AKAlaska History

For seventeen years after the United States bought Alaska, there was no legal way to own anything in it. The purchase closed in 1867 and Congress then forgot the place. No courts sat, no land office opened, no mining claim could be recorded, no will could be probated. The Army ran the district until 1877, Treasury customs collectors until 1879, and the Navy after that from the deck of a single ship. Only the Organic Act of May 17, 1884 supplied a governor and a judge, and they were told to apply the laws of Oregon because nobody had written any for Alaska.

The peoples of the coast, the interior and the chain

Alaska was never one homeland. The Inupiat and Yupik held the Arctic and Bering Sea coasts and hunted bowhead and walrus from skin boats. The Unangax, whom Russians called Aleuts, occupied the volcanic chain running out toward Kamchatka, and the Alutiiq lived around Kodiak and Prince William Sound. Athabascan peoples including the Dena'ina, Koyukon and Gwich'in held the interior river drainages. In the southeast panhandle the Tlingit and Haida built cedar plank houses, carved crest poles and controlled the mountain passes that carried trade inland.

One Native community arrived by boat. In 1887 a group of Tsimshian left Metlakatla in British Columbia with the missionary William Duncan and resettled on Annette Island. Congress made it a reserve in 1891, and it is still the only Indian reservation in the state.

Russian America, 1741 to 1867

Vitus Bering and Alexei Chirikov sighted the Alaskan coast in 1741. The sea otter pelts their survivors carried home set off eight decades of hunting that nearly exterminated the animal. Grigory Shelikhov built the first permanent Russian post at Three Saints Bay on Kodiak in 1784, and did it by storming an Alutiiq refuge rock and killing hundreds of people. The Russian-American Company was chartered in 1799 with a monopoly over the colony, and Alexander Baranov ran it for nearly thirty years.

The Kiks.adi Tlingit destroyed the Russian post at Sitka in 1802 and fought the company to a standstill at their sapling fort in 1804 before withdrawing overland. Russia rebuilt the town as New Archangel and made it the colonial capital. The settlement was always thin, a few hundred Russians dependent on Unangax and Alutiiq hunters pressed into service. Orthodox missionaries, notably Ioann Veniaminov, built an alphabet for the Unangax language, which is why onion domes still stand in villages no Russian settler ever lived in. By the 1850s the otters were gone, the Crimean War had drained the treasury, and St. Petersburg judged the colony indefensible against the British navy.

Seward's bargain and the gold that justified it

Secretary of State William Seward signed the treaty on March 30, 1867 for $7.2 million, close to two cents an acre, and the newspapers called it Seward's Icebox. The handover took place at Sitka on October 18, 1867, still observed as Alaska Day. Vindication came from gold. The Klondike strike of 1896 was in Canadian territory, but stampeders arrived through Skagway and Dyea and hauled their outfits over the Chilkoot Pass, which built Alaskan towns. Gold turned up in the beach sand at Nome in 1899 and near Fairbanks in 1902. The seat of government moved from Sitka to Juneau in 1906, and the Second Organic Act of 1912 finally gave Alaska a territorial legislature. When it met in 1913, the first bill it passed gave women the vote, seven years ahead of the Nineteenth Amendment.

The war fought on American ground

Japanese carrier aircraft bombed the naval base at Dutch Harbor on June 3 and 4, 1942, and Japanese troops landed on Attu and Kiska at the far end of the Aleutians, the only occupation of American soil in the Second World War. Retaking Attu in May 1943 cost weeks of fighting in fog and tundra. The United States also removed roughly 880 Unangax civilians from the Aleutians and Pribilofs to abandoned canneries in southeast Alaska, where crowding and disease killed many of them and some villages were never resettled. The war also brought the Alaska Highway, about 1,700 miles pushed through Canada by Army engineers in eight months of 1942, and a garrison that turned Anchorage into a real city.

Statehood, the 9.2, and what oil paid for

Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act on July 7, 1958, and Alaska became the forty-ninth state on January 3, 1959. The act let the new state select 104 million acres of federal land for itself, a grant with no parallel, and that selection right shaped everything afterward. On Good Friday, March 27, 1964, a magnitude 9.2 earthquake struck Prince William Sound, the strongest ever recorded in North America. It dropped stretches of coast several feet, sent tsunamis as far as California, and wrecked downtown Anchorage and the town of Valdez, later rebuilt on a different site.

In 1968 ARCO and Humble Oil hit the Prudhoe Bay field on the North Slope. Nothing could be built until Native land claims were settled, so Congress passed the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act on December 18, 1971, extinguishing aboriginal title in exchange for 44 million acres and $962.5 million, distributed not through reservations but through twelve regional and more than 200 village Native corporations. The trans-Alaska pipeline followed, 800 miles from Prudhoe Bay to Valdez, carrying oil from 1977. Voters created the Alaska Permanent Fund in 1976 to bank a share of the royalties, and the first dividend went out in 1982. The tanker Exxon Valdez ran aground on Bligh Reef on March 24, 1989 and spilled roughly 11 million gallons into the sound the pipeline had been built to reach.

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