stefansson-wrangel-09-13-083-001

C O P Y

New York, Sept. 6, 1923.

My dear Mr. Stefansson:
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The cable between Seattle and Sitka has been put out
of commission and I have had only the one cable from Noice - the de-
layed one part of which I relayed to you yesterday. Therefore I do
not know whether he has received an offer from Alber or not. I wired
Alber as you suggested but have received no reply from him, although,
of course, my message did not call for a reply.

Until I hear from Noice I cannot close with the
Alliance for Crawford's story, When I do I shall have a contract
drawn up, signed by Pickering and sent to Taylor for his signature.

The Alliance have been somewhat peeved because the
Canadian Press had a story on Saturday from Nome containing the gist
of the Wrangel story while they only got Noice's story late Sunday
night. It may be, of course, that the cables were entirely to blame.
They received about 3,000 from Noice which was immediately skeleton-
ized and forwarded to London, Melbourne and Buenos Aires. Monday
being a holiday, they decided to hold the story for Tuesday and asked
me to make three takes of it of about 2,000 words each. In other words
I had to pad it out. I hope Noice will not shoot me when he sees me
for some of the things I found it necessary to put into his mouth.
I think I improved some points of it with respect to its publicity
value from the standpoint of the cause, although with the exception
of the part you criticized in your cable yesterday it was a pretty
good story - at least from the standpoint of the newspapers.

Yours,

(Signed) D. M. LeBourdais