Malispina alone has eighty miles of water front; and there’s the Nanatuk, Columbia, Muir; but the Government ain’t found names for more’n half of ’em yet, nor a quarter of the mountains.  Now imagine a man getting his family over that divide, driving his little bunch of cattle through, packing an outfit to keep ’em going the first year or so.  Suppose he’s even able to take along a portable house; what’s he going to do about fuel?  Is he going to trek back hundreds of miles to the seaport, like the Government expects, to pack in coal?  Australian maybe, or Japan low grade, but more likely it’s Pennsylvania sold on the dock for as high as seventeen dollars a ton.  Yes, sir, and with Alaska coal, the best kind and enough to supply the United States for six hundred years, scattered all around, cropping right out of the ground.  Think of him camped alongside a whole forest of spruce, where he can’t cut a stick.”

The little man’s voice had reached high pitch; he rose and took a short, swift turn across the floor.  The stranger was silent; apparently he was weighing this astonishing information.  But Daniels broke the pause.

“The Government ought to hurry those investigations,” he said.  “Foster, the mining engineer, told me never but one coal patent had been allowed in all Alaska, and that’s on the coast.  He has put thousands into coal land and can’t get title or his money back.  The company he is interested with has had to stop development, because, pending investigation, no man can mine coal until his patent is secured.  It looks like the country is strangled in red tape.”

“It is,” cried Banks.  “And one President’s so busy building a railroad for the Filipinos, and rushing supplies to the Panama Canal he goes out of office and clear forgets he’s left Alaska temporarily tied up; and the next one has his hands so full fixing the tariff and running down the trusts he can’t look the question up.  And if he could, Congress is working overtime, appropriating the treasury money home in the States.  There’s so many Government buildings to put up and harbors and rivers to dredge, it can’t even afford to give us a few lights and charts, and ships keep on feeling their way and going to destruction on the Alaska coast.  Alaska is side-tracked.  She’s been left standing so long she’s going to rust.”

“If some of our senators could listen to you,” said the stranger, with a swift and vanishing smile, “their eyes would be opened.  But that is the trouble; Alaska has had no voice.  It is true each congressman has been so burdened with the wants of his own State that session after session has closed before the Alaska bills were reached.  We have been accustomed to look on Alaska as a bleak and forbidding country, with a floating population of adventurers and lawless men, who go there with the intention to stay only long enough to reap a mineral harvest.  If she had other great resources and such citizens as you, why were you not in Washington to exploit her?”