in Anchorage to handle the entries of the first and third divisions, the Nome office and the Fairbanks office to handle the second and fourth divisions, respectively. All surveys of the public domain are handled by the cadastral engineers of the public survey office with headquarters in Juneau. The headquarters of the field service and inspection service of the General Land Office are located at Anchorage. The land laws of the United States, modified to meet local conditions, are applicable to Alaska. The administration of the town sites in Alaska is in charge of the division inspector at Anchorage. Timber sales, outside of the national forests, are arranged through the local land offices. Birch timber may be exported, while all other timber on the public domain outside of the national forests may be sold exclusively for local consumption.

With the extension of the scope of work performed by the public survey office, numerous free surveys have been made of the native villages throughout the Territory, and these will lead to the issuance of title to the lands occupied by the natives. Many small reservations were surveyed and the work of marking the boundaries of the national forests in the vicinity of the towns and villages has been carried well along to completion.

The greater part of the land available and suitable for homesteads is in the Fairbanks and Anchorage land districts, and inquiries for information should be directed to these local offices.

The following statement shows the total number of entries made and the total acreage of the land entries in the Fairbanks and Anchorage offices during the fiscal year:

During the fiscal year the following surveys were approved: Fourteen township surveys, whole and fractional, four of which are in the Taku River Valley, four in the Iniskin Bay district, three on the Stikine River flats, one near Petersburg on Wrangell Narrows, and two in the Matanuska coal field.

Forty-four mineral surveys, embracing 175 locations.

Three forest homestead surveys.

Forty surveys of town sites, homesteads, trade and manufacturing sites, etc., were made by the United States cadastral engineers and by United States deputy surveyors.

THE ALASKA CABLE SYSTEM

The Alaska cable system continues to hold its position as one of the most important of the Government agencies in Alaska and handles a large volume of commercial and official messages annually.

The gradual development of the industries and commerce of Alaska can be readily seen by the growth in the traffic over the Signal Corps lines.

The value of the Signal Corps traffic during the first year of its operation was $26,977.69 while the traffic in the fiscal year amounted to $492,343.12, an increase of $22,187.59 over that of 1926.

The following table will show the amount of business handled by the Signal Corps from 1903 to 1927:

In July, 1926, the Navy radio station at Seward was transferred to the Signal Corps for operation. New equipment was installed and station was in working condition by May 15, 1927.

The final transfer of the Valdez-Fairbanks telegraph line to the Alaska Road Commission was completed September 1, 1926. The only telegraph line in Alaska now owned by the Signal Corps is a section of 11 miles between Fort Egbert and the Canadian boundary. The Signal Corps operates one of the Alaska Railroad lines between Seward and Fairbanks over which the traffic for Fairbanks, and other stations reached through the Fairbanks radio station, is handled.

During the year radio stations were established at Valdez, Copper Center, Grundler, and Little Squaw mines. All of these stations are equipped with 50-watt tube transmitters.

The Fortuna Ledge station was moved into a new building and opened in this new location on August 22, 1926.

On September 10, 1926, the headquarters of the second section of the system was moved from Valdez to Seward. All necessary equipment, records, and personnel were moved by the Dellwood at a great saving to the Government in transportation charges.

On August 19, 1926, the office of the radio officer at Fairbanks was closed and all records transferred to the office of the officer in charge, second section, at Seward.

The Dellwood laid four cables from the Seward city office to the radio station during the month of September, 1926. These cables are now successfully used for remote control purposes.

A 500-watt tube transmitter was installed at Juneau in January, 1927, which has proved to be a great aid in radio communication. The Sitka office was moved from the old Signal Corps building to the customs building on April 21, 1927.

A whale became entangled with the Seattle-Ketchikan cable at 5 a. m., April 3, about 200 miles from Seattle, at a depth of 3,600 feet. The conductor of the cable was severed, but the armor, which was of the light intermediate type, was not broken, but was badly tangled. The dead whale was still engaged with the cable when it was brought to the surface by the cable ship at 8 p. m., April 8. During the seven days the cable was interrupted traffic was badly delayed and commercial interests suffered severely. Every effort possible was made to handle the traffic by radio through Ketchikan and Bremerton. On May 11 a fire originating in the furnace room of the Seward radio station caused some damage.

The new money transfer service is now in effect at all money transfer offices except Kotzebue and Tacotna. An appreciable increase in receipts from this service is already noticeable.

It is planned to make Nulato the relay point for radio traffic now handled by Iditarod and the assistant radio engineer is now at Nulato rehabilitating the equipment preparatory to this change. It is felt that this should be a decided improvement over the present routing of traffic.

Communication over the Valdez-Fairbanks trail line, now abandoned, was interrupted as follows:

Interruptions to one circuit, 31 days; interruptions to two circuits, 44 days, 13 hours, 45 minutes.

INTERRUPTIONS TO RADIO

While installing the 500-watt tube equipment at Juneau, that station was closed for 7 days 21 hours. During that time all traffic to and from Juneau radio was handled by the Coast Guard ship Unalga, which was lying at the dock in Juneau.

The Seward radio station was closed from midnight January 30–31 until May 15, 1927, while the station was being rehabilitated and new equipment installed. During this time the Anchorage radio station

handled the Seward schedules. Seward radio was made the net control station, effective May 25, 1927.

Total interruptions to radio channels on the second section were 30 days, 12 hours, and 35 minutes. The interruptions making this total were scattered through the entire radio net of the second section, many of them occurring for only brief periods. In most cases no interruption to traffic resulted.

Signal Corps offices closed during the fiscal year in Alaska were: Haggard, Donnelly, McCallum, Richardson, Wortman, Teikhell, Copper Center, and Chitina. All buildings and property at these stations were transferred to the Alaska Road Commission.

New radio offices were opened at the following stations during the year: Copper Center and Grundler and the Little Squaw mines and Valdez was equipped as a radio station in November, 1926. Livengood reopened for business after having been destroyed by fire in May. 1926.

The charges for sending and receiving messages over the Alaskan system are very moderate and compare favorably with charges for similar service in the States.

The towns of Seward, Valdez, Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway, Nenana, Fairbanks, Sitka, and Petersburg are provided with messenger delivery service such as may be found in towns of like importance in the States.

NAVAL COMMUNICATION SERVICE

The naval communication service in Alaska performs two important functions, in that while the United States naval radio stations. at Sitka, Cordova, Kodiak, Dutch Harbor, and St. Paul insure communication with shipping in the waters contiguous to the coast and on north Pacific routes, they supplement the rapid-communication facilities for the Territory by securing service to communities out of touch with the Army cable and telegraph system and insure continuous communication between the Territory and the United States whenever the system operated by the Signal Corps is interrupted from any cause.

Organization for insuring continuous rapid communication for the Territory provides two main arteries. The high-powered station at Sitka provides a circuit for points in southeastern Alaska, while the stations at Cordova, Alaska, and Puget Sound form the main route for points in southwestern Alaska. The other stations enumerated above act as feeders for this concentration of messages at the two main stations at Cordova and Sitka, in Alaska.

The radiocompass stations on Soapstone Point and Cape Hinchinbrook are used by ships when making the difficult entrances to Icy Straits and to Prince William Sound.

The stations on St. Paul Island, in the Pribilof group, and Dutch Harbor, on Unalaska, are peculiarly useful in that the uniformly excellent conditions as regards atmospheric disturbance existing at these stations permit them to communicate with merchant ships anywhere in the north Pacific Ocean from the Orient to the continental coast.

During the fiscal year of 1927 naval radio stations in Alaska handled 4,316,877 words, of which over 50 per cent, or 1,602,267 words, were commercial from, to, and within the Territory.

THE FOREST SERVICE

The even-tempered, moist climate of southeastern Alaska and the Prince William Sound region accounts for a luxuriant forest cover of Sitka spruce and western hemlock similar in composition and quality to the forests immediately along the coast of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon. These heavily forested coastal sections of the Territory have largely been included in the national forest system under the administration of the Forest Service of the Department of Agriculture. The extent of these national forest lands is 20,000,000 acres and the amount of timber they contain is conservatively estimated at 85,000,000,000 board-feet. The aim of Federal Government is to manage this vast forest resource in a way that will insure its productivity for all time and thus insure a sustained supply of raw material to timber-using industries established in the Territory, which in turn will contribute continuously to the Nation's requirements for forest products.

TIMBER ACTIVITIES

The outstanding feature of Alaskan forestry during the past year has been the interest shown by manufacturers and large users of