Canada and Newfoundland

by Frank G. Carpenter

I went with Billy from pen to pen to examine the stock. It is said that a man may be known by the way animals act in his presence; that if they like him he is to be trusted, if not, he is a man to be watched. If this is true, Chicken Billy should sprout angel’s wings. His hogs seemed to love him. He talked to them as though they were human, and they lay down and rolled over like pet dogs. One of his biggest boars did tricks. The babies of the hog pens were of all ages, from little red piggies as big as a kitten to lusty black Berkshires the size of a fox terrier.

Chicken Billy started in the hog business with fourteen pigs—Duroc-Jerseys, Berkshires, and Yorkshires—most of which had taken prizes at the agricultural fair at Vancouver. He bought them for sixty dollars apiece, and shipped them into the Klondike for breeding purposes.

Leaving the pigs, we went to the farmhouse, a log cabin of two rooms besides a kitchen. The earth was banked up around the outside to keep out the winter cold, and inside were great stoves. For dinner we had eggs fresh from the hens, fried with ham that fairly melted in our mouths. There were mealy potatoes as good as any that ever came out of Ireland, although they had been harvested more than a year before. The bread was made by Billy’s hired man, and there were more cucumbers than we could possibly eat.

After dinner we took a skiff and rowed from the island over to Billy’s potato farm on the mainland. This farm was on the banks of the Yukon, and the crop was raised within a stone’s throw of the river in a seventeen-acre field a half mile long. I have seen many farms, but none better cultivated and more free from weeds than this potato patch. The rows were perfectly straight and the vines reached to my knees. Billy told me he hoped to get six or seven tons to the acre, or more than three thousand bushels in all. At one hundred dollars a ton the gross receipts would be something like ten thousand dollars.

In the centre of the patch is a log cabin with a great cellar where the potatoes are stored until shipped to market. This is so well built and so insulated with air spaces that the potatoes do not freeze, even in the severest weather.

There is no doubt that potatoes can be raised in most parts of Alaska and the Yukon. When Luther Burbank was in Dawson he said that these regions may some day be among the chief potato lands of the world and that by selective breeding a potato can be developed that will mature here to perfection. Even now the country is raising nearly all that it needs, and the potato imports are decreasing. This year the crop is especially good, and the potatoes are equal in quality to any brought in from outside.

Plants live upon sunshine, and as the Yukon Territory has about one third more sunlight than the United States in the same period of summer, Nature puts on its seven-league boots and makes things grow during our nights. Growth begins in April, when the crocuses come up through the snow. Gardens are planted by the middle of May, and by the latter part of June there are vegetables to eat. The chief summer month is July, although the frosts do not come until the middle of September. After that follows Indian summer, when the hills are ablaze with gold.

The country about Dawson is virgin land covered with trees, which are usually stunted except in the river bottoms. There are meadows in the south and the southwest, and also great areas that can be used for grazing. Doctor Dawson, the man who first surveyed the territory, says that there are thirty-eight million acres that can be utilized either for crops or for grazing. He compares the Yukon with some of the inland provinces of Russia where oats, rye, barley, flax, and hemp are raised successfully.

Most of the farming is in small patches. There are gardens about the miners’ cabins where potatoes and turnips, green peas and beets, and carrots and celery are raised. Last year one man grew forty tons of turnips upon a single acre, and from another acre the same man raised five hundred and sixty-one bushels of potatoes. Another farmer brought in to Dawson a cauliflower measuring ten inches in diameter, a turnip weighing fourteen pounds, and six heads of cabbage that tipped the scales at one hundred and thirty pounds.

Already a number of homesteads have been taken up in the territory, and there are little farms here and there on the banks of the Yukon and on the islands with which it is dotted. The soil is a sandy loam made up of silt brought down by the river. The land is so thickly covered with bushes and trees that it costs one hundred dollars and upward an acre to clear it. Farm wages are high, although the demand for labour is limited, and the market for potatoes and other vegetables is confined to the small population in the mines and in Dawson. If the farms are increased by many new homesteaders there may be a glut in the market and the prices will fall.