stefansson-wrangel-09-08-025-002

Mr. A. J. T. Taylor...............2

Hibbard Stewart Company of Seattle.

The following is my schedule of movements: I expect to
leave New York at the latest June 4th to be in Iowa City, Iowa, to
receive an honorary degree on June 6th. This about the degree is
confidential until it comes off (Note by the way what a beautiful
reply this is to all the Anderson criticisms from Ottawa. Anderson
and I were graduated from the University in the class of 1903. He
was a great hero to them and I was a nonentity. Last winter he
went to Iowa and gave out there a full page interview filled with
violent denunciations. This is the answer he gets from the Univer-
sity).

It will be highly desirable if you could get to New York on
or before the first of June. In case, however, you have no business
in New York, I could arrange to leave here earlier and meet you in
Cleveland or Chicago. I prefer a meeting in Cleveland or Chicago
rather than in Detroit or any other city because Cleveland and Chicago
are on my direct route to Iowa.

In case you should find it impossible to come East early
enough to get to New York in time, or to meet me in Chicago before
June 6th, then perhaps you had better delay a little so that we can
meet in Chicago on June 8th or 10th.

I think you will get this letter in ample time, but in case
there is hurry, send a night letter saying where we shall meet.

There is no information about Wrangel available that is any
good. The best is from my own men who spent six months there. I
can give it to you in a nutshell.

Ice conditions around Wrangel Island are usually bad in the
early summer and usually good in the late summer and early fall. There
are probably few seasons (not more than one in twenty) when a ship can
not get to Wrangel Island in August or September. The country is a
rolling, arctic prairie with low mountains in the interior. There
are either no glaciers, or else some tiny ones scarcely more than snow-
banks in the mountains. The amount of vegetation is probably rather
less per square mile on the average in the North. From the rein-
deer point of view, the average of the arctic lands is estimated to be
one reindeer per 25 acres. If we estimate that Wrangel Island will
support one reindeer for each 50 acres, we shall be very conservative.
The island is probably over eighty miles long and over thirty miles
wide, making an area of about 2,500 square miles - giving grazing for
at least 30,000 reindeer.