This subject of what is, or what is not, a good mining region or investment is one to which no rational man can well afford to commit himself. Those who have had extended experience in these matters know that it is a topic which baffles the best investigator, and returns no safe answer to the most intelligent cross-examination. The true advice which can be honestly given is that which prompts every man interested to look and resolve wholly for himself, for he, in fact, knows just as much as anybody else. At the most, the finding of a rich or desirable lead of gold or silver in a new country is an accident or sheer opportunity of chance. Whether it will hold out, or end in a “pocket,” is also only to be determined by working it for all it is worth. Once in a while a man makes a rich find, and is rewarded; but an overwhelming majority of prospectors are ever wandering in fruitless, restless, tireless search for those golden ingots which are still hidden in the recesses of mountain ledges, or buried in the alluvium of river bottoms. The miners in Alaska embrace various nationalities—Australians and Canadians, Cornishmen and Californians, Oregonians and British Columbians predominate—but the number aggregated is not large.[32] If gold or silver-quartz mines of free-milling ore (no matter how low the grade) can be located anywhere on the shores of these mountainous fiörds of the Alexander archipelago, their wealth will be great, because the transportation to them and from them is practically without cost. The expense of working such valuable quartz mines up a hundred or more miles from the sea, will result in abandonment, where reaching them involves frequent transfers of supplies, and the working season is cut by the rigor of winter to less than half or one-third of every year. The same mines, down within the dockage of an ocean-steamer in the Sitkan district would be a steady source of wealth and industry all the year round. The coal which is found here is not satisfactory for steamers’ use—too heavily charged with sulphur. Copper ore is well-known, but not worked in competition with the Lake Superior and Arizona cheap outputs. At the present writing there are no active industries whatsoever in the Sitkan archipelago beyond the energetic stamp-mill of the Treadwell Mine on Douglas Island, and the limited placer diggings of Juneau City. Until a market is created for its large natural resources of food-fishes, the little canneries which our people have started here will not develop; nor will the timber be of much commercial importance until the great reservoirs of the lower coast are exhausted. Statisticians and political economists can easily figure out the time when a population of twenty-five or thirty millions of our own people will be living upon the Pacific coast alone; then the real value of those latent resources[33] of the Sitkan watery wilderness must be patent to a most indifferent calculator.