import 121 of these animals. Doctor Jackson had made the discovery that the moss which covered the whole country from Nor- ton _sound to Point Barrow, and around the Arctic coast to the Canadian boundary, was the reindeer moss upon which the herds of Siberia and Lapland grazed. No other animal would eat this moss; the reindeer will eat nothing else. GENTLE AS A COW, SWIFT AS A HORSE When the deer arrived they were placed in charge of a Mr. Bruce, principal of the school at Port Clarence. A year later he was succeeded as teacher and as superintendent of the herd by W. T. Lopp, who has been in charge of the reindeer industry from that time until today. Mr. Lopp is now the superintendent of all schools in the territory, and is guardian of the 100,000 deer which are now the property of the: government, and administers the rules under which native herdsmen keep and own: the remaining 900,000 head. A reindeer in that frozen country beyond the Yukon is more than a meat animal. It takes the place of both cow and horse, and it serves better than either as a source of clothing and footwear. The meat, the butter, the cheese, the tallow candles, the gar- thongs for tying together the ° parts of a sledge, all come from this docile, faithful, self- sustaining beast. For the last three years the villages of the Arctic and Bering coast have held a great reindeer fair, at - which prizes were given for sledge racing, harness load pulling, ‘and other feats: of products of the milk and car- cass and hide. The longest more than 600 miles—is trav- eled ‘by-a remdeer sledge,. - When Jackson reindeer meat from Alaska has - ~ the school. 'Remdeer. /her‘d feeding, Million Reindeer— All Good Eating Alaska Ships 70,000 Pounds of Meat to the States—An Industry Founded by the Government Now Requires a Publicly Owned Packing Plant proposed the bringing in of deer, some members of congress laughed at the idea. They recalled the fact that just before the Civil war congress allowed Secretary of .War Jefferson Davis to spend $50,000 in importing a shipload of camels from Africa to the Arizona desert, for use in carrying supplies between frontier military posts. The camels were neglected, many of them died or escaped and be- came wild, and the last pair were sold at auction to a circus for $500 apiece. Settlers who came into Arizona in later years shot the few wild camels. Thes experiment failed because no serious attempt was made to see that the camels survived. USED FOR THE i BENEFIT OF ALASKANS In the case of the reindeer, the government did not abandon the animals to chance ownership and neglect. Reindeer breeding is a difficult science, and Doctor Jackson made that fact the basis of his scheme of protection of the herds. Every native who wanted reindeer was com- pelled to start as an appren- tice herder. He received in- struction in the care of the animals, and at the end of his first year was given tiile to four deer. The next year he got eight, the third year 16 deer, and at the end of his four-year apprenticeship he became the independent own- er of a herd of about 100 head. But his ownership was within limits. He could not sell any female deer, alive. He could keep them, and sell the male increase, or any carcasses of male or female that he might slaughter. Further, he must take apprentices to share his own herd, in the same way as he had.shared the herd belonging to For every 200 deer he must get an apprentice herder. In this way the constant di- vision of the herds and the increase of expert breeders and herders of deer was made.the law of the country, and the utmost development of the industry was guaranteed. Superintendent Lopp, in a report to the United States bureau of education, sums up the whole theory of the Alaska reindeer ownership system in this way: “The ordinary commercial concern regards people as instruments for the developmént of business; the policy of the government, through the bureau of education, has been to regard the reindeer as. instruments for benefiting the people.” One mistake only has been made in the 26 years of the history of this relationship between the W. T. Lopp, director of the government reindeer distribution system. He is show- ing how a sled deer ‘pants.” There are 1,000,000 of these ammals in Alaakn. They eat . only the ) remdeer moss, of which there are 200,000 square miles. ’ No other amfial eafs tl\e moss. ; Thls vast nnge IS government hnd. : government, the reindeer and the people of the moss country. At the time of the Klondike rush there was so great a demand for meat that the school authorities im- ported a shipment of reindeer from Lapland, and with them a party of Lapps, whom they paid for their work as herders by giving them the full ownership of deer. These Lapps tired of the country, after a few years, and sold their small herds to a syndicate in Nome, which is now trying to compete on a commercial basis with the herds held by the schools and the natives. Cost of labor makes the venture unlikely to succeed, but the effect of commercial speculation upon the natives has been bad. Every native herd is under the general super- vision of “the head of the schools in the district. Every school herd is directed by the local school principal. The result of this combination of duties has been to bring into the school system of Alaska a set of men who combine scholarship with fine administrative abil- ity. The schools are better run than are schools of simi- lar size and financial re- sources in the states. The total of deer imported by the government into Alas- ka has been about 1,000. Thére are now 1,000 times that number there. The next development will be a pack- Dressing a reindeer carcass. run by the bureau of educa- tion, to-handle the meat for export to the states w1thout paying toll to any pri- vate packer. Some of the members of congress are stxll sus- picious that this reindeer enterprise s, | “paterna- listic.” In that case it must be. dangerous It sets a hornble example to people rlght at home. The Danger fo. Farm Orgamzatl,o_ns, The Farmers’ Union News of Coérvallis, Ore., has \ something to say about the effort of the dark forces to capture the leadership- of farm organizations. Readers of the Leader' are'familiar with' the vio- lent attempt to prevent the re-election of William Bouck as master of the Washington state Grange. A sxmllar plot, without the- vxolence, was ‘recently ~foiled in Oregon. Of this the Farmers’ Union . News speaks as: follows: “By a vote of 29 to' 70, C. E. Spence was again elected for state Grange. His opponent was Lawyer Johnson from Portland. “We wonder what corpora- tion in Portland could have been back of this movement to place at the head of the state Grange a lawyer? And then just let us stop a minute and ask ourselves what kind ofra state Grange would Oregon have with a lawyer at its head? What kind of a Farm- ers’ union would we have with a Portland lawyer at its head? terior'-force may try to start _hidden force in large cities - : the 'hrm orgamzatxons ing plant, to be owned and™ a two-year term master of the’ ‘Who knows how soon: some ul-. . something within our ranks. . by maligning our leaders? - It is queer, this thing of some trying to name the heads of 4 4 IR AR