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Early history
People have inhabited Alaska since 10,000 bce. At that time a land bridge extended from Siberia to eastern Alaska, and migrants followed herds of animals across it. Of these migrant groups, the Athabaskans, Unangan (Aleuts), Inuit, Yupiit (Yupik), Tlingit, and Haida remain in Alaska.
Explorations
As early as 1700, Indigenous peoples of Siberia reported the existence of a huge piece of land lying due east. In 1728 an expedition commissioned by Tsar Peter I (the Great) of Russia and led by a Danish mariner, Vitus Bering, determined that the new land was not linked to the Russian mainland, but, because of fog, the expedition failed to locate North America. On Bering’s second voyage, in 1741, the peak of Mount St. Elias was sighted, and men were sent ashore. Sea otter furs taken back to Russia opened a rich fur commerce between Europe, Asia, and the North American Pacific coast during the ensuing century.
Russian settlement
The first European settlement was established in 1784 by Russians at Three Saints Bay, near present-day Kodiak. With the arrival of the Russian fur traders, many Unangan were killed by the newcomers or overworked in the hunting of fur seals. Many other Unangan died of diseases brought by the Russians.
Kodiak served as Alaska’s capital until 1806, when the Russian-American Company, organized in 1799 under charter from the emperor Paul I, moved its headquarters to Sitka, where there was an abundance of sea otters. The chief manager of the company’s operations (essentially the governor of the Russian colonies), Aleksandr Baranov, was an aggressive administrator. His first effort to establish a settlement at Old Harbor near Sitka was destroyed by the Tlingit. His second attempt, in 1804 at Novo-Arkhangelsk (“New Archangel”; now Sitka), was successful, but not without a struggle that resulted in the battle of Sitka, the only major armed conflict between Alaska Natives and Europeans. (Nevertheless, Alaska Natives continued to agitate for land rights; some of their demands finally were met with the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971.) Yet, compared with the previous Russian fur traders, the Russian-American Company maintained relatively good relations with the Unangan and the Indigenous peoples of the southeast, as well as with the Yupiit of the lower Yukon and Kuskokwim river valleys. It was not uncommon for Unangan to marry Russians and convert to the Russian Orthodox faith, and quite a few Unangan—some with Russian surnames—worked for the Russian-American Company.
During this time, British and American merchants were rivals of the company. A period of bitter competition among fur traders was resolved in 1824 when Russia concluded separate treaties with the United States and Great Britain that established trade boundaries and commercial regulations. The Russian-American Company continued to govern Alaska until the region’s purchase by the United States in 1867.
U.S. possession
The near extinction of the sea otter and the political consequences of the Crimean War (1853–56) were factors in Russia’s willingness to sell Alaska to the United States. U.S. Secretary of State William H. Seward spearheaded the purchase of the territory and negotiated a treaty with the Russian minister to the United States. After much public opposition, Seward’s formal proposal of $7.2 million was approved by the U.S. Congress, and the American flag was flown at Sitka on October 18, 1867. The Alaska Purchase was initially referred to as “Seward’s Folly” by critics who were convinced the land had nothing to offer. The popular dessert baked Alaska was reportedly created to celebrate the acquisition of the territory.
As a U.S. possession, Alaska was governed by military commanders for the War Department until 1877. During these years there was little internal development, but a salmon cannery built in 1878 was the beginning of what became the largest salmon industry in the world. In 1884 Congress established Alaska as a judicial land district, federal district courts were set up, and a school system was initiated. In 1906 Alaska’s first representative to Congress, a nonvoting delegate, was elected, and in 1912 Congress established the Territory of Alaska, with an elected legislature.
Meanwhile, gold had been discovered on the Stikine River in 1861, at Juneau in 1880, and on Fortymile Creek in 1886. The stampede to the Atlin and Klondike placer goldfields of adjoining British Columbia and Yukon territory in 1897–1900 led to the development of the new Alaska towns of Skagway and Dyea (now a ghost town), jumping-off points to the Canadian sites. Gold discoveries followed at Nome in 1898, which brought prospectors back from Canada, and at Fairbanks in 1903. The gold rush made Americans aware of the economic potential of this previously neglected land. The great hard-rock gold mines in the panhandle were developed, and in 1898 copper was discovered at McCarthy. Gold dredging in the Tanana River valley began in 1903 and continued until 1967.
A dispute between the United States and Canada over the boundary between British Columbia and the Alaska panhandle was decided by an Alaska Boundary Tribunal in 1903. The U.S. view that the border should lie along the crest of the Boundary Ranges was accepted, and boundary mapping was mostly completed by 1913. Between 1898 and 1900 a narrow-gauge railroad was built across White Pass to link Skagway to Whitehorse, in the Yukon, and shortly afterward the Cordova-to-McCarthy line was laid up the Copper River. Another railway milestone, and the only one of these lines still operating, was the approximately 500-mile (800-km) Alaska Railroad that connected Seward with Anchorage and Fairbanks in 1923. In 1935 the government encouraged a farming program in the Matanuska valley near Anchorage, and dairy cattle herds and crop farming were established there, as well as in the Tanana and Homer regions.
In 1942, during World War II, Japanese forces invaded Agattu, Attu, and Kiska islands in the Aleutian chain and bombed Dutch Harbor on Unalaska. This aggression prompted the construction of large airfields, as well as the Alaska Highway, more than 1,500 miles (2,400 km) of road linking Dawson Creek, British Columbia, with Fairbanks. Both proved later to be of immense value in the commercial development of the state.
During the war, the U.S. army uprooted most of the Unangan from the Aleutian Islands and sent them to work in canneries, sawmills, hospitals, and schools or to internment camps in Juneau or on the southeastern islands. Disease—particularly influenza and tuberculosis—killed many Unangan during this period. After the war, numerous Unangan returned to the Aleutians, but others stayed in southeastern Alaska.