alaska

For most of its history as a U.S. possession, Alaska was known as the "last frontier," the last part of the country where would-be pioneers could go to live out the American dream of freedom and self-sufficiency through hard work and ingenuity. But with the rise of environmental consciousness in the 1960s and 1970s, that notion subsided. Alaska became America's "last wilderness," the last place in America with vast stretches of undeveloped, unpopulated land. In 1980 Congress designated 50 million acres of the state as wilderness, doubling the size of the national wilderness system.

Few Americans knew much about the region when the United States purchased Alaska from Russia in 1867. Newspaper cartoons ridiculed the purchase as "Seward's Folly," "Icebergia," and "Walrussia." But informed Americans emphasized Alaska's resource potential in furbearers and minerals, and the U.S. Senate approved Secretary of State William H. Seward's purchase treaty in the summer of 1867 by a vote of 37–2.

At that time about thirty thousand indigenous people lived in the region, pursuing traditional subsistence. These people included the INUIT (northern Eskimos) who are culturally related to all Arctic indigenes; Yupik speakers (southern Eskimos) of the Yukon River and Kuskokwim River delta area; ALEUT PEOPLE living in the Aleutian Islands who are related to Alutiq-speaking people on the south shore of the Alaska Peninsula and on Kodiak Island; Dene-speaking Athabaskan Indians who live along the interior rivers; and the Dene-speaking Tlingit and Haida people (Pacific Northwest Coast Indians) of the Southeast Alaska Panhandle (Alexander Archipelago) who are related culturally to the coastal Indians of British Columbia, Washington, and Oregon.

Russian Interest

The Russians were the first outsiders to establish sustained contact with Alaska Native peoples, initially in the Aleutian Islands and later in the southeastern coastal islands. In 1725 Peter the Great commissioned an expedition to search east of Siberia for lands with economic resources useful to the Russian state. The expedition commander Vitus Bering failed to find America on his first attempt in 1728, but returning in 1741 he made a landfall on the Alaskan coast near Cape Suckling. Bering shipwrecked on a North Pacific island on his return voyage and died there on 8 December.

Bering's voyages did not provide a comprehensive picture of the geography of Northwest North America. That would await the third round-the-world voyage of Captain James Cook in 1778. But more than half of Bering's crew survived the shipwreck and returned to Kamchatka bringing pelts of various furbearers, including sea otter. Siberian fur trappers recognized the sea otter as the most valuable pelt in the world at the time, setting off a rush to the ALEUTIAN ISLANDS. Over the next half century, Russian trappers made one hundred individual voyages to the American islands to hunt sea otters, fur seals, and walrus, drawing Alaska's indigenous population into the world mercantilist economy.

American furs and walrus ivory were profitable for private investors who financed the voyages and for the Russian tsarist government, which took 10 percent of each voyage's profit. But the exploitation was costly to Alaska Natives. The Russians relied on Aleut Natives to hunt furbearers and held women and children hostage in the villages while Russian overseers traveled with the hunters. The entire Aleut population was brutalized and decimated by this practice, and new diseases the Russians introduced reduced the Aleut population from twenty thousand to two thousand by 1800.

Ranging relentlessly eastward, Russian trappers in 1759 discovered the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island. In 1784 Grigory Shelekhov established the first permanent Russian post in North America on Kodiak Island. Returning to Russia, Shelekhov attempted to persuade Empress Catherine II to invest in the exploitation of North America, but concerned about Spanish and English interest in the region, she declined.

In 1799, however, Paul III chartered a government sponsored private monopoly, the Russian American Company. Over the next sixty years the company systematically exploited Alaska's resources, primarily furs, returning handsome profits to the stockholders and the government. During the company's first twenty-year charter, Aleksandr Baranov extended Russian activities into the Alexander Archipelago, and in 1824 and 1825 the United States and Britain signed treaties formalizing Russia's occupation there but claiming the area to the south, the Oregon Country, as their own. The 1825 treaty established permanent boundaries for Alaska. In 1812 Baranov also established a Russian agricultural post on the California coast, eighty miles north of San Francisco, but failed in an attempt to establish a similar post in Hawaii in 1815.

Russia did not attempt to establish a new society in North America. The largest number of Russians ever in the colony at one time was 823. They sought only the efficient exploitation of the easily accessible resources. Yet despite the participation of the Russian navy, the company and the government could not keep the enterprise adequately supplied. By midcentury the colony depended on the fiercely independent Tlingit Indians for food. When the Crimean War (1854–1856) demonstrated that Russian America could not be defended, critics began to advocate relinquishing the colony, the profitability of which was becoming a problem.

American Interest

Sale to the United States was the only alternative, as England was Russia's principal European antagonist. In the aftermath of the American Civil War, negotiations proceeded quickly. The United States purchased the colony for $7.2 million. The formal transfer was conducted at Sitka on 18 October 1867, which became a state holiday in Alaska.

Secretary Seward wanted Alaska primarily as a gateway to new markets in Asia for American agricultural and manufactured products. Others recognized Alaska's resource potential. But until those resources were actually discovered and developed, Americans showed little interest in the region. The 1880 census revealed 30,000 Natives and a mere 435 non-Natives. Congress waited to implement legislation organizing the territory until it was warranted by the immigration of more pioneer settlers.

These settlers arrived quickly after 1880, when gold was discovered and investors began development of the Treadwell Mines at Juneau to exploit large lode deposits. By 1884 Treadwell boasted the largest gold stamp mill in North America, prompting Congress to pass the first organic legislation for the region that authorized the appointment of a governor, a judge, and other civil officials. Sitka was named the capital. The act provided for acculturation of Alaska Natives at the direction of a "general agent of education" who was to establish schools in Native villages and in the few white towns.

At the same time the U.S. Army began a systematic reconnaissance of Alaska's interior, which was largely unmapped. Explorations by Henry Allen, William Abercrombie, John Cantwell, George Stoney, J. C. Castner, Edwin Fitch Glenn, and others produced a comprehensive understanding of Alaska's geography and physiography by the end of the century.

By 1890 the census counted over five thousand non-Natives, most in Juneau, Sitka, and Wrangell in the southeastern panhandle. A few hundred non-Native prospector-traders worked along the interior rivers, trapping and trading furs among the Athabaskan Indians. Two hundred ships annually worked the lucrative Bering Sea and Arctic whale fishery and traded with the coastal Inuit.

Prospectors discovered gold on the Forty mile River near the Canadian border in 1886 and on Birch Creek near Fort Yukon in 1891, generating increasing interest in Alaska's mineral prospects. In 1896 George Carmacks and his Indian companions discovered placer deposits of unprecedented extent on tributaries of the Klondike River in the Yukon Territory, setting off the gold rush of 1897–1898. Forty thousand argonauts crossed the mountain passes from the tidewater to the upper Yukon River en route to the gold fields. The rush was short-lived but intense. Four thousand people found gold, but only four hundred found it in quantities that might be considered a "fortune."

Many gold trekkers continued into Alaska and searched virtually every river system for minerals. Gold was found in the creeks of the Seward Peninsula in the fall of 1898, sparking a major rush there and the founding of Nome. Another find in the Tanana River drainage in 1902 led to the founding of Fairbanks. Other discoveries generated minor rushes in a score of places, but most played out quickly. New settlers established a large number of small communities, however, and the 1900 census showed thirty thousand non-Natives in the territory, a figure that stayed virtually the same until 1940.

Although Alaskan gold production peaked in 1906, the federal government adopted substantial legislation in response to the gold rush to nurture economic development and to sustain new settlement, including construction of a telegraph line that connected the territory to Seattle, a system of license fees to generate territorial government revenue, civil and criminal legal codes, and a federally owned and operated railroad, the last a unique feature of government support of western settlement. In 1906 Congress authorized the biennial election of a nonvoting territorial delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives and in 1914 a bicameral territorial legislature. At the same time Progressive Era conservation consciousness led to a number of federal conservation withdrawals, including the Tongass National Forest in 1905, the Chugach National Forest in 1907, Mount McKinley National Park in 1917, Katmai National Park in 1918, and Glacier Bay National Park in 1925.

The gold rush and government support also attracted corporate investors interested in developing Alaska's natural resources. By 1890 thirty-seven Pacific salmon canneries operated in Alaska, and by the end of the century more than twice that number operated. The invention of the fish trap, a system of surface to seafloor netting that led fish to a central enclosure, made fishing extremely efficient and produced high profits. By the 1920s moderate taxation of the salmon industry supplied three-fourths of territorial revenue.

The Guggenheim mining family also became interested in Alaska and early in the twentieth century developed a plan to coordinate development of gold, copper, coal, and oil deposits. Drawing the financier J. P. Morgan into a partnership, they created the Alaska Syndicate, which owned the Alaska Steamship Company; built, owned, and operated the Copper River and Northwestern Railway from Cordova at the tidewater to the Wrangell Mountains; owned the Kennecott Copper Mines; and developed oil deposits at Katalla. Their plans to develop coal deposits near Katalla were stopped when President Theodore Roosevelt closed access to Alaska coal lands in 1906 as a strategic measure. Deprived of the cheap, local source of coal, the syndicate scrapped plans to build their railroad to the Yukon River to link it to the internal river system. Having extracted $300 million worth of copper by 1939, the syndicate attempted to sell the railway to the federal government, but when negotiations collapsed, the partners dismantled the road and transferred the rails and rolling stock to operations in Arizona and Utah.

Aviation had a significant impact on Alaska and from the formation of the first companies in the mid-1920s developed rapidly. Perhaps more than in any other part of the country, the airplane in roadless Alaska permitted access to otherwise inaccessible areas, provided hope in times of medical emergency, and greatly speeded mail delivery. Bush pilots quickly became genuine heroes wherever in the territory they flew.

Federal aid helped Alaska weather the Great Depression. Public Works Administration (PWA) and the Civil Works Administration (CWA) loans for heavy public construction projects provided jobs, as did Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) camps in every section of the territory. Also Native leaders worked with the federal government to extend the Indian Reorganization Act to Alaska in 1936 and to authorize a broad land claims suit by the Tlingit and Haida Indians in 1935. In an unusual rural rehabilitation project, two hundred families from the upper Midwest were transported to the Matanuska Valley near Anchorage in 1935 to start farms. But the experiment failed, for construction jobs created by the remilitarization of Alaska beginning in 1940 promised faster economic advance for the new settlers.

World War II transformed Alaska economically as the government invested $3 billion in three hundred new military installations in the territory. The military personnel in the territory numbered 300,000, five times the 1940 population. Attempting to divert American Pacific forces away from Midway Island in June 1942, Japanese forces captured two Aleutian Islands. In a dramatic battle on American soil in May 1943, a combined American and Canadian force of fourteen thousand retook Attu Island, suffering five hundred killed and nine hundred wounded. The Japanese abandoned Kiska before the American invasion there.

Alaska gained population quickly during World War II. Afterward Cold War strategic defenses in the territory included airfields for long-range bombers and the Distant Early Warning radar net across the Arctic. The Atomic Energy Commission used Amchitka Island in the Aleutians for large-scale nuclear tests and contemplated using nuclear explosions to create a new harbor on Alaska's Arctic coast. Federal spending became the basis of the regional economy that supported a still-expanding population.

Statehood

Shortly after the war territorial leaders began a campaign to achieve statehood for Alaska. They were opposed by the canned salmon industry, which feared additional regulation and taxation. In addition the U.S. military was unenthusiastic because of the increased bureaucracy. But territorial leaders conducted an aggressive, national campaign based on the moral right of all American citizens to have all the rights of other citizens, and following a convention in 1955–1956, they presented Congress with a progressive, uncomplicated state constitution. When polls showed Americans overwhelmingly in support of

Alaskan statehood in 1958, Congress passed the enabling act. Statehood became official on 3 January 1959.

The statehood act entitled the new state to select 104 million acres of unoccupied, unreserved land from Alaska's 375 million acres. Federal reserves already claimed 54 million acres. But the act also prohibited the state from selecting any land that might be subject to Native title. The United States had never executed any Native treaties in Alaska, and the question of Native land title had not been settled. When the state began to select its land, Native groups protested the selections. By 1965, despite Native protests, the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) had transferred 12 million acres to the state, including, fortuitously as it developed, land at Prudhoe Bay on the North (Arctic) Slope. By then, however, Native claims blanketed the entire state. Secretary of the Interior Steward Udall halted all further transfers to the state until Native land claims could be sorted out.

That process had just begun when, in December 1967, Richfield Oil Company discovered North America's largest oil field at Prudhoe Bay. A 789–mile hot oil pipeline would be necessary to transport the oil from the Arctic Coast to Prince William Sound, crossing many miles of land that eventually was titled to Natives. Natives worked with state and industry leaders and the U.S. Congress to craft the ALASKA NATIVE CLAIMS SETTLEMENT ACT (ANCSA) OF 1971. By that act Natives obtained title to 44 million acres of traditionally utilized land, and the United States paid $962.5 million in compensation for extinguishments of Native title to Alaska's remaining 331 million acres. In an unprecedented provision, the money was used to capitalize profit-making Native regional and village economic development corporations. All Alaska Natives became stockholders in one or another of the corporations. Natives would thereby earn stock dividends from their corporations in perpetuity.

The act transformed the status of Alaska Natives, making their corporations an immediate major economic factor in Alaska. Despite early difficulties, most corporations were able to pay stock dividends by the 1990s. Natives adapted well to the roles of corporation leaders and stockholders, though lack of economic sustainability threatened the future of many of the remote villages. Of 100,000 Alaska Natives in a state population of 620,000 in 2000, 30,000 were permanent urban residents.

ANCSA did not guarantee construction of the Alaska pipeline, however, because national environmental groups sued to halt the project to preserve Alaska wilderness. When OPEC placed an embargo on oil exports to the United States following the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, Congress passed the Alaska Pipeline Authorization Act, and construction began.

The state established a comprehensive tax structure for oil production, and by the 1980s oil taxes produced 85 percent of public state revenue. By the 1990s most public sector material infrastructure in the state had been paid for by oil taxation. So dependent was the state on oil money that a contraction of the price per barrel from $40 in 1981 to $15 in 1986 eliminated thousands of jobs and led to the outmigration of 600,000 residents from the state in 1985 and 1986.

In 1976 Alaska voters approved the creation of a publicly owned state investment fund, the Alaska Permanent Fund, made up of 10 percent of all state oil revenue. In 1982 the state legislature mandated that about half of the earnings on the fund be paid per capita annually to all state residents. In 2000 the dividend payment was near $2,000 for each Alaska citizen.

Reflecting the raised environmental consciousness in the United States, ANCSA also included a provision for Congress to establish new federal conservation units in Alaska within eight years. Fearing the loss of opportunities for economic development, state leaders and residents opposed the provision, but Congress proceeded. The battle over the Alaska lands act was bitter and protracted, but in 1980 Congress passed the Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act (ANILCA), which reserved 104 additional Alaska acres in new conservation units, half of which were designated wilderness. Natives were guaranteed access to traditional subsistence resources across the new conservation areas. Mount McKinley Park was renamed Denali National Park.

Americans' new embrace of wilderness values generated both horror and anger when the fully loaded oil tanker EXXON VALDEZ went aground on Bligh Reef in Prince William Sound in March 1989, spilling 10.8 million gallons of oil in an area considered pristine wilderness. Thousands of seabirds and uncounted fish died, along with lesser numbers of seals, sea otters, and other bird and animal species, including killer whales. Native villagers in the sound feared the contamination of subsistence resources. Exxon Corporation spent three summers cleaning up the spill at a cost of $2 billion, and the corporation was fined $1 billion by the state and federal governments.

Alaska mirrors a long-standing debate in the United States over the proper balance between natural resource extraction and resource preservation. The coastal plain of Alaska's Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) is presumed to contain significant oil deposits, which most Alaskans wish to see developed. But the area is considered wilderness by most Americans. The future of the refuge rests with Congress, where at the twentieth century's end vigorous debate continued.

Bibliography

Gibson, James R. Otter Skins, Boston Ships, and China Goods: The Maritime Fur Trade of the Northwest Coast, 1785–1841. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992.

Haycox, Stephen. Alaska—An American Colony. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002.

———. Frigid Embrace: Politics, Economics and Environment in Alaska. Corvallis: Oregon State University Press, 2002.

———, and Mary Mangusso, eds. An Alaska Anthology: Interpreting the Past. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1996.

Kollin, Susan. Nature's State: Imagining Alaska as the Last Frontier. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

Mitchell, Donald Craig. Sold American: The Story of Alaska Natives and Their Land, 1867–1959. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1997; Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 2000.

Sherwood, Morgan. Exploration of Alaska, 1865–1900. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1965; Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1992.

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