The history of Alaska, as part of the United States, began in 1867, but settlement of the region dates back to the paleolithic period (around 12,000 BCE). The earliest inhabitants were asiatic groups who crossed the Bering Land Bridge into what is now western Alaska. Many, if not most, of the pre-Columbian peoples of the Americas crossed the land bridge before migrating south. At the time of European contact by the Russian explorers, the area was populated by the Inuit and a variety of other Indigenous groups.
The name “Alaska” is most likely derived from the Aleut word Alyaeska, meaning greater land as opposed to the Aleut word Aleutia, meaning lesser land. To the Aleuts, this distinction was a linguistic variation distinguishing the mainland from an island.
Most of Alaska’s documented history dates from European settlement. Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in the service of the Russian Navy aboard the St. Peter, is often credited with the Western “discovery” of Alaska. However, Aleksei Chirikov, commanding the St. Paul, made landfall first at the present-day site of Sitka on July 15, 1741. The Russian-American Company soon began hunting the otters and helping to colonize much of coastal Alaska, but the colony was never profitable, due mainly to high shipping costs.
William H. Seward, the U.S. Secretary of State, engineered the Alaskan purchase on April 9, 1867 for US$7.2 million (approximately US$90 million in 2005 dollars). The nearby Yukon Territory in Canada and Alaska itself were the site of a gold rush in the 19th century, and they remained a significant source of mining even after gold reserves diminished. On July 7, 1958 President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Act into law which paved the way for Alaska’s admission into the Union as the 49th State on January 3, 1959.
The “Good Friday Earthquake” of March 27, 1964, registering 9.2 on the Richter scale, killed 131 people and leveled several villages. Oil revenues helped reestablish the population and infrastructure of the State after deposits were discovered in 1968, and after the Trans-Alaskan Pipeline was completed in 1977. In 1989, the Exxon Valdez hit a reef in the Prince William Sound, spilling between 11 and 35 million US gallons (42,000 and 130,000 m³) of crude oil over 1,100 miles (1,600 km) of coastline. Today, more than half of Alaskan land is owned by the Federal Government. The fates of the large reserves of wild frontier in the State are under debate, as is the highly political conflict over oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Prehistory
Paleolithic era
Paleolithic families moved into northwestern North America sometime between 16,000 and 10,000 BCE across the Bering Land Bridge in western Alaska. They found their passage blocked by a huge sheet of ice until a temporary recession in the last ice age that opened up an ice-free corridor through northwestern Canada, allowing bands to fan out throughout the rest of the continent. Eventually, Alaska became populated by the Inuit and a variety of Native American groups. Today, early Alaskans are divided into several main groups: the Southeastern Coastal Indians (the Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian), the Athabascans, the Aleut, and the two groups of Inupiat and Yup’ik.
The Tlingit, Haida, and Athabascans would hold potlatchs in which a person in a position of power would give away all of his possessions, have them eaten, or destroyed. At these potlatches, family histories would be recited, ceremonial titles would be transferred, and offerings would be given to ancestors. The Aleut society was divided into three categories: honorables, comprising the respected whalers and elders; common people; and slaves. At death, the body of an honorable was mummified, and slaves were occasionally killed in honor of the deceased. Means of hunting for these groups included snares, clubs, spears, and bows and arrows.
18th century
Russian Alaska
The first written accounts indicate that the first Europeans to reach Alaska came from Russia. The legend holds that a Russian settlement was established as early as 1648, when Semyon Dezhnev, a Siberian explorer, and Fedot Alekseev, a Russian merchant, began exploring the region, though there is little existing evidence to back up this claim. Vitus Bering, a Danish navigator in the service of the Russian Navy aboard the St. Peter, is often credited with the European ‘discovery’ of Alaska. In June 1741, the St. Peter, captained by Bering, and the St. Paul, captained by a Russian, Aleksei Chirikov, set sail from Russia at the Siberian port of Petropavlovsk. Aleksei Chirikov, commanding the St. Paul, made landfall first at the present-day site of Sitka on July 15, 1741.
After surviving a shipwreck, Bering’s crew returned to Russia from North America with what were judged to be the finest otter furs in the world. The Russian-American Company soon began hunting the otters and helping to lightly colonize much of coastal Alaska, but shipping costs meant that the colony was never profitable. Georg Wilhelm Steller, the ship’s naturalist, hiked along the island and took notes on the plants and wildlife.
Russia soon threw itself into creating hunting and trading posts. Catherine the Great, who became Czarina in 1762, proclaimed good will toward the Aleuts and urged her subjects to treat them fairly, but the hunters’ quest for furs made them disregard Aleut welfare. In 1784, Grigory Ivanovich Shelikhov, who would later set up the Russian-Alaska Company that colonized early Alaska, arrived in Three Saints Bay on Kodiak Island with two ships, the Three Saints and the St. Simon .
The indigenous Koniag harassed the Russian party and Shelikhov responded by killing hundreds and taking hostages to enforce the obedience of the rest. Having established his authority on Kodiak Island, Shelikhov founded the first permanent Russian settlement in Alaska on the island’s Three Saints Bay, built a school to teach the natives to read and write Russian, and introduced the Russian Orthodox religion.
In 1790, Shelikhov, back in Russia, hired Alexandr Baranov to manage his Alaskan fur enterprise. Baranov, concerned by the sight of non-Russian Europeans trading with the Natives in southeast Alaska, established Mikhailovsk six miles (10 km) north of present-day Sitka in 1795. By 1804, Alexandr Baranov, now manager of the Russian-American Company, had consolidated the company’s hold on fur trade activities in the Americas following his victory over the local Tlingit clan at the Battle of Sitka. However, profits began to fall due to overhunting and dependence on American supply ships. Rather than let the British take over the region, Russian America was sold to the U.S., and all the holdings of the Russian-American Company were liquidated.
Spain’s attempts at colonization
Out of fears of Russian expansion, King Charles III of Spain sent forth from Mexico a number of expeditions to explore the Pacific Northwest between 1774 and 1791. The second expedition, led by Lieutenant Bruno de Hezeta aboard the Santiago, along with 90 men set sail from San Blas on March 16, 1775 with orders to claim the Pacific Northwest for Spain. Accompanying Hezeta was the escort and supply ship Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe (generally known as the Senora), initially under the command of Juan Manuel de Ayala. The 37 foot (11 m) schooner and its crew complement of 16 were to perform coastal reconnaissance and mapping, and could make landfall in places the larger Santiago was unable to approach on its previous voyage; in this way, the expedition could officially lay claim to the lands north of Mexico it visited.
The two ships sailed together as far north as Point Grenville, Washington, named Punta de los Martires (or “Point of the Martyrs”) by Hezeta in response to an attack by the local Quinault Indians. By design, the vessels parted company on the evening of July 29, 1775 with the Santiago continuing to what is today the border between Washington state and Canada. The Senora (now with second officer Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra at the helm) moved up the coast according to its orders, ultimately reaching a position at Latitude 59° North on August 15, entering Sitka Sound near the present-day town of Sitka, Alaska. It is there that the Spaniards performed numerous “acts of sovereignty,” naming and claiming Puerto de Bucareli (Bucareli Sound), Puerto de los Remedios, and Mount San Jacinto, renamed Mount Edgecumbe by British explorer James Cook three years later.
Throughout the voyage, the crews of both vessels endured many hardships, including food shortages and scurvy. On September 8, the ships rejoined and headed south for the return trip to San Blas.
Another expedition was that of Alessandro Malaspina. In 1791 the king of Spain gave Malaspina an order to search for Northwest Passage. He surveyed the Alaska coast to the Prince William Sound. At Yakutat Bay, the expedition made contact with the Tlingit. Spanish scholars made a study of the tribe, recording information on social mores, language, economy, warfare methods, and burial practices. Artists with the expedition, Tomas de Suria and Jose Cardero, produced portraits of tribal members and scenes of Tlingit daily life. A glacier between Yakutat Bay and Icy Bay was subsequently named after Malaspina.
In the end, the North Pacific rivalry proved to be too costly for Spain, who withdrew from the contest and abandoned its claims to the region in 1819. Today, Spain’s Alaskan legacy endures as little more than a few place names, among these the Malaspina Glacier and the town of Valdez.
Britain’s presence
British settlements in Alaska consisted of a few scattered trading outposts, with most settlers arriving by sea. Captain James Cook, midway through his third and final voyage of exploration in 1778, sailed along the west coast of North America aboard the HMS Resolution, mapping the coast from the state of California all the way to the Bering Strait. During the trip, he discovered what came to be known as Cook Inlet (named in honor of Cook in 1794 by George Vancouver, who had served under his command) in Alaska. The Bering Strait proved to be impassable, although the Resolution and its companion ship HMS Discovery made several attempts to sail through it. The ships left the straits to return to Hawaii in 1779.
During Cook’s visit, while searching for the Northwest Passage, the Russians tried to impress him with the extent of their control over the region, but Cook considered them a tenuous group of ragtag hunters and traders. Although Cook died in Hawaii after visiting Alaska, his crew continued on to Canton in China, where they sold sea otter pelts they had bought at Alaska, for relatively high prices. Cook’s expedition spurred the British to increase their sailings along the northwest coast, following in the wake of the Spanish. Three Alaska-based posts, funded by the Hudson’s Bay Company, operated at Fort Yukon, on the Stikine River, and in Wrangell (the only Alaskan town to have been the subject of British, Russian, and American rule) throughout the early 1800s.
19th century
Russia-American agreement
Financial difficulties in Russia, the desire to keep Alaska out of British hands, and the low profits of trade with Alaskan settlements all contributed to Russia’s willingness to sell its possessions in North America. At the instigation of U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, the United States Senate approved the purchase of Alaska from Russia for $7,200,000 in golden coins (approximately $90,750,000 in 2005 dollars, adjusted for inflation) on 9 April 1867. This purchase was popularly known in the U.S. as “Seward’s Folly”, or “Seward’s Icebox”, and was unpopular at the time, though the later discovery of gold would show it to be a worthy one. The nearby Yukon Territory in Canada and Alaska itself were the site of a gold rush in the 19th century, and they remained a significant source of mining even after gold reserves diminished.
In Soviet Union there existed a myth that Alaska was rented to the United states for 99 (or 100) years, rather than sold. The myth still perpetuates in Russia, in addition to other versions of events, such as the deal was a result of bribery, of American pressure, or even American manipulation with the stocks of the Russian Americasn Company.
The Department of Alaska
The United States flag was raised on 18 October 1867 (now called Alaska Day). Coincident with the ownership change, the de facto International Date Line was moved westward, and Alaska changed from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar. Therefore, for residents, Friday, October 6, 1867 was followed by Friday, October 18, 1867-two Fridays in a row because of the date line shift.
During the Department era, from 1867 to 1884, Alaska was variously under the jurisdiction of the U.S. Army (until 1877), the United States Department of the Treasury (from 1877 until 1879) and the U.S. Navy (from 1879 until 1884).
When Alaska was first purchased, most of its land remained unexplored. In 1865, Western Union laid a telegraph line across Alaska to the Bering Strait where it would connect, under water, with an Asian line. It also conducted the first scientific studies of the region and produced the first map of the entire Yukon River. The Alaska Commercial Company and the military also contributed to the growing exploration of Alaska in the last decades of the 1800s, building trading posts along the Interior’s many rivers.
District of Alaska
In 1884, the region was organized and the name was changed from the Department of Alaska to the District of Alaska. At the time, legislators in Washington, D.C., were occupied with post-Civil War reconstruction issues, and had little time to dedicate to Alaska. In 1896, the discovery of gold in Yukon Territory in neighboring Canada, brought thousands of miners to Alaska, and, though it was uncertain whether gold would also be found in Alaska, Alaska greatly profited because it was along the easiest transportation route to the Yukon goldfields.
In 1899, gold was found in Alaska itself in Nome, and several towns subsequently began to be built, such as Fairbanks and Ruby. In 1902, the Alaska Railroad began to be built, which would connect from Seward to Fairbanks by 1914, though Alaska still does not have a railroad connecting it to the lower 48 states today. Still, an overland route was built, cutting transportation times to the contiguous states by days. The industries of copper mining, fishing, and canning began to become popular in the early 1900s, with 10 canneries in some major towns.
20th century
Alaska Territory
By the turn of the 20th century, commercial fishing was gaining a foothold in the Aleutian Islands. Packing houses salted cod and herring, and salmon canneries were opened. Another traditional occupation, whaling, continued with no regard for over-hunting. They pushed the bowhead whales to the edge of extinction for the oil in their tissue (though in recent years, due to a decline in commercial whaling, their populations have rebounded enough for Natives to harvest many each year without affecting the population). The Aleuts soon suffered severe problems due to the depletion of the fur seals and sea otters which they needed for survival. As well as requiring the flesh for food, they also used the skins to cover their boats, without which they could not hunt. The Americans also expanded into the Interior and Arctic Alaska, exploiting the furbearers, fish, and other game on which Natives depended.
When Congress passed the Second Organic Act in 1912, Alaska was reorganized, and renamed the Territory of Alaska[5]. By 1916, its population was about 58,000. James Wickersham, a Delegate to Congress, introduced Alaska’s first statehood bill, but it failed to due lack of interest from Alaskans. Even President Harding’s visit in 1923 could not create widespread interest in statehood. Under the conditions of the Second Organic Act, Alaska had been split into four divisions. The most populous of the divisions, whose capital was Juneau, wondered if it could become a separate state from the other three. Government control was a primary concern, with the territory having 52 federal agencies governing it.
Then, in 1920, the Jones Act required U.S.-flagged vessels to be built in the United States, owned by U.S. citizens, and documented under the laws of the United States. All goods entering or leaving Alaska had to be transported by American carriers and shipped to Seattle prior to further shipment, making Alaska dependent on Washington. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled that the provision of the Constitution saying one state should not hold sway over another’s commerce did not apply because Alaska was only a territory. The prices Seattle shipping businesses charged began to rise to take advantage of the situation.
The Depression caused prices of fish and copper, which were vital to Alaska’s economy at the time, to decline. Wages were dropped and the workforce decreased by more than half. In 1935, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt thought Americans from agricultural areas could be transferred to Alaska’s Matanuska-Susitna Valley for a fresh chance at agricultural self-sustainment. Colonists were largely from northern states, such as Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota under the belief that only those who grew up with climates similar to that of Alaska’s could handle settler life there. The United Congo Improvement Association asked the president to settle 400 African-American farmers in Alaska, saying that the territory would offer full political rights, but racial prejudice and the belief that only those from northern states would make suitable colonists caused the proposal to fail.
The exploration and settlement of Alaska would not have been possible without the development of the aircraft, which allowed for the influx of settlers into the state’s interior, and rapid transportation of people and supplies throughout. However, due to the unfavorable weather conditions of the state, and high ratio of pilots-to-population, over 1700 aircraft wreck sites are scattered throughout its domain. Numerous wrecks also trace their origins to the military build-up of the state during both World War II and the Cold War.
World War II
During World War II, the three of the outer Aleutian Islands-Attu, Agattu and Kiska-were the only part of the United States to have land occupied by the enemy during the war. The Japanese launched the campaign mostly as a distraction to battles taking place in other parts of the Pacific, but also intended to use the islands as a base for launching a campaign against the contiguous U.S. The battle became a matter of national pride, defending the nation against the first foreign military campaign on U.S. soil since the War of 1812.
On June 3, 1942 the Japanese launched an air attack on Dutch Harbor, a U.S. naval base on Unalaska Island [6]. U.S. forces managed to hold off the planes, and the base survived this attack, and a second one, with minor damage. On June 7, the Japanese landed on the islands of Kiska and Attu, where they overwhelmed Attu villagers. The villagers were taken to Japan and interned for the remainder of the war. Aleuts from the Pribilofs and Aleutian villages were then evacuated by the United States to Southeast Alaska.
In the fall of 1942, the U.S. Navy began constructing a base on Adak, and on May 11, 1943, American troops landed on Attu, determined to retake the island [7]. The battle wore on for more than two weeks. The Japanese, who had no hope of rescue because their fleet of transport submarines had been turned back by U.S. destroyers, fought to the last man. The end finally came on May 29 when the Americans repelled a banzai charge. Some Japanese remained in hiding on the small island for up to three months after their defeat. When discovered, they killed themselves rather than surrender. There were 3,929 American casualties; 549 were killed, 1148 were injured, 1200 had severe cold injuries, 614 succumbed to disease, and 318 died of miscellaneous causes, largely Japanese booby traps and friendly fire.
The U.S. then turned its attention to the other occupied island, Kiska. From June through August, tons of bombs were dropped on the tiny island. The Japanese, under cover of thick Aleutian fog, escaped via transport ships. After the war, the Native Attuans who had survived internment in Japan were resettled to Atka by the federal government, which considered their home villages too remote to defend. (more…)