The immediate cause of the great development of Alaska of course is to be found in its mines; but most of the people of this country are wholly in error when they think of the mines as being the sole or even the chief permanent cause of Alaska’s future greatness. Alaska has great possibilities of agricultural and pastoral development. Not only her mines, her fisheries, her forests, but her agriculture and her stock-raising will combine to make Alaska one of the great wealth-producing portions of our Republic. I am anxious that our laws should be framed in the interest of those who intend to go there and stay there and bring up their children there and make it in very fact as well as in name an integral part of this Republic. I ask your help and pledge you my help in the effort to secure such legislation. In the case of the mine you get the metal out of the earth, you can not leave any metal in there to produce other metal; but in the case of the salmon fishery, if you are wise you will insist upon its being carried on under conditions which will make the salmon fishery as valuable in that river thirty years hence as now. Do not take all the salmon out and go away and leave the empty river for your children and children’s children; take it out under conditions—the conditions are ready to be created for you by the National Fish Commission, which has been so singularly successful in its work—which will secure the preservation of that river as a salmon river, which will secure the perpetuation of salmon canneries along its banks, so that it will be not an industry carried on only by Orientals in the employ of three or four alien capitalists, but carried on in such a way as to be a perpetual source of income to the actual settlers resident in the locality. Just in the same way I want to have you see that the lumber industry is exploited in a way which, while giving a great return to those engaged in it at the moment, shall also secure the preservation of the forests for the settlers and the settlers’ children that are to come in and inherit the land. I wish to see such land laws enacted and to see them so administered as to be in the interest of the actual settler who goes to Alaska to live, who desires there to produce crops, to raise stock, to make a home for himself; subject to that condition I desire to see legislation shaped in the spirit of the broadest liberality that will secure the quickest possible development of the resources of Alaska; and with that aim in view to have all the encouragement possible given to those seeking to establish by steamship line and by railway quick and efficient transportation facilities in the Territory.
Few things have been more typical of our people and have been more full of promise for the future than the way in which the resources have been developed; and when one sees what has been done here during the last few years I think we have cause to feel abundantly justified in our belief that the qualities of the old-time pioneers who first penetrated the woody wilderness between the Alleghanies and the Mississippi, who then steered their way across vast seas of grass from the Mississippi to the Rockies, who penetrated the passes of the great barren mountains until they came to this, the greatest of all the oceans, still survive in their grandsons and successors. Nor must we forget in speaking of Alaska the immense importance that the Territory has from the standpoint of the needs of the Nation as a whole, as a dominant power in the Pacific. Exactly as with the building of the Isthmian Canal we shall make our Atlantic and our Pacific coasts in effect continuous, so the possession and peopling of the Alaskan seacoast puts us in a position of dominance as regards the Pacific which no other nations share or can share.
FROM ADDRESS AT EVERETT, WASH., MAY 23, 1903
There are few problems which so especially concern Washington, Oregon, and California as the problem of forestry. Nothing has been of better augury for the welfare and prosperity of these great States as well as for the other forest States than the way in which those actively engaged in the lumbering business have come of recent years to work hand in hand with those who have made forestry a study in the effort to preserve the forests. The whole question is a business, an economic question; an economic question for the Nation, a business question for the individual. East of your great mountain chains the question of water supply becomes vital and becomes inseparable from that of forestry. Here that question does not enter in. The lumbering interest is the fourth great business interest in point of importance in the United States. There is engaged in it a capital of over six hundred millions of dollars, and every year the wage-workers in that industry receive one hundred millions of dollars. Such an industry so vitally connected with many others in the country can not with wisdom be neglected, the interests depending upon it are too vast. I do not have to say here in Washington that fire is a great enemy of the forests. Here in Washington it is probable that fire has destroyed more than the axe during the decade in which the axe has been at work.
Our aim should be to get the fullest use from the forest to-day, and yet to get that benefit in ways which will keep the forests for our children in the generations to come; so that, for instance, the country adjoining Puget Sound shall have the lumbering industry as a permanent industry. Recently the trade journals of that industry have been dwelling upon the fact that its very existence is actually at stake, and nowhere in the whole country can the question of forestry be handled better than in this region, because nowhere else is it so easy to produce a second crop. You are fortunate in having such climatic conditions, such conditions of soil, that here more than anywhere else the forest renews itself quickly, so as in a comparatively short number of years to be again a great mercantile and industrial asset. The preservation of our forests depends chiefly upon the wisdom with which the practical lumberman, the practical expert in dealing with the lumber industry, works with the men who have studied forestry under all conditions. I am glad indeed that such co-operation is more and more being accepted as a matter of course by both sides.
FROM ADDRESS AT SEATTLE, WASH., MAY 23, 1903
There is no other body of water in the world which confers upon the commonwealth possessing it quite the natural advantages that Puget Sound confers upon your State. There is no other State in the Union, and I include all of them, which has greater natural advantages and a more assured future of greatness than this State of Washington. Phenomenal though your growth has been, it has barely begun; and your growth in the half century now opening will dwarf absolutely even your growth in the immediate past.
I am speaking in the gateway to Alaska. All our people, even those from the locality whence I come, are beginning to appreciate a little of Alaska’s future. The men of my own age whom I am addressing will not be old men before we see Alaska one of the rich and strong States of the Union. I thank fortune that the National Legislature has begun to wake up to the fact that Alaska has interests of vital importance not merely to her but to the entire Union. Alaska contains a territory which will within this century support as large a population as the combined Scandinavian countries of Europe; those countries from which has sprung as wonderful a race as ever imprinted its characteristics upon the history of civilization. Exactly as the Scandinavian peoples have left their mark upon the entire history of Europe, so we shall see Alaska with its mines, its lumber, its fisheries, with its possibilities in agriculture and stock-raising, with its possibilities of commercial command, with the tremendous development that is going on within it even now, produce as hardy and vigorous a people as any portion of North America.
AT SPOKANE, WASH., MAY 26, 1903
Senator Turner, and you, my Fellow-Americans: