Alaska, the Great Country - Ella Higginson

During the spring of 1908 the Alaska-coal land situation was discouraging. A great area of rich coal-bearing land had been withdrawn from entry, because of the amazing presumption of the interior department that the removal of prohibitive restrictions upon entrymen would encourage the formation of monopolies in the mining and marketing of coal.

Secretary Garfield at first inclined strongly to the opinion that the Alaska coal lands should be held by the government for leasing purposes, and that there should be a separate reservation for the navy; and he has not entirely abandoned this opinion.

The withdrawal of the coal lands from entry caused the Copper River and Northwestern Railway Company to discontinue all work on the Katalla branch of the road; nor will it resume until the question of title to the coal lands is settled and the lands themselves admitted to entry.

The fear of monopolies, which is making the interior department uneasy, is said to have arisen from the fact that it has been absolutely necessary for several entrymen in a coal region to associate themselves together and combine their claims, on account of the enormous expense of opening and operating mines in that country. The surveys alone, which, in accordance with an act passed in 1904, must be borne by the entryman, although this burden is not imposed upon entrymen in the states, are so expensive, particularly in the Behring coal-fields near Katalla, that an entryman cannot bear it alone; while the expense of getting provisions and tools from salt-water into the interior is simply prohibitive to most locators, unless they can combine and divide the expense.

These early discoverers and locators acted in good faith. The lands were entered as coal lands; there was no fraud and no attempt at fraud; not one person sought to take up coal land as homestead, nor with scrip, nor in any fraudulent manner.

There was some carelessness in the observance of new rules and regulations, but there was excuse for this in the fact that Alaska is far from Congress and news travels slowly; also, it has been the belief of Alaskans that when a man, after the infinite labor and deprivation necessary to successful prospecting in Alaska, has found anything of value on the public domain, he could appropriate it with the surety that his right thereto would be recognized and respected; and that any slight mistakes that might be made technically would be condoned, provided that they were honest ones and not made with the intent to defraud the government.

The oldest coal mine in Alaska is located just within the entrance to Cook Inlet, on the western shore, at Coal Harbor. There, in the early fifties, the Russians began extensive operations, importing experienced German miners to direct a large force of Muscovite laborers sent from Sitka, and running their machinery by steam.

Shafts were sunk, and a drift run into the vein for a distance of one thousand seven hundred feet. During a period of three years two thousand seven hundred tons of coal were mined, but the result was a loss to the enterprising Russians.