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By Root 3050 0

bold initiatives of Secretary of State William Seward, the United States acquired more than 586,000 square miles of northern territory from Russia for a song—$7.2 million (less than 2 cents an acre).23 Seward defended the purchase as the final act of western expansionism, claiming that Alaska would provide salmon runs, mineral wealth, and forest resources. (Alaska was also where Seward planned on having lines laid for the international cable being promoted by the American Telegraph Company.) At the time, anti-expansionists called the purchase “Seward’s Folly,” considering the region a frozen wasteland not worth a trillionth of a dollar. But expansionists, including Theodore Roosevelt, later celebrated the Alaska Purchase as a trophy of great worth. Roosevelt described Alaska as glacier-streaked territory of “infinite possibilities” that the U.S. government had wisely purchased “despite bitter opposition” of many small-minded men.24 And Seward himself, who visited Sitka in 1869, understood that his purchase of Alaska would someday be seen as the high-water mark of his long, distinguished career in public service.25

For a few decades the Russians prized Kachemak Bay as a source of lignite coal. In 1855 alone the Russian-American Company, operating out of Port Graham, employed 131 men and produced 35 tons of coal daily. The coal was shipped to San Francisco, but sold at a loss, so the company abandoned the export trade. Russia, which never claimed more than 800 settlers in the colony, was beginning to see that, given the harsh weather and the vast export distances, mining Alaskan coalfields wasn’t particularly profitable. The Russian Orthodox Church, however, flourished in the Kenai Peninsula. The Old Believers split from the main church in 1666, refusing to implement reforms. In Alaska the Old Believers clung to Slavonic texts, used two fingers for the sign of the cross, and practiced triple-immersion baptism. They colonized little villages such as Ninilchik, Nikolaevsk, Razaldna, and Kachemak Selo. They resembled the Amish of Pennsylvania in some ways, such as their old-fashioned clothing—these Russian women wore head scarves—and they represented Russian Alaska well into the twenty-first century.

Starting in October 1867 U.S. troops relieved Russian soldiers at the colonial capital, Sitka; the American flag now flew over the District of Alaska.26 The USS Ossipee brought two government officials to the transfer ceremonies. The secretary of the navy publicly declared that a couple of ships were headed to Alaska to collect information on “harbors, production, fisheries, timber, and resources.”27 Rudyard Kipling once wrote discouragingly of Alaska, “Never a law of God or man/Runs north of Fifty-three.”28 Contrary to Kipling, in coming decades, spiritual pilgrims, a cult of wilderness devotees like Muir and Young, found God in the blue-green ice of Glacier Bay, the upper reaches of the austere Brooks Range, and the caribou-thick coastal plain of the Beaufort Sea. Early dispatches out of frontier mining and timber towns, however, proved that Kipling’s assessment was spot-on. Alaska, in fact, was so underpopulated by U.S. citizens in the late nineteenth century that it had been administered in musical-chairs fashion by several government departments: Army, Treasury, Customs, and Navy.

Alaska’s first census came in 1880, while Muir was on his second voyage up the Inside Passage. Of the 33,426 people residing in the territory, fewer than 500 were non-Native. At the time of the Alaska Purchase, Seward had wisely refused to offer free land to attract homesteaders. The U.S. Mining Laws of 1824 had banned freelance prospecting. This bar was amended a decade later. Alaska belonged to the federal government, and various agencies dispatched wildlife biologists, cartographers, and forest experts to write reports on what exactly Seward had acquired.29 Anthropologists started writing about how Native nomads had crossed from Siberia to Alaska over the Bering land bridge. Reports from the Corwin noted that the Inupiat and Yupik were dispersed