Discover Alaska is the Alaska Historical Society website's new feature that provides answers to some of the most frequently asked questions about our state's past. More answers and more questions will be added in coming months. If you have suggestions for additional questions or for improvements in the answers we have provided here, please let us know by sending an e-mail to the website manager at ahs@alaska.net
What groups of people lived in Alaska when the first Europeans "discovered" it? Who were the first Europeans to explore Alaska? Who were the first Western rulers of Alaska? When and how did the United States come to own Alaska? When was gold discovered in Alaska? How did the gold rush change Alaska? How did World War II affect Alaska? When and how did Alaska become a state? When was oil discovered and developed in Alaska? Who owns the land in Alaska and how did they get it?
General
Reading Alaska's Heritage by Joan M. Antonson and William S. Hanable (a textbook for high school students) Alaska: A History of the 49th State by Claus-M. Naske and Herman Slotnik (a textbook for college students)
Who were the first peoples of Alaska and how did they get there? The ancestors of Alaska's Indians, Eskimos, and Aleuts probably entered North America from Asia across a land bridge. Between 25,000 and 9,000 years ago, when sea level was much lower than it is today, land connected Alaska and Siberia. The land bridge was a thousand miles wide north and south and stretched east and west to link current Siberia with Alaska. Hundreds of years past as people lived on the land bridge and moved across it from Asia to North America. Alaska was the first part of North America these people came to. Some of the people who crossed, particularly those who came more recently, settled permanently in Alaska. Some archaeologists think that there were three major migrations of people to Alaska. The migrations involved different groups of people and occurred thousands of years apart. The first migration occurred at least 15,000 years ago and possibly more than 25,000 years ago. These early immigrants are the ancestors of most Indian tribes in North and South America. The second group of immigrants are the ancestors of the Tlingits, Eyaks, and Athabaskans of Alaska and the Navaho and Apache people of the American Southwest. They moved from the northeastern forests of Siberia perhaps 9,000 to 14,000 years ago. The last group of immigrants moved about 6,000 to 10,000 years ago and some perhaps as recently as 4,000 years ago. They are the ancestors of the Eskimos and Aleuts. They came from the coast of northeast Siberia. (Information extracted with permission from Joan M. Antonson and William S. Hanable, Alaska's Heritage (2d edition, 1992).) Additional
Reading
When and how did the United States come to own Alaska? The United States bought Alaska from Russia in 1867. This is a summary of how that came to pass. American political leaders had expressed interest in acquiring Alaska as early as the 1840s, during the height of the nation's fascination with its "Manifest Destiny" to expand its control across the continent. American traders and whalers were frequent visitors to Alaska's shores, and many spoke highly of its resources. Exploratory steps were taken in 1860 to determine whether Russia would sell Alaska to America. But the question had to await the conclusion of the Civil War. In 1866, a year after the war's end, the Czar's advisors indicated that the Russian-American Company, the semi-official arm of the Russian government that managed the Russian colony in Alaska, was nearing bankruptcy. It would need direct government aid to survive. The advisors also said that Russia's American colony was impossible to defend. The Russian treasury could not afford either a rescue of the company or a war with the United States or Britain over a colony on another continent. Russia's minister to the United States, Edward de Stoeckl, in early 1867 opened negotiations for the sale of Alaska to America. On March 29, 1867, Stoeckl informed Secretary of State William Henry Seward that the Czar had agreed to sell Russian interests in Alaska to the United States. The Russian minister and Seward drafted a treaty that same night. On June 20 President Andrew Johnson signed the treaty and sent it to the United States Senate for confirmation. The treaty provided for a purchase price of $7.2 million in gold. All private property was to be retained by its owners--there wasn't much--and Russian Orthodox Church members were to assume title to churches built in Alaska by the Russian government or the Russian-American Company. The United States Senate approved the treaty by a large majority. On October 18, 1867, transfer ceremonies occurred at Sitka and Alaska became a United States possession. (Information extracted with permission from Joan M. Antonson and William S. Hanable, Alaska's Heritage (2d edition, 1992).) Additional
Reading
When and how did Alaska become a state? Alaskans long chafed at control over nearly all of Alaska's land and much of their territorial government by a U.S. Congress thousands of miles distant and in which Alaskans had no representative. To gain greater control over their own destiny, some Alaskans had advocated statehood from early in the twentieth century. In 1916 James Wickersham, Alaska's non-voting delegate to Congress, introduced the first Alaska statehood bill in Congress. Like many subsequent efforts, the bill gathered little support. In 1955, the territorial legislature passed legislation authorizing a constitutional convention. Alaskan voters elected fifty-five delegates from across the territory. They met at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks in November 1955 to write a constitution for the proposed state. Alaskans voted approval of the constitution in April 1956. The new constitution was to take effect when and if Congress granted statehood for Alaska. Voters approved another proposition in the same election at which they accepted the constitution. This proposition was called the "Alaska-Tennessee Plan." It was so named because Tennessee had successfully used a similar scheme to obtain statehood for itself. The plan called for election of two Alaskans to serve in the United States Senate and one in the United States House of Representatives. The voters selected Ernest Gruening and William A. Egan as its senators and Ralph Rivers as its representative. Congress refused to recognize these unauthorized delegates, but Gruening, Egan, and Rivers acted as effective lobbyists in Washington. Lobbying efforts finally paid off in 1958. That year, Congress approved statehood for Alaska. President Dwight D. Eisenhower signed the Alaska Statehood Bill into law on July 7, 1958. Alaskans accepted statehood as presented in the federal law the following month and elected their first state officials in November. On January 3, 1959, President Eisenhower proclaimed Alaska to be the forty-ninth state of the United States. (Information extracted with permission from Joan M. Antonson and William S. Hanable, Alaska's Heritage (2d edition, 1992).) Additional
Reading
When was oil discovered and developed in Alaska? Oil explorers drilled Alaska's first oil well in 1896 on the shores of Cook Inlet, southwest of present-day Anchorage. They found modest amounts of oil, insufficient to justify development. Six years later, however, a well drilled at Katalla on the Gulf of Alaska struck oil. More wells were drilled at Katalla and eventually a refinery was built. The Katalla oil field continued production until a fire crippled the refinery in December 1933. Private investors and the federal government explored for oil in many areas in the territory for the next two decades, but no production ensued until the discovery of the Kenai Peninsula's Swanson River field in 1957. Oil companies built two refineries on the peninsula to process the oil. Drillers found numerous additional oil fields and more than a dozen gas fields in Cook Inlet. The gas, once transported by pipeline to Anchorage, dramatically reduced heating costs for the state's largest city. Today, however, when most people discuss Alaskan oil, they are referring to oil produced on the state's North Slope. Atlantic Richfield struck oil at Prudhoe Bay in 1968. The Prudhoe Bay field is the largest oil field ever discovered in North America. After necessary government studies and obtaining necessary federal legislation, the oil companies began constructing the Trans-Alaska Pipeline in 1974. Three years later the 800-mile-long pipeline was completed, at the time the most expensive privately funded construction project ever built. Oil flowed south through the pipeline to Valdez, where it was loaded onto tankers to be shipped south to the contiguous states. Oil companies have also discovered and developed other oil fields on the North Slope, including the Kuparuk field, the second largest field discovered on the continent. (Information extracted with permission from Joan M. Antonson and William S. Hanable, Alaska's Heritage (2d edition, 1992) and Robert W. King, "Without Hope of Immediate Profit: Oil Exploration in Alaska, 1898 to 1953" Alaska History, Spring 1994, 19-36.) Additional
Reading Peter
A. Coates, The Trans-Alaska Pipeline Controversy: Technology, Conservation and the
Frontier (Fairbanks: University of Alaska Press, 1993)
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