America's largest state was once mocked as Seward's Folly
Alaska covers more ground than Texas, California and Montana put together, yet in 1867 the United States bought it from Russia for $7.2 million and critics sneered. It sits closer to Asia than any other state, counts as the northernmost, westernmost and oddly the easternmost, and only joined the union in 1959.
The name itself comes from an Aleut idiom, alaxsxaq, usually glossed as 'the mainland' or, more literally, the thing the sea pushes against. Russians first applied it to the Alaska Peninsula. Long before any Europeans arrived, Indigenous peoples had lived here for thousands of years, and the region is widely thought to be where people first entered the Americas over the Bering land bridge. At a dig called Upward Sun River, archaeologist Ben Potter found the remains of a six-week-old infant in 2013 whose DNA revealed a previously unknown population he called Ancient Beringian.
European contact came from the west. The St. Gabriel is generally credited as the first European ship to reach Alaska, on August 21, 1732, and Vitus Bering sailed the St. Peter there in 1741. His crew brought back sea otter pelts prized as the finest fur anywhere, which set Siberian traders sailing for the Aleutians. Sitka, renamed New Archangel for a time, became the capital of Russian America, but the colony never paid its way and was never fully settled.
Secretary of State William H. Seward negotiated the purchase, signed on March 30, 1867. At the handover at Fort Sitka on October 18 that year, 250 US soldiers watched the Russian flag come down, and the date is still a state holiday, Alaska Day. Gold rushes from the 1890s pulled in thousands of miners, the capital moved from Sitka to Juneau in 1906, and territorial status followed on May 11, 1912.
Today about 740,133 people live there, making it the most thinly populated state, with roughly half clustered around Anchorage. Oil, gas and fishing give it one of the highest per capita incomes in the country despite a small economy. Over half the land is federally owned, and Native Americans make up 22 percent of residents, the highest share of any state.
Source: Alaska
