Here is no economic pressure of white settlers determined to occupy the land, such as drove the Indians of the plains farther and farther west until there was no more west to be driven to. If such delusion possess any mind as a result of foolish newspaper and magazine writings, let it be dismissed at once. No man who has lived in the country and travelled in the country will countenance such notion. The white men in Alaska are miners and prospectors, trappers and traders, wood-choppers and steamboat men. Around a mining camp will be found a few truck-farmers; alongside road-houses and wood camps will often be found flourishing vegetable gardens, but outside of such agriculture there are, speaking broadly, no farmers at all in the interior of Alaska. Probably a majority of all the homesteads that have been taken up have been located that the trees on them might be cut down and hauled to town to be sold for fire-wood. A few miles away from the towns there are no homesteads, except perhaps on a well-travelled trail where a man has homesteaded a road-house. [Illustration: AN AGED COUPLE.] [Illustration: FOOTBALL AT THE ALLAKAKET, EXPOSURE 1-1000 SECOND, APRIL, AFTER A NEW LIGHT SNOWFALL.] All the settlements in the country are on the rivers, save the purely mining settlements that die and are abandoned as the placers play out. Yet one will travel two hundred and fifty miles up the Porcupine--till Canada is reached--and pass not more than three white men's cabins, all of them trappers; one will travel three hundred and fifty miles up the Koyukuk before the first white man's cabin is reached, and as many miles up the Innoko and the Iditarod and find no white men save wood-choppers. There are a few more white men on the Tanana than on any other tributary of the Yukon, because Fairbanks is on that river and there is more steamboat traffic, but they are mainly wood-choppers, while on the lesser tributaries of the Yukon, it is safe to say, there are no settled white men at all. As soon as one leaves the rivers and starts across country one is in the uninhabited wilderness. The writer is no prophet; he cannot tell what may happen agriculturally in Alaska or the rest of the arctic regions when the world outside is filled up and all unfrozen lands are under cultivation. Still less is he one who would belittle a country he has learned to love or detract in any way from its due claims to the attention of mankind. There is in the territory a false newspaper sentiment that every one who lives in the land should be continually singing extravagant praises of it and continually making extravagant claims for it. A man may love Alaska because he believes it to have "vast agricultural possibilities," because, in his visions, he sees its barren wilds transformed into "waving fields of golden grain." But a man may also love it who regards all such visions as delusions. [Sidenote: FOOD AND FURS]