| Summary: | Big Game Haven, Plan For Alaska: Government Will Encourage Family Life Of Beasts. BIG GAME HAVEN, PLAN_FORALASKA Government Will Encourage Family Life of Beasts Family life among the kodiak bear, moose, mountain sheep and caribou in Alaska will be fostered by the federal government. These wild beasts are to be encouraged in populating the northern wilderness with their kind, B. Frank Heintzleman explained yesterday. He has just been appointed regional forester for Alaska, and is on his way to headquarters in Juneau. "Alaska is the best big game country on American soil," Mr. Heintzleman said at the Benson j hotel. "And big game is a resource that everyone in the United States is interested in perpetuating. There is plenty of this game there now, and also plenty of wilderness, and I think that over a great part of the territory it can be made into a big resource just as agriculture is in other sections. 99 Per Cent Owned "The federal government is greatly interested in planning for Alaska, and the territorial legislature recently passed a bill creating a planning board of nine members. As the government owns 99 per cent of the resources, I don't think there will be any trouble in carrying out plans for the betterment of the territory. "Right now the big game is an attraction to many hunters. They go up for kodiak bear, moose, mountain sheep, caribou, which still abound in large numbers; there are also deer, black bear and mountain goats. The whole thing is pretty: well watched now, and we are cooperating with the Alaska big game commission in seeing to it that there is no ruthless slaughter." Mr. Heintzleman also declared that the national forests up there contain practically all the commercial timber in Alaska, it being mostly Sitka spruce and hemlock. There are 80 billion feet of this timber, 25 per cent of it being spruce, he said. Pulp Mills Idle "We supply the local demands for lumber, but very little Alaskan timber is exported," the forester stated. "I think the exporting trade waits on the pulp and paper industry. There was a great deal of interest in an Alaskan paper industry befora the depression, but it was dropped during the hard times, and thera are no pulp mills in operation there; "Alaska is a real frontier, the last under the American flag. It has plenty of land to take care of the overflow population from the United States, the territory being as large as the mainland east of the Mississippi and north of North Carolina. There are 65,000 square miles of excellent agricultural land, which would make good homes for hundreds of thousands of families; fine wheat can be grown within 100 miles of the Arctic circle. "There is a vast stretch of country ideal for raising reindeer, and this new livestock industry is growing rapidly. These deer furnish both food and clothing for the natives, and a market for reindeer meat has been established in the States. Gold mining and salt-water fishing are still big industries with us." Mr. Heintzleman knows Alaska, He first went there in 1920 as a logging engineer, two years later he was made assistant regional forester for the territory, serving until 1934, when he was called to Washington, D. C, to work in one of that new deal projects. He is a graduate of the Yale School of Forestry.
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